Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 03:1 (Spring 2021)
Article: A Cultural History Of Fatherhood & Its Retrieval
Author: Michael A. G. Haykin

Eikon 3.1 (Spring 2021) p. 4

A Cultural History Of Fatherhood & Its Retrieval

Michael A.G. Haykin

Over the past few years, voices in the evangelical world have decried the emasculation of men in the West, particularly within the Church. This concern has been laid at the foot of gender confusion and the rise of a militant feminism. But it strikes me that the central issue for men in the Western world is not so much emasculation (which seems to assume a Darwinian concept of life as struggle), as the diminishment of fatherhood and the loss of male friendship. These are huge topics. Allow me to tackle the first here, and the latter in a future column.

Over the past two centuries, there has been a steady recession of the social role of fatherhood. Fathers have either gradually moved or been moved from the heart to the margins of family life. Overall, the cultural story of fatherhood in the West has been essentially downhill since the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But at the outset of the long eighteenth century, fathers were regarded as primary and irreplaceable caregivers in the family.

The central role that fathers played in the nurture and flourishing of their children can be seen in five distinct ways:

(1) Throughout the eighteenth century, child-rearing manuals were generally addressed to fathers, not mothers.

(2) Until the early nineteenth century, when there was a divorce, it was the established custom to award the custody of children to their fathers.

Eikon 3.1 (Spring 2021) p. 5

(3) Throughout this period, it was fathers, not mothers, who were the chief correspondents with any children who lived away from home.

(4) Fathers were regarded as the primary influencers of the marital choices of their children and were responsible for the entry of children, especially sons, into the world outside the home.

(5) And most importantly, fathers had the primary responsibility for what was seen as the most essential of parental tasks: the religious and moral education of the children. As a result — rightly or wrongly — it would be the father who was praised or blamed for the eventual outcome of a child’s life.

Running an eye over this list, it does not require sociological smarts to realize that there has been a fundamental contraction of the concept of fatherhood in the past 300 years. Industrialization and the emergence of the modern economy led to the physical separation of home and work (though this current pandemic may well reverse this trend in part). No longer, as the neo-Freudian thinker Alexander Mitscherlich (1908–1982) once put it, could children typically acquire skills “by watching one’s father, work...