Introduction

In gender studies, research on men and masculinities has been an important research field, and in family sociology the study of fathers is now an important area of focus. The aim of this chapter is to combine these two strands of research by focusing on fathering and the masculine content and performance in childcare. In doing so, we study a group of Norwegian men who availed themselves of parental leave before it was made father-specific. Fathers who stay at home on leave caring for a baby while the mother goes back to work constituted a very small group before the non-transferable father's quota was introduced.

An important contribution to the research on men and masculinities is David Morgan's book Discovering men (1992) in which he addresses the importance of work in men's lives. Work is assumed to be a major basis of masculine identity. He suggests that a strategy for studying men and masculinity is to study situations where masculinity is put on the line. He pinpoints two situations where masculinity is challenged, namely when men are unemployed and when men enter female occupations. Another strategic point for studying what might be labelled a challenge to masculinity is when men temporarily leave the work arena and enter the home in order to assume the main responsibility for a child.

In research on men from a gender perspective, one concern has been to examine the changes in masculinity and to ascertain which values other than strength and power, which have traditionally characterized the relationship between men and women, can now be observed as masculine ideals. In developing this interest, researchers have called for a masculine concept of care and have looked for ways of understanding it (Connell, 1987; Kimmel, 1987; Segal, 1988).

The changing nature and meaning of fatherhood, and the conduct and interaction of fathers with their children are two of the many central foci of contemporary research on fathers. In a review article on fatherhood, Marsiglio (1993) suggests the direction future research should take. Two of his recommendations bear special relevance to our study: (1) the relationship between men's work identity and father identity, and (2) the diverging perspectives of mothers and fathers and the need for reports from mothers to understand fatherhood.