Yesterday, we published an excerpt from Featured Author Leah Libresco Sargeant’s new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. Today, Richard Reeves responds.
When a writer as thoughtful as Leah Libresco Sargeant offers such an inspiring vision of fatherhood, it’s hard not to simply offer an “Amen.” In an era when distinct claims for paternal virtues can be treated with skepticism, any positive agenda for Dads is to be welcomed. My disagreements should therefore be treated as closer to quibbles than objections.
I especially appreciate Sargeant’s insistence on an embodied vision of parenting for Dads as well as Moms. It may well be true that much of the work of fathering is now in the social and emotional worlds, but it is still important for us to feel like our bodies matter to the enterprise.
Fathers’ presence matters less today for physical protection, of course (though that capacity must be retained), but just as much as ever for physical activities, including play. Mothers get flooded with the “love hormone,” oxytocin, following birth and from breastfeeding and holding their babies. Dads get an oxytocin spike from throwing their toddler in the air (and, importantly, catching them). The fact that fathers spend more of their time with children engaged in play can provoke accusations of being “Disney Dads.” But play is serious business in terms of child development. Dads use games to train their children for their lives ahead. And to have fun, of course.
Sargeant is right to say that the “paradigmatically womanly kind of risk” physical risks taken by mothers remain highly salient, above all in childbearing. She is also right that the requirement for fathers to put their bodies on the line for their families has radically diminished in modern societies, for good reasons related to social norms and laws.
But I think she understates the remaining opportunities for men to demonstrate physical courage in the service of others. “When men choose to step into danger, today it is more often as a shared competition with other men, in sports or foolish stunts,” she writes. “There is no beneficiary of their appetite for risk.” I disagree. I’ve just visited the site of the World Trade Center, where it is very hard not to notice that all 343 of the firefighters who died attempting to save others were men. The reason that men account for more than 90 percent of occupational deaths is that they account for the overwhelming majority of workers in the most dangerous jobs, including among first responders.
We should all be grateful that our culture no longer asks men to put their lives in danger on a regular basis. But we should also not assume that this requirement has inevitably evaporated for all time. After all, in present-day Ukraine, adult men under the age of 60 are not permitted to leave the country. They are expected—obliged, in fact—to stay and fight, while women and children are free to leave.
Even in peacetime, it is important to honor the ways in which men sacrifice their own safety and even their own lives for others. Each year, the Carnegie Hero Fund, founded in 1904, issues medals to civilians for courageous acts. The vast majority go to men. In 2024, recipients included Roland V. Hueston, 38, who was killed by a subway train after saving the life of a stranger who had been beaten and thrown onto the tracks in New York City. His mother, Millicent Hueston, said her son had “died the way he lived, helping people.”
If I had my way, there would be an annual White House ceremony for these medal recipients.
But there’s also a need to honor the physical contributions of men in everyday life, even through the much safer activities of sports coaching or leading scout groups and outdoor adventures. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote back in 1962:
The necessary virtues of the present age are essentially domestic virtues, virtues that have long been regarded as more appropriate for women—patience, endurance, steadfastness. It is essential that the tasks of the future should be so organized that as dying for one’s country becomes unfeasible, taking risks for that which is loved may still be possible.
Sargeant is absolutely right in her insistence that men, just as much as women, need to feel needed. She is also right that the task of including men in connections of mutual support is necessarily a greater one than for women, who are bound more obviously to their role as carers for children. She writes that “because men can more easily separate themselves from relationships with the weak, they often find that the world expects them to make this choice.”
It is certainly true that online reactionaries worship at the shrine of selfishness, urging men away from commitment and service. But I don’t think they are finding as many followers as feared. In fact, I sense a growing desire both on the part of “the world” and among men themselves for a recommitment to the virtues of fatherhood and family responsibility. It is striking, for example, that among Americans aged 18-34 without children, 57 percent of men say they “want children someday,” compared to 45 percent of women.
These men know, as Sargeant writes, that children are “the primary way that we are called to live for someone else.” They also seem to know that this is just as true of men as for women; perhaps even more so. And it includes those men who act as father figures as well as father themselves. Men may be slower to be transformed by the experience of parenthood, simply because our caring role in the time that it takes for a child to go from conception to weaning is less direct than that of mothers. But the transformation is just as profound.
One of the challenges of modern fatherhood is to support rich relationships between fathers and children even when there is no longer a romantic tie between parents. Those of us who have navigated this territory do not need to be told that parental cohabitation makes co-parenting easier. Nobody sensibly denies the ideal of the intact family unit. But nor should we discount, even in the slightest way, the continuing importance of fatherhood when parents separate, for children and fathers alike.
Fatherhood is a load-bearing wall in a healthy society. The idea of depending on Dad is not outdated. It never will be.
Correction (10/29/25 at 12:48pm): A previous version of this piece misnamed Roland V. Hueston as Robert V. Hueston. We apologize for the error.
