Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America (review)

Scholars have suggested an interesting anomaly about cultural and economic changes in the antebellum North. Both women and men of the middle class seem to have lost out. Women seem to have lost their place in the economic system, as middle-class careers took men away from the home and women were left with the compensations of a heroic cultural ideal and more time with children. From the perspective of family history, men lost their place as well, doing little their families other than bringing home as much money as possible.

Shawn Johansen’s Family Men shows men trying to understand and put in place positive sides of economic and demographic changes. Men worked with women, sometimes as their helpers. Men worried when they were away from their families for too long. Efforts at limiting births “increased men’s involvement in the private realm” (51), and as men learned more about women’s reproductive health, they “chose to become more directly engaged in the birth process” (55). Men did not accept the clear dichotomies of gender conventions in antebellum advice literature, looking instead for ways to strike balances between working away from home and being involved in those homes.

The author, like many contemporary scholars, has an awkward habit of saying that things were more complex than scholarly models would suggest. One of the few points scholars can make that is virtually always accurate is that reality was more complex than it seemed in past scholarship. We all know, or at least we all should realize, that reality is more complex than any of us can claim to understand, so our job as scholars is to try to bring a little clarity out of the complexity, to try to create useful, working knowledge out of what might seem chaos. Johanson makes the point so often that it sometimes seems to be his thesis. Trying to clarify his main theme early in the work, he stresses the “wide range of behaviors” (10) available to fathers. The book’s clearest thesis statement is rooted in a criticism of past literature, when the author concludes, “This study has emphasized how men held domestic power in the antebellum period, with an eye to overturning a widely accepted image of the distant and powerless nineteenth-century father” (172) A troubling consequence of the author’s repeated criticisms of past scholarship for its lack of complexity is that he generally seems to be writing only for an academic audience. Names of historians, both those he likes and those he does not, appear so frequently that it seems unlikely that readers unaware of scholarly debates will find Family Men as meaningful as they might.

Once Johansen gets past arguing that things were complex, he makes plenty of worthwhile observations about middle-class family life in the mid-nineteenth century. Avoiding advice literature, he looks instead at an array of personal letters and diaries that reveal a great deal about men and their relationships to children and women. The arrangement of the book is novel and appealing. Johansen moves through the stages in the life of a father, beginning with young men’s pursuit of careers, and moving through marriage, the birth, infancy, and youth of their children, into questions of how fathers should influence the lives of sons and daughters as they began to mature, and ending with issues of changed relationships between fathers and their adult children. The appealing result of this arrangement is to revisit many of the same people as they move from inexperienced young fathers to middle and old age.

What emerges is a picture of uncertain men trying to make the best of things. Often, the author highlights variety, showing that some men stressed older models of being in charge through claims to ultimate authority while others pursued changing models of sharing authority with mothers and deserving their authority over children by mixing economic power with influence and affection. What one remembers most from this book is...