John Tosh
This is the first conference on fatherhood: an historic occasion and a wonderful first!
I want to pose a general question: How does history enhance our understanding of fatherhood? What kind of applicable knowledge does it furnish us with? We often come to the project with prejudices: looking for good fathers, as nostalgic examples, or to find the bad father, a prototype which makes us feel good. This process started with the Edwardians and the 1920s: with the dethronement of the Victorians as moral exemplars.
What is the connection between fatherhood and modernity? I don’t feel we have done a lot with that question at the conference. Why? Perhaps it is because although modernity has been a major theme, we have not been looking at the premodern. It is worth looking at the premodern to see changes: to see the consequences we are still living with. It would have been helpful if we had a stronger steer on premodern pre-industrial patterns of fatherhood.
Other things to consider:
1) religion: not a great deal has been said about religion. What particular kind of validation does it offer for the paternal role?
2) our understanding about the domestic role of the father. The family economy of pre industrial period involved all family members and those living in the household including apprentices. It is now common to stress the significance of wives. It is less common to stress the father’s role in this. Peter Lazlitt has worked on premodern family life but even he was surprised to find the eighteenth century husband caring for children while the wife span. It is a complacent belief: that the ‘new father’ has pioneered new fathering. We need to look at those socioeconomic precedents.
3) In pre-industrial socieity children were aware of what their father did: how he identified as a man in terms of his work. One aspect of modern fatherhood is children’s total ignorance of what their parents do and how to have any imaginative engagement with it. I never knew what went on in my father’s office. It is a recurrent feature of twentieth century autobiography, but one which has not been taken up. Actually, it was identified by Robert Bly: one thing at least he was on the right track about.
We might also look at the very recent past. It is the twilight zone where hard knowledge and reliable data are hard to come by: especially between World War One and the 1960s. Traditionally fatherhood is a distillation of certain memories of that period. It was characterised by unprecedented journey times for bread winners. Unprecedented levels of unquestioning stereotyping. Two generations of men were likely to be absent on wartime service, within a very shallow time span of a couple of generations. One last point: military service. The issue of father as protector was raised by Megan’s paper. He may be required to be called up and conscripted to defend his women and children. That was the ideological spin: preserving the sanctity of the home. One of the major themes of the experience of fatherhood and children in twentieth century is the effect of those absences. Of being called up; of contact by way of letters, and of the final return.
Pursuit of historical context is not a kind of indulgence. It is fundamental; it is about providing an indispensable perspective but it has been lacking in relation to fatherhood. Chronology and periodisation are also of fundamental importance.
Megan Doolittle
It has been very fruitful looking at fatherhood through the lens of different disciplines. In the study of fatherhood in more general terms I want to stress the importance of the feminist agenda and the gendering of fatherhood. The shift away from looking from the point of view of sons to looking at fathers from the point of view of the father and the position of the father as important. I think that is a very fruitful development.
Claudia Nelson
I’m interested in the influence that different disciplines have had in shaping the way we look at and discuss issues of fatherhood. Do we look at visual, textual representations; do we talk to real fathers? Do we treat fatherhood as a medical phenomenon or in the law? Benefits of the convergence at this conference has been the interdisciplinarity. We need to continue this in fatherhood studies. Regarding David Morgan’s paper: our individual definition of the father matters a great deal. There is the generalised idea of the patriarch; but there is also the father in terms of his age group and generation; the father in terms of a particular legal position (e.g. divorced, separated). The father as father of sons or of daughters. Or in terms of the ages of his children (the father of an infant or teenager). We need to contemplate the particularising or specifying of difference so as to move away from the tendency which tempts us to talk about fathers as a large group. Our own personal experience does tend to colour our scholarship, and we need to be able to take that step back, to think about why we are studying fatherhood emotionally and intellectually.
David Morgan
This has been a wonderful conference: the conference which future generations of scholars on fatherhood will with they’d been at.
There are two elements which have been bubbling below the surface and which I think help to bring together some of the different disciplines and approaches. 1) The idea of the life course. Seeing that in its full rich sense, not just individual biography but in changing household structures and those existing in a changing context. This is a rich area which can help us to work together more closely. 2) The other is locating fathers in time and in space, in social space. In the social sciences especially, father is necessarily a relational concept. There is a father and a child. We need to think about that relational fact but it is wider than that. There are all sort of others involved, such as the mother, for instance (many sessions began with mothers) and others would be grandparents, siblings, colleagues at work and using the idea of network and personal communities.
