Chiara Baravalle: Fatherhood & Welfare + Waldstreicher & Chauncey

Fatherhood & Welfare 

 

Not knowing where or when to start my research into the history of homemaking fathers, I looked into several into several secondary sources, namely: Robert Griswold’s Fatherhood In America: a History, Stephen Frank’s Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity In the Nineteenth-century American North, Ralph LaRossa’s The Modernization of Fatherhood: a Social and Political History, Lawrence Samuel’s American Fatherhood: a Cultural History, and Jeremy Smith’s The Daddy Shift : How Stay-at-home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family. Taken together, these five authors offer a broad history of fatherhood from the beginning of nineteenth-century to the present day.

In summary:

The modern American middle-class family first emerged in the years between the American Revolution and about 1830. As growing numbers of men adjusted to market relations in a commercialized society, the separation of home and workplace imposed real constraints on nineteenth-century fathers. Yet, market-oriented work often had the ironic effect of intensifying domestic feeling: fatherhood was the vehicle through which men gained access to the idealized domestic circle constituted by women and children.

Nineteenth-century middle-class Americans thought of parenting as a shared, if gendered commitment; fathers participated actively in children’s education and religious studies.. By embracing the sentimental, rather than economic value of children, middle-class fathers distanced themselves from those, below them on the social scale, who continued to send their children to work. In fact, Frank argues that modern fatherhood emerged as part of the nineteenth-century consolidation of middle-class identity.

According to LaRossa, the modernized form American fatherhood that we see idolized today was born during the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, there is a discrepancy between the development of fatherhood in the 1930s and the usual behavior of chronically un- or underemployed men who typically do not turn their energies to the care of children and the maintenance of a home. As Griswold points out, it is little surprise that men who were put out of work would not merely lose a job; they would lose their very identity. Given that “the psychic costs of bread-losing” were nowhere more widespread than during the Great Depression, it is curious that, as LaRossa and Smith contend, the Depression had the ironic effect of allowing more caring and cooperative conceptions of fatherhood to gain a hearing, as exhibited in the parenting manuals of the time. 

The evolution of fatherhood, and especially of stay-at-home fatherhood, also goes hand-in-hand with the story of female breadwinning. Griswold argues that nothing has changed and continues to change fatherhood more than the collapse of men’s monopoly on breadwinning. He writes, “this great organizing principle of men’s lives began to change even before World War II but accelerated quickly in the post-war years.” On the one hand, the image of baby boom mothers pushing strollers through suburban neighborhoods belies the fact that from 1948 to 1960, the percentage of mothers in the work force with children ages six to eighteen jumped from 21 to 36 percent. On the other hand, the brand-new suburbs that characterize the postwar prosperity of the 1950s built a Great Wall of highway between the places where a man worked and where his family lived—rectifying a gender divide that was a century in the making.

            Despite changes in women’s working patterns, American fatherhood existed in what amounted to a political vacuum, until the rebirth of feminism in the 1960s. Griswold contends that the reemergence of feminism and changes in the household economy and have been the two most critical forces changing fatherhood. Furthermore, macro-economic shifts that began in the 1970s (namely, the off-shoring of manufacturing jobs—which traditionally employed breadwinning men—and the expansion of health-care jobs—largely staffed by women) dimmed the economic prospects available to men, as women saw their wages rise and their opportunities brighten. Nonetheless, Smith believes that men’s behavior at home changed only slightly during the 1970s and 1980s: although women often worked just as many hours as their husbands, post-1966 feminism generally did not ask fathers to give up their jobs and become stay-at-home dads (its dominant demands were to end discrimination at work and to split housework and childcare fifty-fifty between spouses).

There are recurrent themes in the history of American fatherhood throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. Firstly, especially middle-class, fathers have experienced a tug-of-war between their desire to spend more time at home and their drive toward competitive achievement (in which their masculine, breadwinning identity is pent up). In fact, historians disagree over the extent of difference between the experience of middle and working-class fatherhood. On the one hand, the obligations of breadwinning have bound men across the boundaries of color and class, and shape their sense of self, manhood, and gender.  On the other hand, the labor force participation by women and children posed a critical dilemma for working-class and immigrant fathers.

