Of War and Men: World War II in the Lives of Fathers and Their Families by Ralph LaRossa (review)

Of War and Men is sociologist Ralph LaRossa’s follow up history to his well-received The Modernization of Fatherhood (1997). It picks up where that volume left off on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor and weaves a narrative that ends with the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. His thesis is that, in spite of its wide variabilities of practice and cultural treatment—what LaRossa differentiates as “the conduct of fatherhood” versus “the culture of fatherhood” (10)—gender roles became more rigid in the wake of World War II and during the development of the Cold War. As a result, he observes a greater emphasis on the “traditional” father’s role of breadwinner and the diminution of the “father-as-pal” and (at least) part-time caregiver roles fathers took on in the 1930s. He calls this process a “traditionalization of fatherhood” (6).

This observation that family relations and gender roles became more “traditional” should come as no surprise to anyone who has read the work of Elaine Tyler May, Beth L. Bailey, or Carolyn Herbst Lewis. Also, what is no surprise is that this history of fatherhood—like most histories of the far-too-understudied subject of historical fatherhood—mostly situates fathering within a historical context without revealing how fathers as fathers effected historical change. Those critiques aside, Of War and Men remains a welcome and richly detailed look at the varieties of fathering that existed in this important period of U.S. History.

The book is divided into thirteen chapters grouped into four parts. The parts can be categorized generally as covering fathers’ wartime experiences at home and abroad, the return of veteran fathers, the early post-war experiences of fathers, and their experiences during the Cold War. As he did in The Modernization of Fatherhood, LaRossa draws on a rich variety of sources: sociological and psychological studies, media in all its forms, and an array of personal reflections and memoirs.

In a remarkably sensitive opening chapter, La Rossa describes the reactions of Japanese-American fathers and their families to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The uncertainty attending the developing policy of interment and the subsequent life in the camps left many Japanese-American fathers powerless to protect their families or themselves from confusion, fear, and grief. Similar fates were suffered by Italian-American and German-American fathers, LaRossa claims.

The next three chapters create a rich contextualization of wartime, offering us glimpses of fathers at war, fathers with sons at war, the families with fathers at war, and fathers coping with life on the home front. Always. LaRossa interweaves examples of the influence of race, class, politics, and economics on the fathers and families he has studied. He is equally thorough in subsequent chapters on the challenges caused when veterans effected in varied ways by their war experiences returned home to wives and children, some of whom had learned to live without them. These chapters are followed by examinations of, among other things, family life in the growing suburbs, a comparison of TV dads with real dads during the 1950s, a review of the evolving text in Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Childcare, and fatherhood and the Civil Rights movement.

Not one of these chapters is anything less than readable and informative, but sometimes one is left to wonder what long stretches of LaRossa’s narrative have to do with fatherhood. So, a long description of the Normandy invasion notes that fathers and sons participated, but offers little insight about what that meant. A long section about segregation in the military evokes the presence of often virulent racism but has little to say about fatherhood beyond the fact that some of that racism’s victims were fathers.

In LaRossa’s defense, by doing little more than setting fathers in a historical context, his history does what most histories of...