**'From Your Ever Anxious and Loving Father': Faith, Fatherhood, and Masculinity in One Man's Letters to His Son during the First World War**

### **Martin Robb**

Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK; martin.robb@open.ac.uk

Received: 27 January 2020; Accepted: 20 March 2020; Published: 24 March 2020

**Abstract:** In the early months of 1916, Charles Robb a retired shipping clerk in the East End of London, England, wrote a series of letters to his 19-year-old son Arthur, an army private awaiting embarkation to the Western Front. Charles Robb was my great grandfather and Arthur Robb was my grandfather. The letters offer an intriguing glimpse of one man 'doing' fatherhood under conditions of traumatic separation and extreme anxiety. This paper presents an analysis of the letters from a psychosocial perspective, exploring the ways in which the writer exhorts his son to live up to the ideals of Christian manhood, while managing the anxiety of separation by presenting a reconstruction in language of the familiar world of home and church.

**Keywords:** fatherhood; war; masculinity; family history; religion

### **1. Introduction**

On a Sunday evening in February 1916, a 65-year-old shipping office clerk from East Ham, a suburb on the eastern outskirts of London, England, sat down to write a letter to his 19-year-old son, a private in the Royal Fusiliers, who was stationed at Aldershot, Hampshire, awaiting transfer to the Western Front in France. The writer of the letter was my great grandfather, Charles Edward Robb, and the person he was writing to was my grandfather, Arthur Ernest Robb. The letter is one of a series of eight written by Charles Robb to his son on a more or less weekly basis between 6 January and 24 February 1916, which came into my possession after my grandfather's death. They had been preserved for half a century in my grandfather's wallet, which is a sure sign of their emotional importance for him. Sadly, only one side of the correspondence survives, as any letters that my grandfather may have written home have been lost.

Initially, my interest in the letters was purely personal, and I regarded them simply as useful background to my family history research. However, the more I read them, the more I came to see their potential as a resource for my academic research on fatherhood. When I looked more closely at these letters, it occurred to me that what they showed was a man actually 'doing' fathering. Most interactions between fathers, and indeed mothers, and their children are fleeting, evanescent, and difficult for researchers to observe or capture. Recent years have seen the field of fatherhood research growing exponentially, with ground-breaking studies of fathers' experience (for example: Doucet 2006; Dermott 2008; Miller 2010; Ranson 2015). However, despite the valuable insights that it offers, most research on fatherhood (including my own) is forced to focus on analysing fathers' reflexive constructions of their fathering practice, which is inevitably slightly removed from that actual practice (Robb 2004a, 2004b, 2020). However, letters between parents and their children provide a rare opportunity to see fathering, and indeed mothering, in action. In the case of my great grandfather's letters, written just over 100 years ago, there is also the opportunity to observe an example of fathering practice at a particular historical juncture, in a specific social context, and to assess it against rhetorical

claims about fathering in the past. A further cause for interest in these letters is that they present an example of a man 'doing' fathering in the unusual conditions of separation and anxiety created by war and the very real threat of personal loss.

Moreover, the value of letters such as these is that they represent a kind of text that is increasingly rare. Before the age of the telephone, not to mention the smart phone and the internet, letters were the usual way in which family members separated by distance, or by extended periods of absence, communicated with each other, thus providing us with the kind of record that is rarely available in an age of texts and emails. What is more, an extraordinary event such as a war, with its experience of lengthy separation between family members and friends, has the side effect of producing extended series of correspondence.

However, it could be argued that these letters are also unusual, even in the context of First World War letter-writing, in that they are from a father to a son. Michael Roper, in his ground-breaking study of 'the battle for emotional survival of young British civilian soldiers on the Western Front in the First World War, and the part played by their families in that battle', writes that 'relationships with loved ones at home ... played a crucial role in sustaining the morale of this largely young, amateur army' (Roper 2010). Inevitably, these relationships had to be conducted remotely, 'through letters, parcels and other long-distance means'. However, Roper suggests that it was mothers, and not fathers, who were the principal correspondents with their soldier sons: 'Among the Imperial War Museum's collections of sons' correspondence from the Western Front there are almost six times as many letters to mothers as to fathers' (Roper 2010). Elsewhere, Roper concludes that 'the figure who appears least often in family correspondence is the father ... The letter was a feminine form, and because of its potential introspection and emotionality, for many mothers it felt a natural means of staying in touch' (Roper 2010). Nevertheless, Roper contends that 'examples of mothers' letters are hard to come by' (Roper 2010), which presumably means that examples of fathers' letters, such as those written by my great grandfather, are even rarer. More broadly, there has been a lack of academic attention paid to the study of fatherhood in the First World War by comparison with the impact of the Second World War on fathering practices (see for example, LaRossa 2011).

Besides his gender, there were other reasons why my great grandfather's letters caught my interest as a researcher on fatherhood and masculinities. One is that they seemed to demonstrate an emotionally expressive form of fathering that contradicted many of the stereotypes about Victorian and Edwardian masculinities. At the same time, these letters were shot through with my great grandfather's deep Methodist Christian faith: indeed, it seemed difficult to separate or disentangle his faith from his fathering. So, these letters offered a case study of a man 'doing' both fatherhood and religious faith, while these two aspects of his identity appeared interwoven in intriguing ways.

With these issues in mind, I set out to analyse the letters, looking for answers to four key questions:


In what follows, I present my findings based on a close analysis of the letters. In addition, this article will also reflect on the more general questions raised by these letters and the experience of analysing them. These include questions about the validity or legitimacy of using material from one's personal family history as the material or basis for academic research. What kinds of methodological questions does this bring to the surface, and how should the researcher approach the use of 'found' material of this nature?

### **2. Background and Context**

Before presenting a detailed analysis of the letters, it will be useful to place them in their familial, social, and historical contexts. Born in Soho, London in 1851, the son of a law stationer's clerk and a mother who would die within weeks of his birth, my great grandfather Charles Edward Robb spent most of his childhood in Stepney in the East of London. His family were Methodists, and Charles' own series of lowly clerical jobs would include employment as housekeeper at the Wesleyan Mission in Whitechapel. Married at the age of 26 to the daughter of an umbrella maker, Charles was the father of eight children who survived beyond infancy, of whom my grandfather, Arthur, born in 1897, was the youngest. By the time of the 1901 census, the family had moved out from Whitechapel to the expanding working-class and lower-middle-class suburb of East Ham, on the Essex border. In 1902, Charles suffered the first of three serious bereavements, when his eldest son, also named Charles, a Royal Marine, died on active service in Aden at the age of 23. Three years later, Charles experienced two more losses within months of each other. In April 1905, his 16-year-old daughter Marion died from heart failure, and a few months later, his wife Louisa died from typhoid fever at the age of 48, leaving Charles to raise his surviving children alone. By the time of the 1911 census, he was living with his married daughter Louisa and her family; also with them were another daughter, Caroline (the 'Carrie' mentioned in the letters) and my grandfather Arthur. Before the outbreak of war, Arthur had worked as a brass finisher's apprentice. We know from other wartime letters that he was already 'courting' Polly Webb, the daughter of a Stepney bootmaker, whom he would eventually marry. Family legend would have it that when war broke out, my grandfather joined up as soon as he was able, perhaps even falsifying his age to ensure that he was eligible for active service in the Labour Corps of the Royal Fusiliers.

As already mentioned, the Robb family were Methodists. Founded by John Wesley in the 18th century as a revivalist sect that eventually broke away from the Church of England, 19th and early-20th-century Methodism was distinguished by its overt emotionalism, an emphasis on a personal relationship with a loving Jesus, and by the involvement of lay people both in preaching and in self-government through the local 'class' system. The socialist historian E.P. Thompson (Thompson 2013) was famously disdainful of Methodism's emotionalism and could only see its influence on the emerging working class in negative terms, despite the fact that he himself came from a Methodist background. The historian of masculinity John Tosh takes an altogether more positive view of the Nonconformist movement's impact, particularly on gender relations. In his book on 19th-century masculinities and domesticity, Tosh discusses three case studies of Victorian couples who were committed to 'the Methodist way of life—the class, the chapel, the preaching, the hymn-singing' (Tosh 2007) and claims that 'Methodism furnished the materials for a feminine, as well as a masculine view of the world, and even for a measure of challenge to patriarchal authority' (Tosh 2007). The relationship between Methodism, masculinity, and fatherhood, in the context of my great grandfather's letters, will be discussed later in this article. Charles Robb's family background, his employment history, which included jobs as an office messenger and shipping clerk, and his Nonconformist affiliation meant that he and his family hovered on the borders between the 'respectable' working class and the lower middle class. Nothing is known for certain about Charles' political affiliations, but his letters show evidence of a robust patriotism alongside the all-important influence of his devout Methodism.

Charles Robb's letters to his son Arthur were written in 1916 at the height of the First World War (Fussell 1975). The second Battle of Ypres had been fought in the previous year, with the loss of about 60,000 British lives. The Battle of the Somme would take place later in 1916, with the loss of more than 19,000 British lives on its first day and 500,000 by the end of fighting in November. This is the theatre of war towards which my grandfather was heading at the time that his father wrote these letters to them. However, all of the surviving letters were written before Arthur left England and were addressed to him at Corunna Barracks in Aldershot, which was the main training ground for British infantry and a gathering point before embarkation for France.

### **3. Content and Structure of the Letters**

What did my great grandfather write about in his letters to his son, and how were the letters structured? In what follows, I will take as an example the letter that Charles wrote on Sunday 1916, one that is fairly typical of the series as a whole, and provide an overview of its content and structure. The letter is, similar to most family letters, something of a mixed bag, combining the serious with the trivial, the meaningful with the mundane. It begins with a reference to Arthur's previous letter and some continuing business about an undershirt that Charles had sent him, while later on, there is some other fairly trivial transaction6 Februaryal business: an address for a sister, a response to a request for a photograph.

However, the letter moves very quickly from these everyday concerns to expressing an intense anxiety about Arthur's current situation, which is framed initially as the writer's surprise that his son is not planning to come home on weekend leave:

### *My Dear Arthur*

*I received your letter yesterday acknowledging the Undershirt but was rather surprised to hear that you were not coming for the weekend. I do not know under what rule or regulation the passes are given in your section but I do hear that in most sections they are allowed by the O*ffi*cer in Charge to a certain number of the best behaved and most attentive to duty during the week.*

*If this is the case in your section it does not appear to be altogether as it should be with you otherwise I am sure that you would have been able to obtain leave by this time.*

*I have been making enquiries from two or three who are able to inform me about the Fusiliers and they have made me almost to wish that you had not joined in that Reg[imen]t.*

Then, there follows a long paragraph in which Charles exhorts his son, in explicitly religious language, to mind his moral behaviour:

*Dear Arthur do take some advice from me, before you left home I begged of you not to associate yourself with bad companions. Remember you are an abstainer from all alcoholic drinks. Stick to the Temperance whatever it may cost you, likewise avoid in every way card playing or gambling betting and every means of dishonesty. I have not the least doubt that you will often find it rather di*ffi*cult to avoid some or all of these Temptations. If the comrades with whom you are placed are mostly used to these things then not only for your sake but for my sake and all your Brothers and Sisters. There is still a Higher Sake for you to consider. Do try and Remember that you have always been taught the Supreme Great Truth that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners and that all through Him might be saved. Again I beg of you Arthur do not be led into following these awful Soul destroying habits. I am very much afraid that you have not at all times enough courage to say No when you are surrounded by Temptation You must Pray and Pray sincerely and earnestly and keep a Watchful eye wide open so that you can clearly see there is Temptation and do not be in the least afraid to meet it and Resist. Not alone in your own strength but keep your memory clear that God is Omnipresent always near you, always ready to hear your Prayer, always willing and anxious to Help you to persist. So I beg of you Arthur not to be negligent with Prayerfulness and Watchfulness. You are not praying alone. I have promised that I will always Pray for you, that promise is to me a Solemn Vow to God so when you find you feel weak Let God know all about it and remember that I too am praying for you.*

This is followed by a short paragraph in which Charles advises his son to recall the words of a favourite hymn as a way of overcoming temptation:

*If you cannot think of words at the moment that you feel depressed try and call to mind some Hymn verse that you know like this Shun evil companions. Bad—Language Disdain—God's Name hold in Reverence. Nor take it in Vain. Be thoughtful and earnest. Kind hearted and true*

*Look ever to Jesus. He will carry you through.*

The lines quoted in the letter are from *Yield Not To Temptation*, a popular Victorian hymn written by Horatio R. Palmer in 1868. Then, there is a concluding paragraph in which the writer shifts the focus to himself and his own health and well-being:

*In conclusion I must tell you this is Sunday evening and I have not been able to attend the Hall or any of the meetings as I am not at all well and am resting all day. It is very quiet and lonesome by myself but I must stand it till about the 26th when I expect that Carrie will be home again.*

After this comes a final exhortation that returns to the main theme:

*Now Arthur I beg you to read this letter and give it all the consideration you can and Do your very best to make a True Soldier not only for your King and Country but try and enrich your Loyalty by Faithfulness and whole Heartedness in your Service to God and His Son Jesus Christ who Loves you*

The writer signs off:

*From your ever anxious And Loving Father Charles Edward xx*

### **4. Methods of Analysis**

In setting out to analyse this and the other letters in the series, I used a methodological approach that drew on both the tools of discursive psychology and the insights of psychosocial research. Potter and Wetherell, in their classic text on discursive psychology, argue for paying attention to the function or purpose of a text, suggesting that 'people use their language to do things: to order and request, persuade and accuse' but that this should not be understood in a mechanical way: when people are persuading, accusing, requesting, etc., they do not always do so explicitly' (Potter and Wetherell 1987). Writing about the ways in which masculinities are constructed within discourse, Nigel Edley makes the claim that 'when people talk, they do so using a lexicon or repertoire of terms which has been provided for them by history' (Edley 2001). As Wetherell and Potter explain, the term 'discourse' has been used in many different ways. Some use the term 'to cover all forms of spoken interaction, formal and informal', whereas the influential French theorist Michel Foucault used it to refer to 'broader, historically developing, linguistic practices' (Potter and Wetherell 1987). For Foucault, discourse is 'a conceptual terrain in which knowledge is formed and produced ... the effect of discursive practices is to make it virtually impossible to think outside them' (Hook 2001; Foucault 1981) Drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of discourse and subjectivity, Lupton and Barclay argue that discourses, 'as ways of framing, speaking about and giving meaning to phenomena, are the sites of struggle, open to challenge from other discourses' (Lupton and Barclay 1997).

A discourse-analytic approach sees identity as multi-layered, non-unitary, and as established and performed in language. While psychosocial researchers would largely agree with this, they are also concerned with what motivates speakers or writers to invest in specific discourses, or particular discursive or rhetorical strategies. At the same time, psychosocial analysis, while sharing discursive psychology's general sense of the social construction of identity, is also interested in how social factors interact with personal factors. Drawing on the principles of psychoanalysis but refracted through a social lens, psychosocial research studies the ways in which subjective experience is interwoven with social life, maintaining that subjective experiences 'cannot be abstracted from societal, cultural, and historical contexts, but nor can they be deterministically reduced to the social'. Instead, social and cultural worlds are 'shaped by psychological process and intersubjective relations' (Association for Psychosocial Studies n.d.). As Stephen Frosh has argued, a purely sociological approach to personal experience risks 'flattening' out emotional life and reducing it to the interplay of social forces (Frosh 2002).

In his study of First World War letters, Roper raises the question of how the insights of psychoanalysis can assist an understanding of the emotional lives of young men on the Western Front

without being reductive or over-speculative. He suggests that while Freud's original psychoanalytic insights on love, hate, loss, and trauma might be useful, for this specific purpose, Melanie Klein's object relations theory offers a more productive resource (Roper 2010; Klein 1986). Clearly, in Roper's case, Klein's emphasis on the primacy of relationships between children and their mothers is determinative, but her broader understanding of emotions and relationships might also inform an understanding of my great grandfather's strategies in his letters to his son. Roper writes that 'emotions for the Kleinian are not perceived as self-contained and individual, but as generated in human conduct and through communication—conscious and unconscious—with others' (Roper 2010, p. 24). In particular, a Kleinian-informed psychoanalytic approach can help to understand strategies for dealing with anxiety, Roper argues, and in particular for understanding omissions and evasions in the letters he analyses (Roper 2010). According to Hollway and Jefferson, common to all psychoanalytic schools is 'the idea of a dynamic unconscious which defends against anxiety and significantly influences people's actions, lives and relations' (Hollway and Jefferson 2000). This is clearly relevant to the present case study, which focuses on one man's rhetorical strategies for dealing with his own anxieties resulting from separation and the fear of loss. On the other hand, Roper echoes the 'common criticism of the use of psychoanalysis in history that we cannot put the dead "on the couch" ... and we cannot test our interpretations on our subjects as a psychoanalyst would' (Roper 2010, p. 25). The same applies to any psychoanalytically informed analysis or interpretation of textual material, which means that conclusions must inevitably remain speculative and open to contestation and revision.

In addition, a psychosocial approach to gender shares, with writers from a sociological perspective such as (Connell 1995), the notion that masculinities and femininities are plural, socially situated, and constantly formed and reformed in social interactions, rather than being static or biologically predetermined. However, a psychosocial perspective also includes a keen awareness that, to quote Peter Redman (Redman 2005), writing about research with boys, 'the various practices through which boys and young men [and one might add, all men] "do" masculinity are saturated with unconscious fantasy, intersubjective communication, and inextricably blurred boundaries between self and other.' Elsewhere, Redman and colleagues argue that 'psychoanalytic arguments can help us get to grips with the emotional labour involved in [everyday] activities, since they necessarily focus on the endless business by which unconscious anxieties and desires enter into and inflect our experience of the social world' (Redman et al. 2002).

A psychosocial approach, drawing at the same time on the tools of discourse analysis, can help us to see that Charles Robb's letters to his son are shot through with a deep sense of anxiety, and at the same time to identify the ways in which he uses language to deal with that anxiety.

### **5. Conflict and Resolution**

If one were subjecting these letters to a rigorous discourse analysis, the first question one would ask of the texts would be: What are they trying to accomplish? What is it that motivates these texts, and what purpose or purposes are they setting out to fulfil? My analysis of my great grandfather's letters leads me to conclude that they are, first and foremost, struggling towards the resolution of a central underlying conflict between the writer's religious identity and beliefs on the one hand, and his son's current situation as a soldier in the British army about to go off to war on the other. I want to suggest that this tension is at the heart of, and is the driving emotional force behind Charles Robb's letters to his son, and it is one that the letters return to and worry away at repeatedly and in different ways.

Another way of expressing this is to suggest that the principal opposition in the letters is between two worlds: on the one hand, the familiar world of home, at the heart of which is the religious faith that Charles holds dear and to which he hopes Arthur also ascribes, and what is perceived to be the alien world of the army and the war. More specifically, it could be argued that the conflict to be resolved in the letters is between Charles' perception of his son's *spiritual* vocation as a Christian and his *secular* calling to serve King and country, which is a calling that Charles rhetorically endorses, while at the same time articulating a distinct sense of unease about its consequences for Arthur's spiritual well-being.

The letters are constructed in such a way that they move, or attempt to move, towards a resolution of this conflict. A clear example of their attempts at resolution is provided by the way in which a number of letters end, with a ritual bringing together of the two callings, the spiritual and the secular. For example, the letter of February 1916 already cited ends as follows:

*Do your very best to make a True Soldier not only for your King and Country but try and enrich your Loyalty by Faithfulness and whole Heartedness in your Service to God and His Son Jesus Christ who Loves you.*

There are similar examples in other letters:

*God Bless You and make you a good Soldier of Jesus Christ so that it may Blend with your life as a Soldier for your King and Country.*

*God Bless you and make you a Good and Steadfast Soldier not only for King and Country but for Jesus Christ who Loves you so much.*

These ritual and formulaic conclusions, which are similar to the blessing at the end of a religious service, combine the two vocations by using the traditional image of the Christian as a soldier of Christ, which is an image that was especially popular in Victorian and Edwardian Protestantism, coinciding with the heyday both of the British empire and of Christian missionary activity, and of which the words of the popular 19th-century hymn *Onward Christian Soldiers* provide a striking example.

However, on the way to these brief moments of ritual resolution, the letters contain all kinds of fractures and failures to resolve the two opposing positions. How does the writer of these letters deal with these conflicts and attempt to resolve them?

### **6. Displacing Anxiety**

As we saw from the letter of 6 February 1916 quoted earlier, the focus of my great grandfather's anxiety in these letters is very much on the moral threat posed to his son by life in the army: the temptation to drink, to gamble, and so on. Charles Robb's expressions of concern about these threats become more intense as the series of letters unfolds, and there is a palpable sense of the distance between himself and his son creating an increasing sense of loss of control over Arthur's behaviour.

What is striking, certainly to the modern reader of these letters, is the absence of any reference to the very real physical threat posed by the war in which Arthur will soon be involved. At the same time, it is important to see things from Charles' perspective. To him, as a faithful Christian believer, what may seem to us with historical insight to be venal or trivial matters, when compared to the danger of death or injury in battle, might have appeared serious threats to his son's spiritual well-being and indeed to the fate of his very soul. At the same time, perhaps direct reference to the threat posed by war would have been taboo not just for my great grandfather, but for any parent writing to a son about to face such dangers. Therefore, a certain amount of avoidance of the subject, even to the extent of devoting precious space in the letters to the discussion of missing items of clothing or overdue subscriptions, might be said to be understandable.

However, on another reading, Charles' apparent obsession with venal temptations and domestic trivia can be interpreted as a displacement of his anxiety about the physical dangers faced by his son going to war and the very real threat of losing him. Even if we allow for the stringent demands of my great grandfather's Methodist faith and his teetotalism, the sheer energy expended in these letters on warnings and scoldings about drinking and gambling seems to speak to a deep level of repressed fear about that which cannot be mentioned in writing. Thus, at least some of what comes across as fear of losing his son to the apparently immoral culture of the army can be taken as a displacement of fear of a loss a more serious and permanent nature. Would it be too speculative to view these unspoken and

repressed fears as intensified by Charles' previous experiences of loss, particularly that of his other soldier son?

In addition to the displacement of anxiety on to the moral culture of the army and domestic trivia, there is a third kind of displacement that is evident in the letters, in the perhaps surprising focus on concerns about the letter writer's own health. To the modern reader, it seems odd to see a father whose son will shortly be facing the prospect of injury or death in battle, complaining about his own minor health problems, especially given the magnanimous Christian concern for his son shown elsewhere. The ostensible aim seems to be to evoke sympathy in his son, and perhaps a sense of guilt, primarily at not coming home for the weekend, but perhaps also at an unspoken level guilt for volunteering to join the army and leaving his father alone. So, perhaps there is a tension here, albeit at an unconscious level and confusingly articulated, between Charles' ostensible patriotism and suppressed feelings of betrayal and loss exemplified by his son's departure for war.

At the same time, I would argue that the letters' repeated focus on the mundane objects and activities of home can be seen as fulfilling a positive function in relation to the letters' aim of reconciling the familiar and sacred on the one hand with the alien and secular on the other.

### **7. Reconciling Two Worlds**

A key way in which the letters seek to redeem the alien world of the army and the war is by creating a bridge between the homely, faith-filled world and the hostile world of the army by projecting an image of the former world into the latter in written form. Interestingly, there are parallels here with the rhetorical strategies adopted by the poet David Jones in his First World War epic *In Parenthesis* (Jones 1937; Jones 1959), which I have written about elsewhere (Robb 1989) and which adopts a similar process of making the strange familiar or redeeming the 'unhomely' world, in Jones' case of the Western Front, by connecting it with 'homely' parallels. It might be argued that this strategy, in Charles' case, is as much for the benefit of the writer as the recipient of the letters; it is a way of overcoming fatherly anxiety as much as comforting and reassuring his son.

One interesting way in which the letters do this, and once again there are intriguing parallels with the work of 'sacramental' poets such as David Jones, is by reproducing the actual language of the 'homely' world, and more specifically the language of the chapel and the Sunday school in the text of the letters, interweaving these quotations with his own words in a multi-layered way. As was noted in relation to the first letter quoted earlier, there are whole passages that do not simply quote from the Bible or from familiar hymns and choruses but rather almost recreate in a ritual way a Methodist service, as if the writer is actually breaking into song.

What this strategy accomplishes is in effect to transfer in a very tangible, sensuous, and emotive form a simulacrum of the 'home' world that embraces not only family and home, but also faith and the weekly world of the church and all it signifies into the unhomely world of the army. Charles' strategy provides a connection between the two worlds, but it also aims to redeem the alien secular world of the army and the war by imaginative association, to bring them back into connection with the familiar spiritual world of faith, family, and home.

