Family Men

Middle-Class Fatherhood in Industrializing America

Shawn Johansen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415917865
• eBook ISBN: 9781135248833
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The image of the cold and distant Victorian patriarch, whose domestic roles were limited to those of provider and disciplinarian, is one that still dominates the way we think about nineteenth-century fatherhood. In Family Men, Shawn Johansen reveals that this myth has very little to do with the complex domestic lives these men actually led. Fathers routinely engaged in numerous domestic chores, cared for children, and took a far more active role in parenting then previously thought. Using a rich selection of personal writings, Johansen resurrects the voices of nineteenth-century fathers, uncovering how their feelings during childbirth, their views on education and religion, the ways their relationship to their children changed as they both grew older, and their attitudes toward many other domestic matters. Family Men is a sophisticated and compelling addition to the growing literature on the history of masculinity and the family.

chapter one

“Oh Ambition!”

CAREERS AND HOME

By his forty-fifth year, Lincoln Clark had come to regret career choices made earlier in life. Born in Massachusetts at the turn of the nineteenth century, he had ventured to Alabama in 1837 with hopes of establishing a law practice in a developing region of the country. By 1845, however, he was tired of the itinerant life of the circuit court. “I am becoming to believe that I am the greatest home man in the world,” he wrote to his wife Julia, “and this I think speaks well for me and better for you. I sometimes think I can not endure this judgeship, it will keep me so long from the only place at which I am satisfied.”¹ Also worried about his children growing up in a culture dominated by slavery, Clark decided to return to the North. But not just any region above the Mason-Dixon Line would do. Having made a stagnating choice a decade earlier, Clark agonized over his decision. He wanted to return to live near family in Massachusetts but worried about the prospects for a law practice in rural New England. “I should probably get nothing but small business and should almost certainly be looked upon as of small importance, and to endure this I have too much pride, and my habits and associations revolt at it; we had place, character and influence in our circle and I must have it still in order to be satisfied.”² Clark finally chose to move his family to Iowa, where, ironically, his ambition eventually pushed him into politics, a career that often kept him away from home for months at a time.

Ambitious, geographically mobile, and working long hours away from home, men like Lincoln Clark seem to be forerunners of the modern absent fathers who abandon wives, children, and home to do battle in the male “sphere” of business and politics. Yet domestic concerns clearly influenced his decision to move; in Alabama, he felt that his job kept him too often away from family and that there were negative cultural influences on his children. Was he attempting to mold his career around the needs of his family, or were these mere excuses, justifications of a guilty conscience that had chosen opportunity and public power over domestic bliss? Was Lincoln Clark a status-seeking lawyer and politician, a concerned father, or perhaps both?

These are important questions to the historian of nineteenth-century fatherhood. Scholars of the family and of women argue that one byproduct of the immense economic and social changes of nineteenth-century industrialization was the growing isolation of the middle-class family from the public world of work and politics. The fate of men in the face of this widening gulf has prompted little debate. Historians assume that as the domestic “sphere” became separated from public life, men of the new middle class were less and less to be found at home. No longer farmers in a slow-paced agrarian world, these men spent long days in the brutish, demanding, and sometimes venal world of business. Many historians believe that this retreat of the family away from the public arena contributed to a divergence of the masculine from the domestic. Indeed, for men, involvement in the masculine working world meant contact with the perceived evils of industrialization. According to historian John Demos, “maleness itself seemed to carry a certain odor of contamination.”³ Since men spent more time working away from the home and thus increasingly were alienated from domestic life and values, fathers were no longer childrearers. Even if they had wanted to fulfill this role, these men no longer had the time or ability to raise children.

Like most of our historical images of nineteenth-century fatherhood, however, the concept of the absent father is based on largely unchallenged and untested assumptions. Three come to the fore in the narrative of fatherhood’s diminishing prospects. Among the most enduring is the idea that dramatic changes in work patterns greatly decreased fathers’ time with children. Usually, the new patterns of work proposed by historians look suspiciously like those that structured the life of the stereotypical 1950s suburban father. These men, responding to economic forces, were unable or unwilling to manipulate their work environment to maintain a strong presence in the home. They spent their days commuting, working, and entertaining, and had little time for anything else. Powerful pressures such as love, attachment, and the desire to influence their children’s lives played little if any part in this equation. These stereotypical men were merely economic beings spending long hours engaged in the culture of work because corporate America provided the only yardstick to measure their success. The second assumption stems from the perception held by nineteenth-century observers that the work-related values of the industrializing nation were less pure than the older, agrarian values. Historians assume that, as middle-class men imbibed new ideas of competition and cutthroat individualism, they became tainted and thus incapable of acting as the moral center of the family. Women, by virtue of their separation from “public” values, became repositories of traditional morality. The third assumption, that childrearing became solely a feminine duty, asserts a strict division of labor between the sexes along public/private lines, thus exempting public men from domestic chores. Finally, underlying each of these assumptions is the notion that men were willing to relinquish domestic influence in exchange for public prestige and power. With these arguments in place, it seems logical to conclude that as men abandoned families for the world of work, there was, as the historian Mary P. Ryan states, a “transfer of functions from male to female as mothers’ concern for child care expanded into the vacuum left by the indifference of fathers.”⁴

