Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North (review)

Although we know much about motherhood in nineteenth-century America, this is the first book available on nineteenth-century fatherhood Historians have neglected the topic in part due to their reliance on the separate spheres ideology when developing their views of nineteenth-century families. Finding the simple dichotomy of a public-private division of the sex roles helpful when constructing their views of gender relations, historians have suggested that in the industrializing economy of the antebellum period, men spent their time and energy in the masculine world of politics and business while women (with some exceptions) lived in and quietly governed the domestic realm. It made sense to extrapolate that men’s fathering role declined significantly during this period. Stephen M. Frank joins the ongoing challenge of the separate spheres construction by showing that while women were the primary parent in middle-class families, men’s fathering roles in the nineteenth century were still important to their families and their own definitions of manhood.

This book is most innovative and interesting in chapters three through six, where Frank skillfully presents to us the voices of fathers and family members Using overlooked yet rich passages in the letters, diaries, and autobiographies of close to 200 families, he explores fathering behaviors in the context of stages in the life cycle of fathers. The author shows that although the provider role took precedence, men had important “part-time” roles as caregiver, nurse, disciplinarian, and authority figure. Also, many readers will be surprised when reading the chapter on becoming a father at the degree to which men were a part of childbirth. Frank’s evidence corroborates other studies that show how some middle-class men involved themselves in pregnancy and offered comfort and support to their wives throughout labor and birth. As children grew, men sought to develop an emotional relationship with the child. Unlike the austere Victorian patriarch stereotype, these fathers used play to express affection, find fulfillment for themselves, and help their wives in rearing good children. By showing this side of fatherhood, he effectively illustrates how men used a seemingly simple role to shape family life. In the final chapter, the author shows the often anxious efforts of fathers to guarantee their maturing children’s future prospects. He suggests that the father-son relationship was rife with stress, primarily because of economics; rural sons faced fathers who expected them to work on the farm until they reached their majority, and urban sons often fell under the obligation of fathers who provided funds for education Daughters escaped these tensions by learning their role from their mothers and serving their fathers as deputy mothers and quasi wives. Many of these findings are intriguing and deserve future attention from scholars.

Unfortunately, Frank’s complex picture of the variety of fathering behaviors and attitudes found in the nineteenth-century middle class is limited by his approach; he weakens the voices of these fathers by his use of rigid and constraining nineteenth-century cultural ideals In the second chapter of the book, he frames his debate by exploring the advice literature that proliferated in America after 1830. At first this seems to be an effective strategy; Frank does a valuable service by showing that, contrary to what many historians have suggested, some nineteenth-century moralists and family “experts” advocated an ideal of “paternal manhood” (p. 24) that encouraged men to assist women in raising children. Moreover, this prescriptive literature provides most readers with a familiar language and point of reference However, by beginning his study of fatherhood with this language and this mindset, the author, like so many other historians, allows the long-dead writers of this advice literature to structure our understanding of fatherhood. When Frank posits the rise of a new “family man” (p 174), the reader is not sure if this new man resided in Victorian families or primarily in the minds of Victorian writers...