Question - how much of a feminist ally is/ was your dad ?

[Sundancerintherain]

My dad, in his 80's now, big burly working Irishman always treated me ..........exactly the same as my brothers.
Sport, DIY, learning to drive , learning to cook, cleaning, life admin, car maintenance. All shown everything, all expected to muck in, all valued.
It's as I go through life that I realise that my group of friends had vastly different experiences with fathers and that their expectations of adult relationships are vastly different.

Or hater even.

My dad never thought of himself as a feminist. He thought that men and women were very different but that they were just as valuable as one another.
He was very unusual for his generation in that he was totally hands on with kids and nappies, he cleared up after meals, he cooked. He was amazing.
He couldn't understand the appeal of women's sport though and struggled with assertive women.

He was a realist really.

Not at all. He didn't like the idea of women being educated so I didn't get any support to go to university, and that meant I couldn't go. I was kicked out at 17 to make my own way.

i think he would like to think he was a feminist, but no way. He thinks he respects women, but from what I can see is he mainly respects intelligent women as long as they are also attractive and thin. Hes always had women friends though

Both myself and my sister are very strong feminists.

My dad pushed us to work hard in school and get decent jobs. He was very proud of what we achieved. He pushed us in stem especially. Fully believed in everyone reaching their full potential regardless of sex.

Mum did all the diy etc he didn't have a clue.

I wouldn't say he was a feminist but he wasn't sexist, I don't remember him ever making sexist remarks.
He did like porn though not envy!

My dad was a fantastic champion & instilled in me that I could achieve anything & my mum is very practical & gutsy. It's only as I got older I realise they were quite unusual.

Things were a bit unusual in my family. Me and my sister went to private schools and my brother was state educated. Me and my sister went to university and he didn't. He did struggle academically but I wonder which came first. He might've had more support in a smaller class.

I don't think they were necessarily motivated by feminism but I was certainly encouraged to go out into the world and achieve.

God, not at all. He was the driving force in my sister and I becoming feminists but only as defiance to his utter misogyny.

He wasn't. In the military for most of my childhood and then went to work for an oil company. He let me do what I wanted and supported the military as a career choice if I wanted (changed my mind last minute) but he had some decidedly sexist ideas. I definitely felt he would have preferred a son, he called me by a male nickname rather than my clearly female name until I went home. Abortion was a very bad thing and should be banned even in cases of rape. When I hit puberty I needed to modify my behaviour/clothes. He made excuses for his boss who rather liked wrestling me to the floor and holding me down in a very inappropriate fashion. He had clear ideas of what my mum should do and hated that she earned more than him when they met (she was a civil servant until I was born).

I would not say he's an ally, but he's not that bad either. He expected mum to do all the cooking and cleaning when I was growing up but he started to do some of it himself later in life, so some progress there. I was treated differently as the only girl but not wildly differently, and he always encouraged education and that I could do anything.

The abusive drunk who verbally, physically, and financially terrorized the family. I would say he was not a feminist.

He did at least believe we should go to university, but that is basically mandatory for everyone in our socio-economic group and our not attending would have been scandalous.

I would not describe my late father as a feminist. Kindness shown to women when it occurred were from his Christian faith, but he was someone who seemed content with my mum working part-time and doing most of the household tasks.

My dad was a massive misogynist and after he divorced my mum a complete lech.

I don't think my wonderful daddy really dilberately set out to be a feminist ally. He is just a very decent, kind and fair man.

However, he did used to be the parent who was home for us after school, he always did the shopping, cooked tea and washed up afterwards because my mum worked longer hours and was the breadwinner and in fact often worked away from home in the week. It never really struck me before how different that was to other dads, especially in the 1980s and 90s.

As a funny aside, when he was made redundant and signed up to a recruitment agency, I once answered the phone to a lady from a recruitment agency. She said she wasn't looking for my dad but wanted to know if my mum was free because they had lots of vacancies for secretaries. I said 'my mum is the HR director for Biffa!'

My Dad would be 113 of he was still alive, and he was just like yours OP.
His mum had 2 daughters and 6 sons - she made sure all of them knew how to look after themselves and what needed doing in a household.

My dad may not have called himself a feminist, but he was. He treated me the same as my brother and did his share of childcare even though he worked longer hours than my mum. My mum was a feminist too.

