Introduction
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 a father’s importance in the home
waned, as a mother’s waxed.
While the expansion of
women’s role 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
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.
In
the middle of the nineteenth-century, the middle-class father was caught
between the advice of Henry Ward Beecher, who emphasized economic and social mobility in the
market economy, and of William Alcott, who 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. Although white, middle-class conceptions of men’s proper role in
the family and in society at large, were based on the particular aspirations
and challenges of the middle-class, they 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 ‘modern’ American, white, middle-class manhood and male
dominance.
“Fatherhood has a long history, but virtually no historians”
It is
necessary to address the causes of the historical misinterpretation—or
underestimation—of nineteenth-century, white, middle-class fatherhood in order
to understand how easily historical analysis can buttress long-held surface
perceptions or clichés, and to liberate fatherhood from its mummification in
the one-dimensional and foolish assumption of men as existing only in the
public sphere. In other words, before constructing a new picture of
nineteenth-century white middle-class fatherhood, several assumptions must be
deconstructed, namely:
1)
The dichotomy between men and women’s role in their
respective public and private spheres, and the mutual exclusivity between bread-winning
and domesticity;
2)
The discrete ‘change’ in domestic ideals, according to which,
as mothers’ domestic influence expanded, fathers’ necessarily withered;
3)
The ‘crisis’ of manhood in the late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century, which required that manhood be remade, with a particular
focus on the newly termed ‘masculinity’ characterized by male virility and racial
difference.
In 1841,
Catherine Beecher published, perhaps the most persuasive and emblematic
articulation of the ideologies of (female) domesticity and ‘separate spheres’:
“A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at
School” (henceforth referred to as “Treatise”). In
one of the first complete guides to housekeeping published in America, Beecher
supported a rigid partition of family (breadwinning and domestic) roles between
men and women. Beecher argued not only that women should be at the helm of
private life, but also that the domestic sphere was crucial to the well being
of American society. Beecher seemed to compensate women for their voluntary
abdication of the right to a position in the public world of men, by endowing
them with leadership of the home and of (at least theoretically) stabilizing
society as a whole. In fact, Beecher grappled with the contradictions of a
democratic society that was inegalitarian and constantly “moving and changing”,
by minimizing differences of class, race, and ethnicity, while maximizing those
of gender. Beecher’s frequently quoted “Treatise” underpins the perceived
separation of the domestic sphere from the rest of society, which has enabled
historians to circumvent complexity and establish distinct stereotypes of
Victorian womanhood and manhood. In fact, “scholarly fascination with the social
and cultural construction of difference between the sexes,” argues Stephen
Frank, “has obscured the extent to which nineteenth-century Americans thought
of parenting as a shared commitment and mutual endeavor.”[1]
When
historians agree that “work experience and
domestic experience became ever more distinct, for greater and greater numbers
of men,”[2]
they ignore two consequential considerations. First, the discrepancy between
the theoretical assumption of an individual’s capacity to isolate different
facets of daily experience, and the de facto impossibility of such
psychological separation. Has contemporary wisdom not accepted that individuals
naturally carry emotions (like stress) that are borne at work into the home, and
vice-versa?
Secondly, there exists a vast
array of nineteenth-century literature—produced by men for men—that directly
addressed the impact of a husband’s temperament on domestic life (see further
discussion on T.S. Arthur). Indeed, the term “father’s care” reverberates throughout
most mid- and late-Victorian parenting advice.
Using
the ideology of ‘separate spheres’ as their template, most historians who have
studied nineteenth-century domestic life have done so in gendered and absolute
terms, that prioritize mothers and forget fathers. Historians have assessed women in terms
of their lives within the home, and men only in terms of their lives outside
the home; women within the boundaries of their roles as mothers, and men in
opposition to their biological, psychological and social roles as fathers.