Second, overly literal historical understandings of the so-called separate spheres (the ideology by which nineteenth-century Americans understood relations between the sexes) seem to have misjudged the salience of private life in the formation of masculine identity. From the Victorian patriarch to the “culture of daddyhood”, the reality of fatherhood seems to contradict the cultural and political constructions fatherhood—the patriarchal ideology of fatherhood.

Thirdly, it is noteworthy that the relationship between fatherhood and the state has changed throughout the twentieth-century: from the New Deal, to the association of the private home not only with individual success but also with he political and economic success of the American Way during the Cold War, to the absorption of increasing numbers of paternal (and maternal) functions by state welfare. More recently, the challenges of low-income fathers face in trying to be ‘good fathers’ have become increasingly apparent precisely because efforts to enforce and increase child support collections and reform the welfare system have emerged on the national policy agenda.

Finally, men’s virtual monopoly of breadwinning has been part and parcel of male dominance. Griswold notes: “How men think about fatherhood helps us understand how they think about themselves as men, and this knowledge may, in turn, help us understand the structure of male dominance.” In fact, as Smith observes, “the importance of [understanding] reverse-traditional families goes well beyond their still relatively small numbers: stay-at-home dads and breadwinning moms reset expectations for all parents.”

With all this in mind, my paper will redefine our understanding of fathers as homemakers, from a narrowly defined and anomalous group, to a common experience of masculinity. In particular, my paper will compare how the New Deal and post-war welfare policies (of the latter half of the twentieth-century) defined, undermined and changed understandings of American fatherhood. How did the New Deal and welfare policies feminize and/or assert masculinity? More broadly, however, my paper will address how and why the history of fatherhood written in a particular way. (N.B. I will have to define ‘post-war welfare policies’ more specifically.)

Primary sources:

(1) Advertisements that show fathers caring for their children; (2) Magazines: Outlook, Parents, Woman’s Home Companion etc.; (3) Government Data (4) Movies and Television (e.g. Kramer vs. Kramer, Mr. Mom); (5) Parenting manuals (e.g. Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care); (6) Diaries and Letters of fathers who received support under the New Deal and from post-war welfare policies; (7) Letters written to the Children’s Bureau.

Secondary sources (and more to come):

Frank, Stephen M. Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity In the Nineteenth-century American North. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Gray, Peter B., and Kermyt G Anderson. Fatherhood: Evolution and Human Paternal Behavior. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Johansen, Shawn. Family Men: Middle-class Fatherhood In Early Industrializing America. New York: Routledge, 2001.

LaRossa, Ralph. The Modernization of Fatherhood: a Social and Political History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Leverenz, David. Paternalism Incorporated: Fables of American Fatherhood, 1865-1940. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Samuel, Lawrence R. American Fatherhood: a Cultural History.

Smith, Jeremy Adam. The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2009.

Varenne, Hervé, “Love and Liberty: the Contemporary American Family” in Burguière, André. A History of the Family. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996.

 Waldstreicher & Chauncey 

 

In “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,” David Waldstreicher questions traditional understandings of a “unitary and coherent black historical experience” in early America, by offering a new way to view successful runaways despite—or in light of—their slavery—as confidence men. Waldstreicher asks several important historical questions:

(1)  “In what sense can slaves have meaningfully fashioned their own selves?”

(2)  How could one really distinguish between slave and a freeman, or a servant and a runaway?

(3)  What were runaways passing for?

Waldstreicher uses runaway advertisements as his major source of primary historical evidence to demonstrate black role-playing as a means of resistance in the pre-racialized, late colonial mid-Atlantic. Waldstreicher analyzes the rhetoric of runaway advertisements to demonstrate how black and racially mixed people used cultural hybridization (via clothing, trades, linguistic ability and racial identity) to their own advantage, and, in turn, how slave owners used advertisements to counter the former’s mobility.

