Redefining Fatherhood in Postbellum and Progressive Era America
The lack of
scholarship on nineteenth-century, white, middle-class American fatherhood
belies the subject’s complexity. Although historians have delved into the
family history of women and children, most have failed to exhume men from the middle-class ideology
of ‘separate spheres’. According to this absolute narrative, parental responsibility,
during the latter half of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, was
partitioned according to men and women’s proper places in their respective public
and private spheres, such that women took control of domestic affairs while men
were expected to fulfill their obligation as providers or ‘breadwinners’. Although
the passage of time has since eroded the biological and moral arguments that
justified this binary taxonomy, most historians have continued to assume that
father’s importance in the home waned, as mother’s waxed.
While the expansion of women’s roles within the home may have tapered
the scope of male domestic involvement, it did not altogether eliminate
fathers’ active participation in childrearing. White, middle-class Americans
continued to regard parenting as a shared commitment and mutual endeavor, and
fathers continued to play a number of significant family roles beyond that of
breadwinner (notably as ultimate disciplinarians and moral and practical teachers).
In other words, the expansion of feminine domesticity merely redefined the
boundaries of masculine domesticity.
This paper uses a
variety of prescriptive literature, produced between the latter half of the
nineteenth- and the early twentieth-century, to track change and continuity in
the rhetoric and culture of middle-class, white fatherhood. At
mid-century, the middle-class father was caught between the mid-century advice
of Henry Ward Beecher, which emphasized economic
and social mobility in the market
economy, and of William Alcott, which advocated greater family intimacy. During the 1850s
and 1860s, a rich male literature emerged in publications like Parents’ Magazine, that simultaneously:
(a) deplored paternal neglect in the home, (b) warned about the effects of
husbands’ temperance on the entire domestic equilibrium, and (c) lauded men’s
self-restraint and socialization en
famille. At the turn of the twentieth-century, understandings of fatherhood
became increasingly intertwined with the redefinition of ‘manliness’, yet men
like the Progressive senator, Albert
Beveridge,
or the media mogul, Bernarr Macfadden, criticized
the popular argument that masculine domesticity would inevitably effeminize
American culture.
Women also contributed to the debate. In the 1870s, Harriet Beecher ridiculed
patriarchal pretensions and praised domestic men, while the early feminist, Abby Diaz, argued that greater masculine
domestic involvement and women’s rights were not mutually exclusive. At the
same time, cultural representations of men as breadwinners were exploited throughout
the postbellum and Progressive eras: by antifeminists—who
opposed women’s suffrage by combating the purported feminization of American
manhood and proposing islands of masculinity—as much as by the authors of
Progressive Era welfare legislation—which made state assistance to mother-headed households contingent upon the
policing and reinforcement of
working-men’s ‘natural and legal’
duty to support their families.
In a political
economy and culture characterized by industrialization and individualism,
fatherhood was not only widely contested and constantly in flux, but also
inherently contradictory. Fathers both served their children and exerted power and authority
over them. Fatherhood both contributed to the maintenance of women’s subordinate
positions, and allowed men to access the privileged domestic circle constituted
by women and children. The continued rearing of boys (and girls) in the mores
of male dominance and gender inequality during the era of suffragists and early
feminists, suggests the extent of male domestic influence and inculcation.
Thus, constructions of American fatherhood provide a window into understandings
of manhood throughout the postbellum and Progressive eras.
Despite important differences in the culture and experiences of
fatherhood across class, race and region, this paper will examine constructions
of fatherhood in northern, white, middle-class culture; in part because the
ideologies of domesticity and ‘separate spheres’ emerged as part of the
consolidation of middle-class American identity; and in part because of the extent to which the Northern middle class used its vast economic
and cultural power to imprint its values on the nation. White, middle-class
conceptions of men’s proper role in the family and in society at large, were
based on the particular ambition and challenges of the middle-class. Yet this middle-class aspirations helped define the character of nationwide American institutions and
legislation. By reevaluating the salience of private (i.e. domestic) life on middle-class
fatherhood, this paper seeks to
remedy the cul-de-sac in historical understandings of white, middle-class-- 'modern' American-- manhood and male dominance.
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