The Impact of a Misogynistic Father

If you grew up with a father who hated women or looked down on them, his voice can show up in the way you talk to yourself when you fail.

It shows up in what you believe you are allowed to want, in the partners you choose, in the version of yourself you think you have to shrink into to stay safe.

For people who grew up with a misogynistic father, that messaging can run so deep that they cannot tell where his beliefs end and their own begin.

And a misogynistic father does not have to say "women are garbage" out loud for the message to land. Often, he does not have to say it at all. Children are extraordinary observers, and they learn the rules of a household long before they have words for them. They learn from how he speaks about women. They learn from how he treats their mother and the other women in his life. And they learn, maybe most of all, from how he treats them, especially in comparison to any other males in the house.

Living with a misogynistic father shapes daughters and sons in different ways, and it shapes the whole family system around it. This article will explore how these beliefs show up in childhood and adulthood, the impact, and how you can move forward - whether your father changes his beliefs or not.

How It Shows Up in Childhood

In a misogynistic household, you grow up with rigid rules about how you are supposed to behave as a son and how you are supposed to behave as a daughter. These rules are rarely explicitly communicated. More often, they are woven into the everyday lives of the family, the messages each member receives, and the roles the members are permitted to take on within the family. In families, both mothers and fathers can transmit misogynistic ideals throughout the family for different reasons. This article will focus mainly on fathers and their role in this message transmission.

For daughters, the shift can be sudden and confusing. A highly misogynistic father who deeply believes women are inferior may be loving and warm to his young daughter, right up until she reaches puberty. Once she is seen as a "woman," something changes. He starts treating her as someone responsible for a specific, narrow set of tasks in the home and who is not allowed to step outside that box. The duties he assigns her may be genuinely valuable. She may even find joy in them. But it is the demeaning tone and the belief that her participation is lesser that does the damage. When the things a daughter is "allowed" to do or "supposed" to do are framed as inferior to what the men in the house are doing, she notices and absorbs the belief that she is in a lower position in the family. She often carries those beliefs into her marriage and into other relationships she builds as an adult if she does not question them or is not exposed to other belief systems.

Sons are watching all of this, too. They see how his father treats his sisters and his mother. He sees their responsibilities labeled "girl stuff" or coded as weakness. And in many misogynistic households, the worst thing you can call a man is a woman. So the son starts avoiding anything associated with his mother or his sisters, because he does not want to be seen as less than, soft, or weak. He may even want the power his father seems to hold because of his gender. Somewhere along the way, he figures out that mirroring his father might be the only path to staying close to him and earning the title of "man."

Misogyny within families is simply a system reproducing itself. Researchers who study sexism within families describe it in two forms that often live in the same house. There is hostile sexism, the open belief that women are inferior and that women who step outside traditional roles are a threat. And there is benevolent sexism, which is subtler and dresses itself up as care. Benevolent sexism casts women as loving but fragile, as people who need a man's protection and support, with that protection quietly conditioned on the woman staying inside her assigned role.

Most misogynistic men who hold disdain for the women around them were never allowed to feel, or to inhabit a version of masculinity that included anything that was remotely “feminine.” They are suppressing huge parts of their own internal experience to maintain that narrow image, and they spend enormous energy managing shame, guilt, and fear. When their own children try to step out of the box, it threatens their identity. These fathers may also feel there are immense consequences for men or women who step out of these culturally prescribed roles. They truly fear for their children and their ability to find love, maintain their careers, or lead productive and enjoyable lives. They believe the only way to achieve safety is to follow the identified scripts. This does not excuse the harm, but it helps explain why it is so rigid and why it can so easily be passed down from one generation to the next.

The Impact and How It Continues Into Adulthood

The reason this matters so much is that childhood rules do not stay in childhood. They become the default settings we carry into our adult lives, often without ever consciously choosing them.

For daughters, one of the clearest places this shows up is in expectations for men. A 2019 study of sisters from divorced and separated families found that growing up exposed to low-quality fathering, not the father's physical absence, but the quality of how he behaved, predicted what women came to expect from men as partners in adulthood. Daughters who spent more of their childhood living with a low-quality father went on to hold lower expectations for how much men would invest in their relationships, and those lower expectations were in turn linked to their own later relationship and sexual decisions (DelPriore et al., 2019). She has to work not to become a prisoner of his limited beliefs about what she can achieve and what the men in her life are capable of.

