The Country of the Fathers

‘For the first time in history we are in a position to look at the country of fathers and see it for what it is and has been. What we see is the one system which recorded civilization has never actively challenged and which is so universal as to appear a law of nature’, wrote Adrienne Rich only forty years ago in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.¹ Ursula Owen quotes Rich in her introduction to the 1983 feminist anthology, Fathers: Reflections by Daughters,² which asks how girls felt growing up on intimate terms with one of ‘the fathers’, a figure of power. Both books signal feminism’s part in bringing fathering into relief at a historical point when fatherhood was already in decline as an institution. The father as sole family ‘provider’ for mothers and children was about to disappear. According to the sociologist Jessie Bernard, the role of male provider existed for less than two centuries, from the 1830s through to 1980. Feminist scholars identified the ‘family wage’ simply as a strategy used by male labour unions both to bolster their status and to keep women out of the workplace.³ Activists attacked the many surviving elements of patriarchy one by one: in marriage and divorce laws, definitions of sex and intimacy, the medical professions, childcare, banking and credit practices, the workplace, and so on. Fatherhood was not a birthright but a chosen praxis and network of personal relationships. Historians began in the 1980s and 1990s to plot developments in the exercise of fatherhood in the context of a changing masculinity.

Mothers were also getting their turn as historical actors; ‘the other history’⁴ was being told as a part of women’s history, a sub-discipline taking shape in the U.S. in the 1970s. Conferences and journals sparkled with the excitement of the discovery of female agency in arenas where women had been blacked out: the French Revolution, for example; the activism of accused prostitutes; of suffragists; of temperance advocates; or of pioneer lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s. In Britain in particular historians were looking at social class and labour history through a new feminist optic. Motherhood had been ‘historiographical terra incognita’, as a Gender & History reviewer put it in 1997,⁵ but mothers were now being mapped as heroic figures who sustained life in the harshest material circumstances.⁶

It has been really pleasurable, in fact downright fun, to see one of the products of that era of feminist ferment, my book Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London 1870–1918, read so carefully. Julie-Marie Strange both engages with the book and critiques it up and down, while courteously describing it as the ‘standard text’ (p. 7) and even ‘magisterial’. Fatherhood and the British Working Class initiates a dialogue between us which I continue here. Love and Toil ‘does not tell the story of fathers’, she charges (p. 3). Here I want to discuss Strange’s excellent new book, and then briefly address its main criticism of my older one: that it sidelined fathers. In support of Strange’s position, historian of fatherhood Lynn Abrams has noted that Love and Toil’s index under ‘Fathers’ lists only: ‘discipline’, ‘funeral arrangements’, ‘father’s chair’, ‘Sunday dinner’ and ‘superior meals’.⁷ Working-class fathers of the nineteenth century had a bad reputation with the policy-makers of their own time and with scholars today, she says, and historians too have tended to locate the working-class father, when not at work, ‘in the pub, the working-men’s club, on the allotment or in the company of his pigeons rather than his children’.⁸ It is indeed true that the first mention of fathers in Love and Toil is in parentheses.⁹ I have looked back at the politics and scholarship that defined my assumptions about working-class London mothers and fathers in late Victorian and Edwardian London, that Strange rightly characterizes as ‘the women’s history approach...