Roper (2010) writes about the way in which parcels from home acted for soldiers on the Western Front as a tangible expression of maternal love as well as an embodied reminder or representation of home. He gives examples not just of food but of other tokens of home such as a mother sending her son swatches of their new kitchen wallpaper, which are tokens that acted in an almost sacramental way (in a way that David Jones would have recognised and endorsed) as physical representations of 'home'. As Roper comments:

'Some might interpret these offerings as signs of civilian incomprehension of life in the trenches, but this was the stuff of home itself, and it offered the most direct contact short of going on leave. Historians, transfixed as they are by the written word and the drama of the trenches, have sometimes overlooked the significance of these ordinary domestic objects—now vanished—as conveying maternal love' (Roper 2010).

Charles' tangible but seemingly trivial representations of home in words can be seen as fulfilling a similar function to these parcels, in this case acting as tokens of paternal love. John Tosh argues that there was something particular about Victorian Methodism's emphasis on the home as a spiritual entity:

'In drawing religion into the home at the same time as work was being taken out of it, the Methodists greatly intensified the hold of domesticity over the middle class and produced much of its characteristic tone and atmosphere. Methodism, like other forms of Evangelicalism, had its own theological rationale for locating so much religious observance in the home. It was a "religion of the heart" which valued the spiritual feelings of the individual. The relative intimacy of the small domestic gathering made space for an atmosphere of spiritual fellowship, in which the soul was bared, guidance sought, and reproof administered. This new dispensation, it has often been pointed out, enhanced the status of women, since it implied a new spiritual dimension to their traditional role as guardians of the hearth. But there were vital implications for men as well. What bound men to the home, in the early Victorian period especially, was not just the popular ethic of companionate marriage, or the emotional and material needs of the breadwinner, but the conviction that home was the proper place to cultivate one's spiritual well-being. The godly household was a corner of heaven on earth' (Tosh 2007).

### **8. Fathering and Faith**

Discussion of my great grandfather's rhetorical strategy of forging redemptive connections between familiar and unfamiliar worlds prompts the question: what is the relationship in these letters between fathering and faith? One way of answering this is to suggest that Charles Robb's Methodist Christian faith provides him with two distinctive registers for his performance or practice of fatherhood and by extension for his identity as a man.

One of these registers has already been seen on display in the extract from the first letter quoted earlier. It is a register of moral exhortation with an insistent emphasis on courage, effort, and action. There are similar examples in other letters in the series:

*Try and do all and everything of your Best in all things and do not forget the best way to conquer di*ffi*culties that seem almost impossible and are likely to conquer you is to use your own energy, capability, goodwill and endeavour.*

*I hope that you are getting on well and endeavouring in every way to do your very best. You are now placed in a position that everything you are told to do must be done immediately without any excuse for not doing it so keep up your courage and at every di*ffi*culty that comes in the way keep smiling and at all risks persevere until you conquer it Be active Be prompt Be careful Be willing Be diligent and then you will get on.*

*Dear Arthur I trust and pray earnestly for you that you will not forget the teachings of the Sunday School and the Scouts to Trust in God at all times and remember God for Jesus Christ's sake. God loves you not for a day but eternally and in answer to your Prayer assist you to overcome all di*ffi*culties and Temptation Do not forget to Be constant in Prayer and Watchful against Temptation.*

We can see here one side of Nonconformist spirituality: the Puritan emphasis on working out one's own salvation with fear and trembling, and on individual effort, courage, and persistence, which are familiar from Bunyan's *Pilgrim's Progress* and Max Weber's famous analysis of the Protestant work ethic (Weber 2013). The connection with conventional images of Victorian masculinity should be apparent (Mangan and Walvin 1987). This aspect of his religious identity is a resource for a particular kind of masculinity in Charles' letters, one that is active, self-reliant, defensive, bounded, and wary of threats from outside.

However, alongside this, it is evident from the letters that Methodism provides Charles with another quite different register for performing fatherhood. Tosh (2007) has written about the ways in which Methodism provided a language that enabled Victorian men to be emotionally expressive, with its emphasis on the unconditional love of God and an intimate personal relationship with a loving Jesus, which was imagined often in quite feminine terms. A hint of this is seen in the final

quotation above, with its reminder of God's infinite love for Arthur. Charles signs off one letter as 'your anxious and Loving Father' and adds two kisses. Another letter ends with the words 'With prayer from your Loving Father Charles Edward' and 'Love and Kisses from all'. Other letters in the series end in a similar fashion, with references both to the divine love of Jesus Christ 'who loves you so much' (24 January), 'Jesus Christ who loves you' (6 February), and to paternal love 'With abundance of Love and kisses from your father' (10 February), 'With love and kisses from your loving Father' (18 February), and so on.

These examples provides something of a corrective to the conventional image of the ways in which a 65-year-old man, brought up in the Victorian era, might have written to his 19-year-old soldier son 100 years ago. It suggests that another kind of masculine identity was available to men of this era from particular Christian backgrounds besides the austere stereotype of the self-reliant Puritan. The Christian, and specifically Methodist, image of the loving fatherhood of God provides Charles with a model for his own fathering, and at the same time, the emotional spirituality of Methodism offers him a language in which to openly express his love for his son. Tosh writes about one of the men in his case studies, a Methodist farmer from Lincolnshire, that his 'fatherly involvement' was 'not what we might expect of a Victorian father, much less a devout Methodist' and that fatherhood was integral to this man's 'sense of his divinely ordered place in the world, and inseparable from his masculine self' (Tosh 2007).

One might be tempted to characterise one of Charles Robb's rhetorical registers as more masculine and the other as more feminine, if we take masculinity as being conventionally associated with effort and action and femininity with expressivity and care. However, this is to fall back on stereotypical assumptions of what 'typical' fathering or masculinity might have been when Charles Robb was writing. To see him as unusual is to fall into the trap of viewing 'past fatherhoods' as the opposite of early 21st-century notions of caring or 'hands-on' fatherhood. One might argue that the contemporary discourse of 'new' fatherhood almost needs this stereotypical image of fathering in the past against which to define itself, although research by Tosh and other historians of fatherhood has done much to problematise the received picture of fathers' lack of engagement in the care of their children in the past: see for example Julie-Marie Strange's work on Victorian and Edwardian working-class fatherhoods (Strange 2015), Laura King's overview of post-First World War fatherhood (King 2015) and Ralph LaRossa's work on fathering practices in the inter-war period (LaRossa 1997). Part of the problem has been the absence of first-hand evidence of different fathering practices in the past, an absence for which I hope this analysis of my great grandfather's letters, as well as pioneering research such as that conducted by Tosh and others, might begin to compensate.

### **9. Family History and Fatherhood Research**

The analysis of my great grandfather's wartime letters in this article prompts certain questions about the methodological legitimacy of using 'found' family history material of this kind as the basis for academic research. One question that is raised by this approach is the degree to which one can claim that the accounts analysed are in any sense representative of the broader spectrum of experience, in this case of fathering practice, in the period being studied. However, the same question might be raised about any other example of so-called 'micro history', or indeed any research using a 'case study' approach (Ginzburg 1993). The claim is not that these localised case studies are necessarily 'typical', but rather that their analysis lends a depth and richness to understanding of a spectrum of experience that is not available when using a wider historical lens. The same might apply to the burgeoning field of autoethnography, in which researchers use the example of their own experience as data (for example, see (Strasser 2016).

However, there are additional issues raised when using material from personal family histories as the basis for academic research. For example, the researcher, as a family 'insider', may have access to external data that could colour his or her interpretation of the material. This might take the form of direct personal knowledge of the writer or speaker, or in the case of more distant relatives such as my great grandfather, access to family stories and anecdotes, as well as a general 'feel' for the family context not available to an 'outsider' researcher. Again, some of these problems and issues are familiar from other kinds of 'insider' research, such as participant observation in ethnography (Hammersley and Atkinson 2019).

These factors would certainly create complications if one were adopting a purely discourse-analytic methodology, in which case one would want to rigorously exclude any information from outside the text. Clearly, both as a family 'insider' and as a family history researcher who has researched my grandfather's and great grandfather's lives, this was not possible for me, as it might have been for an outsider researcher coming to these texts without that knowledge. However, a psychosocial approach, with its interest in the personal factors behind an individual's investment in particular discourses, might take a more permissive attitude to this extraneous knowledge. At the same time, one needs to bear in mind Roper's caveat, mentioned above, about the dangers of psychoanalysing the dead.

To what extent, then, might what we know of Charles Robb's life experience from external sources help us to understand the strategies he adopts in these letters and the way in which he practices fathering? I have already referred to the fact that his life had been marked by a number of losses, beginning with the death of a mother whom he never knew, and followed by the deaths of two children and of his wife. Added to the experience of the latter bereavement, and as a consequence of it, is the fact that, to be the best of our knowledge, Charles had to raise his younger children as a single father, although we cannot know the precise circumstances of this, or whether there were other female figures—older sisters, or aunts, for example—who acted as maternal substitutes after the death of his wife Louisa. It is tempting to speculate that Charles was forced to act as both 'father' and 'mother' to Arthur, at least, as the youngest child (who was only 8 years old when his mother died), and this might lead us to conclude that the particularly expressive nature of Charles' letters, rather than being typical of fathers from his religious background or his generation, have resulted from his unusual role, for the period, as a single father.

As a researcher analysing my great grandfather's letters, it would have been difficult if not impossible for me to exclude this kind of extraneous information from my interpretation of the letters. However, as with all academic research, surely the response is to remain reflexively aware of the dangers of over-interpretation, to avoid speculative conclusions based on limited evidence, and at the same time to consider alternative explanations, all of which I hope I have done in this analysis.

### **10. Conclusions**

My great grandfather's wartime letters to his son provide a rich case study of one man 'doing' fathering under difficult conditions of distance and separation in a specific social and historical context. Analysing the letters has demonstrated some of the ways in which particular rhetorical and discursive strategies may be used to displace overwhelming anxiety and to resolve seemingly intractable personal conflicts. At the same time, this analysis has cast light on some of the ways in which religious belief and masculine identity can interact, and the ways in which a particular religious tradition—in this case, Methodist Christianity—was able to provide a resource for an affective and expressive masculinity and fathering identity. It is to be hoped that this kind of 'micro-history', accompanied by rigorous analysis, can make a significant contribution to the growing social history of fatherhood and to the re-evaluation of stereotypical assumptions about fatherhood in the past, as well as contemporary debates about fatherhood and masculinity.

### **Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Acknowledgments:** An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance Forum on 'Fathers and Fatherhood' at The Open University, UK, in June 2013, and at the Annual Conference of the American Men's Studies Association, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, in April 2016. The author is grateful for the comments received from participants at these events.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

### **References**

Association for Psychosocial Studies. n.d. (undated) 'What Is Psychosocial Studies?'. Available online: http: //www.psychosocial-studies-association.org/about/ (accessed on 23 March 2020).

Connell, Robert William. 1995. *Masculinities*. Cambridge: Polity.

Dermott, Esther. 2008. *Intimate Fatherhood: A Sociological Analysis*. London: Routledge.


Fussell, Paul. 1975. *The Great War and Modern Memory*. New York: Oxford University Press.


Strange, Julie-Marie. 2015. *Fatherhood and the British Working-Class, 1865–1915*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Strasser, Daniel S. 2016. 'You Might Want to Call Your Father': An Autoethnographic Account of Masculinity, Relationships, and My Father. *Journal of Family Communication* 16: 64–75. [CrossRef]

Thompson, Edward Palmer. 2013. *The Making of the English Working-Class*. London: Penguin Books.

Tosh, John. 2007. *A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-class Home in Victorian England*. London: Yale University Press.

Weber, Max. 2013. *The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism*. New York: Oxford University Press.

© 2020 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

### *Article* **"My Daddy** ... **He Was a Good Man": Gendered Genealogies and Memories of Enslaved Fatherhood in America's Antebellum South**

### **Susan-Mary Grant \* and David Bowe**

School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE1 7RU, UK; d.bowe9994@googlemail.com

**\*** Correspondence: susan-mary.grant@ncl.ac.uk

Received: 18 February 2020; Accepted: 24 March 2020; Published: 1 April 2020

**Abstract:** While the last few years have witnessed an upsurge of studies into enslaved motherhood in the antebellum American South, the role of the enslaved father remains largely trapped within a paradigm of enforced absenteeism from an unstable and insecure familial unit. The origins of this lie in the racist assumptions of the infamous "Moynihan Report" of 1965, read backwards into slavery itself. Consequently, the historiographical trajectory of work on enslaved men has drawn out the performative aspects of their masculinity in almost every area of their lives except that of fatherhood. This has produced an image of individualistic masculinity, separate from the familial role that many enslaved men managed to sustain and, as a result, productive of a disjointed and gendered genealogy of slavery and its legacy. This paper assesses the extent to which this fractured genealogy actually represents the former slaves' worldview. By examining a selection of interviews conducted by the Federal Writers' Project under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s (the WPA Narratives), this paper explores formers slaves' memories of their enslaved fathers and the significance of the voluntary paternal presence in their life stories. It concludes that the role of the black father was of greater significance than so far recognised by the genealogical narratives that emerged from the slave communities of the Antebellum South.

**Keywords:** Slavery; Fathers; American South; Memory; WPA Narratives

You growed up in slavery time. When Old Massa wuz 'drivin you in de rain and in de col'—he wasn't don' it tuh he'p you 'long. He wuz lookin' out for hisself. Course I wuz twelve years old when Lee made de big surrender, and dey didn't work me hard, but—dese heah chillum is diffunt from us.

(Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine, 1934)

### **1. Introduction**

British actress Fanny Kemble was, famously, horrified by what she encountered on her husband's slave plantation in Georgia; so horrified, indeed, that the couple soon separated. Kemble waited, however, until the United States itself had, temporarily, separated to publish her memoirs of life in the slave south, memoirs that included a damning indictment of the constrictions that slavery imposed on the relationship between enslaved fathers and their children. This, she charged, "resembles ... the short-lived connection between an animal and its young. The father, having neither authority, power, or charge in his children, is of course, as among brutes, the least attached to his offspring." Kemble was not much more positive about enslaved motherhood, which she described as "mere breeding, bearing, suckling, and there an end," but she did identify a stronger, albeit compromised, bond between mother and child (Kemble 1863, pp. 59–60). Historian Andrew Delbanco has recently echoed Kemble's

comments. Slavery, Delbanco argued, "robs mothers of their motherhood, and thereby stunts the souls of their sons. It turns motherless black boys into heartless black men." In its destruction of the mother-child bond, he concluded, slavery was "a factory for manufacturing monsters" (Delbanco 2019, p. 157).

This paper challenges the assumption that slave men were heartless monsters, and offers evidence to show that enslaved fathers bequeathed their children a more robust legacy than historians have so far acknowledged. Using a selection of 200 interviews (some 10% of the total available via the Library of Congress) conducted with former slaves by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, it divides the analysis into two parts: the first concentrates on the evidence from the WPA interviews themselves, and the second assesses how bringing fatherhood more firmly into the frame might nuance the ways in which the WPA narratives have so far been used by historians.

Slavery's destruction of the African American family unit formed the focus of much contemporary abolitionist criticism of the institution, and has been of interest to historians for many decades now (Gutman 1976; Manfra and Dykstra 1985; Jones 1985; Malone 1992; Stevenson 1997; Hudson 1997; Dunaway 2003; West 2004; Fraser 2007; Fraser 2009; Patterson 2010; West 2012). This critique, however, has become increasingly gendered over the years, productive of a genealogy of divisive descent within which the role of the black father remains a contested, unsettled, and often marginalised one. There are, in some respects, sound reasons for this, the most obvious being the fact that from the mid-seventeenth century, enslaved status, first in Virginia and then in the rest of the then colonies, derived from that of the mother. The reasoning behind this, and the sexual exploitation of slaves that it highlighted, was made clear in the wording of the legislation (Act XII) passed in Virginia in December of 1662. This was in response to doubts that "have arisen whether any children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free." To abolish these doubts, the act ruled "that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother" (Hening 1809, vol. II, p. 170).

This matrilineal ruling has led to many erroneous assumptions over the years. For the modern African American family it had perhaps its most deleterious impact with the publication, in 1965, of *The Negro Family: The Case for National Action*, written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Assistant Secretary for Labor. Commonly termed the "Moynihan Report", this argued that a combination of the economic and psychological effects of slavery, the segregated nature of society after the Civil War and into the twentieth century, and the ever-present threat of lynching "worked against the emergence of a strong father figure" within black communities. In support of his racially-informed assertions, Moynihan cited cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead's 1962 publication, *Male and Female*, and specifically her argument that slavery, along with warfare, famine, epidemics, and social unrest, undermined the family unit and destroyed the "delicate line of transmission" whereby men learned nurturing, paternal roles. The primary familial unit to emerge from slavery, Moynihan argued, was "mother and child ... the biologically given" (United States Department of Labor 1965, chp. III).

As far as oral history is concerned, the absent-father trope gained traction via one of the most commonly-cited and influential writers on the genealogy of black America, Alex Haley, who penned both *Roots* (1976) and *The Autobiography of Malcolm X* (1965). Haley expressed the belief that, typically, "slave children would grow up without an awareness of who their parents were, and particularly male parents" (Haley in Perks and Thomson 2015, p. 23). This assumption can be heard even now in the most recent scholarly literature. As Michael Connor and Joseph White noted, "[h]istorically, black fathers have been either invisible in the study of child development and family life or characterized in negative terms." Above all, they are too often seen as "absent fathers who are financially irresponsible and rarely involved in their children's lives" (Connor and White 2007, p. 2; see also Hamer 2001).

Yet, Connor and White could almost be writing about the WPA narratives when they observed that that there "seem to be major discrepancies between the negative absent father images of black men described by demographic studies and the picture of black men in fathering roles which emerges from structured interviews, narratives, biographical sketches, community-based observations and ethnographic investigations" (Connor and White 2007, p. 2), because what the WPA interviews represent above all is an assertion of a genealogical narrative for the African American community in the South. By far the largest percentage of the interviews examined for this paper begin by listing the names of mother and father, and often grandmother and grandfather, too. Those interviewed had a clear sense of their ancestral history, their location within a line of descent, even in cases of an absent father. In this respect, the oral history of the formerly enslaved has had a "transforming impact" upon our understanding of the black family (Paul Thompson in Perks and Thomson 2015, p. 37). The WPA narratives are clear about the positive role that many fathers, even what Jennifer Hamer termed "noncustodial" fathers, represented in the lives of their children (Hamer 2001, p. 33). Many enslaved fathers played what Connor and White termed a "generative" role in guiding the next generation, and this was recognised by their offspring (Connor and White 2007, p. 5).

It must be stressed that in seeking to extend our understanding of the father's role under slavery, this paper is not an analysis of enslaved masculinity, but rather the *memory* of enslaved masculinity in its paternal iteration. The WPA interviews are, as has long been recognised, difficult sources to use. To date, they have been approached largely as a debriefing exercise, the interrogation of a generation on the cusp of leaving the national stage with the intention of securing, before it was too late, direct evidence of life under slavery in the antebellum era. The interviews were conducted in the Depression-era South, a land of lynching, where racial tensions were high and the likelihood of many of those interviewed being completely candid about slavery was slim. The degree of directness could and did vary depending on whether the interviewer was white or black. "Dissimulation," as Paul Escott observed in his study of slave memory, "became a regular part of life for most slaves," and, bringing this forward, Catherine Stewart observed that the "compromising circumstances of the color line in 1930s America made it almost impossible for blacks and whites to speak to one another freely" (Escott 1979, p. 34; Stewart 2016, p. 3).

Historians have long been aware, in short, that as far as the conditions of slave life were concerned, black interviewers usually elicited both more direct and more detailed accounts than most white interviewers, although as Stewart noted in her discussion of Zora Neale Hurston's attempts to collect folklore in Florida, this is not necessarily an assumption the historian can always make (Stewart 2016, pp. 133, 155–65). However, recounting memories of fathers sidestepped the racial dynamic. The subject of slavery was politically charged in a way that the personal memory of a parent might not seem to be to a patronising interviewer, since it did not directly involve any kind of assessment of the interviewee's experience under or opinions of slavery, nor did it challenge white hegemony directly—but indirectly was another matter. A memory of brutality to a father could be recounted to an unsympathetic white interviewer in a way that an account of brutality to oneself, or anger at the black economic condition in the 1930s, might not safely be attempted. This enabled those interviewed to critique, indirectly—so indirectly that it is sometimes doubtful if the white interview picked up on the criticism—the brutality of the South's "peculiar institution". Theirs was, in its purest form, "a language of implication" (Stewart 2016, p. 201). Not all bothered to dissemble. "You are going around to get a story of slavery conditions ... before the civil war?" interviewee Thomas Hall asked. "You should have known before this late day all about that. Are you going to help us? No! you are only helping yourself," he charged. "No matter where you are from I don't want you to write my story cause the white folks have been and are now and always will be against the negro" (Library of Congress n.d.; see also Crosby 2012, p. 271).

In Hall's case the interviewer had clearly stirred up unwelcome memories, and this raises a second issue with these interviews. Many of those who first used them, as much as many of those who conducted them, did so absent any oral history training (Blassingame 1977, pp. xliii–lvi; Stewart 2016, pp. 2–7, 64, 201–3). This can be problematic when the interviewee is not being as direct as Hall. Laura Cornish, for example, welcomed her interviewer by observing "Lawd have mercy 'pon me, when you calls me Aunt Laura it seems jes' like you must be one of my white folks, 'cause dat what dey calls me" (Library of Congress n.d.). At face value, this could be read as welcoming. More subtly, it can be read

as a somewhat passive-aggressive reaction to the interviewer's calling her "Aunty". It was more likely a blunt criticism of the interviewer's patronising approach, but whether the interviewer heard it that way is open to doubt.

Nevertheless, and bearing all these problems in mind, as the first example in America of state-sponsored space within which former slaves could "talk about black identity", these interviews are indispensable (Stewart 2016, p. 2). In order to assess the role of the enslaved father in the life stories of those who were children when slavery ended, the memories of fatherhood that they retained, however indistinctly, the significance of the paternal presence, or absence, in their lives, and the role that fatherhood played in the genealogical narrative constructed out of the slave past, they are revealing. What they reveal is that fatherhood was of greater significance in the autobiographical memories and consequently the life narratives of many former slaves than it has been, so far, to the historiography of slavery. This paper agrees that, in purely evidential terms in respect of slavery, the WPA narratives are open to challenge; but as a means of assessing the ways in which former slaves wrote themselves into a national genealogical narrative of family and freedom, it proposes, they are both revealing.

### *1.1. Enslaved Fatherhood in the American South*

Fathers are not wholly absent from the extensive and, for obvious reasons, frequently fractious debate over slavery in the United States. From Eugene Genovese's magisterial study of slave life, *Roll, Jordan, Roll* (Genovese 1976, pp. 482–95), onwards, the significance of the father has not been entirely ignored. In part reacting against the "Moynihan Report", many historians, mainly writing in the 1970s and 1980s, challenged the idea that slave families had been compromised, if not entirely destroyed, under slavery. They emphasised the importance of the slave family in sustaining individuals trapped in an inhuman labour system, and identified an active slave culture distinct from the white world in which the enslaved had been forced to live (Blassingame 1972; Gutman 1976; Genovese 1978, p. 29; see also Parish 1989, pp. 76–89). Subsequent scholars, however, have evinced a tendency to read the problems that Moynihan described back into the slave past, and have qualified the image of the relatively stable slave society that emerged from earlier studies. Such stability as existed, historian Brenda Stevenson insisted, inhered in the matrifocal nature of the slave community around which "flexible extended families were formed to provide nurture, education, and socialization for its members to cope with the ever-present threat of displacement by their owners." Within this structure, "'husbands' had no legal claim to their families" and therefore "could not legitimately command their economic resources or offer them protection from abuse or exploitation" (Stevenson 1997, pp. 160–61).

As a result, the role of the slave father has, of late, become somewhat neglected; lost in wider studies that seek to assess enslaved masculinity in the Antebellum South. It is not entirely absent. Emily West, in particular, has closely examined the lengths to which enslaved men would go in order to hold their family units together. She has found that over 30 percent of marriages were "cross-plantation" relationships, where husband and wife succeeded in sustaining the family unit, but only across distance (West 2004, pp. 46–47; and see also West 2012; West 1999). However, it forms no obvious part of what Sergio Lussana has termed the "homosocial world of enslaved men". This world, Lussana argued, provided a very necessary "emotional landscape" for enslaved men, "serving as a buffer against the dehumanizing features of enslaved life, and a source of resistance" (Lussana 2013, pp. 872, 874; see also Lussana 2010a). For him, relational masculinity functioned within a framework of violence, particularly in respect to semi-organised wrestling and boxing contests, where the fighters could validate their own masculinity by defeating their opponent in front of their fellow slaves (Lussana 2010b, pp. 901–22; see also Doddington 2018). With its focus on the relationships male slaves formed with each other rather than with their children, the issue of fatherhood did not really factor into the emotional equation.