My brother and I are both feminists and proud

He's not, but as a child, even as a teen tbh until my later teens I mistakenly thought he was. He talked the talk about equality and as children me and my sister and brother were all brought up pretty much the same and I never felt there to be any injustice. However it's only as I've got older and more political that I've noticed that he's not really. He was a pretty 'hands on' dad, but only to a point. My DM only very recently told me she quit most of the part time jobs she had when we were little due to pressure/lack of support from him basically, with childcare/domestic work and undermining in the sense of 'you earn hardly anything your job is not important why bother' affecting her confidence. In fact I would say actually my eyes weren't even fully open to it all until I've become a mother myself - he has this same attitude to my own job and has told me to quit numerous times. You would think a father would want their daughter to retain some aspect of financial independence wouldn't you? He pushed me academically very hard at school and tried to get me into a STEM/healthcare career which I didn't and as I've never got a decent job yet since I graduated from uni a few years ago he is disappointed and told me I won't amount to anything now since I had my child so better to quit work and focus on them instead. At the same time he was fuming when I announced our pregnancy . He seems to actually be getting increasingly sexist and reactive the older he gets too, making more comments about women's dress and essentially saying rape victims are asking for it if they 'insert offensive trope here'. My DM says he never used to be anywhere near that bad and he's getting worse. I certainly don't remember him ever making comments like that when I was younger even though he's always thought women should dress conservatively etc he's obsessed with women's sexual morality as he sees it - which is hilarious because I recently discovered he had at least one instance of cheating on my DM which resulted in a child that he's never even had the balls to tell me about yet. So hypocritical. Basically I was a bit of a 'daddy's girl' as a child so it's been very upsetting to see and realise all this disappointment in him as I've gotten older and realised he's not at all the man I once thought he was .

My dad is working class and northern. Fairly silent and treated as the head of household. But he was the parent who insisted my sister and I be given toy lorries, cars and meccano. He also supported my mum, who left school at 10, to gain qualifications including her degree and masters. We were always up and down but now I recognise he is very much a product of his upbringing and proud of us.

Mine wasn’t much of a feminist ally, but he had grown up with very few opportunities and was therefore delighted when I got a place in a grammar school and then went to university. Less to his credit is that he knew how much my mother (who dislikes other women) was bullying me, but did not intervene because he wanted a quiet life.

Your dad sounds brilliant OP.

My dad is a misogynist. I have a brother to compare upbringings to. "No, because you're a girl" was something I heard frequently in my childhood. I had no guidance on careers, car maintenance, DIY, how to budget. My dad is a violent control freak and preferred to deal with things himself rather than me learn new skills or be assertive.

He gets furious about women e.g. shouts "stupid bloody woman" about another driver, but no gendered or aggressive language about other men. I limit contact now obviously. One recent conversation that stands out is him complaining that 'any woman can accuse him of rape and she'll just be believed'.

Like many previous posters, my dad (now in his 80s) has gone through life as a feminist ally though he'd laugh and say he was just supporting what was obviously fair and sensible if you told him so. He and my mother had aspirations and made a formidable team, sharing childcare and housework so that they could both go out to work. He's always been quick to support advances in women's rights and accept women taking on positions of authority in organisation he's been part of. When I was growing up I never felt any obligation to conform to a gender role.

He was, however, most upset when one of my sisters wouldn't let him walk her down the aisle at her wedding because she didn't like the symbolism of being given away.

My parents are/were both academics, in closely related fields. My dad was the one with the big career, because he was farther along when they married. In some ways, related to that, both of them were trapped in, or benefited from (both, a bit of each), various stereotypes of gender roles, but thanks to them, also, I grew up with the assumption that I could legitimately aim at anything to which I felt inclined. I always felt encouraged in anything I wanted to pursue, whether it be in the sciences or in the humanities or in the arts: I was very much the beneficiary of a humanistic education, from my parents and from the choices they made as to my schooling. My dad taught me how to build a functioning geyser model out of a soup can and bits of tube and a soldering iron. He also taught me that Bach's music has to dance. I'd guess he was a feminist of his generation, but honestly, it never came up, because equality was just assumed to be a fact (even though now, I can see how my mum's path might have been different (or not) a few decades later). I miss him terribly.

Mine was sexist but not a misogynist.

We had completely traditional sex based roles in my family in the 80s. Mum stayed at home, got up every morning to make his sandwiches and dinner was on the table every evening at 5;30pm. He gave her housekeeping money every week but otherwise had a tight rein on the family finances.

He used to "babysit" one evening a week while my mum went out to political meetings and occasionally socialised. He could just about make cheese on toast but I don't think he ever cooked a proper meal, when my parents divorced he married my stepmother and she took over the wife work.

What he did right was encourage me to be my own person. I was always a geeky little kid, he was an engineer and encouraged me in typically male pursuits. I would be sawing and building wooden models, riding my bike, playing with lego, teaching me advanced maths and taught me programming before most households had computers.

When they divorced my mum was so much happier earning her own money, spending time with interesting adults and being in control of her life.

I vowed I would never let myself be dependent on a man, and have stuck to that to this day.

My dad has mostly always been a great feminist ally. I remember going to an event he set up years ago and there was an exhibition in it championing women. I was shocked and he asked why, given he cared about equal rights.

He took me to see Suffragettes when it came out and as a historian he does talks on women that most of history have forgotten about.

But - in recent years it has become clear he is far from perfect. I've heard him make inappropriate comments about women more than once now after a few drinks. He also has ingrained ideas about female/males roles but would protest he doesn't. I used to put him on a bit of a pedestal but he has come down from that a bit now