This book, and this chapter particularly, challenges these assumptions through a discussion of antebellum middle-class men’s work. Diaries and correspondence reveal that, in many ways, work actually linked men to their families. For most middle-class men, acting in the role of provider usually created strong emotional bonds that tied them to their wives and children. Fathers were more than providers, but even this role had many facets aside from just an economic one. The same sources also show that many middle-class men regularly performed domestic chores, suggesting that the boundary between public and private was not strictly equivalent to the gender line. Careful examination of family relations among the middle class also shows that men did not relinquish all of their domestic power and moral authority to women. While antebellum women saw their influence over childrearing increase during these years, men strove to retain the rights and privileges that they held in relation to wives and children. Throughout the antebellum period, men exercised considerable influence over the running of homes, the raising of children, and the allocation of family resources.

One cannot deny, however, that work patterns played an important role in shaping middle-class fathering. Indeed, this study begins with the issue of work because it was so central to men’s identity and authority.⁵ When young men made a career choice, they often determined much of their future as a father; work shaped men’s daily routine, including the number of hours they would spend away from home and how many opportunities they would have to interact with children. In addition, by putting men in the position to control most of the family income, work formed a significant source of men’s power over family members. By locating the origins of changes to fatherhood in the shifting economy, family historians acknowledge these important ties between work and fatherhood. However, by assuming that work pushed men from domestic affairs, they have ignored a basic tension in the lives of antebellum men. A close look at the correspondence and diaries of middle-class families reveals that fathers strove to balance their often conflicting roles in the workplace and the home. For many, this task exacted the price of substantial psychic stress. Lincoln Clark wrestled with his career dilemma for at least two years before finally choosing opportunity over proximity to family by moving to Iowa instead of New England. The stress of maintaining public and private roles, instead of showing decline, actually illustrates the strength and conviction of men’s commitment to both arenas. To deny middle-class fathers any significant role other than that of an economic provider rejects the complexity and authority of nineteenth-century fatherhood.

When young middle-class men ventured from home and school to find work in the antebellum North, they stepped into a world quite different from that known by their grandfathers. In the commercializing economy of the nineteenth century, the path to middle-class success lay not on the farm, but in the emerging industries and enterprises of consumer capitalism. Although some found middle-class status on farms where cash crops were grown, young men were more likely to find jobs with rhythms set by the time clock rather than the round of the seasons. Business historians have shown that commerce, which had been dominated by the all-purpose merchant before the early nineteenth century, saw the proliferation of specialized merchants in the Jacksonian period. Importers, exporters, brokers, jobbers, manufacturers’ agents, freight forwarders, bankers, insurance company officers, credit reporting agents, retailers, bookkeepers, and the ubiquitous all-purpose clerks were just some of the white-collar occupations that flourished in the commercial growth of the antebellum period.⁶ Often, young men had little choice but to seek these jobs outside of their community of origin. New Englanders were particularly prone to leaving the rocky farms of their homeland. Some sought more lucrative opportunities in the new businesses of the South and West. Others found positions that required constant travel on the burgeoning transportation systems of the industrializing nation, moving about far more than their forefathers would have thought possible.

Changes to work patterns were more fundamental, however, than just new kinds of occupations; the very culture and value of work took on new meaning. Diligent labor was venerated in America before 1800, but nineteenth-century men took this value a step further than their colonial counterparts by considering work an end in itself. At the death of his father, George Templeton Strong, a New York lawyer who produced an extensive diary over his lifetime, wrote, “It was from higher than money-making motives that he toiled early and late, and denied himself relaxation and holiday. It was from the feeling that what work he had to do ought to be done thoroughly, promptly, and well.”⁷ Behind Strong’s statement was a panoply of values and incentives pushing men to revere work. The Protestant work ethic held that labor was ennobling and character-building by nature, not to mention that it also kept men from the sins of idleness and dissipation. Work also produced material rewards. John Pintard, founder of the New York Historical Society, wrote in a letter to his daughter in 1819, “To labour incessantly is the doom of man. ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread,’ was denounced on Adam, but a merciful God tempered the sentence of vindictive justice by giving bread as a never failing reward of industry.”⁸ To some observers, acquisitiveness certainly had a hold on the minds of middle-class men. “Most men are too much devoted to money-making,” noted William A. Alcott, the author of a book for young wives. “Nor is this the worst. They are not merely desirous of becoming wealthy, in a reasonable time and in proportion to their own diligent efforts; for were it so, the evil would be more tolerable. But they are in haste to be rich.”⁹ George Templeton Strong wondered, “Is it the doom of all men in this nineteenth century to be weighed down with the incumbrance [sic] of a desire to make money and save money, all their days?”¹⁰ This was certainly true of Rinaldo Parker, a schoolteacher incongruently driven by the desire for wealth. Writing to his mother in 1837, he verbosely observed, “There is but one solitary star that emits any directing or attractive raye [sic] through the long & dubious perspective of coming years. There is but one desire—one object that stimulates, enerves to action my paralyzed & sluggish energies—it is the acquiring of what is called competence & wealth.”¹¹ Parker admitted that his “fevered thirst for power” was excessive, even destructive, yet still the thirst remained.