Walter Johnson, examining the slave markets of the Antebellum South, detailed several cases where an individual resisted sale away from family, but most of these met with little long-term success. The father, one former slave recalled, "was not considered in any way as a family part" (*Slave Narratives* 1941, North Carolina, XI, Part 1, 361). Slavery, as Johnson emphasised, was a "story

of separated lovers and broken families, of widows, widowers, and orphans left in the wake of the trade" (Johnson 1999, p. 41). Increasingly, as historians tell it, it has become a story largely about mothers (White 1985; Frankel 1999; Lindquist 2011, p. 220; Cowling et al. 2018; West and Shearer 2018; West 2018; Glymph 2020), and yet, this was not necessarily the narrative that former slaves recounted to their WPA interviewers.

Hannah Plummer's family was typical of many in America's Antebellum South in that her parents, Allen and Bertcha Lane, had different enslavers, albeit in this case living proximate to each other in Raleigh, North Carolina. As a result, Hannah's father lived with his family. He also lived a more independent life than some. As a stone cutter, he hired himself out for wages, the bulk of which, however, went to his enslavers. This prompted the somewhat critical comment from his wife and children's enslaver, Governor Charles Manly, that although Hannah's father lived with his family, Manly derived no financial benefit from this arrangement. Hannah's father, Hannah recalled the Governor complaining, "ought to keep up his [the enslaved] family" (*Slave Narratives*, North Carolina, XI, Part 2, p. 178).

Hannah was born in 1856. She was eleven years of age when America's civil war ended and slavery was abolished via the 13th Amendment, and in her early eighties when asked to recall her memories of life as a slave. Did she remember Governor Manly saying this to her father? Is it likely that he said it in front of her? Can we, in fact, be certain that he said it at all? The answer to these questions is probably not, not very likely, and no, we cannot be certain. What we can be more certain of is that this is what Hannah Plummer told her interviewer. This was one of the "memories" she pulled out from her years of enslavement, one of the "memories" she retained of her father, and it is worth our while to ask what it tells us; not just about Hannah's years as a slave, but about the assumptions often made in relation to the WPA narratives as a whole.

The problems of racial and class bias and intimidation that historian John Blassingame highlighted over half a century ago now with respect to the compromised nature of the WPA interviews have not diminished (Blassingame 1977, pp. xlii–li). What has changed is that oral historians now feel more confident dealing with the fact that oral history represents "a shared project in which both the interviewer and the interviewee are involved together, if not necessarily in harmony." Both the "specific distortions" that the interviewer brings to the table, along with the likelihood that interviewees frequently tell the interviewer only "what they believe they want to be told" are now accepted qualifiers in the process of conducting, and consulting oral testimonies (Alessandro Portelli in Perks and Thomson 2015, p. 55). Furthermore, as oral historian Michael Frisch has stressed, in the context of memories of the Great Depression, what historians are often presented with is *received memory*. This is most evident, he argued, in interviews with the young, whose sense of the past "owes much to what their parents have not remembered and have not told them" (Michael Frisch in Perks and Thomson 2015, p. 46).

With these findings in mind, the charge that the WPA interviews lack immediacy due to "the long time between the actual slave experience and interview," combined with the fact that "an overwhelming majority" of those interviewed "could describe only how slavery appeared to a black child," appears less of a barrier to comprehension and analysis than it once did (Blassingame 1977, p. l). Indeed, the WPA interviews have never described slavery as it "appeared to a black child". What they actually described was how slavery appeared to, or at least was described by, an adult, and an adult at the other end of life course from the child he or she was during slavery. Assessing the extent to which memory in older age is necessarily neurologically compromised, combined with the impact of the hostile racial environment of slavery itself, as well as that in which many of these interviews took place, is beyond the scope of this article. However, as Kelly McWilliams et al. noted, "[r]esearch on the influence of prior maltreatment on children's eyewitness memory is still in its infancy", which should at least give us pause when it comes to generalising about the reliability, or unreliability of what the WPA interviews reveal (McWilliams et al. 2014, p. 702).

What we can say with certainty is that what these interviews offer us is not the detail of the memory of slavery, but an insight into the genealogical *narrative* that emerged from slavery. More than many

other sources, they "compensate for chronological distance with a much closer personal involvement" (Alessandro Portelli in Perks and Thomson 2015, p. 53). They are examples of what psychologists term "autobiographical memory ... the chronicle of our lives, a long record we consult whenever someone asks us what our earliest memory is, what the house we live in as a child looked like, or what was the last book we read." Autobiographical memory, as psychologist Douwe Draaisma has stressed, "both recalls and forgets at the same time". It contains "next to nothing about what happened before we were three or four," it focuses on and never fails to remember "hurtful events" and "humiliations", it is "our most intimate companion". The earliest memories, in particular, "cannot always be separated from stories circulating in the family" (Draaisma 2004, pp. 1, 12, 24).

Bearing all this in mind, Hannah Plummer's apparently perfect recall of quite a specific conversation that took place over seventy years previously tells us one, or both, of two things: first, this conversation was of significance to Hannah, such that she was able to recall it with some clarity well over half a century later; or, second, that it was the product of received memory, an echo of her mother's memory of it. In either case, it was a memory that positioned Hannah's father firmly within the fledgling cash nexus that functioned as part of slave society, as a man with some status, such status deriving both from the skills that enabled him to work quasi-independently and the recognition of this fact by Hannah's enslaver (on this point see Hudson 1994, p. 77).

Whilst it may have been an unrealistic assumption given the family's particular circumstances, Hannah's enslaver clearly considered Hannah's father as having the same responsibilities as a father and husband that a free man would have shouldered. This was not unusual. As historian David Doddington stressed, the evidence indicates that "enslaved men who lived in family units were typically expected to act as providers of sorts", as well as "be the mobile partners in abroad marriages", an observation borne out in the interviews examined here (Doddington 2018, p. 100; West 1999, p. 238; Macdonald 1993; Pargas 2006a, 2006b; see, e.g., *Slave Narratives*, Charles W. Dickens, North Carolina, XI, Part I, p. 255; J. H. Beckwith, Arkansas, II, Part 1, p. 132; Henry Bland, Georgia, IV, Part 1, p. 83; Amanda McDaniel, Georgia IV, Part 3, p. 71). A slave was always both property and person in the Antebellum South, but Hannah's father appears to have been considered, by Hannah's enslaver at least, to have been both slave and free. It is difficult to assess what this meant for Hannah's father, but his contradictory status may have been the source of some pride for Hannah's mother and, by extrapolation, Hannah herself. What appears to be a negative memory of an enslaver's complaint can, in fact, be read as a positive assertion of a father's status.

Hannah Plummer was not alone in deriving some pride from her father's position as a skilled slave. Charles W. Dickens recalled how his father "split slats and made baskets to sell", but this was clearly received memory, because Dickens went on to add that "[h]e said his master let him have all the money he made sellin' de things he made" (*Slave Narratives*, North Carolina, XI, Part 1, p. 256; see also Della Briscoe, Georgia, IV, Part 1, p. 125; Minnie Davis, Georgia IV, Part 1, p. 255). John Day, a former slave from Tennessee, recalled his father, Alfred's, success as a blacksmith. "Blaksmithin' was a real trade them days," he told his interviewer, and by the end of the Civil War his father had accumulated some "fifteen hundred dollars in Confederate money". So valuable was Alfred, indeed, that when his enslaver decided to sell him, not on any other grounds than "he could git a lot of money for him", he quickly changed his mind and bought Alfred back. "Day de only time," John reported, "master sold one of us" (*Slave Narratives*, Texas, XVI, Part 1, p. 302). Similarly, Carey Davenport, a retired minister at the time of his interview, understood that a specific skill translated into cash value for a slave. Proud of his father's carpentry and ironwork expertise, and keen to emphasise that his father had made "the best Carey plows in that part of the country", the economic worth that this translated into for his father's enslaver nevertheless became inseparable from, was possibly part of, the pride that Davenport derived from his father's abilities. "He was a very valuable man," Davenport reported, "and he make wheels and the hub and put the spokes in" (*Slave Narratives*, Texas, XVI, Part 1, p. 283).

Independent work of this nature, as Doddington has emphasised, "could be an arena of 'self-making' for enslaved men" (Doddington 2018, p. 90). Given the second-hand nature of much of the evidence with respect to the WPA interviews, this is plausible but perhaps harder to prove. The emphasis placed upon paternal skill and effort in these interviews, however, certainly suggests that this particular narrative was of significant value to the "self-making" of their descendants. It is important to stress that maternal support, skill, and effort is not entirely absent in these narratives, and apparently equally valued by the interviewee in many respects. However, what dominated many of the accounts was the father's, not the mother's work. This was the case even when the interviewee detailed the mutual effort that both parents sustained in order to support their families.

Louisa Adams, for example, told her interviewer that her "[d]ad and mammie had their own gardens and hogs," which was essential, as Louisa recalled. "We were compelled to walk about at night to live," she reported, we "were so hungry we were bound to steal or p[e]rish." Later in the interview, however, she highlighted the hunting skills that her father deployed in order to keep the family from starvation. "My old daddy partly raised his chilluns on game," she recalled, apparently privileging this over the combined effort of both parents to raise food (*Slave Narratives*, North Carolina, XI, Part I, pp. 2–3). An even more obvious example is that of Hannah Crasson from North Carolina. At first Hannah did not differentiate between her parents when recounting their efforts to provide for their family. "They worked their patches by moonlight," she recalled, "and worked for the white folks in the day time. They sold what they made. Marster bought it and paid for it." However, then joint effort suddenly translated into paternal success alone: "He made a barrel o' rice every year, my daddy did" (*Slave Narratives*, North Carolina, XI, Part I, p. 188).

In some cases, the durability and security of an enslaved family was clearly understood by those interviewed so many decades later to have been directly linked to the father's independent economic leverage within the slave system. This may have pointed to its unusual nature, or it may have been a reflection of survival recounted at a time, during the Great Depression, when survival was becoming more of a challenge. The memory was not always a pleasant one. Robert Glenn from North Carolina recounted the considerable efforts that his father had exerted to try and hold his family together. "My father's time was hired out," Glenn explained, "and as he knew a trade he had by working overtime saved up a considerable amount of money." When Glenn was sold, his father attempted to buy his son back, but was unable to do so, not because he did not have the money, but because the slave speculator refused to sell to a black slave. Economic power, when wielded by African Americans, had its limitations in the Antebellum South. It was not until long after slavery had ended that Glenn, unlike so many in the aftermath of slavery, succeeded in finding his parents again, an emotional encounter that Glenn detailed to the interviewer. "I broke down and began to cry. Mother nor father did not know me, but mother suspicioned I was her child," Glenn recounted. "Father had a few days previously remarked that he did not want to die without seeing his son once more. I could not find language to express my feelings" (*Slave Narratives*, North Carolina, XI, Part 1, pp. 329–330, 339).

Given the extended trauma attendant upon separation, combined with the emotion Glenn experienced when the family was reunited, the reader can be reasonably confident that this was part of Glenn's autobiographical memory. Trauma, indeed, is most likely to produce, and retain, "the very first autobiographical memories," so it is unsurprising that it forms a significant component of the WPA interviews (Draaisma 2004, p. 22). The high cost of resistance was just one aspect of this. Rebellion, violence, and resistance have been the main themes analysed by historians seeking to understand how male slaves manifested their gender identity; a trend evidenced in, most prominently, Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins' edited collection of essays on masculinity and slavery, *A Question of Manhood*, almost all of which are centred on slave violence and resistance, defined as "slave flight and revolt, sabotage and the destruction of property, the feigning of illness, manipulation and refusal to work, self-mutilation, suicide and even the killing of one's children, poisoning, physical, and violent confrontation" (Hine et al. 1999, p. 2). Violent confrontation, or confrontation of any kind, however, could carry a high cost, as Anne Clark's father found out. "My poppa was strong. He never had a lick in his life," Anne recalled with some pride. When the day came that the enslaver tried to whip him, Anne's father stood up to him. "I never had a whoppin' and you can't whop me," he declared. "But I

can kill you," was the response, and the enslaver "shot my poppa down. My mam tuk him in the cabin and put him on a pallet. He died" (*Slave Narratives*, Texas XVI, Part 1, p. 224).

In some cases, it was not direct confrontation that produced violence, and not necessarily white on black violence. Mary Bell from Missouri looked back at the effort her father had expended in order to visit her mother on the two days a week that he was allowed to do so. However, "so often he came home all bloody from beatings his old nigger overseer would give him," she remembered. "My mother would take those bloody clothes off of him, bathe de sore places and grease them good and wash and iron his clothes so he could go back clean" (*Slave Narratives*, Missouri X, p. 27). Louisa Adam from North Carolina recalled performing this service herself, a memory that must have stuck in the mind of the child she was at the time. "I have greased my daddy's back after he had been whupped until his back was cut to pieces," she reported. "He had to work jis the same" (*Slave Narratives*, North Carolina XI, Part 1, p. 5). Similarly, Mary Gladdy from Georgia recounted the time that her father, able to hold off several of his fellow slaves who had been charged with helping the plantation foreman whip him, was then shot by the foreman, "inflicting wounds from which he never fully recovered" (*Slave Narratives*, Georgia IV, part 2, p. 17). A J Mitchell's father was whipped for asserting his freeborn status. "I've seen stripes on his back look like the veins on the back of my hand," the interviewer was told, "where they whipped him tryin' to make him disown his freedom" (*Slave Narratives*, Arkansas III, Part 5, p. 103).

Retrieving and repeating these memories of violence similarly spoke to an assertion of status that enslavers were unwilling to acknowledge; an assertion of racial equality, of humanity, of belonging to a family, a family that slavery as an institution was designed to destroy. Fathers within these familial units were sometimes remembered as functioning in ways identical to more stable families, to free families, although sometimes also in having to behave in ways more extreme than most free families ever had to experience. Although bell hooks proposed that "most black male slaves stood quietly by as white masters sexually assaulted and brutalised black women and were not compelled to act as protectors," those interviewed by the WPA sometimes told a different story (Hooks 2004, p. 34).

Sallie Carder's father was "shot and killed", for example, whilst attempting to prevent the overseer from whipping his wife (*Slave Narratives*, Oklahoma XIII, p. 28). Fathers also often experienced extremes of violence simply for visiting their families, as Mary Bell's father might have done, despite having passes permitting them to travel. In part this may have been indicative of gender-related assumptions in the Antebellum South, but here, too, fathers sometimes take second place to mothers in the literature. Deborah Gray White, for example, argued that this arrangement reinforced female independence (White 1985, p. 154). Yet, this came at a cost for their husbands. Enslaved fathers visiting wives and children on nearby plantations risked being beaten by the patrollers, who clearly needed little excuse to mete out violence to slaves. Manda Walker, for example, remembered how, due to the problems caused by a swollen creek, her father had "stayed over his leave dat was written on his pass." As a result, the slave patrollers "[t]ied him up, pulled down his breeches, and whupped him righ befo mammy and us chillum. I shudder to dis day," Manda recalled, "to think of it." "I often think," Manda mused, having narrated this harrowing episode, "dat de system of patarollers and bloodhounds did more to bring on de war and de wrath of de Lord than anything else" (*Slave Narratives*, South Carolina XIV, p. 171).

The role of father was not always so fraught with danger. Memories of a father's love and concern also come through the WPA narratives. "I 'members when I's jus' walkin' round good pa come in from the field at night and taken me out of bed and dress me and feed me and then play with me for hours," Will Adams recalled. John Day looked back in admiration at a father who would, after "de day's work" work for himself to support his family. "He'd work until midnight, sometimes," Day remembered, commenting "I never seen such a worker." John Smith from Raleigh had mixed memories of his father who, according to Smith, "believed in whuppin like the white folks did." Yet, before his father died he told Smith that he "had done more for him dan de other chilluns. He whupped me too much," Smith commented, "but atter all he was my father an' I loved him" (*Slave Narratives*, Texas XVI, Part 1, p. 2; Texas XVI, Part 1, p. 302; North Carolina XI, Part 2, pp. 279–80).

Slave fathers also sought to protect their families by offering simple advice and encouragement. Susan Davis Rhodes, an ex-slave from Missouri remembers that "people in my day didn't know book learning but dey studied how to protect each other, and save 'em from much misery as dey could" (*Slave Narratives*, Missouri X, p. 284). Similarly, Tennessee Johnson, a slave from Louisiana, recalled how "[d]ey do all dey can to keep de young people out o trouble, but if dey get into trouble, dere's a place in de quarter de meet an' dey talk it over. One say 'yo' boy do dis, or yo' girl do dat', and dey help to get dem out of trouble." Slave fathers, in particular, one interviewee recalled, were particularly concerned with protecting their daughters from both black and white men, and supervised the courting practices of their daughters: "He (the father) sit ... de boy in one corner an' de girl (the daughter) she sit in dis corner, fo' de paw don' want her thrown back on de fambly" (Malone 1992, p. 234).

By focusing on their fathers in these various ways, former slaves were asserting both the stability and gender norms, for the era, of the slave family under a system designed to destroy both it and the individuals it encompassed. They were also able to critique slavery as an institution obliquely. Rather than challenging the interviewer directly, as Thomas Hall had done, and asserting bluntly the obvious truth that slavery was a system predicated on violence, that "punishments were severe and barbarous", and that some "marsters acted like savages", those interviewed achieved the same end by approaching the subject indirectly, speaking for or about their fathers rather than for or about themselves (*Slave Narratives*, North Carolina XI, Part 1, p. 360). In so doing, they were also openly and consciously retrieving a relationship that enslavers had so often attempted to subvert, and not necessarily through sale. Enslavers sometimes deliberately inserted themselves into a quasi-paternal role, either because, as was the case with Laura Cornish's enslaver, they wished to deny the reality of enslavement; "he won't 'low none he culled folks to call him master," she recalled, or in an attempt to undermine the familial bond. "We called our fathers 'daddy' in slavery time," Jerry Hinton reported. "Dey would not let slaves call deir fathers 'father'" (*Slave Narratives*, Texas, XVI, Part 1, p. 254; North Carolina XI, part 1, p. 429; see also Minnie Davis, Georgia IV, Part 1, p. 254). It was an assertion of fatherhood, and freedom.

### *1.2. Bearing Witness to the Slave Past, and Its End*

Perhaps the most famous escaped slave and leading abolitionist advocate and editor, Frederick Douglass, concurred with Fanny Kemble's reading of the parent-child relationship under slavery. Although apparently able to recall the considerable risks his enslaved mother had incurred in order to see him, travelling some twelve miles on foot in the dark after a day in the fields, he had little real memory of her. In adulthood, he understood that the separation of mother from child was most likely intended "to hinder the development of the child's affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child." When she died, he remembered, he "received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger." The issue of fatherhood for many, but not all slaves is encapsulated in Douglass' emphasis on a barely-remembered mother rather than a father. It is most likely that, for him as for many others, Douglass' father was his mother's enslaver (Douglass 1845, pp. 2–3; see also Douglass [1892] 1962, pp. 28–29; Blight 2018, p. 9; Settle Egypt 1945, p. 105; Cade 1935, p. 13; and Alex Haley in Perks and Thomson 2015, p. 23).

In part, the extraction of the male slave from a fatherhood role is because for too long he was understood to function as a man only within a familial setting. As former slave Elias Thomas commented, "[i]t took a smart nigger to know who his father was in slavery time" (*Slave Narratives*, North Carolina, XI, Part 2, p. 343). The acceptance of this assertion as typical of the slave experience has largely dominated ever since sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, followed several decades later by historians such as Kenneth Stampp and Stanley Elkins, concluded that male slaves were denied both their masculinity and a fatherhood role. Kenneth Stampp cited the intensive labour regime imposed on

slaves as a major source of disruption to a slave's family life and relationships (Kenneth 1956, p. 292). E. Franklin Frazier also pointed to sale and forced migration as a significant cause of rupture in the bond between a slave father and his children (Frazier 1939, pp. 79–94).

Elkins, echoing Fanny Kemble, proposed that for enslaved children, "the plantation offered no real satisfactory father-image other than the master", since the 'real' father "was virtually without authority over his child". Indeed, as Elkins emphasised, "a father, among slaves, was legally 'unknown'." Furthermore, "the very etiquette of plantation life removed even the honorific attributes of fatherhood from the Negro male, who was addressed as 'boy'—until, when the vigorous years of his prime were past, he was allowed to assume the title of 'uncle'." Only in naming practices, Elkins found, were fathers acknowledged in the naming of their sons (Lindquist 2011, pp. 224–25; Elkins [1959] 1976, pp. 55, 130, 284).

Perhaps the main issue with the concept of fatherhood, as this wends its way, in essence providing a faint historiographical genealogical pathway, through the extensive literature on slavery in the United States, is that of the long-term impact that enslavement had on slave fathers, slave families, and, by extrapolation, the American nation. Here, one must draw a distinction between micro-studies, often localised, of the slave experience, and macro-studies of masculinity, only some of which engage with race, such as those by Rotundo (1993), Harper (1996), and, of course, Hooks (2004). Several of these examine what one might regard as the fall-out from slavery across a wider geographical distance and a longer time-span than the Antebellum South (Harper 1996; Hooks 2004; Bederman 1995). Some are comparative (Patterson 1982). Almost all, arguably, have been in some way influenced by the conclusions offered in Moynihan's contentious 1965 report and its proposition that "[a]t the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family" (United States Department of Labor 1965, chp. II).

Echoes of this concern for the stability of the African American family, specifically, can be heard throughout the nineteenth century. They were reinforced by a variety of individuals and organisations, among them the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission and the short-lived Freedmen's Bureau, both of whom sought to influence the future of the black family, in the years immediately after the Civil War (see, e.g., Frankel 1999, pp. 136–37). Scholars, too, have disagreed about the stability of the black family in the South in the aftermath of slavery. Researching black step-families, Jo Ann Manfra and Robert Dykstra, for example, challenged Herbert Gutman's suggestion that "[f]rom bondage the black family passed resolutely into freedom, its demographic health less damaged by slavery than it would be by Gilded Age racial discrimination and economic deprivation." What they uncovered in Virginia was "that serial marriage and the stepfamily, initially observable in slavery, became characteristic features of the postemancipation black family" (Manfra and Dykstra 1985, pp. 18–20). One only has to look at the post-slavery marriage records of the Freedmen's Bureau to get some sense of the extent of this, containing as these do the echoes of the uncertainty of relationships under slavery, of "previous connections", and children from unions whose stability could be so readily undermined by an enslaver (The Freedmen's Bureau Online n.d.).

Manfra and Dykstra's findings, however, have themselves been qualified by, among others, Andrew Billingsley, who strove for a more nuanced assessment of the black family in the 20th century and the legacies this carries from slavery. "Too many discussions of African-American families," he charged, "focus exclusively on single-parent families or on the underclass or on children in trouble as if these phenomena were characteristic of African-American families." The result, he argued, "is an absurd and counterproductive tendency to see African-American families in isolation," but also, one might add, to see them as somehow fixed in our assumptions about slavery and its fall-out across American society (Billingsley 1991, p. 27; see also Billingsley 1968). In fact, as has been shown by Raley, Sweeny, and Wondra, the "long-run historical influences such as the legacy of slavery" have less impact than one might suppose, and "the racial divergence we see now in marriage formation is relatively recent" (Raley et al. 2015, pp. 91–93). Moynihan's report, avoiding as it did any discussion of middle-class, middle-income black families, and working instead within the kind of stereotypical

parameters critiqued by Billingsley, tells us more about the racial assumptions prevalent in 1960s America. It tells us very little either about the extent or the importance to children of their father, but it has arguably had the effect of preventing us asking the question.

The ending of slavery allowed the formerly enslaved to acknowledge a paternal relationship the very name of which had previously been compromised, and many did so even if the father in question had been mainly or wholly absent from the family unit. Not all did—Thomas Cole from Texas commented that he "was sposed to take my father's name, but he was sech a bad, ornery, no-count sech a human, I jes' take my old massa's name" (*Slave Narratives*, Texas XVI, part 1, p. 225)—but many did. Contra Frazier's argument in respect of the lack of memory of black fathers, they did so in order to assert their own genealogical narrative, to write an often invisible or absent black father into their life stories (Lindquist 2011, p. 213).

"Pap's name was Tom Townes, 'cause he 'longed on de Townes place. He was my step-pap and when I's growed I token my own pap's name, what was Crawford," John Crawford explained. There was no hostility toward his step-father in this decision. His narrative made it clear that he had enjoyed a good relationship with Townes. but for Crawford, the absent biological father was an important part of his own identity. "I never seed him, though," Crawford admitted, "and didn't know nothin' much 'bout him. He's sold away 'fore I's borned" (*Slave Narratives*, Texas XVI, Part 1, p. 257). It was important to Willie Buck Charleston, Jr. that he could identify a line of genealogical decent. "I'm for the world like my daddy," he proudly told his interviewer (*Slave Narratives*, Arkansas II, Part 2, p. 8; see also James Monroe Abbot, Missouri X, p. 1). Perhaps the most poignant example of the significance of fathers to those formerly enslaved came from Mary Colbert from Georgia, whose father had died when she was a child. "Now about my father," she mused, "that is the dream" (*Slave Narratives*, Georgia IV, Part 1, p. 213).

