‘A Postscript for Father’: Defining a New Fatherhood in Interwar Canada

During the interwar years, the rise of family experts saw the formation of a new ‘parenting partnership’ between mothers and childrearing advisers drawn from the ranks of medical professionals, psychologists, and social workers. Far from sharing their own authority with mothers, making parenting a more equitable shared experience, or elevating maternal authority over the traditional authority of the patriarch, the experts were determined to ‘manage’ and regulate women into their ideal of modern scientific motherhood. They believed that social disorder had opened a vacuum of authority in the nation’s homes that was manifesting itself in the decline of fatherhood, a process contributing to further disarray. Paradoxically, despite the predominance of men in the ranks of family experts and child welfare advocates, fathers were not encouraged to be active partners with their wives in raising their own children, a role coveted by the experts themselves. While they made a few listless attempts to advise fathers on fathering, there is little evidence in Canadian advisory sources of the period that they were also committed to defining ‘a new fatherhood.’ Yet their effect was precisely that, if almost entirely by default.