Family Men

Fathers are often neglected in histories of family life in Britain. Family Men provides the first academic study of fathers and families in the period from the First World War to the end of the 1950s. It takes a thematic approach, examining different aspects of fatherhood, from the duties it encompassed to the ways in which it related to men's identities. The historical approach is socio-cultural: each chapter examines a wide range of historical source materials in order to analyse both cultural representations of fatherhood and related social norms, as well as exploring the practices and experiences of individuals and families. It uncovers the debates surrounding parenting and family life and tells the stories of men and their children. While many historians have examined men's relationship to the home and family in histories of gender, family life, domestic spaces, and class cultures more generally, few have specifically examined fathers as crucial family members, as historical actors, and as emotional individuals. The history of fatherhood is extremely significant to contemporary debate: assumptions about fatherhood in the past are constantly used to support arguments about the state of fatherhood today and the need for change or otherwise in the future. Laura King charts men's changing experiences of fatherhood, suggesting that although the roles and responsibilities fulfilled by men did not shift rapidly, their relationships, position in the family, and identities underwent significant change between the start of the First World War and the 1960s.

The image of the cold and distant Victorian patriarch, whose domestic roles were limited to those of provider and disciplinarian, is one that still dominates the way we think about nineteenth-century fatherhood. In Family Men, Shawn Johansen reveals that this myth has very little to do with the complex domestic lives these men actually led. Fathers routinely engaged in numerous domestic chores, cared for children, and took a far more active role in parenting then previously thought. Using a rich selection of personal writings, Johansen resurrects the voices of nineteenth-century fathers, uncovering how their feelings during childbirth, their views on education and religion, the ways their relationship to their children changed as they both grew older, and their attitudes toward many other domestic matters. Family Men is a sophisticated and compelling addition to the growing literature on the history of masculinity and the family.

More important, Coltrane suggests that as fathers participate more fully in raising their children and performing traditionally female household tasks, men will themselves be transformed by the experience in profoundly positive ways and American society as a whole will move closer to true gender equity.

Fighter, Worker, and Family Man explores how German-Jewish men tried to maintain their understandings of masculinity under Nazi rule.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.