In 1952 the widely read British newspaper the Daily Mirror reported the trial of a young shoplifter under the headline “Father Told—‘Lay Your Love On with a Trowel’” (116). The headline apparently quoted the advice offered by the chair of the juvenile court in front of which the girl had appeared. This very public foregrounding of paternal love—and of its supposed restorative power—perhaps sits at odds with the way historians have come to think about parenting in the recent past. Mothers, not fathers, have tended to lie at the heart of historical accounts of family life, notably so in those that deal with the years immediately following the Second World War, when psychoanalysis was very much in the ascendancy and when women were charged with the emotional reconstruction of Britain one family member at a time. Where men have featured in histories of the family, they have tended to appear as husbands grappling with the demands of companionate marriage, romantic love, and marital sex, rather than as dads playing with their offspring or doling out sweets. Adopting a socio-cultural approach, in Family Men Laura King reframes the family story, tracing shifts in the advice given to fathers about their conduct, interrogating the relationship between this role and broader models of masculinity, and illuminating everyday experiences of fathering and being fathered, across a period of significant societal change. In doing so, King demonstrates quite definitively that fatherhood has a complex twentieth-century history and that its interrogation can shed new light on the dynamic relationship between public and private life.
King's book is a welcome addition to a growing subfield of historical research. It follows on chronologically from Julie-Marie Strange's wonderful history, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914 (2015), and sits alongside other insightful work, including that of Joanne Bailey for the eighteenth century and Lynn Abrams for the twentieth. A defining feature of this body of research is the attention it pays to the complex interplay of prescription, practice, and emotion, and King's book is no exception. Her wide-ranging evidential base facilitates this approach. She draws heavily on newspaper and periodical material that simultaneously represents everyday practice and constitutes new norms, providing evidence of what King identifies as a growing cross-class “truly national” (4) and “increasingly prescriptive” (15) culture of family life. She sets print media alongside fictional representations (Uncle Quentin from Enid Blyton's Famous Five children's adventure series makes more than one appearance) and mines existing collections of social science and oral history from different historical moments and disparate geographical locations. Using the latter, in particular, allows King to explore the complicated ways in which individuals worked with the cultural, emotional, and financial resources at their disposal at any given moment. Her attention to the complexity of individual stories does not, however, militate against overarching interpretation. There are clear patterns at play here, and King identifies causal factors. She sees the popularization of psychological ways of seeing the world, rising living standards, and the Second World War as particularly significant factors in the reframing of fatherhood in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.
King organizes the book into five substantive chapters. In the first two, she deals with roles and tasks, showing what men were expected to do and what they actually did. Here we see a gradual extension of fatherhood beyond breadwinning and disciplining to include entertaining and being “spare mothers” (78). King shows that the provider role itself shifted in meaning and significance—notably so in the context of affluence—but that there was no fundamental challenge to the idea that it was a father's fundamental duty to provide economically for his family. She nonetheless points to the pleasure or pain that fathers might take from the successful or unsuccessful execution of this role. In the remaining chapters King focuses on emotions and relationships, power and authority, and the relationship between a masculine and a parental identity. She charts a growing sense of the father's influence on a child's psychological development, explores the treatment of difficult emotions such as fear and jealousy, and maps the practices through which paternal love was communicated. She shows that while patriarchy remained intact, hierarchies of power within individual families were destabilized. Crucially, she demonstrates that in the years after the Second World War it was easier to combine active fatherhood with acceptable masculinity; indeed a “family man” identity might help define manliness beyond the family itself. Rather than subscribing to the notion of a gradual “domestication” of the British man, King instead uses the concept of “family orientated masculinity” to denote significant change within a strongly gendered context.
Family Men demonstrates that more was expected from fathers from the mid-1930s as the cultural and social significance of fatherhood grew. This was not a one-way process. Most men—though not all—expected more from their role as father and increasingly saw it as an important aspect of their gender identity. Of course, as King acknowledges, more was also expected of mothers in this period as an “intensification of parenting” took hold. Certainly, motherhood and fatherhood remained distinct in this period, understood as an “equality of difference” (193) rather than a convergence of roles and expectations. For King, the double helix as used by Margaret Higonnet and Patrice Higonnet in their study of gender in wartime ultimately provides the most convincing way of depicting change across the century. The key point is that there was change and Family Men provides a thoughtful account of that change and the reasons for it.