Some women swing the pendulum too hard in the opposite direction and reject everything their misogynistic father wanted for them, because staying anywhere near his vision feels oppressive. That instinct is understandable, but it is still giving him control. True freedom is being able to choose for yourself, based on who you actually are and what your values tell you. You do not have to give up something you love just because it happens to fit your father's narrow idea of what a woman should be. You also do not have to perform anything to spite him.

The son who learned to chase his father's power often becomes a man deeply unfulfilled by the script he believed would give him power and security. A 2023 study following children into adolescence found that fathers' involvement in family life, the everyday caregiving and sharing of household labor, was linked to more gender-egalitarian attitudes in their children (Cano & Hofmeister, 2023). When a father models the opposite, when he treats care work as beneath him and domination as the goal, his son tends to internalize that as normal and natural. Some sons go further and witness their fathers abusing the women in their lives, and they learn that that is normal in the home. The son's adult work, then, is to refuse to become what he was taught to be, and to build a version of masculinity that honors what actually matters to him, rather than the one that was passed down to keep him in line.

Some fathers also perpetrate real violence against women. That violence does not just hurt in the moment. It tells daughters what they can expect from men and from the world, and it reshapes how a son understands what men are permitted to do. When that is the family someone came from, the impacts are profound, and healing usually requires support.

Healing Yourself Whether He Changes or Not

Your healing does not need to depend on your father's transformation. It would be great if he changed. Many of the people in our groups will spend years quietly hoping for it. But waiting for him to become a different man is one more way of keeping him in charge of your life. You can heal while he stays exactly the same. People do it all the time.

Start by separating his voice from yours. So much of what feels like your own self-doubt or your own ceiling is actually his programming. When you catch a harsh belief about what you are allowed to want or be, it helps to ask: Is this mine, or is this his? Naming it as inherited does not make it disappear overnight, but it loosens its grip. You stop treating it as the sole truth.

Notice where the pendulum is swinging too far. If you are a daughter, pay attention to whether you are making choices from your own desires or solely in reaction to him. Reclaiming something you genuinely love that he happened to approve of is not a betrayal of your growth. Refusing something you actually want just because it fits his mold is not freedom either.

Reset your expectations on purpose. If you learned to expect very little from men, or from relationships in general, that expectation was set by a flawed teacher. You are allowed to revise it. You can decide, as an adult, what care actually looks like to you, and hold the people in your life to that standard rather than the low bar he set.

Grieve the father you needed. A lot of people skip this step because it hurts too much, or they feel like they are not allowed to mourn someone who is still alive. There is real grief in accepting that the father you have is not the father you needed, and that the protector or the encourager or the safe man you deserved may never show up.

Build the relationships you actually want. The deepest harm of a misogynistic household is that it teaches you to relate to people through rigid categories rather than as full human beings. Build relationships where you are known beyond those categories and where you do not have to perform a role to be loved.

And finally, decide what relationship, if any, you want with him now. Some people in our community find a way to stay connected on new terms. Some set firm boundaries. Some choose distance or estrangement. There is no single correct answer here, and your choice can change over time. What matters is that the decision belongs to you, made from your own clarity rather than from obligation or fear or the hope that good behavior will finally earn you the father you always wanted.

You did not choose the household you grew up in. You did not write the rules that were handed to you. But you are the one who can write the script now.

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Barni, D., Fiorilli, C., Romano, L., Zagrean, I., Alfieri, S., & Russo, C. (2022). Gender prejudice within the family: The relation between parents' sexism and their socialization values. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 846016.

DelPriore, D. J., Shakiba, N., Schlomer, G. L., Hill, S. E., & Ellis, B. J. (2019). The effects of fathers on daughters' expectations for men. Developmental Psychology, 55(7), 1523–1536.

Cano, T., & Hofmeister, H. (2023). The intergenerational transmission of gender: Paternal influences on children's gender attitudes. Journal of Marriage and Family, 85(1), 193–214.