Men of the nineteenth century often viewed work as a path to the wealth and opportunities that formed the building blocks of social power. “Work was a means to independence and self-advancement,” writes historian Daniel T. Rodgers.¹² A man’s job determined to a large extent his status in the community: The amount of money he made usually correlated with the extent of his influence. At the same time, as Rodgers argues, “Work was an outlet for self-expression, a way to impress something of oneself on the material world.”¹³ Work, then, was very attractive to men in the nineteenth century because it was the arena in which they expressed dreams, pursued ambitions, and sought self-aggrandizement.

Men also valued work because it had its altruistic side. At the very least, it was understood that work fueled the economy, and thus contributed to the common good. Some occupations like the ministry and medicine were particularly valued for their chance to serve mankind. When a young man, like William Potter of Massachusetts, faced the choice of his life’s work, he asked himself where in society he could “do the most good.”¹⁴ Potter’s sense of duty to his fellow man led him first to teaching and then eventually to a position as a Unitarian minister. “I find that the only sure way to contentment with one’s lot,” he wrote trying to convince his Quaker father, “is patient & persevering effort to discharge faithfully one’s daily duty.”¹⁵ Yet men felt conflicting pressures when it came to their sense of duty. After hearing that his baby was ill, Thomas Kilby Smith, an Ohio legislator, wrote, “My position as a public officer renders it imperative for me to remain at my post, happens what will. I must stifle my heart & my feelings towards all ties & live only to the performance of my duties.”¹⁶ While Smith’s anguish dramatically illustrates the tension between public and private duties, the two were closely intertwined. Robert Griswold has shown that in the divorce court records of California, “nothing more detrimental could be said about a man than that he did not support his wife and family.”¹⁷ Although Griswold’s evidence comes from the West and the last half of the nineteenth century, the same can be said of the antebellum East. Violation of the expected provider role brought the censure of the community, which in turn jeopardized the reputation and social standing so vital to the livelihood of middle-class men.

Since work occupied such a central place in the lives and identities of men, it is tempting to see it as the defining characteristic of nineteenth-century fatherhood. How could men take an interest in fatherhood when they were so mesmerized by the opportunities available in this new economy and bound by its rigorous demands upon their time? The chance to choose one’s own career, travel, earn a hefty paycheck, negotiate the intricacies of commerce, or wield power in the influential industries of nineteenth-century America were all heady opportunities seemingly more attractive than anything that the domestic realm offered. Capitalist society seemed to measure men’s success in terms of hard work and income, not the kind of children they raised. It is no wonder, then, that many historians suggest that men’s attention wandered from home during these years. The new types of employment seemed to be at cross-purposes with involvement in the home.

One must, however, be careful about drawing simplistic conclusions about the relationship of work and fatherhood. Obligation, love, mutuality, and authority, although frequently tied to the economic functioning of the family, often worked independently of these pressures and needs.¹⁸ Men’s love for their children or sense of duty to wives or God pushed them to nurture and care for children at times when purely economic motivations would dictate that they do otherwise. The provider role linked men not only economically but also emotionally to their families. “The new businessman might in fact be caught up in the excitement of building his ventures,” writes historian Peter Stearns. “Yet even to himself, and certainly to the outside world, he phrased his personal goals in terms of his family.”¹⁹

There is no doubt that men keenly felt the responsibility to provide. In colonial society, where the home was a place of production, men shared with women and children the task of producing the necessities of life. In the antebellum period, however, men’s wages formed the basis of the family economy, as middle-class families primarily became places of consumption. Women’s and children’s labor, although important for domestic chores, was no longer needed for production. Even farming families, through the shift to commercial crops, became more closely tied to the market and patterns of middle-class consumption dur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• chapter one: “Oh Ambition!”: Careers and Home
• chapter two: Husbands as Fathers: Pregnancy and Birth
• chapter three: Oedipus Forgiven: Infancy and Early Childhood
• chapter four: The Tyranny of Love: Paternal Power and Authority
• chapter five: Providing a Middle-Class Future
• chapter six: Fathers and Children’s Transition to Adulthood
• Conclusion
• Note on Sources
• Manuscripts and Published Collections
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index