Some former slaves acknowledged the direct influence that their fathers had had on their lives. "Father could neither read nor write," announced the Rev. W.B. Allen from Georgia, "but had a good head for figures and was very pious. His life had a wonderful influence on me," he admitted. Although "I was originally worldly—that is, I drank and cussed, but haven't touched a drop of spirits in forty years and quit cussing before I entered the ministry" (*Slave Narratives*, Georgia IV, Part 1, p. 12). For others, it was a particular skill or trade that they had inherited from their father, enabling them to make a living after slavery. "I am a shoemaker," James Bertrand told his interviewer, "I learned my trade from my father." Ed Craddock took over from his father, a school janitor, after slavery (*Slave Narratives*, Arkansas II, Part 1, p. 158; Missouri X, p. 96). Perhaps the most important skill that slave fathers passed on to their children was that of survival in a post-war, racially hostile world where violence against former slaves was endemic.

Memories of violence, indeed, run through the WPA narratives, violence and the long-term evidence, the scars of being "skinned up", that it left on the body if a slave had been whipped, and on the mind if a child had witnessed it (e.g., *Slave Narratives*, North Carolina XI, Part 2, p. 103; see also King 1994, p. 147). Survival after slavery, however, meant that these memories, if not the physical evidence of their accuracy, had to be suppressed. Roberta Manson recalled the struggle her family had to make a living as sharecroppers after slavery. They "stayed on wid marster caue they didn't have nuthin. Dey couldn't leave," she reported. On one occasion, a former overseer who had beaten Manson's father very badly came to ask her father to work for him. Roberta was shocked. "I axed pa ain't dat de man who beat you so when you wus a slave?" Her father, having a clearer sense of what survival required in the New South, hushed her: "you shet your mouth," he told Roberta, thereby conveying a lesson about suffering, survival, and suppression that Robert never forgot (*Slave Narratives*, North Carolina, XI, Part 2, pp. 103–4). Similarly, Della Fountain from Oklahoma remembered how her "brother Joe felt mighty big after freedom and strutted about." On one occasion, a white man had thrown a ball of mud that landed on Joe's foot. "It didn't hurt him a bit," Della recounted, and had not been meant seriously, "but Joe bridled up and he started to git smart, and father told him he'd break

his neck if he didn't go home and keep his mouth shut." Father "finally to whup Joe," Della recalled, "to make him know he was black" (*Slave Narratives*, Oklahoma, XIII, p. 104).

The importance of the father in helping offspring to safely navigate the new and dangerous landscape of freedom is perhaps the most significant, and most meaningful evidence that one can draw from the WPA interviews. It is evidence of what, in the context of post-Franco Spain, has been termed "genocidal genealogy", the delineation of a world in which former victim and former perpetrator of extreme violence are not only required to construct a future proximate to each other but in which the former victim must somehow relinquish, or at least not express openly, the memory of that violence (Macho 2016). The difference is that former slaves could not safely relinquish that memory; their future safety depended on their keeping it alive and passing it on to their children in ways not obviously likely to prompt racial retribution. The racial realities of the American South prompted them to play an active "generative father" role, both under slavery and after it ended. This was, for many, a conscious decision. Historian Edward Baptist emphasised the importance of being a husband or a father to enslaved men "who wanted to live in a way defined by moral choice rather than fear." Such men, he proposed, "had to turn to the long view, to thinking of the people who would one day be left behind them" (Baptist 2014, pp. 281–82). We can see the results of that approach clearly in the WPA interviews, both with respect to the memories of fatherhood recalled and the ways in which these were framed (Connor and White 2007, p. 5).

Here, too it must be stressed that interviews with the aged, designed to elicit memories of when they were young, are likely to suffer from the same constraints and the issues of memory as in the very young. However, because what we are dealing with here is often "received memory", and also because some of the WPA interviewees made it clear that they were not talking about themselves, but about their parents, we can hear the echoes of slavery in the life narratives of those too young to remember it in any coherent way. These individuals are not presenting their own memories of slavery, but representing those of their parents. "I was mighty young an' I members very little 'bout some things in slavery but from what my mother and father tole me since the war," Martha Hinton admitted to her interviewer. Still, some memories stuck. "De first pair of shoes I wore," she recalled, "my daddy made 'em" (*Slave Narratives*, North Carolina, XI, part I, p. 434; see also Irella Battle Walker, Texas, XVI, Part 4, p. 123). "I was never a slave," Millie Markham told her interviewer. "I was not born in slavery, but my father was. I'm afraid this story will be more about my father and mother than it will be about myself" (*Slave Narratives*, North Carolina, XI, part 2, p. 106; see also J. H. Beckwith, Arkansas, II, Part I, p. 132).

The significance of memories not their own to the life narratives of African Americans living in the post-slavery south can be clearly seen in the case of J.F. Boone from Arkansas. Boone had been born seven years after slavery, and was clear about his lineage. He set it out for his interviewer. "My father's name was Arthur Boone and my mother's name was Eliza Boone," he established at the outset, "and I am goin' to tell you about my father, Arthur Boone." Boone went on to detail what his father had told him about slavery, the violence, the hardship, the cruelty. His father died relatively young, Boone reported, at just fifty-six. The implications of why this should be, at least in Boone's opinion, were clear. He concluded his narrative by stressing that this was his father's story. "Now whose story are you saying this is?" he asked. "You say this is the story of Arthur Boone, father of J.F. Boone? Well, that's all right, but you better mention that J.F. Boone is Arthur Boone's son." So adamant was Boone about this that even the interviewer felt moved to comment: "the insistence on the word 'son' seemed to me," he observed, "to set this story off as a little out of the ordinary" (*Slave Narratives*, Arkansas II, Part 1, pp. 210–13).

For Boone's interviewer there was one other aspect of this particular narrative that was unusual; the fact that Boone's father was a Union veteran. "Yes, my father fit in the Civil war," Boone confirmed. "I have seen his war clothes as many times as you have hairs on your head I reckon. He had his old sword and all. They had a hard battle down in Mississippi once he told me" (*Slave Narratives*, Arkansas II, Part 1, pp. 211–12). What Boone's interviewer found unusual was not mention of the

war—many interviewers specifically asked about that subject—but he was most likely expecting to hear that Boone's father had accompanied his Confederate enslaver to war; it was the Union part of the answer that surprised him. His surprise said more about white expectations about black behavior during the Civil War than anything else. However, the Civil War component to the memory of fathers is significant to our reading of these interviews and to the memories of fathers that they contain. Recounting Civil War activity, and specifically on behalf of the Union, was a clear assertion of agency on the part of the slave father and, as such, a source of pride for his children. It was evidence that the father concerned had fought actively for his freedom and that of his family. It emphasised that his story, and consequently his children's life narratives, could be located in the national emancipation narrative to emerge from the war, however compromised in racial, social, and economic terms emancipation had proved to be. Some memory of the Civil War that ended slavery in the United States formed a significant component of the narratives of over 75 percent of the group assessed here. "I 'membr more 'bout that war back yonder than I member 'bout the war we had a few years ago,: Margaret Green from Georgia commented (*Slave Narratives*, Georgia IV, Part 2, p. 63). In this respect, however, how it came into the discussion, what narrative was remembered, or at least offered, and whether any memory of a father came into it was almost wholly location-dependent.

Those interviewed in states such as North or South Carolina had a lot to say about the war, about the arrival of Union troops in their area and the impact these had. Many described hiding the enslaver's valuables and food from the troops; many recalled that union troops had looted the slaves' cabins; some recollected shooting a "Yankee". How plausible aspects of these narratives are is open to some doubt, since it is more than likely that this "memory" of a faithful slave, or at least a narrative of shared suffering when Union troops arrived, was one that the interviewer encouraged (see e.g., *Slave Narratives*, North Carolina XI, Part 1, pp. 255–56, 434; Part 2, pp. 135–36, 214, 217; Missouri X, p. 40). Narratives from former slaves located further west were more mixed, and the memory of Union troops was, similarly, mixed; a child's fear remembered, combined with an adult's realisation of what the war had meant for the enslaved (see, e.g., *Slave Narratives*, Arkansas II, part 5, pp. 2, 7). For some, the memory was a sad one; of a father disappearing into the Civil War, and never coming home again. Some fathers, such as Irene Robertson's or Warren McKinney's, both from South Carolina, took the opportunity to abandon their families and begin new lives; others, as was the case for Joe Casey's father, came home just to die (*Slave Narratives*, Arkansas II, Part 5, pp. 30, 40; Missouri X, p. 76).

Boone's narrative was, therefore, unusual in its recollection of a father who fought for the Union. Unusual but not unique. Tanner Thomas remembered his mother telling him that his father had "taken sick and died in the war on the North side" (*Slave Narratives*, Arkansas II, part 6, p. 304). Some, of course, were not certain. "My daddy got his leg shot in the Civil War," one interviewee recalled, but "I don't know which side he was on" (*Slave Narratives*, Arkansas II, Part 4, p. 62; see also Nannie Jones, p. 164). However, most knew which side their father had been on, or at least wished to have a father who fought for the Union as part of their life narrative. "My father ran off and joined the Yankee army," William Latimore reported, adding that he had a clear recollection of when Abraham Lincoln had died because the Union troops "all wore that black band around their arms" (*Slave Narratives*, Arkansas II, Part 4, p. 242). J.T. Tims recounted how he and his father had escaped slavery and travelled to Natchez, where both had joined up; he in a white regiment and his father in an African American one (*Slave Narratives*, Arkansas II, Part 6, p. 338).

Several of these narratives emphasised the significance of the military contribution their fathers had made to the cause of freedom. J. Roberts related the story of his father, "a federal soldier in the Civil War," and his father's reminiscences about a conflict that he never expected to survive, while Omelia Thomas recounted the wounds her father had sustained fighting for the Union. On this subject she was adamant. "He was on the Union side," she stressed, "He was fighting for our freedom. He wasn't no Reb" (*Slave Narratives*, Arkansas II, Part 6, pp. 53, 297). Sarah Woods Burke from Virginia, similarly, engaged in a bit of racial role-reversal when her interviewer unwisely enquired about which side her father had fought for in the war. "On which side? Well, sho nuff on the side of the North, boy!" was

her sharp retort (*Slave Narratives*, Ohio XII, p. 17). Although, for obvious reasons, they were hardly in the majority, these particular life narratives staked a claim for the speaker's descent from a Union veteran, invoking the memory of fathers who were active not just in helping their families survive slavery, but in fighting to end it. In this respect, Omelia Thomas was not simply passively reminiscing but actively passing on, to future generations, her father's message when she recalled that "he'd tell us many a day, 'I am part of the cause that you are free'" (*Slave Narratives*, Arkansas II, Part 6, p. 297).

### **2. Conclusions**

The importance of fathers in the narratives of former slaves recorded by the WPA serves as a corrective to the widespread assumption that enslaved families comprised mothers and children, with fathers a shadowy or altogether absent element in the family structure and, consequently, in the genealogical narratives that emerged from the slave community. In this respect, the direction of late-twentieth and twenty-first century scholarly enquiry has largely, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, pursued a nineteenth-century pattern. Academic debate over the paternal role is usually located in two main areas: the political, public one, concerned with social stability, fiscal planning, the ordering of the family with the state; and the private, personal one, with its roots in what historian John Demos termed the "hothouse family," a nineteenth-century familial ideal and one from which the father was largely excluded (Demos 1978, p. 27). Too often, however, the 1965 Moynihan Report continues to cast a long shadow over the questions that scholars ask about the slave family, influencing to an unhelpful degree the resultant debates over whether, in fact, the familial unit to emerge from slavery was "mother and child ... the biologically given" (United States Department of Labor 1965, chp. III). The questions we ask of the slave experience, and its legacy, can be reframed, however, if we understand and approach the WPA interviews as examples of the genealogical narratives composed by and working for the African American community in the South. As such, they emphasise the significance of the role of the father in the individual life narratives of those born on the very edge of slavery, in the years immediately prior to America's civil war.

In this respect, locating the slave experience in the wider history of the American family can be helpful, and further research in this direction may prove to be instructive. In the antebellum years, as Demos (among many others) noted, the American family became identified as distinct from rather than part of wider society, and the domestic environment one that protected its inhabitants from the evils and agitations of what was becoming, for many Americans, an increasingly urban life. Along with this shift came "the equation of home-life with the development of individual character," and a concomitant division, along both gendered and generational lines, of responsibility for said character. "In the brave new world of nineteenth-century America," Demos noted, "there was no alternative to home life for the proper rearing of children" (Demos 1978, pp. 29–31). Within the home, it was maternal influence that mattered most, especially as far as male children were concerned. For nineteenth-century Americans, in short, any flaw in or weakening of maternal power risked the creation of Delbanco's "monsters", men growing "into potency with no sense of empathy or love" (Delbanco 2019, p. 157). Slaves hardly had the opportunity to construct anything approximating the ideal, middle-class home, but, as Demos noted, that does not mean that there was no structure to their child-rearing practices. The African American experience under slavery, he argued, more closely resembled an earlier epoch, when "responsibility for character-training was shared among a variety of people and institutions (parents, other kin, neighbors, churches, courts, and local government)" (Demos 1978, pp. 28–29).

Historians of slavery generally concur in this, highlighting a range of familial options: "Matrifocality, polygamy, single parents, abroad spouses, one-, two-, and three-generation households, all-male domestic residences of blood, marriage, and fictive kin, single- and mixed-gender sibling dwellings—these, along with monogamous marriages and co-residential nuclear families," existed in Virginia at least (Stevenson 1997, pp. 160–61; see also Manfra and Dykstra 1985). The evidence for this is stronger in some slave states than in others, but the WPA narratives offer us the opportunity not simply to search for how the slave family was in practice, but assess how it was in *memory*. Further

quantitative or qualitative research in this area may shed further light on the importance of the paternal role for slaves, and the value of the WPA narratives in this regard. Such research, however, might also be usefully informed by the growing field of oral history, since it is childhood memory, conjoined with an adult's perspective on race relations that forms the evidential base here. As oral historians have stressed over the years, the reality rarely matches the recollection of childhood. "Oral sources are credible but with a *di*ff*erent* credibility," Alessando Portelli stressed. "The importance of oral testimony may lie not in its adherence to fact, but rather in its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge" (Portelli in Perks and Perks and Thomson 2015, p. 53).

From a state perspective, the WPA, as Stewart has argued, spoke to "a new role for the federal government as author of a narrative of national identity that was inclusive in its approach to the various ethnic groups, communities, and diverse cultures that comprised the United States." In this context, the former slaves "became the case study—a metonym—for discussing the possibilities or problems of full integration into the national body" (Stewart 2016, pp. 38, 65). Many of the problems, in the 1930s and ever since, were associated with the absent father trope, itself predicated on enslavers' denial or acknowledgment of the father's role—biological, emotional, social, or material (Stevenson 1997, p. 221).

The WPA narratives support the conclusions of those historians who argue that slave fathers did play an active role within the family unit, in the form of "emotional support and affection, moral instruction, discipline, and physical protection," as well as practical and vocational skills such as "metal and wood working, carpentry, and blacksmithing along with a host of other traditional skills such as folk medicine" (Stevenson 1997, p. 251). Crucially, the interviews reveal how significant this support was to the formerly enslaved, how significant it was to their autobiographical memories, how central to the life narratives they constructed and passed on, because the most significant aspect of the WPA interviews was not what they provided the state, but what they represented for the African American community in the South in the 1930s. These were claims for recognition reaching across both generational and genealogical space. Generational, because it is hardly likely that the WPA interviews were the first time that these former slaves had narrated their memories of slavery. Anyone who has interviewed individuals in the later stages of the life course or has family members at that stage knows that these stories are repeated and refined over and over again. The scholarly approach to these interviews can sometimes give the impression that this was the first and only time that these narratives were uttered, but this is unlikely. Yes, they were provided in what Stewart noted was state-sponsored space, but that does not mean it was the first time they had been heard (Stewart 2016, p. 2).

As both reminiscences for blacks and reckonings for whites, the WPA narratives were in part intended to instruct African American youth, who had not experienced slavery but for whom life in the South in the 1930s remained traumatic. They were genealogical because they served as reminders that there was a lineage, even for those born in slavery; a biological lineage, a familial one, and, for some, a military one. They bore witness to the fact that slavery, for those trapped in it, was not simply "a factory for manufacturing monsters" (Delbanco 2019, p. 157). Undoubtedly, slavery produced some monsters. More certainly it was created by those who fitted that description to a greater or lesser degree. However, for those who endured it, for those who lived in its final years and inherited their parents' memories of it, survival meant not becoming a monster, but remaining a man, such that, in future years, a former slave like Perry Madden could tell his interviewer with confidence, "my daddy ... he was a good man" (*Slave Narratives*, Arkansas II, Part 5, p. 42).

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, S.-M.G. and D.B.; methodology, S.-M.G.; software, S.-M.G.; validation, S.-M.G. and D.B.; formal analysis, S.-M.G.; investigation, S.-M.G. and D.B.; resources, S.-M.G. and D.B..; data curation, S.-M.G. and D.B.; writing—original draft preparation, S.-M.G.; writing—review and editing, S.-M.G.; visualization, S.-M.G. and D.B.; supervision, S.-M.G. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

### **References**


Parish, Peter J. 1989. *Slavery: History and Historians*. New York: Harper and Row.

Patterson, Orlando. 1982. *Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study*. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Patterson, James T. 2010. *Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America's Struggle over Black Family Life: From LBJ to Obama*. New York: Basic Books.

Perks, Robert, and Alistair Thomson, eds. 2015. *The Oral History Reader*, 3rd ed. New York: Routledge.


West, Emily. 2004. *Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina*. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.


© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

### *Article* **Generations Comparison: Father Role Representations in the 1980s and the New Millennium**

### **Maria Letizia Bosoni \* and Sara Mazzucchelli**

Department of Sociology, Catholic University of Milan, 1, 20123 Milano MI, Italy; sara.mazzucchelli@unicatt.it **\*** Correspondence: marialetizia.bosoni@unicatt.it

Received: 22 January 2019; Accepted: 3 April 2019; Published: 9 April 2019

**Abstract:** In the light of relevant and current debate on the changing role of fathers, this contribution is aimed at analysing the international literature on fatherhood, comparing two distinct periods of time, from the social, cultural and demographic point of view: the years 1980–1999 and the new millennium. This will contribute to identifying features of the fatherhood transformation in these two contexts, which in fact refer to two generations of fathers. The research questions to be answered are: Which aspects characterize the process of fatherhood transformation, in an intergenerational perspective? How are paternal childcare practices represented in different historical and social periods? An analysis of the academic publications on fathers in Scopus and Google Scholar will be conducted, in the two temporal periods indicated, using T-Lab software, in order to map fathers' role representations.

**Keywords:** father; family; generations; transformation

### **1. Introduction**

Reflection on fatherhood and its transformation is now a global phenomenon, with many studies highlighting that men and fathers are more visible and present in the care of their children, compared to the past. However, how it clearly indicates a radical transformation of the paternal role is the subject of great debate in many countries (Miller and Dermott 2015; Craig and Mullan 2010).

Research from different countries (Magaraggia 2013; Bosoni 2014a, 2014b; Bosoni et al. 2016; Ruspini and Tanturri 2017) reports the growing importance of the father figure in the family context and a greater desire and willingness of the father to be present in childcare, with more involvement in practical care activities (O'Brien and Wall 2015; Miller 2011; Gregory and Milner 2011; Lamb 1999). Thus the complex issue of reconciling family and work, long considered purely feminine, is increasingly seen as a paternal responsibility. In this sense, policies (in particular leave schemes) have certainly given a significant impetus: the paternal role is increasingly recognized in the contemporary debate.

Despite the greater involvement of fathers in the care, they still play a secondary role in the family and are mainly dedicated to ludic activities rather than to physiological care, especially in early childhood (Bosoni 2014b; Tanturri and Mencarini 2009; O'Brien 2009). Therefore, although the studies highlight a greater emotional connection between fathers and sons and the rise of a new model of fatherhood and masculinity (the terms "new fathers" and "loving fathers", in opposition to traditional terms, are particularly widespread), we cannot conclude that there has been a radical overcoming of the breadwinner model (Gillies 2009; Perra and Ruspini 2013). This applies to many countries, including Italy; traditional models coexist with new paternal practices and styles and it is not possible to identify a single prevailing model.

From 2000, studies on fatherhood have increased, reporting a process of transformation and renewal of fathering practices. In particular, qualitative studies have revealed the relevance of intergenerational transmission: contemporary fathers define themselves in relation to the previous generation (i.e., one's own father) and often in terms of differences ("I am different from my father") from the traditional model, while the traditional model still serves as a form of internalized reference that is no longer seen to be applicable in today's society. However, the relationship between one generation and the next is complex, as the old interiorised model is in tension with new life style (Bosoni and Baker 2015).

In this contribution we intend to discuss in particular this generational difference, by analysing the literature about fathers in two different periods, corresponding to two distinct generations: the years 1980–1999 and 2000–2017.

It is important to point out how we intend the meaning of generation, inspired by relational sociology (Donati 2011): generation is conceived as the set of people who share a relationship, linking their place in the family–parental sphere (i.e., child, parent, grandfather, etc.) with the position they have in the whole society according to their social age (i.e., according to age groups: young people, adults, elders, etc.) (Terenzi et al. 2016). Considering generation as a relationship between the intra-family dimension and social collocation allows us to think about generations in a new way: as a phenomenon that characterizes individuals, families and society in different ways but linked to one another. A generation cannot be made by a single family, just as it cannot be done by society alone. A generation instead consists of the subjects who are in a context of relationships in which the same age—not merely biological but according to a historical and social time—connects the way of being in the family and in the society (Donati and Colozzi 1997).

In doing our analysis we take in mind this definition of generation. In the following paragraphs we will firstly review the studies on fathers, highlighting the main features and themes and then we will analyse the international literature by using T-lab software, comparing two distinct periods from the social, cultural and demographic point of view—1980–1999 and 2000–2017—in order to identify the distinctive features of fathering/fatherhood in these two contexts, which represent two generations of different fathers1. The specific research questions we will try to answer are these:


### **2. Research on Fatherhood: Between Change and Continuity**

Studies on fatherhood agree in highlighting in the contemporary context, albeit with different emphasis, an image of loving and tender father, in opposition to the traditional ideal (severe and not accustomed to the expression of emotions). In particular, the expectations on fatherhood highlight a desire to be actively present: the fathers even before birth identify themselves as an involved and caring parent and define themselves as a "good father" (Miller 2011). At the same time, however, some authors have begun to reflect critically on this fatherhood transformation process, questioning what is really "new" in the parenting style of today's fathers. Male identity seems to be still strongly associated with the idea of breadwinner, the man who takes care of the economic support of the family through extra-domestic work, so that alongside the desire to be a good father and a father involved in childcare there is also a desire to be a good economic provider. According to Dermott (2008), the distinction of the two elements (breadwinner and involved father) as opposites is produced by our instinct to dichotomize reality and use opposite categories, although the two elements can also coexist. Dermott, in fact, described paternity through the concept of "intimate fatherhood", where the idea of intimacy

<sup>1</sup> The choice of these periods originated above all by the fact that according to Scopus database publications on fatherhood increased from 2000, particularly in the Social Sciences. Therefore, the selected publications in these two time periods represent on the one hand research on men involved in the transition to fatherhood in specific life-span (although with age differences), on the other hand they report the representation of eminent scholars in two distinct time and social periods.

refers to a personal and particular relationship, characterized by presence; closeness; expression of emotions; reciprocity; and dyadic, one-to-one relationship.

The relationship between fatherhood and motherhood is also central in the father's identity formation (Bosoni 2014b): male identity is formed starting from an imaginary set of ideas and representations deriving both from an intergenerational legacy and from current relationships, in particular the relationship with the partner. What seems to emerge more and more clearly—though not always consciously—is a relational dynamic where fatherhood can be understood in relation to motherhood. Moreover, this tendency to bring parenthood closer to motherhood (sometimes called "homogenization" or "de-differentiation" of parental roles) does not actually produce a flattening of differences, which are enhanced (Doucet 2006).

Studies have also revealed the intergenerational transmission of fathering/fatherhood (Brannen and Nilsen 2006; Bosoni 2014b): the relationship with the previous generation is fundamental as it constitutes the internalized reference model, with referent to both meanings and practices of being a father, which need however be adapted to the contemporary social and family context.

