Life with father: Parenthood and masculinity in the nineteenth century American North.

Abstract

This study is a social and cultural history of fatherhood in New England and the Midwest from the early republican era to the late nineteenth century. The study reconstructs the father's role in childrearing, setting contemporary social expectations alongside what actual fathers did and thought. The analysis is based primarily on the personal documents--letters, diaries, and reminiscences--of some 200 men and their families, but also utilizes the writings of Victorian domestic advisers and representations of fatherhood in popular culture. Scholarly focus on the nineteenth century as the "age of the mother" and stereotypes of the starched Victorian patriarch obscure our understanding of masculine involvement in contemporary domestic life. Rather than denying fathers a place at home, the nineteenth century's domestic canon made care for children a social norm highly prized by both sexes. Cultural expectations encouraged the regulation, not the renunciation, of paternalism, and fathers were actively engaged in bringing up children, both when they were young and as they grew older. By undertaking what contemporary parents called a "father's care," men attempted to reconcile competing demands for competitive achievement in the marketplace with the intense love of home prescribed by sentimental middle-class culture. No secular norm for fatherhood prescribed the actual behavior of all men all the time, but a distinctive social type--the "family man"--emerged as a standard against which behavior was judged. This new male identity was a cultural invention of the middle class. However immersed middle-class men became in the world of commerce, breadwinning and "paying the bills" never encompassed all that it meant to be a father. The family man refused to cede the domestic space to women. He used mealtimes, fireside gatherings in the evening, and especially his presence on Sundays as occasions for the exercise of paternal authority and companionship. His main intent as the masculine parent, however, was not to manage motherhood. Rather he sought to reinforce maternal childrearing whenever necessary, especially during times of family crisis. For most nineteenth-century parents there was no contradiction between glorifying motherhood and engaging fathers in childrearing.