Papa Can You Hear Me? Fatherhood in 19th century US and Britain

Bodies in Blue, Episode #2 of 4. Like all things, “fatherhood” has a history. From the enslaved men of the Anglo-American Atlantic to the middling sort to working class daddies and "their chairs," ideas about fatherhood across socio-economic status in the nineteenth century shared one common trope: fathers were supposed to be providers. This wasn't always the case in the US or Britain. 18th-century ideal fatherhood looked quite different from the 19th century, and of course in the late 20th century feminists and gender equality activists began criticizing this narrow view of fatherhood. So this episode takes a look at the particularly industrialized, urbanized, "Victorian" kind of daddying.

Find Sarah Handley-Cousins's new book, Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North on Amazon, or at a library near you.

Select Bibliography

For the full bibliography and transcript of this episode, visit digpodcast.org

Stephen M. Frank, Life with Father : Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)

Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White : Family and Community in the Slave South, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Julie-Marie Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865-1914, (University of Manchester. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

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