Furthermore, the debate on the fathering transformation is strongly connected with the cultural dimension, namely "the rules, values, beliefs and symbolic representations of paternity" (LaRossa et al. 2000, p. 375). These aspects define the expectations connected to being a father, which can assume various connotations in different social-historical contexts, for example, in Western industrialized societies we can identify at least three socially and normatively recognized aspects: "the father as an economic provider for the family", "the father as a male model of reference for sons and daughters" and "the father as a playmate" (LaRossa 2007, p. 89).

The symbolic-cultural dimension of fatherhood also indicates the importance and relevance of the paternal figure: how fathers are considered as competent caregivers, what is transmitted between generations about being a father (specific tasks and activities, work vs. care) and expectations about what fathers do towards the children. Moreover, the symbolic dimension of fatherhood reveals a great deal about the culture of fatherhood: the Father's Day, the male and paternal representation in films or books (LaRossa 2007). This contributes to defining the social expectations of fatherhood—what a father is expected to do or not.

Under great discussion is also how much the cultural dimension of fatherhood has changed over time. LaRossa and colleagues (LaRossa and Reitzes 1993; LaRossa et al. 2000) analysed the media representations of Father's Day and Mother's Day in America between 1940 and 1999, highlighting a drop of the patriarchal and absent father since the 1950s in favour of a father more involved in the care of children and less authoritarian that they found with greater force in the 1990s. This study highlights a change in the culture of fatherhood, although authors conclude that it is not possible to describe the extent of this transformation as it is characterized by a non-linear process. What is clear is that the cultural dimension of parenthood changes over the centuries but not in a linear or simple way. As a consequence, paternal practices in terms of activities and involvement with their children vary widely in different social, economic and political contexts (Coleman and Ganong 2003). This is also confirmed by more recent studies (Marsiglio et al. 2000) that highlight the presence of different fathers' styles, defined as "fatherhood diversity" to indicate the presence and coexistence of traditional and new models, not necessarily in conflict. The renewal process of fatherhood (well expressed by the term "new fathers") is actually linked with a tension between tradition and modernity, in which the new coexists with the old, as paternity is expressed in different ways and there is not a single model of reference. Several research studies in the European context have agreed on this variability (Zajczyk and Ruspini 2008; Naldini and Torrioni 2015; Crespi and Ruspini 2016).

Thus, the cultural dimension of fatherhood—including symbolic and normative aspects—and fathering practices—aspects related to the care of a child—are two different but strongly linked dimensions of fathers' experience. The cultural dimension is certainly not easy to detect, as the operationalization of values and orientations behind the paternal role is a very debated question; even the definition of the concept of value is so complex that some authors speak of a terminological

jungle (Halman 1995) or black box (Hechter 1993), pointing out that in social research we can only grasp beliefs, attitudes and opinions, which are assumed to refer to values guiding human action (Cipriani 2012).

For this reason, many studies have focused on paternal practices (fathering), highlighting in particular involvement with young children (Yeung et al. 2001; Brotherson et al. 2005) and the desire to be good fathers (Morman and Kory 2006); less explored is the process by which men come to define themselves as fathers (fatherhood). Regarding this last aspect, the studies also agree in highlighting an intergenerational dimension of fatherhood, namely the need to relate with one's father to define the actual experience. This suggests that the perception of what a father should be in the family context always occurs in relation—and by difference—with the previous generation, which represents the internalized reference model although it is not completely pertinent to the contemporary context (Brannen and Nilsen 2006). It should be noted, however, that despite the emphasis on the greater recent involvement of fathers in family care, data still show the presence of a gap between tasks and responsibilities in the couple, confirming that the father often assumes a role of secondary caregiver, especially when children are young (Finn and Henwood 2009). Although research studies have mainly taken into consideration the relationship between fathers and young children, recently some research has highlighted the relational dynamics underlying the bond between father and son in adolescence (McKinney and Renk 2008).

Moreover, fatherhood can be considered as a transition influenced by different personal, social and family factors (Palkovitz and Palm 2009): it is a process of skills learning (fathering)<sup>2</sup> that contributes over time to define their own experience (Coleman and Ganong 2003; Dermott 2008; Featherstone 2009; Hobson 2002). Recently, the debate on fatherhood has highlighted the important link between fatherhood (often emphasizing the "right" of fathers to care for their children) and work, thus contributing to redefine the complex issue of family–work reconciliation as a problem that is not only female (Bosoni 2014a; Mazzucchelli 2011). The role of policies (leaves) in particular has been highlighted in supporting fathers to share parental responsibilities (Rossi et al. 2009).

Scholars have more recently focused on childcare tasks and their division in the family as well as work and family balance, with a gender perspective (Tanturri and Mencarini 2009; Magaraggia 2013; Ruspini and Tanturri 2017). Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly clear that choices regarding the division of tasks between parents have undergone a decision-making process by the couple, rather than the individual, in which paternal and maternal competencies are not blurred but valued as different (Rossi and Mazzucchelli 2011).

From what has been said so far, it is clear that the concept of fatherhood is multifaceted and complex; in the same society and historical epoch, in fact, different interpretations of the paternal role can coexist, even in contrast with each other (e.g., "absent father" and "new father"). Therefore, rather than looking for the prevailing/appropriate model, it is interesting to document and explore diversity, which as we said is also and above all generational. For this reason, in this contribution we analyse this last aspect by giving voice to the literature of two different epochs.

### **3. Analysis of the Studies in Two Historical-Temporal Contexts**

In this paper we review the international literature on fatherhood, distinguishing and comparing two distinct time periods, which represent two generations of different fathers: the years 1980–1999 and the new millennium (2000–2017).

<sup>2</sup> Several studies confirm that fatherhood is perceived as something that must be learned, in opposition to the motherhood that is considered by fathers as a natural and biological (Miller 2011; Bosoni 2014b).

The specific research questions to be answered are:


We carried out an analysis of the most relevant academic publications in Google Scholar concerning the paternal figure in the two time periods indicated, through T-Lab software, with particular attention to the theme of intergenerational transmission of parenthood and parenting, in order to identify the distinctive traits of fatherhood in these two historical-temporal contexts.

These distinctive features are indicated by key words that the TLab software can highlight and analyse, showing the relationships graphically. This method allows us not only to deeply analyse selected literature in a specific period, identifying key concepts but also providing a useful comparison of different studies on fathers.

The thematic analysis allowed us to map the representations of paternity, highlighting the intergenerational aspects and the declinations associated with them.

### *3.1. Methodology*

First we identified the main sociological and psychological publications in Google Scholar in the two time periods (1980–1999, 2000–2017), inserting keywords to guide the research: father's involvement, fatherhood, fathering, intergenerational transmission of fatherhood, fathers and adolescent sons. Then we selected the 10 most relevant papers for each historical period according to the relevance order given by Google Scholar, number of citations and the relevance of journals in which it was published (i.e., Journal of Marriage and the Family, Family Relations, Fathering . . . ).

The complete texts of the selected articles were analysed. As a method of analysis we used T-LAB, which consists of a set of linguistic and statistical tools for content analysis and text mining allowing a graphic and synthetic representation of relationships between words and concepts3.

The wealth of the designated corpus allowed us to carry out analyses of different types and complexities: word associations, radial diagrams and sequence analysis. We will discuss them in order.

From a preliminary analysis of the keywords in the 1980–1999 literature (Table 1, columns 1 and 2) we can see that the words with the highest occurrence values are "father" (1735) and "child" (1181). "Mother" (655), "parent" (605), "family" (601), "relationship" (471) and "adolescent" (421) follow at a distance but with significant values.

In the most recent literature (2000–2017) (Table 1, columns 3 and 4) we can see how the words with the highest occurrence values are again "father" (1169) and "child" (652). "Man" (373), "family" (318), "fatherhood" (282), "involvement" (279) and "mother" (277) follow at a distance but with significant values.

In comparing the two periods, some interesting elements emerge: in the years 1980–1999 the literature deals with the subject of paternity by focusing on the substantial difference present in the parental couple, that is, the difference with the maternal figure; there is also a large focus on the transition to adolescence; in today's literature the focus is on the theme of masculinity in relation to fatherhood (we speak of father but also of fatherhood); paternal involvement assumes a decisive role ("involvement", "involve"), as does that of care ("care") and of the relationship with the world of work. The focus is not on the difference but on the relationship, with the mother figure and between the different areas of life.

<sup>3</sup> There are several valuable elements of this program: its interface is particularly user-friendly and allows an application to very different fields and objects as well as automatic lemmatization available in several languages (Italian, English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese). T-LAB also uses automatic and semi-automatic processes that allow you to quickly highlight significant patterns of words, themes and variables; finally all software processes are transparent and can be easily customized using a wide and flexible range of analysis tools (for deep explanation visit https://tlab.it/en/presentation.php).


**Table 1.** Keywords with relative occurrence values: comparative analysis between 1980–1999 and 2000–2017.

The comparison of key words in the two periods considered which represent two distinct generations highlights continuity rather than discontinuity in fathers representation: father-mother-child relation is central in both periods, then a focus on masculinity emerges along with the idea of being a good father.

We will now analyse in more detail the specificities of the studies on paternity in the two temporal periods, through ad hoc elaborations.

### *3.2. Studies on Fatherhood in the Period 1980–1999*

### 3.2.1. Radial Diagrams

In radial diagrams the selected lemma is placed at the centre, with the others distributed around it, each at a distance proportional to its degree of association. The relations brought to light are therefore all significant according to a one-to-one relationship between the central lemma and each of the others.

The lemma "father" (Figure 1)—as a central keyword in word associations—is associated with different subjects in relation to which the paternal function is explicit (child, in the differentiation of son and daughter but also mother) and better defined as a role that is played in the family and connected to practical parenting practices ("support", "suggest", "involve", "involvement", "spend time"). Fatherhood is linked to the generative but also the work dimension. The themes of change and masculinity ("man") are also central.

**Figure 1.** Radial diagram with "father".

The lemma "child" (Figure 2)—in the second place as a keyword in word associations—seems to mirror what has already been highlighted with the lemma "father". It is in fact associated with mother, father, parent and concrete actions in which the dimension of parental care is clarified ("care", "parenting"): "spend time", "involvement", "support". The relational ("relationship", "interaction") and value dimension ("belief") and attention to the needs of the child are central.

**Figure 2.** Radial diagram with "child".

The lemma "mother" (Figure 3)—in third place as a keyword in word associations—is also in line with the results highlighted by the lemma "father", albeit with some specificities. The theme of the difference of gender ("boy", "girl", "daughter") and of age ("old", "young", "age") of the children ("child") emerges as decisive; the maternal figure is also defined by difference with the paternal figure ("father") within the family context in which the parental dimension is strongly felt ("parent", "parenting") and has peculiar characteristics. In addition to the theme of involvement and spending

time the relationship that is connoted as supportive is emphasized. The focus on the adolescent condition is also interesting.

**Figure 3.** Radial diagram with "mother".

The lemma "parent" (Figure 4)—in fourth place as a keyword in word associations—takes up some elements already mentioned in the other words and emphasizes other new aspects: parenting has to do with specific expectations ("expect") and values ("beliefs") that translate into parenting practices and behaviours in which the relationship ("interaction") is centred on a strong disciplinary aspect ("disciplines"). It is interesting, again, to see the emphasis on difference, either in the paternal or maternal code ("mother", "father") or in relation to the children. Rather than the gender difference ("sex", "boy"), the age difference is more emphasized, focusing on the change in the parental role in the growth of children ("developmental") and especially in the adolescent phase.

**Figure 4.** Radial diagram with Parent.

*Genealogy* **2019**, *3*, 17

Finally, the lemma "adolescent" (Figure 5) is interesting because it shows us the focus of the studies conducted in the considered period (1980–1999); it is a survey (study, rating, exploration, rate, sample) in which some specific themes related to identity are investigated: "discrepancy", "achievement", "expectation", "belief", "task".

**Figure 5.** Radial diagram with "adolescent".

What is fundamental is the reference to the family and the relationship with the parental figures (parent), in particular the mother.

### 3.2.2. Sequence Analysis

T-LAB allows the researcher to calculate for every lexical unit the predecessors and successors: in the produced graphs, lexical units less distant from the selected one are those that are more likely to precede it (predecessors) or follow it (successors)4.

Focusing on the analysis of keyword sequences, Figure 6 shows all the predecessors and all the successors of the lexical unit "father". The strongest predecessor is "mother", followed by "generative", "responsible" and "child"; predecessors present but less relevant than these are "time", "interest", "influence", "role", "definition" and "work".

<sup>4</sup> The T-LAB software allows to perform a Markov analysis of three types of sequences and to export the related outputs for a Network Analysis.The types of sequences that can be analyzed are the following:

<sup>(</sup>A) Keyword Sequences, the elements of which are lexical units (words or lemmas) present in the corpus or in a subset of it. In this case the maximum number of 'nodes' ('types' of lexical units) is 3000;

<sup>(</sup>B) Sequences of Themes, whose elements are units of context (ie elementary contexts) classified by a T-LAB tool for thematic analysis (Thematic Analysis of Elementary Contexts, Classification Based on Dictionaries or Modeling of Emerging Themes). In this case, since the sequence of elementary contexts characterizes the whole 'chain' (predecessors and successors) of the corpus, T-LAB realizes a specific form of analysis of the speech, whose nodes can vary from a minimum 5 to a maximum of 50;

<sup>(</sup>C) Sequences stored in a Sequence.dat file prepared by the user. In this case the maximum number of records is 50,000 and the number of 'types' (i.e., nodes) must not exceed 3000.

Starting from a matrix in which all the predecessors and all the successors of each item are registered (lexical unit or theme), T-LAB calculates the transition probabilities (Markov chains) between the various units of analysis thus identifying predecessors and successors.

**Figure 6.** Predecessors of "father".

Stronger successors are "involvement" and, again, "mother"; weaker successors are "involve", "presence", "behaviour", "work", "role", "child" and "spend". The word "absence" appears at a distance (Figure 7).

**Figure 7.** Successors of "father".

Looking at the terms that appear both as predecessors and as successors of the lexical unit "father" is interesting to highlight how fatherhood defines itself as a relationship with two fundamental figures, the mother and the child; the reference to the paternal role and the definition of paternity in reference to the working field ("work") also clearly emerges.

In comparing the predecessors and successors of the lemma "mother", some recursions appear compared to what has already been reported with the lemma "father": the attention to the child and to the topic of time as well as the focus on the relational ("relationship") and parental dimension ("parent") as well as the attention paid to the adolescent phase.

Instead, the accent on the role and its definition as well as on the work disappears; it is interesting to underline a change: while for the fathers "absence" is thematised, for the mothers "waiting" is thematised.

According to graph theory. the predecessors and successors of each node (in our case, lexical units or themes) can be represented with arrows (arcs) in input (in-degree = types of predecessors) or outgoing (out-degree = types of successors). See Figure 8.

**Figure 8.** Predecessors and successors sccording to graph theory.

Based on their relationship (successors/predecessors), it is possible to verify the semantic variety generated by each node:


In our case, "father" has 10 types of successors (out-degree) and 10 types of predecessors (in-degree), so it can be classified as a "relay" node.

### *3.3. Paternity in the New Millennium*

### 3.3.1. Radial Diagrams

The lemma "father" (Figure 9)—the leading keyword in word associations—is associated with different subjects in relation to which the paternal function (child, in particular son and mother) is also defined here as a role that is played in the family, as already noted in the analysis of the literature from 1980–1999.

**Figure 9.** Radial diagram with "father".

A further element of commonality with the literature is that to define fatherhood, the references to masculinity (man) and to work are central; unlike this, however, there is a strong and explicit reference to the issue of care. Paternity is seen in a relationship in which great emphasis is given to the experiential aspect ("experience"), which is expressed in activities and practical parenting practices where dedicated time and involvement ("involved", "involve") are fundamental; this last aspect is the primary object of study and it is central in defining a model of a good father.

The focus placed on the relational and experiential dimension—where a leading role is reserved for the involvement—and on the modelling underlying the definition of fatherhood (good father model) represents a novelty in contemporary literature.

The lemma "child" (Figure 10)—in second place as a keyword in word associations—is associated with "mother", "father", "parent", "family" and concrete actions in which the dimension of parental care is explicit (i.e., "spend time", "involvement", "involve", "share", "play", "connect", defined as experience, activity and connection. As already noted for 1970–1999, the relational dimension ("relationship") and attention to the needs of the child are central; differently from it, however, the dimension of values and support is not themed but there is rather an emphasis on the ludic experiential and temporal dimension (paternity is displayed both on weekends and on weekdays).

**Figure 10.** Radial diagram with "child".

The lemma "man" (Figure 11)—in third place as a keyword in word associations—is associated with "father", "father-figure", "fatherhood", "family", "child" and "woman". This confirms what emerged in the list of keywords: in today's literature the focus is on the issue of masculinity ("man") placed in relation to that of the most widely understood paternity; paternal involvement assumes a decisive role ("involve", "involved") as well as that of care and of the relationship with the world of work. In addition to the experiential aspect ("experience"), the attitudes ("attitude") and the different modalities to cover the role ("model") are also discussed. Finally, it is interesting to note the focus on the theme of intergenerational transmission ("generation").

**Figure 11.** Radial diagram with Man.

Finally, the lemma "family" (Figure 12)—in fourth place as a keyword in word associations—is strongly associated with the themes of fatherhood ("father"), masculinity ("man") and parenting ("parent", "mother", "child"). The family is considered from a structural and relational ("relationship") point of view, focusing in particular on the intact family; membership ("member", "role", "involvement") is thematised, as is the dynamic-temporal aspect that refers to transition and change ("transition", "change", "time", "life"); the reference to the theme of generations is also interesting, as is the focus on the work environment, both as an activity and as remuneration ("income", "work").

**Figure 12.** Radial diagram with "family".

### 3.3.2. Sequence Analysis

Focusing on the analysis of keyword sequences, we identify here the predecessors and successors of the lexical unit "father".

Stronger predecessors are "biological", "good" and "mother"; intermediate predecessors are "time", "generative" and "man"; and weaker predecessors are "transition", "child", "experience" and "involved" (Figure 13).

**Figure 13.** Predecessors of "father".

Comparing these results with what emerged from the years 1980–1999 literature, some recursive terms emerge—"mother", "child", "generative", "time"—and there are some changes: the reference to the workplace ("work") and the definition of role disappears, while the reference to what defines a good father and the link between fatherhood and masculinity ("man") are strong; although weaker, the focus on "transitions" is interesting.

The strongest successor is "involvement", followed closely in distance by "child" and "mother"; intermediate successors are "involve", "son", "role", "experience" and "describe". Weaker successors are "spend" and "family" (Figure 14).

**Figure 14.** Successors of "father".

Comparing these results with the analysis of the previous literature, here too some recursive terms emerge—"mother", "child", "involve", "involvement", "spend", "role"—and some innovations: the reference to the working field, the presence or absence of the paternal figure and behavioural dynamics ("behaviour") disappear while the reference to the experiential dimension ("experience") is strong.

Looking at the terms that appear both as predecessors and as successors of the lexical unit "father" in recent literature, it is interesting to highlight how fatherhood defines itself as a relationship with two fundamental figures, the mother and the child; the reference to the paternal involvement ("involved") and to the experience of paternity also clearly emerges.

According to graph theory (Section 3.2), finally, having father 10 types of successors (out-degree) and types of predecessors (in-degree) can be classified as a "relay" node.

### **4. Conclusions**

The analysis carried out on a selection of literature in two different historical-social contexts was aimed at gathering possible differences from an international perspective with respect to the emergency representation of paternity. In particular, we asked two questions:


Regarding the first question, the analysis of the keywords present in the two periods highlights first of all the centrality of the relational dimension (with the child, with the mother) already starting from the 1980s; this aspect is amplified starting from the new millennium with a broader meaning, including aspects related to masculinity, the cultural dimension of fatherhood and the different areas of life (family and work in the first place).

Paternity, in the years 1980–1999, is connected to concrete parental practices ("support", "suggest", "involve", "involvement", "spend time") and to both the generative and work dimensions. The theme of change is also central and above all the relational dimension ("relationship"): fatherhood is defined as a relationship with two fundamental figures, the mother and the child.

The theme of difference is also present: gender difference ("boy", "girl", "daughter") and age difference ("old", "young") of children ("child") and difference with the mother figure. The adolescent condition is analysed in relation to paternity and to the change in the parental role in the growth of children ("developmental"). The surveys with adolescent children focus on the theme of identity, on the relationship with the family (in particular with the mother figure) and on other specific topics ("discrepancy", "achievement", "expectation", "belief", "task").

The studies in the new millennium are placed in continuity with the previous ones, highlighting in addition to already known aspects some further themes: fatherhood is in fact associated with different subjects in relation to which one explicates one's role, within a dynamic relationship, especially with children and the mother. Here, however, there is an explicit reference to the theme of care, as well as of work: work and care are not considered as opposites but as dimensions equally present in the paternal experience.

Since the 2000s, paternity has taken on a broader and more complex sense, which includes masculinity ("man"). Great emphasis is also placed on the experiential aspect ("experience") of parenting; the focus is on dedicated time and involvement ("involve", "involved") in an attempt to identify paternity models and the characteristics of a good father.

Involvement is characterized as a key lemma in recent literature and is expressed as being present ("presence"), influencing ("influence") and requiring the devotion of time every day ("weekday") in awareness of diversity (different types or levels of involvement) and concrete activities.

To conclude, the analysis conducted, in line with previous theories (Dermott 2008; Doucet 2006; Miller 2011), seems to suggest a strong relationship between the two generations. Paternity in the 1980s

and 1990s and in the new millennium is marked by great connections, rather than by discontinuity. Continuity is given by the relational dimension (with the mother and the child) as central aspects of paternal identity; recent studies include a specific reflection on masculinity in general. However we cannot conclude that new fathers as totally different from the previous generations, but different paternal style coexist. So, the paternal role is widened and deepened.

Moreover, keeping in mind the definition of generation given by the relational sociology (see the introduction) as the set of people who share a relationship both intra-family and in the social context, it is interesting to note that most of the literature on fatherhood has an intra-familiar focus (relationships with own father, the mother and children); it is rather difficult to see the social dimension of the intergenerational relationship of fatherhood/fathering. A more explicit tension toward a social dimension of fatherhood is given by considering the expression of masculinities in different social contexts as well as the importance of work in fathers life. From this perspective, fatherhood/fathering can be conceived as an intergenerational dimension articulated in different levels (personal, familiar and social) linked to one another.

With respect to the second research question, we also note a greater focus on the relationship with young children but less with adolescents; nevertheless, comparatively, we see a greater interest for the adolescent age in the years 1980–1999 compared to today. While in 1980–1999 some studies with a family perspective put the adolescent age in the spotlight, in the most recent years the reflection on the paternal involvement and on the different modalities with which this is expressed—favouring however the first years of life—prevails; studies on adolescence today do not look at it as a normative phase of the family (Marta et al. 2012; Scabini and Marta 2006) but focus mainly on non-normative transitions connected to it (e.g., adolescence in separate families).

Finally, regarding the relationship between the father and young adult children, we find in the literature that it is an important element for the well-being of the child and its importance emerges above all in the experience of divorce, associated with the removal of fathers from the domestic sphere, which contributes to impoverishment and deterioration of the father–young adult relationship (Greco 2006; Amato 1994).

Moreover, it should be emphasized that the relationship between fathers and young adult children is not particularly analysed, as is also evident from the analyses conducted. The studies that have taken it into consideration, mainly of a psychological nature, tend to analyse the negative aspects of intergenerational relations in terms of psychological distress or poor well-being (Umberson 1992; Lawton et al. 1994).

Sociological studies on the father and the young adult are practically absent. This is because the paternal role is structured in fact from early childhood and in relation to the mother. In this context, the intergenerational relationship immediately appears to be a very strong driver.

Although many studies, even in recent times, have highlighted the importance of maintaining a good parenting relationship after a divorce with a renewed interest in the father–child relationship, especially with young children, the adult father–child relationship is still left in the background.

**Author Contributions:** M.L.B. wrote Sections 1 and 2, S.M. Sections 3 and 4.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

### **References**

Amato, Paul R. 1994. Father-child relations, mother-child relations and offspring psychological well-being in early adulthood. *Journal of Marriage and Family* 56: 1031–42. [CrossRef]


Terenzi, Paolo, Lucia Boccacin, and Riccardo Prandini. 2016. *Lessico Della Sociologia Relazionale*. Bologna: Il Mulino.


© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

### *Article* **Against All Odds? Birth Fathers and Enduring Thoughts of the Child Lost to Adoption**

### **Gary Clapton**

School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, UK; gary.clapton@ed.ac.uk Received: 4 March 2019; Accepted: 25 March 2019; Published: 29 March 2019

**Abstract:** This paper revisits a topic only briefly raised in earlier research, the idea that the grounds for fatherhood can be laid with little or no 'hands-on' experience of fathering and upon these grounds, an enduring sense of being a father of, and bond with, a child seen once or never, can develop. The paper explores the specific experiences of men whose children were adopted as babies drawing on the little research that exists on this population, work relating to expectant fathers, personal accounts, and other sources such as surveys of birth parents in the USA and Australia. The paper's exploration and discussion of a manifestation of fatherhood that can hold in mind a 'lost' child, disrupts narratives of fathering that regard fathering as 'doing' and notions that once out of sight, a child is out of mind for a father. The paper suggests that, for the men in question, a diversity of feelings, but also behaviours, point to a form of continuing, lived fathering practices—that however, take place without the child in question. The conclusion debates the utility of the phrase "birth father" as applied historically and in contemporary adoption processes.

