Did John Wayne become a feminist as-a-father-of-daughters? Credit: Getty/Images
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Four years and four months ago, I became the father of a daughter, Ada, our second child. As is traditional, I am a pushover with her where I was stern with our son; she gets forgiven things that Billy would have been naughty-stepped for 20 times over.
Sometimes I try to interrogate my own reasons for it, in that guilty way that parents do with every decision we make, everything that we could have done differently. I wonder if it’s second-child syndrome, that everything she does is old hat to us so we’re relaxed, whereas everything the eldest one does is new ground broken and new fears faced. Or if it’s just differences in personality, that she tends to misbehave with a cheeky grin that makes it harder to be angry. Or, of course, if it’s simple sexism: I forgive the girl-child things I wouldn’t the boy, because gender roles. I don’t know what the truth is.
Another cliché is that fathers of daughters are suddenly supposed to have a wave of newfound feminist feeling. “As a father of daughters, I now realise that, in fact, women should have the vote,” we are meant to say; or, “As a father of daughters, I now realise that perhaps we should pay women nearly as much money as men.”
It’s such a trope that I know of at least two articles spoofing it. Both of them are good and funny and hit home. “As a man with no daughters, I am completely incapable of feeling any empathy towards any woman whatsoever,” says one. “How merrily I used to drive down country lanes in my old Ford, periodically dodging off-road to mow down female pedestrians (you must remember I had no daughters then),” recalls the other. Other pieces are more straightforwardly angry.
I haven’t greatly noticed such a change in myself, I think probably because I’m already as perfectly egalitarian and pro-women as it’s possible to be; DM me if you want lessons in feminism, ladies! But there’s an implicit accusation in the trope, and I want to defend my fellow fathers-of-daughters from it.
The accusation, I think, goes something like this. The father-of-daughters didn’t care about women beforehand; he was unable to even process the idea of them as fully human. Now that he has daughters, he wishes to protect them from bad things, and to do that — he belatedly realises — he needs to protect all women. But it shouldn’t take the production of a new woman from your genetic material to realise that women deserve equal pay, a life without fear of assault and all those other things.
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