The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History - Softcover

LaRossa, Ralph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226469042 ISBN 13: 9780226469041

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1996

Synopsis

The period between World War I and World War II was an important time in the history of gender relations, and of American fatherhood. Revealing the surprising extent to which some of yesterday's fathers were involved with their children, The Modernization of Fatherhood recounts how fatherhood was reshaped during the Machine Age into the configuration we know today.

LaRossa explains that during the interwar period the image of the father as economic provider, pal, and male role model, all in one, became institutionalized. Using personal letters and popular magazine and newspaper sources, he explores how the social and economic conditions of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression—a period of technical innovation as well as economic hardship—fused these expectations into a cultural ideal. With chapters on the U.S. Children's Bureau, the fathercraft movement, the magazine industry and the development of Parent's Magazine, and the creation of Father's Day, this book is a major addition to the growing literature on masculinity and fatherhood.

About this title

About the Author

Ralph LaRossa is professor of sociology at Georgia State University and the author of Conflict and Power in Marriage: Expecting the First Child; Transition to Parenthood: How Infants Change Families (with Maureen Mulligan LaRossa); Becoming a Parent; The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History; and Of War and Men: World War II in the Lives of Fathers and Their Families.

From the Back Cover

'The Modernization of Fatherhood' is an enlightening documentation of shifts in the social construction of fatherhood, both as a cultural institution and as an individual reality.

Reviews

In his study of changing attitudes toward fatherhood during the 1920s and '30s, LaRossa, a sociology professor at Georgia State, offers some compelling material and an interesting and important thesis?but both are buried under unnecessary details. LaRossa argues that what most people perceive as new attitudes toward fatherhood actually date back decades. His prologue quotes letters and articles from fathers in 1932 that could have been written yesterday, including one from a father who described the hard work and special joy of taking on 2 a.m. feedings. The book is studded with moving raw material in the form of letters that parents wrote to the government seeking advice in caring for their children: "I nursed my baby mornings and night at night time after working all day then nursing my child. every drop it swallowed it would throw up... while my baby starved and my husband refused to provide for us." However, as LaRossa labors on, the reader learns more about collections of letters housed at the National Archives than about the changes they illustrate: he even describes the coding system used by the U.S. Children's Bureau to route the letters it received. Scholars who care about writing often say that research should be like an iceberg: only the tip should show. LaRossa, unfortunately, presents the entire mass?peak, slope and base.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226469042
• ISBN 13: 9780226469041
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 295