**Keywords:** birth fathers; adoption; fatherhood

### **1. Introduction**

There can be an enduring psychological/attachment bond between the child and their biological father that is of significance both to the child and the father, whether the father is present, absent or indeed has never been known to the child (Clapton 2007, pp. 68–69).

In this paper I wish to further explore the connection to their children experienced by birth fathers1 in adoption. This exploration takes the form of a review and discussion of the existing literature relating to birth fathers plus the paper will draw upon developments in our understanding of how expectant fathers may develop attachments to their child as a means of the exploring the creation of the "enduring psychological/attachment bonds" found in the birth father literature. But first, a concise statement of context and clarity of definition is necessary.

### **2. Adoption**

The traditional form of adoption in the U.K. has changed. Stranger (out of family) adoptions of healthy babies, voluntarily relinquished by natural parents has declined. In its place in a process that can be charted from the late 1980s, the majority of contemporary adoptions involve older children who have spent time in public care. These are children that have relationships with their parents, siblings and other family members. Many of these adoptions take place against the consent of the birth parents (O'Halloran 2015). This paper focuses on the biological fathers of the children of adoptions in the previous era of so-called "closed" adoptions referring to the sealing of records and practice of secrecy

<sup>1</sup> The use of the term 'birth father' is explored in the latter part of this paper but for ease of flow and comprehension, the term will be used throughout to denote the biological father of the child given up for adoption.

relating to a child's familial origins (Ryburn 1995). These closed adoptions are distinct from the more open adoptions of today when adoptive parents, adopted children and birth families are more likely to have some form of contact with each other, either before, during or after the adoption has taken place.<sup>2</sup> The marked increase in the practice of open adoption and decrease in closed adoptions can be dated roughly from the end of the 1980s (Clapton and Clifton 2016). The focus of this paper involves the closed adoptions prior to this period when, invariably, after the adoption, birth parents knew little or nothing about their child.

### **3. Birth Parents and Adoption**

Research, in decreasing degree of attention has focused on adopted children, adoptive parents and families, birth mothers and birth fathers (Clapton 2018). The existing research on the impact of adoption on birth parents demonstrates the extreme and longstanding implications for them of the loss of a child to adoption. Most of this literature concerns birth mothers. The main UK studies (Bouchier et al. 1991; Howe et al. 1992; Hughes and Logan 1993; Logan 1996) concluded that there are continuing negative consequences for many birth mothers' physical and mental health and well-being. Research, especially in Australia, has characterised the birth mother experience as that of disenfranchised grief related to the continuation and domination of maternal feelings towards the child (Robinson 2018). There are far fewer studies of birthfathers.

### *Birth Fathers and Adoption*

In February 2019, I entered the words "birthfathers" and "adoption" into Google and up came the message "Did you mean "birth mothers" adoption?". Well, no I did not. See Figure 1.

**Figure 1.** Google and birthfathers.

Working out where the (biological) father fits in adoption is not only problematic for Google. The nature of fathering and fatherhood is a relatively new field of study compared to that of mothers. Much has been done in the last few decades to develop our understanding of how men become fathers, the role of fathers and the unique contribution that they can make to the life of a child (Lamb 2010). However, an equivalent degree of scholarship on birth fathers in adoption does not exist3. This may be because of a long-held view that "It sometimes appears that we have actually

<sup>2</sup> This is not to suggest that adoption is a one-off event. Adoption is a life-long process for all (Gediman and Brown 1991, p. 254), rather it is to acknowledge efforts to achieve continuity of connections between birth families and adoptive families in contemporary adoptions.

<sup>3</sup> The adoptive father is equally under-researched (Siegel 2017).

been guilty of contributing to a myth that. suggests that a child born out of wedlock has only one natural parent" (Anglim 1965, p. 340) Forty-five years later, Coles refers to what he terms "the common view that birth fathers were not there (at pregnancy and birth), so how could they possibly have an emotional response?" (Coles 2010, p. 25). Research that has raised the possibility of the birth father who has had no or little physical connection with their child, having paternal thoughts and emotions problematises such lasting notions of birth fathers, contributes to our developing insights regarding fathers as a whole and can be said to be part of a general 'catching up' about fathers that has addressed a traditional emphasis on mothers, and a lack of attention as to how men perceive fatherhood (Clarke and Popay 1998). A significant aspect of fatherhood research is that it has focused on what men do (or not) with their child (Ranson 2015) with less work on what it means and feels like to be a father. 'Hands-on', expressive behaviour is seen as the moment when men come into their own as fathers with their children (Brannen and Nilsen 2006). This makes the case of birth fathers who feel for their child yet have had not such experience of contact worthy of study. As will be seen there is a small collection of studies, some individual accounts, magazine and internet contributions, and knowledge that can be gleaned at second-hand via accounts of adopted people meeting their fathers that sheds light on the relatively secret, inner lives of birth fathers. As such the trajectory of our knowledge of birth fathers mirrors how our understandings of fathers started further back in the field from mothers. In the words of birth father Ward's counsellor and intermediary "Birth fathers are about thirty years behind birth mothers in gaining their voices in the adoption process" (Ward 2012, p. 198).

For decades birth fathers have been talked of as shadowy (Mason 1995), shadowy figures (Rawles 2003; Hughes 2015) phantom fathers (Passmore and Chipuer 2009), and invisible men (Coles 2010). Twenty years ago in relation to later-life contact between adopted people and their families of origin, March (1995) counselled that to "focus only on the adoptee-birth mother contact is an injustice too often in the current adoption literature" (p. 104). Unfortunately this advice on the need for further attention has not been taken up in the main, e.g., birth fathers remain overlooked in the adoption literature in general (Neil 2017; Siegel 2017). Adoption-related stories and fiction for children repeat the absence of a biological father. In the classic children's story designed for adopted children, *The Mulberry Bird* (Brodzinsky 2013), Mother Bird's struggles are detailed: her struggle to feed her baby bird; the storm that drives her to seek counsel from the wise Owl; her visit to the seashore birds, who welcome the baby bird into their soft, safe nest. But one figure is all but missing. The male who fathered baby bird is mentioned only in passing. Mother Bird "noticed that some of the other mothers had father birds to help them. Her baby's father had flown away long before she built her nest and laid the pale blue egg." (p. 11).

Our lack of knowledge—and misunderstandings—stands in contrast to some interesting facts on the ground. These are that:

More British men than ever before are trying to track down their adopted kids. Over 1000 birth fathers are officially registered with adoption-contact agencies and hundreds more are believed to be searching for their children independently (Rawles 2003).

According to Australian researchers, Passmore and Chipuer (2009), the little we know of the search behaviour of birthfathers questions any notions of them being marginal or disinterested. In one of the first pieces of birth father research, a survey of 125 American birth fathers, 96% had considered searching for their relinquished child, and 67% had actually searched (Deykin et al. 1988). Similar results have been found in Australia where Cicchini (1993) found that 77% of the thirty birthfathers in his study had taken active steps to seek information about, or make contact with, their child. Clapton (2003) found that nearly 90% of the thirty Scottish and English birth fathers in his study desired some contact with their child. Twenty out of the twenty seven fathers in the study by Passmore and Coles had actively searched (Passmore and Coles 2009). The most recent account of birth father experiences includes the information that nine of the twelve interviewed were searching for their child (Kenny et al. 2012). Applications for information and contact registers are another means of locating and measuring birth father interest. Browning cites New Zealand figures relating to birth parent

applications for identifying information relating to their children and these indicate that birth fathers made up 12% of these (1034/8095) (Browning 2005, p. 4). Elsewhere the Adoption Contact Register for Scotland has a very similar proportion—250/2274—eleven percent of birth fathers registered as seeking contact with their children (Birthlink 2019. personal communication). The number of birth fathers on the Adoption Contact Register for England and Wales is also similar at 1025 out of a total of 10547 birth parents registered (HM Passport Office 2019. Personal communication) There are many reasons for the disproportions (in relation to birth mother expressions of interest). These include men's reluctance to express emotions and their names not being on the birth certificate (Coles 2010) but suffice to say that these statistics add to the cumulative impression that a sizable amount of birth fathers, contrary to the impression of marginal figures, have an enduring interest in their child. So whilst it is acknowledged that most of the men in the above studies were recruited via one form or another of a means to register for news of their child's welfare and hope for a meeting, the repeated refrain of interest in their child is unignorable.

What do the existing works tell us of being a birth father? Deykin et al. (1988), Cicchini (1993), Clapton (2003), Witney (2004), Triseliotis et al. (2005), Passmore and Coles (2009) and Kenny et al. (2012) have in common the finding that some birth fathers have been, or indicated a wish to be, in contact with their child. What might drive this?

### **4. Enduring Love, Enduring Fatherhood**

"The adoption rubbed me out legally but not emotionally" (in Clapton 2003, p. 122).

In Author's study of thirty birth fathers, it was found that after the adoption of their child, whilst nearly half of the men experienced an eventual reduction of feelings of immediate distress, others reported that things either did not get better or that such feelings had intensified. Many of these feelings convey feeling like a father:

As time went by when I'd see a child, I'd think B—must be that age. This feeling has become more pronounced as I've got older. There has never been a time when I was completely free (Clapton 2003, p. 128).

The child was never out of mind for most of these men, on birthdays and Xmases and at "any quiet moment" In *The Birth Father's Tale* Ward (2012) writes of his son being "never far from my mind", that "he's shaped my life", and wanting to tell him "that there's been an invisible hand over him, wishing him well" (p. 3). Birth fathers also speak of rituals of observance and devotion:

Every year when his son's birthday comes around, John buys a bottle of whiskey, goes into a dark room and drinks till he drops. He's been observing this ritual for as long as he can remember. 'I've been pining for my son all my life. There's not a day goes by when I don't think about him' (in Rawles 2003, p. 80).

The men in the Passmore and Coles study (2009) send yearly birthday and Xmas cards to the adoption agency. Others attend the adoption agency every year for an annual up-date on their child's life. Some have left money in their wills to their adopted-out child (Browning 2005).

Much of this, it has to be noted, involves men that never saw or touched their child. Ward (2012) never held his child or saw him yet: "If you spend over thirty years starved of a person, you dearly love, devoid of dialogue with him, all that exists is thinking, writing and imagining" (p. 201). For those that did have sight or touch the loss remains palpable for decades:

The one thing I remember most is the smell, like a new-born smell—comes back now. I suppose that stays with you all the time. It's immediate. (in Witney 2004, p. 56).

Ward and others speak directly of paternity, specifically "My frustrated parenthood" (Ward 2012, p. 200) and "You don't stop being a father just by signing away the adoption papers" (in Rawles 2003, p. 81). The adopted-out child is spoken of as lost ("a lost son" Passmore and Coles 2009, p. 8), and a missing family member "Her absence from our family leaves a hole in my heart. I wish we could be reunited" (Kenny et al. 2012, p. 83). Cicchini (1993) found

considerable evidence of feelings of responsibility. This is echoed elsewhere when fathers speak of having "abandoned their charge" (Clapton 2003, p. 133).

Expressions of parental feelings are intense in many of the accounts. The top reason for searching in Cicchini's study was "I have a sense of responsibility for my child" (1993, p. 19). The associated motivation for assurance as to their child's welfare is present as the highest-rated of search motives in Passmore and Coles (2009).

These fathers identify an ambivalence at the heart of the matter when they acknowledge that their feelings exist in spite of having no experience of day-to-day care, and "have difficulty in responding truthfully when asked how many children we have" (Coles 2010, p. 44). And they also grapple with their identities: "I didn't bring her up, her dad did, I'm her father" (in Clapton's study (2003, p. 165)4.

The research has also identified incidences of fathers conforming to some of the more popular stereotypes of men who discover they are to become fathers: "I disappeared to London hoping no one would find me. I was distraught" (Witney 2004, p. 55). Whilst it follows that larger and more random studies of birth fathers might reveal greater evidence of such behaviour, present in the accounts that we have are mostly feelings of connectedness (with the child) (Coles 2010), "emotional and psychological ties" (Rawles 2003, p. 81) and a pervasive vein of attachment or bond, albeit a one-way street: " ... there is evidence of a constellation of feelings and behaviours that indicate the development of a sense of fatherhood" (Clapton 2003, p. 83).

What then are we to make of these beliefs in, and feelings of, fatherhood? Are bonds with the child a result of maturation (Cicchini 1993), guilt (Mason 1995; Passmore and Coles 2009), shame over abandonment (Coles 2010), a combination of all these? Ainsworth makes a difference between relationship bonds which are dyadic, and affectional bonds which can be experienced by the individual in absentia of the other (Ainsworth 1991, p. 37). Are these what birth fathers feel? Whilst it has already been acknowledged that our knowledge of birth fathers is scant and that the research to date has not drawn on random samples, yet there is sufficient repetition of testimony to feelings of fatherhood to warrant a deeper enquiry into the possible source of the feelings of paternal-ness expressed throughout the existing accounts. In the face of normative expectations that fathers provide and care and that the essence of a good father is 'being there' (Plantin et al. 2003), from where might birth father feelings emerge, and what sustains them in the face of never having 'been there' for their children? A small group of recent studies that delves deep into fathers' emotions, their sources and creation, might shed greater light.

### **5. The Creation and Maintenance of Paternity**

Condon et al.'s (2013) study of first-time fathers' ante-natal attachment begins with the pertinent observation that "in the attachment research literature, it is largely behaviours which are the focus of assessment methodology" (p. 15). This is germane because, in the case of birth fathers, aside from the various commemorations and rituals referred to above, there are no behaviours to observe relating to interactions between fathers and children. Condon et al. go on call for a "holistic approach to the understanding of the parent–infant relationship" that requires "consideration of both parental subjective experience as well as behaviour" (ibid. emphasis added). Paternal attachment is a "feeling state", and they conclude that the findings from their analysis of expectant fathers' self-reports suggest that "a father's attachment may not stem solely from actual interaction with the neonate or infant" but "Rather, the predominant contribution may stem from some underlying 'capacity' to form an attachment bond which is activated in fantasy before the baby is even born" (p. 25). The writers speculate that such attachment might reflect "a kind of 'commitment' to the couple relationship" (ibid)—in the case of the birth fathers' adoptions that we know about, the majority of cases involved young people in relationships with each other, though, it has to be said, by no means were the majority

<sup>4</sup> The dad or father question is discussed below.

of pregnancies planned (Clapton 2003). The conclusions of Condon et al. therefore problematise fixed notions of "being there" and "hands-on" as the definitions of how bonds are formed between fathers and their children. In other specific instances e.g., men absent as soldiers; research has shown a sense of fatherhood thrives after the birth without ever having seen the child (Bell 2008; Turner and Rennel 1995). Notwithstanding that the men in the latter studies were in expectation of a future relationship with their child, the fact that in some of the birth father cases, the men were disabused of this expectation, makes signs of attachment in birth fathers ever more arresting.

Given the latter proviso about thwarted expectations and the evidence of mixed reactions to the pregnancy, nevertheless, it can be said that, whether they embraced the role or not, the birth fathers in the studies were expectant fathers. A second study that may be of use in understanding and appreciating birth fathers' paternal bonds is the enquiry by Edelstein et al. (2015) into hormonal changes in expectant fathers. The researchers find hormonal changes in expectant fathers that they suggest are associated with the development of fatherhood (p. 322). In her discussion of the "neurochemistry of fatherhood", Machin covers the same territory of hormonal changes and makes a similar observation concerning the expectancy stage of fatherhood (Machin 2018). Could such changes also be at work for birth fathers in amongst the mix of conflicting emotions during the pregnancy and birth, whether or not they were present, banned or took themselves away?

Remaining with expectant fathers, the systematic review by Baldwin et al. (2018) notes that for many new fathers the transition to fatherhood was the "best experience" in their lives (p. 2139) and goes on "The ability to father a child made men feel like they were accomplishing an important phase in their lives" (ibid.) There is some evidence of the pleasure of having fathered a child and looking forward to a familial relationship in the birth father literature (Clapton 2003; Witney 2004; Coles 2010) Whether or not wholly embraced, and by no means all did so as noted above, the majority of the birth fathers that we know of experienced a transition to fatherhood that was to make and retain a decisive impression on their lives.

Lastly of this small group of studies on expectancy and fathers, although a small sample was used, Khambatta's study of eight birth fathers using a 'Parent Attachment Questionnaire' of her own devising (Khambatta 2011), found that "biological fathers in the current sample consider genetic ties to be an important component of interaction with their child(ren), and an even greater element of their attachment relationships with the genetic child(ren)" (p. 35).

All told then, it is suggested that developments in our understanding of how men transition to fatherhood posits an empirical basis for birth fathers' enduring paternity or paternal-ness and their attachment to their children. This seems to be a combination of genealogical, biological, psychological and emotional factors. But do they have a "right to call themselves a father" (Coles 2010, p. 156)? It seems that we have gone a long way around to arrive at what most people would acknowledge, and certainly most people involved in adoption do—the basic truth that "all adopted persons have two mothers and two fathers" (ibid. p. 186). In a recent paper on adoption reunions Clapton (2018) argued that our developing understandings of the experiences of reunions leads to the conclusion that hierarchies of family in adoption are unhelpful. That is, the notion of equating the family with those that have done the work of raising the adopted child as the primary one, and the birth family as secondary—and provisional or contingent—was problematised by reunions between adopted people and their families of origin: reunions with birth fathers (and those with siblings) both disrupt any fixed essentialist ideas of kinship between adoptive people and birth mothers, but also poses the question, as Hughes does, of the helpfulness of ideas of kinship hierarchies (Clapton 2018, p. 41).

The present paper applies this notion of a more flattened, less hierarchical approach to relations between adopted people and their fathers whether the birth father is in the life of the child or not.

### **6. Who's the Daddy?**

California law, like nature itself, makes no provision for dual fatherhood Michael H. v. Gerald D. 1989, p. 118 quoted in (Hubin 2014, p. 76)

Hubin (2014) however goes onto note that "There is nothing in nature that declares that a child cannot have more than one legal or social male parent" (p. 79). He counters with difference between genetic parentage and social parentage, the key determinant of 'who's the daddy', being the father who has the "responsibility-for-dependent-life" with the "agent", the father holding "a special duty to promote the well-being of that dependent life and, a fortiori, to prevent its suffering" (p. 86). Hubin approvingly quotes Mahowald:

A real mother, then, is first and foremost a woman who cares for a child, from any state of development, until the child no longer needs that care. A real father is a man who does the same when he can, i.e., after the child is born. ... it is hard to see how genetic ties alone ever provide an adequate basis for defining real mothers or real fathers (Mahowald 2000, p. 526 cited p. 84).

This harks us back to the distinction made between birth fathers and adoptive fathers with the latter the ones 'being there' ("real fathers are those who are there", Gadd, birth father, (Gadd 2003)). However, Hubin concludes that the rise of various and differing family formations in the 20th century has seen increasing involvement of what he terms "genetic fathers" in the lives of children being raised by the child's mother and her husband, the non-biological father (p. 89). For now it is worth noting that such involvement of two fathers in the life of a child is very clearly the case in the 21st century adoptions from care. Family practices in such adoptions can blur binary constructs of "real" father and "genetic" father and I return to this at the conclusion of this paper.

So although it might seem uncontroversial that "father" can be used interchangeably in many of the more fluid of contemporary Western family practices5, the title "dad" still seems sacrosanct, fit only for one man. But what of the outpouring of parental feelings documented in the birth father literature, the dedication to their children's welfare, the constant references to affection, bonds and enduring love, and the activities designed to achieve a reunion with their "lost son" (Brown 2015), or missing family member?6. It is true that to a man, birth fathers have repeatedly acknowledged that "their child's adoptive father is the "dad" (Passmore and Feeney 2009, p. 103). Some men go as far as to say that to call themselves anything more, or have a greater or equivalent claim on paternity as the adoptive father would be discreditable: "For me to act as your father would be inappropriate and morally wrong" (Trinder et al. 2004, p. 67). But yet, a deeper delving in our (albeit scanty) knowledge of birth fathers reveals less conviction, greater disruption to the accepted definition, more blurring and hesitancy over fixed categories of "dad" and "father". Additionally, the accounts of adopted people and birth fathers relating to later-life reunions also give pause for greater consideration of what we call the fathers in adoption. On a first reading, in the birth fathers accounts, there seems little debate about being and feeling like fathers (though Ward lists over ten terms from "blood to "proper", (Ward 2012, p. 112)). And it is also clear that irrespective of objective reality, many of the birth fathers refer to their son or daughter using the possessive—writing about counting off the years, Ward is typical: "Three years later when my son was nine" (2012, p. 155 emphasis added). In response to a question about what he was seeking one day, one of the respondents in Author's study of thirty birth fathers confessed: "The simple reason is that she's not mine at this moment in time. At this moment in time—probably the wrong thing to say—she's on loan to someone else" (2000, p. 258). Birth fathers' attitudes to possible reunions and actions in reunion share a variety of 'takes' on the relationship. Reunions have the effect of making corporeal the father-child relationship between birth fathers and their children. The reunion literature certainly shows a spectrum of views following later-life contact. For adopted people, one woman declares: "you can't be my father, you are my biological father and there's no getting away from that, but you are not emotionally my father and you didn't bring me up"

<sup>5</sup> It must be noted that the debates and controversies visited in this paper are very much anchored in Western culture, especially the anglophone world of the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all of which societies have experienced similar trends and developments in adoption. Elsewhere in the majority world, the issue of hierarchical distinctions and roles in fatherhood and fathering can be less controversial.

<sup>6</sup> See Hughes (2015) in which the word "reunion" as applied to birth fathers in adoption is problematised.

(Trinder et al. 2004, p. 66). Another (about her birth father), " ... even though someone conceived me and gave birth to me, those people can never be a parent and I've told them that. They physically can't be a parent because there's no history there." (Passmore and Chipuer 2009, p. 98). The seven adopted people in the latter study were clear that their relationships with their birth fathers ranged from "no relationship, to distant relative, to close friendship". After a reservation about small sample size, Passmore and Chipuer go on to note that "It is interesting that none of the adoptees regarded it as a father–daughter relationship" (ibid, p. 100). At the other end of the spectrum there are instances of a conferring of both the title of dad and role by the adopted person: "me dad" as one person says in Trinder et al.'s *Adoption Reunion Handbook* (2004, p. 62). Another refers to his birth father as "my old man" (Clapton 2000, p. 172) and another in the study by Hughes (2015) is "happy to call her biological father "dad" and herself "his girl"" (p. 163). Whilst it is difficult to estimate prevalences it is clear that "father" far outweighs "dad" in the accounts of adopted people, for example, in Browning's study only one of the twenty adopted people uses the term "dad" to describe her birth father.

And yet, as far as birth fathers are concerned, after contact and establishment of a relationship, Clapton (2003) notes that in some cases of the birth fathers in his study, "there were indications that the two roles of biological and social father were converging during contact and the subsequent relationship with the adopted child" (p. 176). For most of the birth fathers we have knowledge of such a convergence may be a pipe dream because "They are aware that their child will not view them as their father. However, they still identify their child as their own but the label of father versus birth father is difficult for them to establish as their own" (Christensen 2017, p. 22). In a similar vein to the expressions of possessiveness referred to above, in his blog, on meeting with his (adult) son Brown (2015) writes of his relief "to know that he had been well cared for" and although he meets with his son's adoptive parents, there's a sense of his son being returned to him.

Thus there are many points along a spectrum of lived paternal-ness from no grounds to be called father to many reasons t to have the title and so what can be suggested is that the role of the father is disrupted and rendered more fluid in adoption. Such ambiguity is crystallised in disputes and debates over terminologies.

### **7. Conclusions: It's Only Words**

Words matter. Yet it remains the case that the vast majority of the literature speaks of birth mothers and fathers and adoptive mothers and fathers. The distinction has been made hesitantly: "Birth mother or father" acknowledges the associated reproductive relationship and in the absence of a term to best describe the relationship, would seem the best among the alternatives available" (Browning 2005, p. 7).7

In *The Birth Father's Tale*, Ward (2012) worries away at the word "birth": "why birth son? Why not just son? Oh, I see. Well that's how we are known in the adoption business isn't it? I'm his birth father and he's my birth son" (p. 29). He visits the names discussion. Is he "Father Number One, Father One?" and decides that "Our society still has no words for mothers and fathers who surrender their child for adoption (pp. 192–93). Further discrepancies are apparent in evidence which shows the widespread lack of use of the prefix "birth" in accounts of meetings and contact between adopted people and non-parent members of their birth families. For example, in Author's study of the long-term outcomes of reunions (2018), none of the accounts relating to sibling contact of any of the forty adopted people used the phrases "birth brother" or "birth sister", in fact one respondent went out of her way to eschew what she regarded as demeaning prefixes: "I feel so lucky to have found an amazing brother and sister. We don't like to say 1/2 half brother and 1/2 half sister" (p. 10).

