A man in business attire is welcomed at the front door of his home by his wife and children (a boy and a girl). This cover image from Nicholas Townsend’s The Package Deal captures the main theme of the book: to examine the construction of masculinity for middle-class men in the United States. Using substantive quotations from men’s narratives, Townsend identifies four main elements that create “the package deal”: marriage, work, fatherhood, and home ownership. The interrelationships between these make for a compelling account of the masculinity, normative cultural expectations, and conflicting tensions that create the “American Dad.”

The Package Deal is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature that has turned the anthropological gaze onto North American cultural identities and cultural production. Townsend conducted fieldwork from 1980 to 1992 in a town he calls “Meadowview,” in northern California’s Silicon Valley. After World War II “Meadowview” was transformed from an agricultural and cannery town to a suburban town. The narratives in the book are based on Townsend’s interviews with 39 men in their late thirties who had graduated from Meadowview High School in the early 1970s. The author’s fieldwork also included interviews with the men’s female classmates, wives, and former teachers. At the time these men were in high school, 95 percent of the population of “Meadowview” was white (p. 18). Townsend’s interviewees included five Hispanic and Asian men (13 percent of his sample). Despite this diversity, Townsend did not find that the men he talked to “had different visions of what it means to be a successful man and a successful father in the contemporary United States” (p. 20)--more on this below.

Existing scholarly work on U.S. families has often focused on the performance of gendered roles or on the conflicts or imbalance women experience juggling work and family life. Townsend, nudges this discussion beyond the basic factors involved in work–life role imbalance to examine how fatherhood itself is inherently constructed on inevitable contradictions born of the cultural imperative to be both a good father and a good provider. Townsend relies on insights from feminist analysis, apparent from the bibliographic essay presented in Appendix 2. This is a careful study of a less often examined aspect of gendered identity in the United States: the everyday social construction of masculinity among west coast middle-class men. In their gendered lives the men try “to achieve their composite goal by following a culturally approved life script” (p. 29). Townsend reveals how their masculinity is constructed through the links among fatherhood, marriage, home ownership, and employment. The men’s family lives are defined through this multiple lens, and contradictions and challenges abound. Townsend carefully reveals the ironies hinging on this construction of American fatherhood. One of the most fundamental is that men are required to be caring fathers precisely as demands on their work time (including commuting time) increase (p. 145). Townsend clearly lays out the interrelationships among the four aspects of the package deal. For instance, he shows how men’s experiences of fatherhood are mediated by women’s roles and activities (see, for example, chapter 4), how middle-class identity is tied to occupational issues (p. 122), and how links between home ownership and the provider role bind men to choices in employment (p. 144). In highlighting these aspects of men’s lives, Townsend explores the dominant cultural view of U.S. kinship and the concomitant and inevitable ties to family material circumstances.

Embedded in the men’s quotations is a narrative of personal achievement and choice. This is not surprising, given the Protestant work ethic that these men embody, with its emphasis on individual accomplishment. Townsend’s careful ethnography reveals how these narratives must be understood in a context of social situations and circumstances that precisely guide the kinds of choices the men are able to make. For instance, kin (often parents) assist the men in purchasing their own homes. In some cases, this assistance involves a substantial financial contribution toward a down payment. In other cases, it involves living arrangements that allow men to purchase houses (e.g., living with an aunt and not paying rent; purchasing a house with a sibling, with the agreement that the sibling will be “bought out” at a later date). In turn, the men speak about their future plans for and obligations to their parents. Some envision “joint-family” arrangements (to borrow from South Asian kinship terminology), with multiple generations living in the same household. Others indicate that they have discussed their parents’ needs and preferences with their parents, to accommodate these considerations in their own nuclear family decisions. Despite these references to multiple forms of financial and social obligation and interdependence, in their narratives the men emphasize that they have bought their own homes and that they are self-made. Beyond the narrative of self-achievement, this assertion that they are self-made is also linked to what Townsend calls “the voluntaristic approach to inter-kinship obligations” (p. 172).

The Package Deal has many strengths that cannot be covered in a short review. Even so, Townsend’s discussion of class status, an inevitably pervasive aspect of these men’s lives, remains a less satisfactory aspect of this exploration. This is perhaps not surprising given that in “September 2000, 69% of adults in the United States considered themselves middle or upper middle class” (p. 122). This renders class a social category that is simultaneously comparative and normative. Townsend’s discussion of class is clearly tied to employment and earnings both in terms of the distinction he draws between jobs and careers and in terms of the level of income and income trajectory that he says these men can expect over their lives. Townsend thus acknowledges the men’s precarious “middle position” but does not link it to any other aspect of their lives beyond employment. In this way, Townsend seems to compartmentalize class identity as a narrowly defined notion of earnings, which otherwise eclipses his more nuanced descriptions of the interconnections between other aspects of these men’s identities. Similarly, Townsend does not address the intricacies of masculinity, fatherhood, and the mens’ ethnic identities. Of the 39 men whose narratives inform this book, three were Hispanic and two were Asian American. Townsend states, “In my interviews, the racial-ethnic category was not associated with different fundamental values about the place of fatherhood and family in men’s lives, although some men did invoke their particular ethnic or cultural background to explain adherence to values that were in fact widely shared” (p. 20). Were the men who envisioned joint families Hispanic or Asian American? It is not clear, and more concrete examples of such invocations would have been illuminating. One also wonders why the author decided to think of ethnicity as optional (á la Waters), as he states, “I have not treated racial-ethnic categories as explanatory variables” (p. 21). Simply excluding such categories as factors in analysis and examining “the lives and words of people who accept the dominant values” (p. 21) seems to undo an important aspect of the construction of masculinity.

Nevertheless, The Package Deal is a welcome addition to discussions of the changing notions of family life in North America as examined through a gendered lens. It will prove a useful resource for researchers because of its in-depth perspective and would be suitable for senior undergraduate or graduate courses on kinship, the anthropology of family, and North American ethnography, as well as courses on gender and identity. It provides a perspective, too often overlooked in the pursuit of the far-flung “native,” on the agency and complications of those right outside our front doors, in this case, by unpacking the trope of the dominant cultural view of fatherhood and family life in the United States.