Under few circumstances have historians acknowledged the possibility that
women’s involvement in their children’s lives increased as part of a general
increase in parenting— the combination of motherhood and fatherhood—as the collective family economy was displaced by
the domestic child-centered, middle-class household and the patriarchal colonial family was softened by love and mutual
obligation.
For the historiography of
middle-class fatherhood, this ‘change’ in middle-class parenting is drastic but
one-dimensional. For example, in Past,
Present, and Personal: the Family and the Life Course In American History, John Demos
broadly sums up the “literature on fathers” as depicting men “passing from the
center to the periphery of their children’s spiritual and emotional lives.”[3] Demos
assumes that when one clergyman-author declared, “I cannot believe that God has
established the relation of father without giving the father something to do,”
this clergyman underscored a change in the so-called reality of fatherhood, rather
than in its culture and rhetoric. It is far more likely that Demos’s clergyman
intended to provide a counter-argument to those advice-writers who marginalized
men from parenting in order to elevate and/or relegate women within their ‘own’
domestic sphere.
There is nothing
wrong with analyzing what Shawn Johansen calls the “rigid ideals found in advice
manuals,”[4] as
long as that analysis includes a variety of advice manuals that represent the
true complexity of Victorian discourses of fatherhood. As such, this paper does not seek to extrapolate
the so-called reality of fatherhood from prescriptive literature. “Literature,”
Johansen notes, “can tell us much about the values of the writers, but little
about parental behavior or beliefs.”[5]
Instead, this paper will complicate the historiography of domestic literature
and unmask
the historical ways different ideologies about fatherhood developed changed,
were combined and contested. To define fatherhood as an ideological process (articulated
through prescriptive rhetoric and culture) is not to say that it deals only
with intellectuals or ideas, but that the ideology of
fatherhood itself was not static, as most historians would suggest.
Consider
the coexistence, in late nineteenth-century Connecticut, of contrasting fraternal secret
societies, some of which were intended to allow men to escape from
female-identified spheres of the home, and and some which located men primarily within their
families. On
the one hand, Mark Carnes contends that the
popularity of fraternal secret societies reflects the extreme “gender
bifurcations of Victorian society,” which alienated men from women in the
household and “deprived [men] of a… family environment in which they could
freely express nurturing and paternal emotions.”[6]
On the other hand, Amy Koehlinger argues that the Knights of Columbus (a
Catholic fraternal organization) consistently “praised an ideal of manhood that
was predicated upon deep attachments to religious faith and that valorized
men’s integration into their families.”[7]
Finally, it
is noteworthy that, beginning in the 1890s, the term ‘masculinity’ entered and
complicated the lexicon of fatherhood. Gail Bederman believes that middle-class
white men began articulating white supremacy in terms of male power and,
conversely, male supremacy in terms of white racial dominance. The so-called ‘wages of whiteness’ became increasingly central to
understandings of a new and virile manhood, while the ‘savage’ (i.e. non-white)
races had not yet evolved pronounced sexual differences. But even at the height
of the perceived ‘natural’ differences between men and women (that emphasized
women’s proclivity to child-rearing), fatherhood remained a vital component in
the social definition of manhood. ‘Masculinity’ did not eliminate, what
Margaret Marsh has termed, “masculine domesticity.” Instead, middle-class, white
men were urged to reconcile the drive toward competitive achievement with
intense love of home.
[1] Frank, Stephen M. Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity In
the Nineteenth-century American North. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998. 1
[2] Demos, John. Past,
Present, and Personal: the Family and the Life Course In American History.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 61
[4]
Johansen, Shawn. Family Men: Middle-class Fatherhood
In Early Industrializing
America. New York: Routledge,
2001
, 8
[5] Johansen, 6
[6] Koehlinger, Amy. “Let
Us Live for Those Who Love Us”: Faith, Family, and the Contours of Manhood
Among the Knights of Columbus in Late Nineteenth-century Connecticut”. Journal
of Social History, 38.2 (2004). 455
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