<sup>7</sup> Understandably, given the relative maturity of the birth mother research, the debate about maternal nomenclature emerged earlier (Affleck and Steed 2001). This too has not been settled (Gair and Moloney 2013).

Phrases matter too. And perhaps the phrase that is most problematised in exploring the experiences of birth fathers (and birth mothers) is "as if born to". Adopted children are treated in law "as if born to" the adoptive parents in adoption legislation (see The Adoption and Children Act 2002, England and Wales, s. 67). It is clear from the accounts of the birth fathers we know of that, this is patently not felt to be the case. Furthermore, the accounts of adopted people in the literature convey the obvious appreciation that whilst they have a mother and father, they were not born to them (Beauchesne 1997).8

Yngvesson (2007) challenged the long-standing viewpoint in adoption that "a child can only be one thing or the other and whose adoptability requires the cancellation of one identity, so that identity can be replaced by another" (p. 569). What if this argument were applied to the fathers in adoption? When both adoptive father and birth father can say that they have a daughter, what if that daughter were enabled to comfortably say that she has not one father but two? (with the proviso when necessary that only one would be "dad").

Such clarity would put an end to the wrangling over nomenclature for birth parents e.g., "biological", "natural", "blood", "original", 'first' have all been used. The most popular titles continue to be "birth mother" or "birth father" (albeit that the discourse is dominated by academics and professionals). That is to say, that from now on, could an adopted person being permitted to contentedly say that they have two fathers, without one being termed "the birth father"? After all, today's adopted children, adopted at the age of four or five or older, will grow up in the full knowledge, derived from practical experiences, that they have another father 'out there'. In relation to these contemporary adoptions, where there might very well be up to two mums and two dads in play (Jones and Hackett 2012), it seems unnecessarily divisive and inimical to a child's welfare and interests to insist on familial hierarchies.

In conclusion, the agonies of birth mothers whose children were adopted before the 1990s have been documented (see for example, Charlton's *Still Screaming*, (Charlton 1998)) and those of birth fathers from the same period (Cicchini 1993; Clapton 2003; Witney 2004). Increasingly, the despair, anger and traumas of today's fathers and mothers whose parental rights have been forcibly extinguished and their children adopted are being charted (Clifton 2012; Lewis and Brady 2018; Smeeton and Boxall 2011). This paper has argued that dropping the 'birth' from fathers and mothers of children adopted out in the era of 'closed' adoptions is worth debate. The debate is all the more pressing for today's mothers and fathers involved in the adoptions of the children that have known them and may know them again in later life. It is suggested that the words birth mother and birth father are not only anachronisms but are demeaning and perpetuate a falsehood that the adopted children had only a biological or genetic connection to them. In such cases, a maintenance of the 'as if born to' principle flies in the face of reality for all concerned, but also, as we have seen with the studies of birth fathers discussed in this paper, discounts the fathers who are legally rubbed out but hold their child in mind daily for the remainder of their lives–against all odds.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

### **References**

Adoption and Children Act. 2002. Adoption and Children Act. Available online: https://www.legislation.gov. uk/ukpga/2002/38/contents (accessed on 21 March 2019).

<sup>8</sup> During the debate on the Adoption and Children Bill (England and Wales) in 2002, the British Association of Social Workers called for the removal of the phrase 'as if born to' because the wording "unhelpfully implies a legal pretence or fiction which is at odds with the facts" https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/cmstand/special/st011128/11128s01.htm (accessed on 2 March 2019).


*Genealogy* **2019**, *3*, 13

Ryburn, Murray. 1995. Secrecy and Openness in Adoption: An Historical Perspective. *Social Policy & Administration* 29: 150–68.

Siegel, Deborah. 2017. Fatherhood and Adoption. In *Fatherhood in America: Social Work Perspectives on a Changing Society*. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas.

Smeeton, Joe, and Kathy Boxall. 2011. Birth parent's perceptions of professional practice in child care and adoption proceedings: implications for practice. *Child & Family Social Work* 16: 444–53.

Trinder, Liz, Feast Julia, and David Howe. 2004. *The Adoption Reunion Handbook*. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. Triseliotis, John, Julia Feast, and Fiona Kyle. 2005. *The Adoption Triangle Revisited*. London: BAAF.

Turner, Barry, and Tony Rennel. 1995. *When Daddy Came Home: How Family Life Changed Forever in 1945*. London: Hutchinson.

Ward, Andrew. 2012. *The Birth Father's Tale*. London: CoramBAAF.

Witney, Celia. 2004. Original fathers: An exploration into the experiences of birthfathers involved in adoption in the mid-20th century. *Adoption & Fostering* 28: 52–61.

Yngvesson, Barbara. 2007. Refiguring Kinship in the Space of Adoption. *Anthropological Quarterly* 80: 561–79. [CrossRef]

© 2019 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

### *Article* **Father Involvement, Care, and Breadwinning: Genealogies of Concepts and Revisioned Conceptual Narratives**

### **Andrea Doucet**

Faculty of Social Sciences, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON L2S 3A1, Canada; adoucet@brocku.ca

Received: 6 December 2019; Accepted: 16 January 2020; Published: 24 January 2020

**Abstract:** This paper addresses an enduring puzzle in fathering research: Why are care and breadwinning largely configured as binary oppositions rather than as relational and intra-acting concepts and practices, as is often the case in research on mothering? Guided by Margaret Somers' historical sociology of concept formation, I conduct a Foucauldian-inspired genealogy of the concept of "father involvement" as a cultural and historical object embedded in specific histories, conceptual networks, and social and conceptual narratives. With the aim of un-thinking and re-thinking conceptual possibilities that might expand knowledges about fathering, care, and breadwinning, I look to researchers in other sites who have drawn attention to the relationalities of care and earning. Specifically, I explore two conceptual pathways: First the concept of "material indirect care", from fatherhood research pioneer Joseph Pleck, which envisages breadwinning as connected to care, and, in some contexts, as a form of care; and second, the concept of "provisioning" from the work of feminist economists, which highlights broad, interwoven patterns of care work and paid work. I argue that an approach to concepts that connect or entangle caring and breadwinning recognizes that people are care providers, care receivers, financial providers, and financial receivers in varied and multiple ways across time. This move is underpinned by, and can shift, our understandings of human subjectivity as relational and intra-dependent, with inevitable periods of dependency and vulnerability across the life course. Such a view also acknowledges the critical role of resources, services, and policies for supporting and sustaining the provisioning and caring activities of all parents, including fathers. Finally, I note the theoretical and political risks of this conceptual exercise, and the need for caution when making an argument about fathers' breadwinning and caregiving entanglements.

**Keywords:** father involvement; care and breadwinning; provisioning; indirect care; genealogies; historical epistemologies; relational ontologies; historical sociology of concept formation

### **1. Introduction**

Concepts are not answers, solutions ... Instead, they are modes of address, modes of connection, what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) sometimes call "moveable bridges" (p. 32) between those forces which relentlessly impinge on us from the outside to form a problem and those forces we can muster within ourselves, harnessed and transferred from outside, by which to address problems. This is why concepts are created. They have a date, often also a name; they have a history that seizes hold of them in inconsistent ways, making of them new concepts with each seizure and transformation insofar as each concept has borders and edges that link it up and evolve it with other concepts. (Grosz 2011, pp. 78–79)

In 1990, historian Thomas W. Laqueur (1990, p. 205) bemoaned that he was "annoyed that we lack a history of fatherhood", that "history has been written almost exclusively as the history of men and therefore man-as-father has been subsumed under the history of a pervasive patriarchy", and

that "Fatherhood, insofar it as has been thought about at all, has been regarded as a backwater of the dominant history of public power". Although Laqueur (1990, p. 205) admitted that he wrote his chapter in a "grumpy, polemical mood", his reflections resonated with those of other fatherhood researchers and historians who aimed to counteract dominant fathering narratives that employed "deficit" perspectives of fathering (which judged men to be inadequate parents) and presented men only in their roles as breadwinners (for overviews see Hawkins and Dollahite 1996; Dermott 2008), absent fathers (e.g., Popenoe 1996), or "deadbeat dads" (Boumil and Friedman 1996).

Throughout the 1980s and afterwards, fathering scholars, especially in countries in the Global North (LaRossa 1997; Lewis 1986; Pleck 1997), sought to recover positive historical and contemporary fathering narratives, documenting fathers' caregiving potential, capacities, and practices. Across a broad spectrum of theoretical, methodological, and ideological approaches, feminist, fatherhood, and family scholars argued that father involvement has significant generative benefits for children's development (e.g., Lamb 1981), for families, for both men and women (e.g., Chodorow 1978; Okin 1989), and for the attainment of gender equality and wider social change. Gender and feminist scholars speculated that father involvement could overturn the metaphoric and oppositional relationship between "the rocking of the cradle and the ruling of the world" (Dinnerstein 1976, p. 27) and that "the most revolutionary change we can make in the institution of motherhood is to include men in every aspect of childcare" (Ruddick 1984, p. 226).

By the early 1990s, scholarly attention to fathers' caregiving and to the possibilities of "revolutionary change" for men, women, children, and societies was burgeoning. Fathering had become a "hot topic" (Marsiglio 1993, p. 484) in cross-disciplinary scholarship. Today, studies on fathering and caregiving constitute a massive academic research field. While fathering now exists as a parallel and overlapping field with mothering, there are, on my reading, at least two large differences between them. First, considerable effort has gone into defining, conceptualizing, assessing, and measuring "father involvement" or "paternal involvement" over the past thirty years (e.g., Day and Lamb 2004; Lamb et al. 1985; Lamb 2000; Pleck 2010; Palkovitz 2002; Devault et al. 2015; Dermott 2008; Dermott and Miller 2015; LaRossa and Reitzes 1995; Marsiglio et al. 2000). Little attention has been given, however, to the idea of "mother involvement", despite extensive historical, cross-cultural, and contemporary research on how mothers have taken on most of the labor and responsibilities for children. Most concepts of mothering are thus synonymous with mothering involvement. Researchers have instead focused on delineating motherhood as an institution and as an experience (Rich 1995), detailing its diverse representations (Bassin et al. 1996) and its varied personal, political, social, and cultural aspects (Ruddick 1995). The complexity of mothering and its cross-cultural and intersectional variations, such as motherwork and othermothers (Hill Collins 1994, 2000), intensive mothering (Hays 1996), and mothering as "concerted cultivation" (Lareau 2011), have also been taken up by many scholars.

A second, related difference is that whatever the site or set of practices, research on father involvement is largely premised on the separation of care and breadwinning as concepts and as practices. Father involvement is defined by what fathers do as caregivers, with little consideration given to how financial provisioning or breadwinning might also be *part of* caring for children. When attention *is* given to breadwinning, it is seen in a negative light. Rather than highlighting the possible complex conceptual intra-connections between care and earning, emphasis is usually placed on how fathers' earning activities take *away from* their caregiving. Notable exceptions to this include research on low-income fatherhood (see Edin and Nelson 2013) and selected fathering research on breadwinning and care that acknowledges "providing as a form of involvement and care" (Christiansen and Palkovitz 2001, p. 99; see also Eerola 2014; Pleck 2010; Schmidt 2017). I would argue that, overall, as research on fathering and care has proliferated, however, attention to fathers' breadwinning/providing and care entanglements have remained largely unexamined. In contrast, there is a growing body of research and analysis that attends to how mothering responsibilities also include breadwinning or financial provisioning, especially for low-income mothers and racialized

mothers (e.g., Damaske 2011; Hill Collins 1994, 2000; Neysmith et al. 2010). One reason for the lack of attention to breadwinning in contemporary fathering research is that in comparison to care, which is a massive field, breadwinning has rarely been theorized or conceptualized within the social sciences (see Warren 2007). Still, this begs the question: If mothers' caring and breadwinning can be conceptualized as relationalities, why are father involvement and breadwinning so often approached as oppositional binaries?

Guided by the epistemological insights of historical sociologist Margaret Somers (2008, p. 209), I take up this puzzle here by conducting a Foucauldian-inspired genealogy of the concept of father involvement as a cultural and historical object embedded in "histories, networks, and narratives". I explore historical narratives of how the care/breadwinning distinction came into effect, its consequences, and why it matters for how we think about, do research on, and advocate for social change in paid work, care work, and gender equality. My aim is to un-think and re-think conceptual possibilities that might expand knowledges about fathering, care, and breadwinning.

I make three arguments in this paper and lay out one important caveat. First, I argue that the concept of father involvement is founded on an enduring binary opposition between practices and concepts of care and breadwinning. Second, I maintain that in addition to now well-developed narratives of fathering and care, including scholarship on father's caregiving, caring masculinities, and fathering embodiment (e.g., Doucet 2018; Dermott 2008; Ranson 2015; Elliott 2015; Robb 2019), we need fatherhood narratives that attend to the conceptual and practice-based interplay between breadwinning and caregiving. This is especially true in current historical socio-economic contexts, when rising levels of employment precarity, which translate into "care deficits" and "care crises" (Fraser 2016, p. 100), require us to consider how parents' care work and related caregiving services are financially supported. Third, I posit revisioned conceptual narratives that attend to the integration of caring and financially providing for care.

My caveat, which is partly addressed in the genealogical approach that I lay out below, is that the arguments I make here could inadvertently lead to *exactly the opposite* of what I am hoping to achieve. I am aware that I am taking on a conceptually challenging exercise because arguments about how mothering should include breadwinning have supported struggles around gender inequality in paid work and care work. To make similar arguments about fathering could unintentionally let fathers "off the hook" in terms of caregiving, bolster now debunked notions of "separate spheres", and reverse a hard-fought recognition of the potential and power of men's caregiving. It could also obscure the critical role fathers' caregiving has had in promoting gender equality and in changing masculinities, among other socio-cultural benefits. I thus have to make this argument carefully, drawing a conceptual distinction between breadwinning as a broad earning practice and provisioning work directed towards supporting children and family life. Moreover, as I will detail below, my approach to genealogies recognizes the politics and ethics of knowledge making and the effects (both intended and inadvertent) of my claims.

Like all genealogies, this excavation is also undertaken "with a certain degree of caution and humility" (Saar 2002, p. 123, drawing on Saar 2002) because it "unsettles objects that appear to us as self-evident by dislodging them from their usual frames and placing them in new series" (p. 130). A genealogy is a "multi-layered conceptual practice" (p. 115) and the argument I am making needs to attend to the relationality, historicity, and ethico-political character of all related narratives, including conceptual narratives.

This paper is informed by a two-decade-long research program focused on fathering and caregiving as exemplified in three longitudinal studies conducted mainly in Canada, but also in the United States, on caregiving fathers, breadwinning mothers, and families with parents who shared care and earning responsibilities in varied ways across time. These studies included in-depth interviews with fathers who self-identified as primary or shared primary caregivers of children, fathers who took leaves to be at home with their children (by not working, by working part-time and/or in home-based work, or by using paid or unpaid paternity or parental leaves), breadwinning mothers, and women and

men who shared caregiving and earning responsibilities. For these three studies, I conducted or co-conducted interviews (in-depth individual interviews, couple interviews, and four focus groups) with one-hundred-and-forty fathers and fifty-one primary breadwinning mothers (mainly white and middle class parents, but also Indigenous, second-generation immigrant, and gay fathers) with follow up interviews five to ten years later with nineteen men and seventeen women (for details on two of these studies, see (Doucet 2018, 2015, 2016); for details on my study on fathers and parental leave, see (Doucet and McKay)). I do not draw directly on these interview data in this paper, but they do form the conceptual and analytical terrain for the arguments I develop here.

This paper is organized as follows: First, I lay out my genealogical approach to concepts, which is broadly based on that of historical sociologist Margaret Somers and her informing influences, including epistemic reflexivity, relational ontologies, and a Foucauldian-inspired approach to genealogies (e.g., Foucault 1984) and historical epistemologies (Foucault 2002). Second, I develop a historical case study of the concept of father involvement, giving attention to its larger conceptual network, including the concepts of care, breadwinning, and paternal responsibilities. Third, I argue for a conceptual reconfiguration of father involvement, drawing on a small selection of research on fathers and on mothering.

### **2. Methodology: Genealogies**

Although there are many ways to do genealogies, most are loosely influenced by a "Nietzschean/Foucauldian legacy or lineage" (Knauft 2017, p. 1) albeit with a recognition that "readings of Foucault's work have revealed that there is no clearly stated, well-defined or prescribed methodology for investigations" (Reich and Turnbull 2018, p. 13). Genealogical work can be considered "broadly reconcilable with Foucault's" (Kendall and Wickham 1999, p. xii) when it exhibits the following three traits (among others): First, this is the case when genealogical work overlaps with scholarship that is widely defined as "the history of the present" (e.g., Dean 1994; Rose 1999; Scott 1988). Generally speaking, "Foucaultians are not seeking to find out how the present has emerged from the past", but rather "the point is to use history as a way of diagnosing the present" (Kendall and Wickham 1999, p. 4) and "to re-conceptualize the dilemmas of the present, describing the varied pathways that are entangled within the present moment" (Kretsedemas 2017, p. 2). Second, a genealogical methodology aligns with Foucault's when it focuses on contingencies or conditions of possibility rather than on causes, meaning that the emergence of any particular event is thought to be just "one possible result of a whole series of complex relations between other events" (Kendall and Wickham 1999, p. 5). Third, genealogical work is broadly consistent with Foucault's approach when there is a general suspension of judgment.

This last point has proven to be contentious for some scholars, including feminist researchers who draw on Foucault's writing without fully embracing it due to their "reading of Foucault as an antihumanist thinker who refused to engage in normative discussions" and their view that "his theory undermines attempts at social change, because his conception of power obscures the systematic nature of gender oppression" (Deveaux 1994, p. 232). This Foucauldian dimension of genealogical methodologies is also challenged by Somers (2008, p. 22), who is broadly informed by Foucault, yet holds to the view "that the empirical and the normative are mutually interdependent". Somers characterizes her knowledge making practices as a form of *relational and pragmatic realism*, which entails recognizing "the impossibility of an innocent positioning, while striving to achieve a politically-epistemically responsible one" (Code 2006, p. 219). Relational and pragmatic realism is, as Somers (1998, p. 766) puts it, "a minimalist realism" that "presumes that if one is going to be a realist at all—that is, assign mind-independent status to elements of the world—then, by definition (*and humility*), one must be agnostic about the absolute truth of any given theory about the world (emphasis added)" (p. 744). Moreover, this is a vision of knowledge making as negotiated politico-ethico-onto-epistemological entanglements. The questions we pursue, Somers (2008, p. 9) explains, "*are driven by [our] place and concerns in the world*"; they are "inherently ontological (because they) contain a priori decisions about *how we understand the social world to be constituted* (emphasis added)" (Somers 1996, p. 71).

The genealogical approach that I employ in this paper is guided by Somers (2008, p. 209) *historical sociology of concept formation*, which is a "genealogical accounting of conceptual configurations" that approaches concepts by thinking about what they *do*, rather than what they *are*. It views them as "cultural and historical objects" that "lack natures or essences; instead, they have histories, networks, and narratives". I engage in what Hacking (1990, 2002) and Somers (1996) call "taking a look" at the "relational patterns" (Somers 2008, p. 204) of concepts in order to practice what Deleuze and Guattari (1994, p. 2) describe as "the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts" and of rethinking "revisionary conceptual frames". The overall aim of such an exercise (the beginning of which I take on here) is to gain a "sense of *how we think and why we seem obliged to think in certain ways* (emphasis added)" (Hacking 1990, p. 362, cited in Somers 2008, p. 254) while also figuring out "how to begin the process of unthinking" (Somers 2008, p. 265).

### **3. Genealogies of Concepts: A Historical Sociology of Concept Formation**

In addition to the broad points made above about Foucauldian-inspired genealogies, Somers' genealogical approach to concepts is guided by the wide and deep fields of epistemic reflexivities, historical epistemologies and the historicity of concepts, and relational ontologies and the relationality of concepts. I briefly lay out my reading of Somers' approach below and then apply it broadly to a case study of the concept of the involved father.

### *3.1. Epistemic Reflexivities and Concepts*

Somers (2008, p. 172) notes: "Social scientists in recent years have come increasingly to recognize that the categories and concepts we use to explain the social world can *themselves be fruitfully made the objects of analysis* (emphasis added)". This process of "turning social science back on itself to examine often taken-for-granted conceptual tools of research" (Somers 2008, p. 172) is part of the process of "epistemic reflexivity" (Bourdieu 1993), which refers to a "constant questioning of the categories and techniques of sociological analysis and of the relationship to the world they presuppose" as well as a consideration of the "'epistemological unconscious' and social organization of the discipline and field" (Somers 1992, p. 41).

Epistemic reflexivity also means turning from questions of "what" to questions of "how", "radically shifting the context of discovery (at least initially) from the external world to the cognitive tools by which we analyze this world" (Somers 2008, p. 265). In the projects that inform this paper, the first twenty years of my research focused on questions of *what*—meanings and practices of fathers' (and mothers') caregiving as well as related concepts and practices (i.e., masculinities, gender equality, embodiment, and gendered divisions of labor) (See Doucet 2018). As I attended more and more to epistemic reflexivities, my questions about *what* I was studying became increasingly intra-connected with questions about *how* I was studying. I focused on how our "conceptual vocabularies and categories, our ways of constructing standards of knowledge, our definitions of significant projects, and our methods of justifiable explanations themselves all have histories" (Somers 1998, p. 56). In addition to the potential they illuminate for thinking about conceptual histories and rethinking new possibilities, these points are connected to historical epistemologies: the second dimension of Somers' historical sociology of concept formation.

### *3.2. Historical Epistemologies and the Historicity of Concepts*

Historical epistemologies are a set of philosophical and epistemological ideas about how "successful truth claims are historically contingent rather than confirmations of absolute and unchanging reality" (Somers 2008, p. 267) and how "things we take as self-evident and necessary ... simply take on the appearance of being the only possible reality" (p. 10). This approach to historical epistemologies is very similar to what Hacking (2002, p. 8) calls "historical ontologies" or "historical meta-epistemology", which are different from conventional understandings of epistemology that are often connected to issues of "knowledge, belief, opinion, objectivity, detachment, argument, reason, rationality, evidence, even facts and truth". Rather, historical epistemologies are about how objects, including concepts, come into being as "a series of contingent becomings" (Walters 2012, p. 115).

Somers (2008, p. 268) argues that "Understanding how concepts gain and lose their currency and legitimacy is the task of historical epistemology, which entails reconstructing their making, resonance, and connectedness over time". This means looking at the historicity of concepts, recognizing not only how they came into being, but what keeps them in place, and thinking about other conceptual possibilities. Influenced by "the Foucaultian notion of the historically contingent but nonetheless internal integrity of the cultural pattern or logic", this "does not translate into a coordinated, systemic integrity in the larger domain of culture as a whole, which itself is composed numerous, *often competing conceptual networks* (emphasis added)" (Somers 2008, p. 206.) As I take up below, there are always *other* possible conceptual narratives, which lead, in turn, to differently crafted scholarly narratives.

### *3.3. Relational Ontologies and the Relationality of Concepts*

The third part of Somers (1998, p. 767) genealogical approach to concepts addresses their "relational configurations". This aspect builds on Hacking (2002, p. 24) insight that "concepts are 'words in their sites'" in that "all concepts are located and embedded in conceptual networks" (Somers 2008, p. 257). In other words, a particular concept "is not an isolated object but has a relational identity" and the "subject of research should be the entire conceptual network or the relational site, in which it is embedded" (p. 268). This calls for a relational approach because we can only understand an object (including a concept) "within the space of that network" (Somers 1995, p. 235). Put differently, Somers (2008, p. 206) argues that "concepts cannot be defined on their own as single entities, but only deciphered in terms of their 'place' in relation to the other concepts in the web". Her point, informed by relational theories, including relational sociology (Emirbayer 1997), is that "instead of employing a language of categories and attributes, a historical sociology of concept formation *substitutes a language of networks and relationships to support relational thinking* (emphasis added)" (Somers 2008, p. 207).

