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John R. Gillis ¹

Today, with the panic over absent fathers and deadbeat dads at one of its periodic peaks, the sense of failure and loss that surrounds fatherhood is overwhelming. Coming, as I do, from a part of the world where “Promise Keepers” fill football stadiums and Million Man Marches have become annual events, I may be unduly influenced by that environment. Nevertheless, similar concerns have been voiced on the other side of the Atlantic, where, as An-Magritt Jensen (1998) argues, fatherhood is also under pressure, ‘shrinking’ from both ends, with fewer men entering it and more men leaving it than in past generations.

But before we succumb to the prevailing panic, with its attendant nostalgia for the “good old” days of fatherhood, it would be well to remind ourselves that the crisis of fatherhood is a repeated theme in Western civilization. We have survived it before and will no doubt weather this one as well. But it is equally important to point out that each crisis has been different in nature, unique to the conditions of its own time. We cannot therefore turn to the past for solutions to our current problems. For those, we need to face the future and think hard about what kind of fatherhood might best meet the challenges of this global age.

The first of the crises of fatherhood that is relevant to us today was the turmoil that was occasioned by the collapse of the patriarchal monarchical order from the 1770s onwards, leading to the American and French Revolutions, which also profoundly altered familial and social relations at every level. Replacing patriarchal monarchies with fraternal republics shook fatherhood to its very foundations. And it took more than a century for it to re-establish itself in the form of father-asbreadwinner role, an invention of the rising middle class, that only really became the norm for Western societies at large in the mid-20^th century. What was unique about post-patriarchal fatherhood was that it yoked paternity to masculinity for the first time. Manhood (as gender identity) and paternity became equivalents, an equation which, as we see later in this article, is at the core of the current crisis of fatherhood.

The origins of our current dilemma can be traced back to the 1960s in both Europe and North America, and has intensified over time, with no obvious end in sight. In a rather short period of time universal fatherhood has ceased to be a realistic prospect. Today, 40 percent of children in the USA do not live with their birth fathers; by age 18, almost half will have lived apart from him for some period in their lives. This trend is directly related to rising divorce rates, as well as the increase in unwed maternity, which is now one-third of all American births. Of these, two-thirds of the fathers were not immediately identified. Roughly the same trends, if not the exact numbers, are found in Europe, though there are regional variations (Jensen 1998).

What is of even greater concern to those who see fatherlessness as a sign of moral decay and a cause of problems ranging from low mathematics scores to juvenile homicide is what they call the “culture of fatherlessness“. As David Blankenhorn (1995: 2) puts it: “in addition to losing fathers, we are losing something larger: our idea of fatherhood.“ While it is not altogether clear that there is any less commitment to fatherhood as an ideal, there is no question but that the realization of the ideal has become more difficult.

Blankenhorn and many other American commentators on fatherlessness believe we are at a cultural as well as a behavioral turning point. They argue that throughout history fatherhood has acted as a civilizing force, making good men as well as good families. Men, they argue, are naturally selfish, unsocial, even promiscuous beings. The family, and the conscription of men to fatherly duties, is all that stands between us and social chaos. Their solution to the current dilemma is to insist that men must be persuaded to return to fatherhood, or, if that should fail, to be drafted into that role by the state. While there is great division of just how much coercion will be necessary to accomplish this end, there is currently legislation being enacted in the USA and elsewhere to restrict divorce, mandate paternity and criminalize so-called “deadbeat dads.“

Not all the movements to revitalize fatherhood are patriarchal or backward looking. It is quite possible to argue that fatherhood is completely compatible with an egalitarian family life based on mutual respect and shared responsibilities. In fact, this was the model of what was called ‘New Fatherhood’ from the 1920s onwards, endorsed by feminists as much as conservatives. Marriage seemed to be moving toward greater freedom and equality during this century; and it was just when the long-standing feminist goal of domesticating men seemed within reach in the 1970s that the current crisis of fatherlessness surfaced.

I want to argue that the marginalization of fathers in Western countries is a structural rather than a moral problem, that we must look beyond the family and even the nation to understand it. It seems to me to be linked in important ways to the current restructuring of the global capitalist economy, to profound changes in class as well as gender relations that this has occasioned, and to the fate of the nation-state itself. Just as the first crisis of fatherhood, the crisis of patriarchy, was tied to the shift from commercial to industrial capitalism organized on a national basis, so the eclipse of breadwinner fatherhood coincides with the end of the linkage between capitalism and the nation-state, and the beginning of a new political/economic order whose future we can only dimly perceive at the moment.

1.Premodern Patriarchy

I trust that I do not have to convince the reader that fatherhood is a historical, not a natural, phenomenon, that its meanings have varied widely over time. There have always been biological fathers, but fatherhood itself is a social and cultural construct. In the West, that form of fatherhood we are want to call patriarchy began only in the 14^th century. Until then Christian iconography gave little attention to fathers. Joseph was represented mainly as a senile, cuckolded husband, the subject of artistic satire and folk humor, denied both saintly character and plausible paternity. And it was only in the early modern period that Joseph emerged as a patriarchal figure worthy of respect and emulation (Atkinson 1991, Herlihy 1985).

The authority and prestige of patriarchs increased enormously during the Renaissance and Reformation. The causes of this shift are complex, but it can be at least partially explained by the emergence of a commercial capitalist economy based on household production. Protestantism did its part by reviving the patriarchal ideology of the Old Testament and by sweeping the cosmos clear of competing maternal figures (Thurer 1994).

