Antenne 2, January 1980. In the program “Cartes sur table”, Georges Marchais, general secretary of the French Communist Party (and father of four children), accuses the first secretary of the Socialist Party of having betrayed him in 1977 during a statement to the news on national defense. “I was in Corsica in front of the television (…). I told my wife: Mitterrand has decided to abandon the common program of the left. » And let go in the process : “I told her: “Liliane, pack your bags, we’re going back to Paris!” » (Humanity will transcribe the next day: “Let’s pack our bags and go back to Paris! »). A formula that has gone down in history that political scientist Pascal Perrineau analyzes for the website of the National Audiovisual Institute (INA): “That’s the, let’s say, unfeminist side. There is, for a leader of a major left-wing party, a somewhat outdated side. »
Obsolete, really? Forty years later, women continue to pack their bags (71% of mothers, according to the IFOP in 2023). And men, to store them in the trunk of the car (a question of optimizing space), of which they also hold the steering wheel (64%). However, who says suitcase implies washing the laundry (72% of women are responsible for the “machines”), making lists so as not to forget anything and, when returning from vacation, repeating: laundry, hanging, folding, storage in the cupboards . Certainly, this does not seem insurmountable: multiply by the number of children and you can quickly find Liliane curled up in a ball on the bathroom carpet. Even more so if she works the next day.
However, observing the series, the advertising, the countless books devoted to fatherhood and the super daddies of social networks, modern darons in so-called “egalitarian” heterosexual couples have invested themselves fully in parenthood, and all the more or less thankless tasks that accompany it.
This revolution of “new fathers”, whom we encounter at the end of school, in supermarkets and parks (or on cycle paths with their cargo bike full of kids), would constitute a vast hoax, according to Stéphane Jourdain and Guillaume Daudin, authors of the comic strip The New Fathers Scam (Glénat, 184 pages, 20.50 euros). A myth which camouflages a stubborn reality: certainly, men participate more in the education of children and in household chores than the previous generation. But, all the studies have confirmed it for twenty years, the chasm remains immense with what their companions deal with on a daily basis.
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