Family Men: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Britain, 1914-1960 by Laura King

By Laura King

Fathers are usually overlooked in histories of relations lifestyles in Britain. Family Men offers the 1st educational research of fathers and households within the interval from the 1st global battle to the top of the Nineteen Fifties. It takes a thematic process, reading various elements of fatherhood, from the tasks it encompassed to the ways that it with regards to men's identities. The ancient procedure is socio-cultural: every one bankruptcy examines a variety of old resource fabrics for you to examine either cultural representations of fatherhood and comparable social norms, in addition to exploring the practices and stories of people and households. It uncovers the debates surrounding parenting and relatives lifestyles and tells the tales of guys and their children.

While many historians have tested men's dating to the house and relations in histories of gender, relatives lifestyles, family areas, and sophistication cultures extra mostly, few have in particular tested fathers as an important family, as historic actors, and as emotional contributors. The historical past of fatherhood is intensely major to modern debate: assumptions approximately fatherhood some time past are continuously used to aid arguments concerning the kingdom of fatherhood at the present time and the necessity for switch or in a different way sooner or later. Laura King charts men's altering reports of fatherhood, suggesting that even supposing the jobs and duties fulfilled via males didn't shift quickly, their relationships, place within the family members, and identities underwent major switch among the beginning of the 1st international struggle and the Nineteen Sixties.

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81 These two examples focused in their images on sons, yet all were careful to insist that fathers should be considering the futures of sons and daughters in the text. This most likely indicates a desire to appeal to as many potential customers as possible, but also reflects a belief that fathers should be taking care of both sons’ and daughters’ educations and futures. 82 It is difficult to assess how many fathers took out such policies, but the frequency of this advertising technique would suggest a substantial number did so.

Delap and S.  60. 18 Family Men for their families declined through this period as the cultural emphasis on the significance of fatherhood increased. Such men were increasingly vilified in popular culture and in individuals’ accounts. Yet one aspect of a father’s position as a parent was not usually questioned throughout this period: his relative inferiority in status compared with the mother. The father was seen as secondary and as complementary to the mother, often simultaneously. In his study of working-class fatherhood from 1900 to 1939, Tim Fisher suggests change to the father’s role could happen in various ways: through a convergence or divergence of the mother’s and father’s roles, or through a shift of emphasis within the father’s accepted role.

Dick Beavis, for example, born in the early part of the First World War in County Durham, wrote of his father’s irresponsibility: ‘old dad was working but he had an awful habit of spending the pay in the pub’.  8.  3.  21. 34 Dick Beavis, What Price Happiness? My Life from Coal Hewer to Shop Steward (Whitley Bay, 1980), pp. 12–13.  202.  16. 24 Family Men England, stating that his father ‘didn’t care one hoot how you lived or what you eat’ and that he failed to provide properly, looking after himself alone.

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