Fatherhood and the experience of working-class fathers in Britain, 1900-1939

Abstract

In the last ten years or so, largely as a consequence of serious study into manliness and masculinity, the place of the father in family life has begun to gain some critical attention in an historical context. The focus to date has been primarily on the Victorian middle-class father, and this thesis seeks to continue the story into the Edwardian and interwar years and to broaden the focus of enquiry onto the less well explored experience of the working-class father.

The first portion o the thesis examines fatherhood as a set of perceived and prescribed ideas by examining some prominent 'discourses' from the period. During the passing of the 1925 Guardianship of Infants Act, lawmakers and judges scrutinised the father's importance to family life. While emphasis was placed on the importance of the mother - in itself often exposing a limited perception of the father's functions - the father was still seen as an important figure in his children's lives. Continuing these themes, a 'progressive' and cohesive understanding of fatherhood emerged from within the infant welfare movement that stressed the importance of a close father-child relationship for 'healthy' child development and also argued that fathers could not fulfil their functions as parent from the margins of family life. Mirroring the attempts to 'educate' working-class mothers in welfare clinics, it was the working-class father who became the target of this didactic 'fathercraft' movement, and it was the fathercraft movement that provided a legitimate and pioneering version of male parenting in the inter-war years.

The second portion of the thesis moves the focus onto the conduct of fathers and the day-to-day experiences of fatherhood among the working-class. It uses oral history and autobiography to illuminate some of the ways that the father-child relationship was shaped. It suggest that middle-class perceptions of fatherhood were often at odds with the realities of working-class life, but that there was probably a greater 'overlap' between the conduct of fathers and the 'culture' of fatherhood than the current literature suggests. It is shown that fathers were often loving and certainly often 'involved' as parents and that this involvement is only fully understood by viewing the father in a different way from the mother. This portion of the thesis also examines some experiences of fatherhood during the First World War by an analysis of letters written during that conflict. The strains on family life created by the enforced absence of the father serves to highlight some of the assumptions and expectations surrounding his functions. Similarly, an exploration of the experiences of the unemployed father highlights that joblessness sometimes affected his functions as a parent and that being less able to 'provide' often caused as least short-term shifts in the expectations surrounding a father's behaviour.

The thesis shows that there was much continuity in the experiences and the understanding of fatherhood in the period but also that inter-war period is most accurately viewed as a unique period in the history of fatherhood. As contemporaries believed, and as this study suggests, the expectations surrounding inter-war fatherhood were shifting. This did not simply create a forerunner to the ideas of 'New Fatherhood' that emerged after the Second World War as has sometimes been suggested. Rather, this thesis concludes, the period between 1900 and 1939 witnessed - not a dramatic change - but a subtle refocusing when it came to the experience of fathers and the perceptions surrounding fatherhood.