Julie Beck, Jun 15, 2018<\/p>\n
Dads love beer. Moms love wine. And greeting-card companies love gendered tropes about parenting.<\/p>\n
In the lead-up to Mother\u2019s and Father\u2019s Day, the greeting-card aisle presents doors to two alternate universes. One is a wonderland of blooming flora and boats bobbing on tranquil lakes, where grateful baby animals snuggle their protective parents and everyone speaks in heartfelt but generic verse. The other is a cartoon dystopia where crudely drawn characters live out a stereotypical parenting farce. Here, every child is an unmanageable hellion or a perfect angel, mothers are chore-obsessed disciplinarians who must physically hide from the endless demands of their mob of loin-fruit, and fathers are \u2026 off golfing. Or grilling. Or on the toilet. It\u2019s basically Family Circus<\/em>, but with more fart jokes and everybody\u2019s constantly drinking because they hate their kids so much. But in a funny way.<\/p>\n In the week before each parental holiday this year, I visited my local Target and CVS to sample the cards on offer. While there were a few that had expansive notions of mothers\u2019 and fathers\u2019 responsibilities, for the most part, the themes and symbols of both sentimental and funny cards reflected a stark division of gender roles in parenting: In card-world, mothers do everything, and fathers are an afterthought.<\/p>\n The messaging isn\u2019t subtle, either. Some cards are very clear about which parent is considered more important. \u201cHappy Mother\u2019s Day to a woman who does it all!,\u201d read one card. \u201cYou work. You cook. You clean. You nurture \u2026 You crazy?!\u201d But the woman on the inside of the card has a happy enough expression, even though each of her limbs is engaged in a different task. A month later I found a Father\u2019s Day card that said: \u201cFather\u2019s Day is in June \u2026 Because about a month after Mother\u2019s Day, somebody went \u2018Hey, wait a minute!\u2019\u201d (In reality, it took much longer. President Woodrow Wilson declared Mother\u2019s Day a national U.S. holiday in 1914<\/a>; it wasn\u2019t until 1972<\/a> that President Nixon made Father\u2019s Day official.)<\/p>\n A more scientific study of the themes of Mother\u2019s and Father\u2019s Day cards<\/a>\u00a0 looked at a batch in 2010. The researchers, Carol Auster and Lisa Auster-Gussman (who, fittingly, are mother and daughter) came to this conclusion: \u201cRitualized holidays tend to support the status quo, and traditional ideologies of motherhood and fatherhood,\u201d of mothers as nurturers, and fathers as providing more utilitarian support. \u201cThe portrayal of motherhood and fatherhood on the greeting cards is important because these cards may act as agents of socialization, shaping individuals\u2019 perceptions, regardless of whether the cards reflect the reality of parenting,\u201d the study goes on to say.<\/p>\n Mother\u2019s Day cards, they found, were much more likely to have cursive lettering and pastel color palettes, especially featuring purple and pink, while Father\u2019s Day cards used more \u201cbold\u201d colors, like blue, tan, black, and red, and often had \u201cwhimsical\u201d fonts. Mother\u2019s Day cards tended to feature flowers, leaves, butterflies, bees and dragonflies, and Father\u2019s Day cards were decorated with tools, stars, cars, and men\u2019s clothing (like ties).<\/p>\n In terms of content, Father\u2019s Day cards emphasized supporting the family economically, imparting practical lessons, and being the best\u2014far more \u201cNumber One Dad\u201d or \u201cBest Dad Ever\u201d sort of cards than mothers had. \u201cIt was like they needed an award, but there wasn\u2019t a lot of depth in what they were achieving,\u201d says Auster-Gussman, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the University of Minnesota.<\/p>\n In contrast, Mother\u2019s Day cards focused a lot more on what the mothers were doing for their children. The cards in the study that mentioned \u201cthe little things you do\u201d were, without exception, Mother\u2019s Day cards, and cards that talked about making a child feel loved were much more likely to be for moms, too.