In particular, Waldstreicher focuses on the case of Charles Robert and his owner John Holt to show: (a) that a, in this case literate, slave’s value was rooted in his or her awareness of how the Mid-Atlantic, merchant capitalist system worked, and (b) that the slave’s knowledge (e.g. multilingualism) made it all the more imperative for opinion-makers-cum-slave-owners to repudiate the former’s socio-economic importance. Waldstreicher argues that architects of the public sphere, like Holt, sought to impose a strict, binary racial taxonomy in order to counter runaway knowledge of social and racial differences. In fact, Waldstreicher contends that John Holt’s advertisement of Charles Roberts was not so much a reflection of his slave’s “smooth tongue”, as much as of his own “villain” characteristics.

Statistical evidence lends credence to Waldstreicher’s interpretation of the print advertisements: he includes a Table charting the rise in the number of advertisements for commodities (including slaves) in the 1730s and 1740s. Waldstreicher also includes well-known primary sources, like Alexander Hamilton’s Itinerarium, to situate his study in a dialogue with existing historical scholarship of early American documents. 

Waldstreicher explicitly engages with the work of other historians. On the one hand Waldstreicher builds on scholarship to further substantiate his claims. For example, Waldstreicher points to Billy G. Smith’s work on the destabilizing effect of individual runaways on the mid-Atlantic colonies to provide concrete evidence and backing to his own deductions. Waldstreicher cites Jack P. Greene’s argument that the Middle Colonies were especially open to “creative possibilities of possession” (i.e. creative appropriation) given their geographic location between North and South, and their economic prominence for slave importation, immigration and trade. Waldstreicher also uses better known arguments made by historians of women as analogies to better explain his point about slaves as surrogates of men.

On the other hand, Waldstreicher seeks to expose what scholarly literature on cosmopolitanism and inter-colonial networks has largely ignored, namely by thinking about the slave advertisements as a print genre in of themselves, and as an essential part of the newspapers they helped subsidize. Furthermore, Waldstreicher points out that existing scholarship on the subject of passing negates the possibility that For instance, Waldstreicher disproves Werner Sollors’ assertion that racial passing was a phenomenon particular to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Overall, Waldstreicher’s paper is clearly stated, absorbing and well-supported. His use of a particular form of evidence—runaway advertisements—and of a relationship between master and slave creates a memorable and concrete basis on which to make his specific and novel argument(s).

George Chauncey’s Gay New York is based on a similar questioning of print and culture as the collective possession of the master class or elite. Chauncey argues that the “gay world” that flourished in New York before WWII has been almost entirely forgotten both in popular memory and historical scholarship; by shedding ‘new’ light on the subject, Chauncey sets out to disprove the “myths of isolation, invisibility and internalization” about gay life.

Chauncey asks several historical questions:

(1)  “How do we lose sight of a world so visible and extensive in its own time…?”

(2)   The fact that the working-class gay world took on different forms and meanings suggests not that it should be excluded from our existing understanding of middle-class gay culture, but that we should redefine the boundaries of our inquiry into the gay history.

Chauncey explicitly engages with other historians primarily to show how his study disproves existing scholarly views—ergo dismissal—of the “strength of the gay male subculture” in pre-war New York. He criticizes the historical methods of existing studies that have used “accessible” but misleading records of the elite. By constrast, Chauncey explains that his study does not fall into the same methodological trap, and thus adds new information to dialogue about gay history. In doing so, Chauncey not only undermines the primacy of the middle-class (as opposed to working-class) gay world, but also questions the notion of historical ‘progress’ more broadly. It is noteworthy that Chauncey addresses that which he does not analyze, namely the lesbian world of pre-war New York, most likely so that he does not seem negligent or ignorant of parallel and contradictory historical narratives.

By contrast, Chauncey uses primary sources to support his argument and refute most existing historical scholarship. Much of Chauncey’s argument about the existence of a distinctive pre-war gay is based on his analysis of jargon. In fact, Chauncey redefines our understanding of this history of subculture by analyzing its existence in the era “before hetero-homosexual binarism was consolidated as the hegemonic sexual regime in American culture,” much in the same way that Waldstreicher reevaluates cultural hybridization or passing before the racial binarism was consolidated as the hegemonic racial regime in American culture.

Chauncey clearly states: (1) the intent of his study, not only the what, where, when and how of his subject; (2) the ways in which his study builds upon and reevaluates existing scholarship; and (3) his methodology for historical analysis which allows him to remedy the gaps in knowledge left by other historians.