Somers (2008, p. 109) relational thinking about concepts and how they do not have "essences" but, rather, "histories, narratives, and networks" is very similar to that of Elizabeth Grosz. Drawing on Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari (1994), Grosz (2011) maintains that concepts are not connected to truth claims; they are contingent on their changing landscapes, *and any change a*ff*ects not just the concept but also the landscape*. Their ontological relationalities are revealed in how

Each concept produces out of its diverse components a provisional but tightly contained consistency that is both an endoconsistency and an exoconsistency, which regulates its relation with its neighboring, competing, and aligned concepts. This means that even a *slight change* (emphasis added) in the relations of these neighboring concepts begins a process of *producing new concepts* (emphasis added). (Grosz 2011, p. 66)

In the context of this paper, this means we must think about the concept of the involved father as part of a relational network of concepts that includes care, breadwinning, and gender equality. These concepts are themselves constituted within and by historical developments, shifting social institutions, changing ideologies about these concepts and practices, and geo-political processes of capitalism and neoliberalism. As these landscapes and neighboring concepts change, or as concepts are introduced from other sites, new concepts and conceptual configurations can emerge.

### **4. Father Involvement, Care, Breadwinning, Equality: Genealogies of Concepts**

In this section of the paper, I am guided by my reading of Somers' genealogical approach, which explores the historicity and relationality of concepts. Like all narratives, this scholarly narrative is selective because "*genealogy entails active practices of selection* (emphasis added)" as "our questions are always the product of our situated selves" (Somers 2008, p. 9). Although historical mappings must refer to "events, irruptions, discourses, and social practices" that occur within "a particular time space", the mapping process is still, as Dean (1994) argues, "an activity that is irrevocably linked to its current uses" (cited in Somers 2008, p. 10). My overall aim is to map how concepts are embedded in particular histories and are part of "*a structured web of conceptual relationships*" (Somers 1995, p. 229).

Mapping historical epistemologies entails reading history theoretically and conceptually. For this, I draw on feminist theorist Nancy Fraser's account of the different phases of capitalism and her multilayered analysis of two centuries of earning, caring, gender, and intersectionality. She describes three historical phases that she suggests form "an account of the social contradiction of capitalism", reading "today's 'care deficits' as expressions of capitalism's social contradiction in its current, financialized phase" (Fraser 2016, pp. 100–1). The first phase she describes is "the 19th-century regime of liberal competitive capitalism", which created the gendered ideal of "separate spheres" that divide paid and unpaid work, breadwinning and care (p. 100). I focus mainly on the second and third phases she describes: "The state-managed capitalism of the 20th century" and the "globalizing financialized capitalism of the present era", characterized by the "ideal of the 'two-earner family'" (Fraser 2016, p. 104) and rising inequalities in access to care services and supports.

### *4.1. "Separate Spheres", the "Family Wage", and Fathers and Breadwinning (Early 20th Century)*

According to Fraser(2016, p. 108), this historical phase of state-managed capitalism of the twentieth century was typified by "large-scale industrial production", dual processes of "domestic consumerism in the core" (or the Global North) and "ongoing colonial and postcolonial expropriation in the periphery" (or Global South), and the rise of the social welfare state, which "defused the contradiction between economic production and social reproduction" through social welfare and social protection policies. It also exhibited a widespread valorization of "the heteronormative, male-breadwinner, female-homemaker model of the gendered family" (p. 111). Although historical dates for this period vary between and within nations, many commentators, including Fraser (p. 112), argue that it began in the 1930s (after WWI and during the Depression) and that "By the 1980s, prescient observers could discern the emerging outline of a new regime" partly connected to women's rising rates of employment in the formal economy in many countries in the Global North.

Two central ideas that dominated this historical phase were "separate spheres" and the "family wage". American sociologist Parsons (1967) famously promoted the notion of "complementary spheres" corresponding to distinct gender divisions of labor, with women engaging in unpaid care work in the "private" sphere of the home and men taking on paid work (breadwinning) in "public" workplaces (see also Parsons and Bales 1955).

As with all histories, however, there are always alternative narratives. One is that despite the evidence of distinct gender divisions between breadwinning and caregiving (spatially, ideologically, and in practice), these spheres were in fact not as separate as they appeared: women routinely participated in earning or breadwinning and men were involved in caregiving. Fraser (2016, p. 104) herself notes that while the family wage was a dominant ideal, "relatively few families were permitted to achieve it". In North America and some Europeans countries, historical research demonstrates that in many households, women and mothers, especially racialized women and in low-income families, actively contributed to household economies by intensifying provisioning work inside the home (e.g., taking in boarders, caring for others' children, informally selling homemade clothes or baked goods), by participating in family agriculture and businesses, or by working part-time or full-time outside the home for wages (e.g., Tilly and Scott 1987; Bradbury 1984, 1993; Hill Collins 1986). As for fathers, a small literature on fatherhood histories highlights how fathers were more than breadwinners throughout this phase of state managed capitalism. Sources dating back to the 1930s, including diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, and interviews with fathers all reveal that they were, indeed, involved in varied ways in caring for children (see Griswold 1993; LaRossa 1997).

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, several theoretical developments occurred in research on fathering, mothering, and care, and new concepts and conceptual narratives began to take shape. First, the view that domestic labor and care work were indeed "work" entered the scholarly and activist agenda. Instigated mainly by feminist scholars researching mothering and care as well as by

particular strands of feminism (e.g., radical feminism and socialist feminism), scholars began to study the meanings and practices of the daily caregiving and domestic tasks of women, both as forms of work and as subjects worthy of scholarly attention (e.g., Luxton 1980; Oakley 2008). The recognition that women continued to be mainly responsible for all dimensions of care, from infant care to eldercare, inspired conceptual innovations highlighting the intra-connections between care and work, including the notion that mothering is not only an act of love, but also labor (e.g., Graham 1983; Luxton 1980).

Second, an acknowledgement of the conceptual integration of paid work and care work prompted many commentators to argue that all societies and economies rely on women's care labor. Initial versions of the feminist concept of social reproduction, a sister to the concept of care, sought to integrate women's labor into broader Marxist analyses of production and capitalist relations (e.g., Hartmann 1981; Molyneux 1979). For example, an early iteration of the concept of social reproduction was "the domestic labor debate", which began in the late 1960s, mainly in the United Kingdom and North America, about how capitalist production and waged labor were intricately dependent on women's unpaid, unvalued, and invisible labor in the home (e.g., Dalla Costa and James 1973).

Third, the late 1970s saw the burgeoning of a field that came to be called the "ethic of care", largely initiated by Carol Gilligan's *In a Di*ff*erent Voice*, (first published as an essay in 1977 and then a book (Gilligan 1993)). It was "one of most influential books of the 1980s", because it "revolutionized discussion of moral theory, feminism [and] theories of the subject" (Hekman 1995, p. 1). Early on, the ethic of care sought to move beyond liberal conceptions of the subject as autonomous and independent towards views of subjects as relational and inter-dependent in order to make women's caregiving practices empirically and theoretically visible and to highlight the transformative power of care as a social ethic for both women and men (e.g., Ruddick 1995; Larrabee 1993; Noddings 1984).

A fourth theoretical development in the 1970s concerned the potential for care to be a social ethic for men and for fathers. Countering Parsons' notion of complementary spheres, early examinations of fathering pointed to the deep social and personal problems that ensue when mothers and fathers adopt gendered and largely separate social and domestic roles. This focus on the social costs of constrictive gender roles was well expressed by leading feminist psychoanalytic scholars, including Dorothy Dinnerstein in her classic, *The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976)*, and Nancy Chodorow in *The Reproduction of Mothering (1978)*. Referring to "sexual arrangements" as the "division of responsibility, opportunity, and privilege that prevails between male and female humans, and the patterns of psychological interdependence that are implicit in this division", Dinnerstein (1976, p. 4) argued that a central "human malaise" thus "stems from a core fact that has so far been universal: the fact of primary female responsibility for the care of infants and young children".

Fathering scholars also picked up on the effects of narrowly prescribed gender roles and the need to study and understand men not only as breadwinners but also as carers of children (e.g., Lamb 1981; Lewis 1986). Socio-economic and demographic changes, such as men's declining wages, increasing male unemployment, sustained growth in women's labor force participation, increasing numbers of two earner families, and changing ideologies associated with men and women's caring and breadwinning activities and identities, all led to an increased interest in reconceptualizing father involvement.

### *4.2. The "Two Earner Family", Father Involvement, Care, and Breadwinning (Financialized Capitalism of the Present Era)*

Fraser (2016, p. 104) argues that "the financialized capitalism of the present era" with its dominant ideal and practices of the "two earner family" is a neoliberal regime that

Promotes state and corporate disinvestment from social welfare, while recruiting women into the paid workforce—externalizing carework onto families and communities while diminishing their capacity to perform it. The result is a new, dualized organization of social reproduction, commodified for those who can pay for it and privatized for those who cannot, as some in the second category provide carework in return for (low) wages for those in the first.

This new regime is entangled with widened and deepened concepts of care that attend to shifting socio-economic and geo-political geographies of care, as well as to other conceptual and empirical developments.

By the early 1990s, interest in the concept of care had expanded to the point that feminist theorist Alison Jaggar(1991, p. 83) noted that scholarship on the ethic of care had "become a small industry within academia and outside the academy". Care ethics then moved into a "second wave" (Williams 2001) in which theorists attended more closely to overlaps between care and justice, the socio-economic structuring of care, and the socio-political dimensions and effects of how care is performed, delivered, and managed. An even stronger emphasis was placed on how all care work and care research demands a shift from autonomous, liberal conceptions of subjectivities towards relational, inter-dependent notions of human subjectivities (Kittay 1999; Tronto 1993; Sevenhuijsen 1998). More recently, what could be called a "third wave" of care work is attending to transnational and migrational dimensions of care, "global care chains" between the Global South and North, and newly configured patterns of gendered, classed, and racialized dimensions of caregiving and care-receiving (e.g., Boris and Parreñas 2010; Duffy 2011; Mahon and Robinson 2011).

As noted earlier, Somers (2008, p. 268) genealogical approach is informed by insights from the field of historical epistemologies, which aims to understand "how concepts gain and lose their currency and legitimacy" while also "reconstructing their making, resonance, and connectedness over time". As I detail below, connections between care and breadwinning, and how these connections differ across contexts and diversity, have deepened in several ways over the decades.

Looking back to the early 1980s, as women's employment increased in many countries in the Global North, a surge of attention was given to the indivisibility of women's experiences of earning and caring, as evidenced partly in scholarly work that included "women, work, and family" in their titles or as central themes (e.g., Lamphere 1987; Lewis et al. 1988; Zavella 1987). The focus on this indivisibility has deepened in current scholarship. For fathers, on the other hand, research has consistently demonstrated how, overall, men's working lives and earning capacities are more linear, being largely unencumbered by care responsibilities partly or fully taken on by the women in their lives. This state of affairs has led to different scholarly narratives about fathers' working and caring lives. Men have experienced what Connell (2005, p. 79) has aptly called their "patriarchal dividend", while women have borne "motherhood penalties" (Budig et al. 2012), and "care penalties" (Folbre 2001).

Empirical observations about gendered differences in working and caring experiences led to considerable public debate and scholarship throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including on questions of how to define and measure father involvement and its connection to gender equality and child well-being. One of the most comprehensive definitions of father involvement comes from the scholarship of leading fathering scholars (Lamb et al. 1985, p. 884), who envisioned it as a set of three practices that meet children's needs: "*interaction",* meaning a "father's direct contact with his child, through caretaking and shared activities"; "*accessibility",* defined as "being present or accessible to the child"; and "*responsibility*", which refers to "the role fathers take in making sure that the child is taken care of and arranging for resources to be available for the child" (Lamb et al. 1985, p. 884).

Accessibility has, on my reading, received less attention than the other two dimensions: fathering interaction (or what has also been called "engagement" (Lamb 2000)) and paternal responsibilities. Fathering interaction is connected to the expansion of time use studies, which attempt to measure "the father's direct contact with his child, through caretaking and shared activities" (Lamb et al. 1985, p. 884). Indeed, Pleck (2010, p. 63) notes that the relationship between time and father engagement (as part of fathering involvement) came "full circle" as research on time use "and the way that it typically defined and reported father's engagement in the 1980s, contributed to the initial conceptualization of engagement as fathers' total time spent with his children or a particular child".

The description of paternal responsibility provided above seems to be implicitly connected to breadwinning in its focus on arranging resources and ensuring children's care. Yet, the broader description of this dimension, both in the original article (Lamb et al. 1985) and in subsequent work (e.g., Lamb 2000), plays down the breadwinning dimensions and focuses instead on wider sets of responsibilities that are more about planning and scheduling; these include, for example, "arranging for babysitters, making appointments with pediatricians and seeing that the child is taken to them, determining when the child needs new clothes, etc." (Lamb et al. 1985, p. 884). This research on paternal responsibilities did not include breadwinning because in the 1980s, scholars had "yet to consider paternal behavior in (a) more comprehensive fashion" (Lamb et al. 1985, p. 884) and although financial provisioning "is obviously a precondition for providing goods and services to the child", breadwinning was excluded because "earning income does not automatically translate to it *being spent on the child* (emphasis added)" (Pleck 2010, p. 86).

Feminist scholars also veered away from including breadwinning as part of fathering involvement. As Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2000, p. 87) puts it so well:

Men are often said to be "taking care of their family" when they earn and bring money into the household. Despite the use of the term *care* in this phrase, breadwinning would not be considered "caring". In fact, economic support has historically been seen as men's contribution in lieu of actual care giving; simultaneously, care giving has been viewed as women's responsibility, an exchange for being supported by the primary breadwinner.

Although these early cautions about the complexities of including breadwinning as part of father involvement and paternal responsibilities do make sense in light of their conceptual "histories, networks and narratives", new contexts and conceptual developments provide opportunities to explore and reconsider concepts, such as a concept of father involvement that includes the parental responsibility of providing for children. Indeed, on my reading, one of the most significant developments in care concepts during this present stage of financialized capitalism, with its growing socio-economic inequalities, is that connections between care work and paid work and between earning and caring have deepened. These developments are part of new theoretical iterations, including a field called "care economies", developed by international feminist scholars and advocated by organizations such as the International Labor Organization (ILO), which now fuses care and work concepts into an "unpaid care work–paid work–paid care work circle" (Addati et al. 2018, p. 10). I believe that these conceptual shifts call for researchers to think, again, about the utility and implications of widening the concept of father involvement to include breadwinning. In the next section of this paper, I highlight some of the scholarly literatures that have helped to create new conceptual narratives that support this move.

### **5. Revisioned Conceptual Narratives**

Grosz (2011, p. 79) writes that "each concept has borders and edges that link it up and evolve it with other concepts". Below, I attempt to draw attention to some of these "borders and edges" and to make a case for revisioned conceptual narratives that challenge the enduring oppositional binaries of care and breadwinning that underpin research on father involvement.

### *5.1. Widening Father Involvement: Paternal Responsibilities and Indirect Care*

Joseph Pleck (2010) recently amended the highly cited conceptualization of father involvement as engagement, accessibility, and responsibilities (Lamb et al. 1985) that he helped to define by extending the meaning and scope of the practices originally envisioned over thirty years ago. He now includes the "fostering of community connections" as "process responsibility", which refers to ensuring that needs are met (Pleck 2010, p. 67). Although Pleck does not explicitly reference ethics of care scholars, overlaps with Sara Ruddick (Ruddick 1995, p. 22) earlier approach to parental responsibilities as a set of processes and practices involving "preservation, growth and social acceptability" are apparent. Pleck's recent reflections also resonate with Joan Tronto (2013, pp. 22–3) writing on "processes of care" as a series of interconnected practices that are "nested" together: caring about someone's unmet needs, caring for these needs, caregiving or making sure the care work is done, and care-receiving or assessing the effectiveness of care acts.

I am especially interested in how, in widening this definition of father involvement and, specifically, its component of paternal responsibility, Pleck (2010, p. 67) focuses on "*material* indirect care", which, as per its initial formulation, still includes arranging goods and services for the child, but also "purchasing" these goods and services. Pleck (2010, p. 88) acknowledges that although the key focus of fathering research should remain the initial "primary components of paternal involvement" (e.g., engagement, accessibility, and responsibility), "much more study is needed of indirect care", including material care (e.g., breadwinning), mainly because parents' capacity to financially provide for their children "may also benefit child development". He writes: "Whether construed as an aspect of paternal involvement or not, more research on fathers' breadwinning and how it influences developmental outcomes is also needed" (p. 88).

A similar point is made by researchers who study the lives of marginalized or vulnerable fathers. Ethnographic research and interviews that address fathers who fit one or more of the categories low-income, non-residential, and young fathers, highlight how father involvement includes both provisioning or breadwinning and emotional involvement. As Katheryn Edin and Timothy Nelson (Edin and Nelson 2013, p. 7) write from their seven-year research with "disadvantaged fathers" in "America's inner cities" (p. 7): "These fathers now want roles more like conventional mothers' roles" (p. 223). But they also point to what others have called a "paradox of a pattern of involved fatherhood emerging alongside a retreat from family commitment" (Waller 2002, p. 41; see also Gerson 1993), including breadwinning. According to Edin and Nelson (2013, p. 223):

Meanwhile, mothers have been forced by sheer necessity to take on more of the traditional father's tasks. A cynical interpretation of this attempted role swap is that it excuses the men from financial and moral responsibility—that they're trying to claim a poor man's version of the Disneyland Dad, one that reduces a father to a buddy while skipping the harder tasks of providing financially and setting a good example.

Edin and Nelson (2013, p. 223) also point to the differences in their research study between fathers who live with the mothers of their children, where "live-in fathers look much more like their middle-class counterparts—combining breadwinning with nurturing" whereas men who lived apart from their partners "couldn't flee, or even try to flee, from the breadwinner role and attempt to 'elect' instead to invest in relational fathering".

Overall, a focus on father involvement as defined only by caregiving and care time ignores broader structural constraints within which fathering (and mothering) occur, including those linked to an increasingly precarious labor market. Father involvement will not be fully realized until workplace structures and state policies support men and women in their roles and identities as both caregivers and financial providers (see Fraser 1994a, 1994b; Williams 2010). If policies and public discourses that support men's caregiving are needed, then policies and public discourses that support men's breadwinning—so that they can both provide for and care for their children—are also needed. As Fraser (2016, p. 117) writes, there is a "demand for a massive reorganization of the relation between production and reproduction: for social arrangements that could enable people of every class, gender, sexuality, and color to combine social-reproductive activities with safe, interesting and well-remunerated work".

### *5.2. Provisioning*

Another way of thinking about the connections between care and breadwinning is illustrated in the concept of provisioning, defined as "all the work women do to provide for themselves and others—whether paid or unpaid in the market, home, or community spheres" and "the daily work performed to acquire material and intangible resources for meeting responsibilities that ensure the survival and well-being of people" (Neysmith et al. 2010, p. 152). The concept builds on the interventions of feminist economists who have studied the many forms that unpaid care work and paid employment take in the lives of women in the Global North and South (e.g., Barker 2005; Power 2004; Taylor 2004)—researchers who have sought to avoid being "impeded by conceptual barriers of public and private spheres that interrupt and thus hide the extent of the work" (Neysmith et al. 2010, p. 164). Provisioning includes "recognized provisioning activities" (e.g., formal and informal labor market activities, domestic labor and caring activities, and formal and informal volunteer commitments in the community), "invisible provisioning activities" (e.g., activities focused on sustaining and advocating for the health of oneself and significant others and looking for and applying for "financial assistance and other resources), and "ensuring safety" for oneself and one's children (i.e., "finding safe housing and dealing with violence against themselves and others") (p. 156).

The concept of provisioning resonates with the metaphor of weaving paid work and care work, which highlights how concepts, practices, and identities are not only connected, but deeply intra-connected for many mothers, especially those in "Native America, Latino, Asian American, and African American families and communities" (Hill Collins 1994, p. 374). Referring specifically to African American women, Hill Collins (2000, p. 71) notes that provisioning is less an issue of "achieving economic parity with their Black male counterparts and more one of securing an adequate overall family income". This echoes other feminist scholarship on motherhood that argues that for many women, caring and earning are not "opposed categories", but are unfolding in constant relationship with one another in "changing patterns over the life course" (Garey 1999, p. 164).

The metaphor of weaving care and earning has been taken up by cross-cultural researchers since the 1980s. Whether they are referring to breadwinning, earning, or provisioning, feminist scholars have argued that just as care *is* work, financial provisioning is intricately interwoven with care. Hill Collins (1994, p. 372) expressed this eloquently when she wrote: "examining racial ethnic women's experiences reveals how these two spheres" of paid work and family are not only connected but "*actually are interwoven* (emphasis added)". In a similar way, Garey (1999, p. 191) wrote that women's care and employment practices and identities are "not independent categories—they are overlapping, connected, interwoven" (see also Balbo 1987; Davies 1990).

These two conceptual moves—to see breadwinning as a form of material indirect care and to envision provisioning as the weaving of care and earning—both enrich and widen the concept of father involvement in a way that resonates with research on the diverse contexts and experiences of mothering and fathering. These new conceptual narratives lead, in turn, to different relational configurations of inter-woven concepts of father involvement, care, and breadwinning.

The genealogical work of un-making and re-making concepts of father involvement, care, and earning can also reconfigure our notions of human subjectivity. Rather than viewing humans as workers *or* as earners (a distinction lodged in concepts like the stay-at-home father/mother (Doucet 2016)), we might view humans as needing to provide and be provided for, to care and be cared for at varied points across the life course. This perspective acknowledges the "secondary dependence in those who care for dependents" (Kittay 1995, p. 11) and the critical role of resources, services, and policies (such as childcare and employment leave policies and social protections for parents) for sustaining the provisioning activities needed to support caregivers and the work of caring. As Fraser (1997, p. 61) argued in the late 1990s, "deconstructing the opposition between breadwinning and caregiving" leads to theorizing and designing policies "for people whose lives include breadwinning *and* caregiving (emphasis added)" (Fraser 1994b, p. 85). This could also inspire a more sustained and convincing socio-political argument for high quality childcare services and state and employer social protection policies that allow people to care *and* to financially provide for that care.

### **6. Conclusions**

This paper has undertaken a genealogy of the concept of "father involvement", guided by Somers' historical sociology of concept formation and wide and deep literatures on Foucauldian genealogies, epistemic reflexivities, historical epistemologies, and relational ontologies. Genealogical work brings attention to the taken-for-granted concepts and categories that we use in our research, their histories, and their relationalities in wider conceptual webs. I have thus explored the concept of father involvement

as a cultural and historical object embedded in my reading of particular "histories, networks, and narratives" (Somers 2008, p. 209) with the aim of un-thinking and re-thinking conceptual possibilities that might lead to expanded knowledges about fathering and care-breadwinning entanglements. This genealogical exercise brings attention to how the concept of father involvement has developed within oppositional binaries of care and breadwinning, rather than through an acknowledgement of the relationality of these concepts. There are sound historical and socio-cultural reasons for this. Father involvement, particularly in mother/father households, has often been synonymous with breadwinning, and most social institutions still consider fathers to be secondary caregivers and treat them accordingly. Although I am cognizant of these lingering narratives about fathering, my main argument, with one caveat, is that breadwinning is conceptually intra-*connected* with care, and can, *in some contexts*, be regarded *as a form* of material indirect care.

The caveat that I cautiously laid out earlier partly explains my many abandoned attempts to write this paper (starting a decade ago as I was analyzing my research interviews with breadwinning mothers). I began this inquiry by asking: If mothers' caring and breadwinning are conceptualized as relationalities, why are father involvement and breadwinning so often approached as oppositional binaries? It is one thing to make arguments, now well supported across several feminist fields, about the intra-connections between mothers' care and breadwinning, but it is another thing altogether to make this same argument about fathers. To point out the relationality of care and breadwinning in fathering poses theoretical and political risks. Its unintended effects could include, for example, a return to a "separate spheres" ideology that genders caring and breadwinning, or the strengthening of still deeply entrenched social and structural gendered inequalities in paid and unpaid work, which have everyday and long-term consequences. I thus reiterate in concluding this paper, that the inclusion of provisioning *as part of* father involvement must attend to the complex relationality, historicity, and ethico-political character of concepts, conceptual narratives, and their wider "relational configurations" (Somers 1998, p. 767). As concepts are "words in their sites" (Hacking 2002, p. 24), my argument for a revisioned concept of father involvement thus requires a close examination, not only of the concept itself, but of its articulations within wider sites, including "the entire conceptual network or the relational site, in which it is embedded" (Somers 2008, p. 268).

This work is more than an academic exercise. Revisioning concepts opens up new ways of thinking and acting. This is because concepts are *performative* in that they not only "describe social life" but "are also active forces shaping it" (Fraser and Gordon 1994, p. 310). Concepts that connect or entangle caring and breadwinning recognize that people are care providers, care receivers, financial providers, and financial receivers in varied and multiple ways across time. Widening our concepts of care and earning can shift our understandings of human subjectivity as relational and intra-dependent, with inevitable periods of dependency and vulnerability across the life course. This also draws attention to how policies, resources, and services that adequately support *all* parents in their roles as caregivers and income earners are essential for the sustenance, growth, and well-being of families and communities.

**Funding:** This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Canada Research Chairs Program, grant number 231901-2018.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

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