<\/p>\n Eight years later, my batch of cards indicated that the messages haven\u2019t gotten much subtler. Many Mother\u2019s Day cards featured chores, or referenced how much mothers are expected to do for their kids. Father\u2019s Day cards evoked leadership or strength, or portrayed the dad as a superhero (though there were a couple superhero mom cards, too.)<\/p>\n Cards for both genders jokingly suggested that parents turn to drink to cope with the stresses of raising kids\u2014though in card-world, dads are always drinking beer, while moms love wine and cocktails, seemingly without exception. (A public health study from 1980<\/a> \u00a0expressed concern that greeting cards regularly suggest that \u201cgetting drunk is a natural and desirable concomitant of celebrations and that drunkenness is humorous, enjoyable, and harmless.\u201d)<\/p>\n The fancier, more expensive cards for moms tended to feature rhinestones (a bejeweled dragonfly, in one notable example of Mother\u2019s Day trope synergy), while high-end cards for dads were often given natural textures like leather or twine, or, once, the whole front flap was just a piece of wood. (\u201cA strong father makes a strong family,\u201d it read.)<\/p>\n There were many, many calls for moms to take the holiday to relax for once\u2014by any means necessary. \u201cThis Mother\u2019s Day, put out the \u2018Do Not Disturb\u2019 sign, lock the door, kick your feet up, and enjoy the peace and quiet,\u201d one card read. And on the inside: \u201c \u2026 until they find a way in through the air ducts.\u201d<\/p>\n Auster and Auster-Gussman suggested that perhaps, in American culture, motherhood is too serious of a thing to joke about. Most of the funny Mother\u2019s Day cards that there were<\/em> oriented their humor around the high standards for or hard work of being a mother. One card showed two cartoon owls eating bag lunches. \u201cMy mom gets up early every morning to dig up fresh, grass-fed worms from organic soil,\u201d one owl says. \u201cMy mom goes to the bait shop,\u201d the other says. The inside reads: \u201cWhatever works, right? #Keepinemalive. Happy Mama\u2019s Day!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe scripts we have for motherhood traditionally, or normatively, fall so easily into sentimental expressions of love,\u201d says John McMahon, a professor of political science at SUNY Plattsburgh. \u201cAnd if that\u2019s less acceptable, or less standard for dads, then we have to have something to fill that place, and we have to be creative about other cultural forms that fatherhood can take.\u201d The cuddling animals and gratitude platitudes of the sappy cards seem to resonate more with stereotypical conceptions of motherhood, while funny cards might allow kids to express love to their fathers without getting too sentimental.<\/p>\n \u201cFathers are fair game to be made fun of in a way that moms are not,\u201d West says. \u201cFor example, there\u2019s a long history of the bumbling dad in sitcoms. I think fatherhood has been conceptualized as not as central to men\u2019s identity, so it\u2019s more open to making fun of \u2026 I think we just have more of a vocabulary around feeling [for] motherhood.\u201d<\/p>\n There were several Father\u2019s Day cards where the entire joke was that Dad doesn\u2019t contribute to the family, and Mom does everything. \u201cDadequate<\/em>:,\u201d one said, in the style of a dictionary entry defining the word. \u201cMeets Dad\u2019s standards but is guaranteed not to live up to Mom\u2019s.\u201d Another listed a litany of questions under the heading \u201cStuff You Ask Mom,\u201d and under \u201cStuff You Ask Dad\u201d it just said, \u201cWhere\u2019s Mom?\u201d There\u2019s a whole genre of cards designed for a celebration of fathers that essentially just tells them they\u2019re useless.<\/p>\n Mother\u2019s Day and Father\u2019s Day cards promote traditional and stereotypical ideas that still <\/b>have power in American culture. But \u201cthey absolutely would not sell if they didn\u2019t correspond to at least some dimension of lived reality, or an ideal that people hang on to,\u201d Jaffe says. Perhaps the reason so many cards lean on stereotypes is that, when trying to come up with messages that will have the broadest appeal among American families, card companies find that these oversimplifications are reliable shared ground.<\/p>\n