I recently talked to a man who was disappointed that his daughter, in her early twenties, was not eager to go to law school. She had an entry level job at a major food conglomerate.  He wanted her to get a law degree, too.

I suggested she may be worried about later. He said, “Oh, I know she wants that.”  He meant a home and children, but he spoke as if the desire for these was weak, some form of escape for his daughter.

I once saw a man publicly scold his adult daughter because she had decided to cut back her hours at work after the birth of her second child.

The average father no longer yearns for a home for his daughter and a man who can protect her.  He wants her to have an impressive life, even a position in the military if she can get it.  Why? Is he genuinely concerned for her? Is he worried about any lingering financial responsibilities?  Does he feel he has done less if his daughter is simply a mother and wife? How much of his dreams for his daughter is vanity? How much love?

A man who wants his daughter to be a man seems a neutered being. A society that creates neutered men is hollow. It can only limp lifelessly into the future. 

Here is a different sort of dream. In his poem, “A Prayer for my Daughter,” Yeats hopes for a daughter with “radical innocence”:

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

A good home is a form of ceremony. In such a place, a culture’s “innocence and beauty” are born.

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