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#girldad and fatherly models for vocation

#girldad and fatherly models for vocation

Last updated on: July 31, 2026 at 2:00 am by Lisa Clark Diller

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#girldad and fatherly models for vocation 2026-07-24T11:05:08-04:00 Lisa Clark Diller

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I was born and raised before memes and hashtags like #girldad or “every dad of daughters has his designated girl-son” or “eldest daughters are actually the first-born son” became popular on the socials. My parents have four daughters and two sons, and their oldest child is a boy. And while their divided their oversight of the domestic tasks in traditional ways (with my mom doing inside tasks for the most part and my dad doing outside things) they did not spend a lot of time gendering the jobs that we children participated in. We lived on a working farm, and we all had indoor and outdoor chores to do. Still, in our home, it was a known thing that I was the one who most enjoyed the lawncare, barn and milking responsibilities, and would rather assist my dad in repairing a fence than work on sewing or cleaning or cooking in the house. There were lots of jokes, but also just an allowing of me to follow my own path, as long as I was helping in some way.

As I study parents and children in seventeenth century England, I am particularly interested in what vocational options they encouraged for their sons and daughters. Catholic families had possibilities that most Protestant ones did not, because their daughters could become nuns. There were diverse orders for women, including ones that took girls with disabilities, ones focused on quiet and prayer, some who ran schools, and at least one that tried not to be cloistered. The Mary Ward Sisters didn’t wear distinctive clothing and were often called “Jesuitesses” for their movement out in the world. These women wanted to proselytize, teach, and work for widespread conversion. Mary Ward, an English gentlewoman, was prosecuted by the Catholic church as well was by her own countrymen for her unconventional “Institutes” that she set up, both on the Continent and in England. Many Catholic girls wanted this sort of religious life, rather than the traditional contemplative one, and their parents had a range of reactions.

By definition, Catholic clergy don’t have children, and so Catholic boys and girls who chose the religious path were leaving the one occupied by their parents. They were choosing not to have families or to engage in the vocational labor of their mothers and fathers. Many parents were delighted with this choice, and for others it represented a loss. Young people who became priests or nuns were doing something outside what was considered “natural” for their gender. They looked more to aunts and uncles who were members of religious orders as models for what role they might take.

I was in many ways very much my father’s daughter. And my father was a minister/pastor in addition to a gentleman farmer, and while the two vocations were not by definition connected, in the world I grew up in, they were both deemed masculine. I liked Bible study and theology and while all of us participated in the spiritual life of the home, I was the one who my dad gave books to and who listened to his stories of seminary classes with curiosity and the hope to one day take such fun courses. All of us children were given preaching options in our adolescence, so I was not the only one who developed those skills. But as I came of age attending a Christian college with great interest in both theology and biblical studies, being a Christian camp director and youth leader, and taking on greater and greater roles as a lay preacher in my various contexts, it is very surprising that not once did anyone say “are you going to be a pastor like your dad?”

Bill Clark baptizing his son Ken

I never thought about this till I was in my 30s or 40s. My choice of employment in academia rather than church ministry was not one I intentionally made. No one actually ever told me I couldn’t be a minister and by the time I was in college and graduate school I knew women ministers in my own tradition. But as I grew older, I realized that at least part of how we imagine ourselves is connected to what people tell us growing up. And for girls, at least for most of history, there has been more scope for following in their mother’s footsteps than their father’s footsteps. There is no doubt that if I had been a young man running Christian youth camps and preaching and reading theology that the lovely humans who spiritually mentored me and were part of my church community would have mentioned (over and over, no doubt!) that I should be a pastor like my father. And that would have been something I would have had to contend with and think about and listen to my conscience regarding which direction I should seek training and employment.

We live in a world where none of us have follow in our parents’ professions; we can all go on to do something different for a living. As a historian, I know how limited the options were for children, and most of them made a living in very similar ways to their parents. Still, our sense of work roles being connected to gender is strong enough that it is still hard for us to tell daughters that they are like their dads or might want to do their father’s work, without it feeling like some kind of statement. And sometimes it genuinely feels like it might mean a demeaning of what their mothers do for a living or their choice of housewife or homeschool mom. I know that for me, my mom’s profession of nursing smacked a little too much of traditional “girlie” jobs, and part of my leaning toward my dad’s interests could have been my desire to not be trapped in particular gender roles. My own sexism against “female jobs” was part of my calculus, even though I was unaware of it. And yet, I ended up in the feminized profession of teaching, (I have written about my unwitting following of my mother’s role in an earlier post.)

Children choose vocations similar to their parents for several reasons, including but not limited to temperament (maybe genetic propensity and skills?), opportunity for mentoring, and family pressure. I know the young people I teach at university might be choosing to pursue something they’ve had an opportunity to see up close, to know the advantages and disadvantages. They don’t know the whole range of options out there for them, and it is too overwhelming to try them all out. Professions their parents are part of are demystified. I’m still very much my father’s daughter, in spite of society’s lack of encouragement to follow in his steps. I realized early in my preaching and teaching experience that I was using his cadences for public speaking, modeling some of my ways of speaking the Word on the decades of listening to him preach. I became a church planter and am a preacher elder in my local congregation, despite being part of a denomination still primarily dominated by male leadership. And I’m happy to earn money by teaching at a university rather than through pastoral care, but I always wonder what might have happened if there had been even the smallest bit of encouragement by people around me to become a minister.

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