Trev Broughton
I thought I had a highly specified idea I wanted to work on: lone fathers, lone literary fathers in the late nineteenth century. What I have found listening to the various papers is I have been picking up hints of that as a topic to pursue: Charlie Lewis’s psychological studies of separation; widowers in relation to children; Tim Fisher’s paper on father craft where widowers were an ideal target audience for that propaganda. Margaret Markwick’s study of so many lone fathers in Trollope. So thank you for that, but it has made me wonder: what I want the specificity for? Do I want it because it has been neglected or am I interested in it because it is some kind of text case or faultline, a way into thinking about gender and paternity? I think those are different kinds of projects. I come away with a question. Yes. I think we need specificity but what do we want it for? There are a number of answers to that.
Helen Rogers
I think I think I probably mentioned this a few times. One of the things that has been bubbling away: what we actually mean by ‘care’ and ‘provision’ and are those distinctive activities and do they overlap? How are they gendered, and as researchers what do we impose on those terms. Connected to the issue of provision and care is the issue of play. I was struck by a couple of papers: Amanda Wade’s discussions of sharing narratives and in Neil Armstrong’s paper on Father Christmas. Otherwise there has been little discussion of play. Charlie raised this. Who does it? Gender issue about who makes decisions and who makes choices and what is structured. Those are still very much problems which we kept coming up against. As Berthold stated in David’s plenary yesterday: why are you taking about mothering and fathering at all? Is there something specific about them? We have skirted around that. David said at the end of his plenary session about fathers fathering and fatherhood and how perhaps they were unravelling in the modern period and this is what defines the modern.
General Responses from the floor:
1. What was missing? I have heard a lot from speakers in history of the construction by mothers of fathers but nothing about the construction of fathers by mothers. Women being able to do the role of the father and reconstructing the father, by earning and providing.
2. Pam Morris: I was interested to hear about African fathers: a different perspective from the Anglo American focus we have had.
3. The perspective could be broadened a little to include people who really have a very good idea of the tradition the background and the culture of the people. That would be very fascinating illuminating information. I would also like to say that this issue of fatherhood is very important to me because in the part of the world I come from there is so much emphasis on mothering and gender is being seen as synonymous with the family only but incidentally and contradictorily fathers hold very important positions in that part of the world as well but nothing is said about them. I would have expected something from this kind of conference: an in-depth scholarship which would deal with conceptual frameworks from more regions of the world.
4. There has been an awful lot on the private aspects of fatherhood, domestic space, relationships with children, but not a great deal on public aspects of fatherhood. Public life in general. Need to make a link between private and public real.
5. John Tosh: I would agree. There has been a lot of work on private and public realm but have we brought the two together? See David Roberts’ two books in 1970s: Paternalism and Fatherhood. They don’t speak to each other. Tim Ashplant is beginning to think about links in the family are taken into the political realm. I would like to see more work on this. Fatherly ideas as implicators. Patrick Joyce Nineteenth century. Metaphors of colonial rulers overseas: as fathering in another context. I am working on this.
6. Jackie Eden: There was a paper on Ireland and fatherhood which the person could not deliver. About church state and the domestic.
7. Tim Ashplant: Triangle idea. 1) Figure of the father as the paternal metaphor. Tabitha Freeman transformation of the patriarchal figure. Struggling with their actual father and the figure of the father. 2) Father figures as mentors which people can adopt in the absence of a fathering or in the struggle with the figure of the father, Black Panther movement figures who adopted Malcolm X. 3) Fraternal or sororial figures instead of dyadic struggle. There are other allies or opponents. Freud, Totem and Taboo, band of brothers who overthrow the father. We don’t hear much about that. We hear a lot about the dyad.
Helen: Swedish delegates asked us to add ‘ideology’
Judith Newton: I am interested in how changes in fathers’ relations to their children are hooked up with the intimate relations between men and women in the home. I am trying to sort out. It would be nice to hear amore about that.
Helen: Sometimes the term father is just equated with husband and it is just a throw away term. Suggestions about how we can use this conference to take this further? We will set up email on a list server.