Historians have now established that male heads of the new household economy took their patriarchal duties seriously (Demos 1986, Griswold 1992, Rotundo 1993). The domestic treatises of the 17^th and 18^th centuries were directed mainly to the male heads of household and they were involved not only in the provisioning and medicating but in the socializing, educating, and disciplining of children from the infancy onwards. “The bond between father and child was understood to be as intimate and as enduring as that between mothers and children“, writes Steven Ozment in his “When Fathers Ruled“ (Ozment 1983: 132). The father’s relationship to the child was not only close but full-time. It is highly significant that Protestantism defined fatherhood as a sacred calling, as an essential dimension of the this worldly asceticism men owed to God. Luther himself insisted that “when a father washes diapers and performs some other mean task for his child, and someone ridicules him as an effeminate fool … God with all his angels and creatures is smiling“ (cited in Ozment 1983: 8).

However, we must not confuse patriarchy with paternity, or assume that it was the sole definition of what it was to be a man in the early modern period. On the contrary, social fatherhood and biological fatherhood remained quite separable in a period when family meant a household, not the biological unit. A man without a household, no matter how many children he might have sired, was excluded from the rights and duties of patriarchy (Boswell 1988). High death rates and extensive poverty dictated that many children were deprived of their biological parents and were brought up in the households other than those of their biological parents. Until the 19^th century the poor still gave up their children to the “kindness of strangers.” David Herlihy has estimated that two-thirds to three-quarters of all families were unable to bring up their own children to adulthood at the beginning of this period; and things were not much better at the end.²

Children committed to the care of strangers were treated as full members of the household family, as no different from its biological offspring. In return, they regarded the heads of those households as their social fathers and mothers (Tadmore 1989). As Europeans colonized the world, this notion of family as household went with them. On the plantations of the American South, slaves not only took their masters’ names but identified themselves as a part of their families. In turn, masters talked of their families, “white and black“ (Genovese 1972: 70-75).

In the early modern period there were by definition no fatherless families. Living apart from a patriarchal household was discouraged, even criminalized. On the other hand, there were many biological fathers who, because of their economic circumstances, would remain familyless, for patriarchy was limited to propertied males. In the household-based economy of protoindustrial commercial capitalism and plantation slavery, paternity was never enough by itself to qualify a man for social fatherhood. In the prenational patriarchal political order only male householders really counted.

Fatherhood was the calling of the privileged male. It was not equivalent of manhood as such, for, at the time, masculinity had many recognized forms, including several that excluded paternity altogether. The medieval world had provided many opportunities for celibate manliness. Priesthood and knighthood were honorable, superior callings. Church and military service provided institutional support for bachelor males, as did the crafts, with their journeymen’s organizations. It will be remembered that the first stages of European expansion were accomplished largely by single males. It was not until the 17^th century that colonization became a family affair, but even then fatherhood was denied to a very large part of the population, namely slaves and indentured servants. The conventional view of preindustrial Europe and colonial America as family-centered societies is nothing but myth, invented to serve the needs of later generations (Gillis 1996).

2.The End of Patriarchy

This patriarchal world would receive a seismic shock with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the nation state. The French and American Revolutions dethroned fathers literally and symbolically. No longer could the polity be conceived of as a hierarchy of patriarchal households. New nations would henceforth conceive of themselves as families of fatherless siblings, emphasizing egalitarian/horizontal rather than hierarchical/vertical bonds (Hunt 1984).³ A whole new gender and generational order was visible as early as 1793 in the French Republic’s call for levée en masse (quoted in Best 1982):

“Young men will go to fight, husbands will forge weapons and manage the transport services, wives and daughters will make tents and uniforms and will serve in hospitals; old men taking their stands in public places will inflame the patriotism of our soldiers.”

The absence of fathers did not go unnoticed. “It seems to me, at times, as if there were no more men left in the world, they have all become citizens,“ complained one American wife and mother, who went on to note: “Their humanity seems merged in some presidency or secretaryship. They are good trustees, directors, cashiers, bankers, but they are very indifferent husbands and fathers.“ (quoted in Thayer 1854: 41).⁴

For the first hundred years of the new industrial/democratic era, it seemed as if fatherhood might become a thing of the past. Even when fathers fought, they did so as the sons of the motherland, for, as one scholar has pointed out, the new nation-states “politicized motherhood and marginalized fatherhood“ (Griswold 1992: 13). In its initial phases, industrial capitalism also contributed to the marginalization of fatherhood, not just through its removal of men’s work from the household, but also by reassigning male generativity exclusively to the public sphere. Patriarchy was transferred to the firm, where some men assumed authority over other men, as well as over their female and child employees, by virtue of their ownership of the means of production. In exchange for a virtual monopoly over the life of the whole of the material world, the fathers of industry ceded their place in the family to women.⁵ Men ceased to be the givers of life and became the chief providers for life, virtually reversing the previous relationship between fatherhood and motherhood (Gillis 1996).

Of course, this was initially only a middle-class phenomenon. Among the aristocracy and the lower orders older understandings of patriarchy lingered, but among the bourgeoisie the role of husband, now disconnected from the practical work of domestic husbanding, became the measure of manhood. For a time it seemed to overshadow fatherhood, and, to the degree that bourgeois males became connected to home and family only through women, men became distant figures, figuratively, and sometimes literally, strangers to their own children. By the end of the 19th century, middle-class fatherhood had become a matter of evenings, weekends, and certain calendered occasions, like Christmas, when fathers played the role, not as the patriarchs of old, but as the newly invented Santa figure, the ultimate provider, but still very much a stranger.

3.Redomesticating Fatherhood

The post-patriarchal model of manhood served the first phases of the Industrial Revolution well. The detachment of manhood from patriarchy was also integral to the New Imperialism of the late 19^th century, which was largely a bachelor affair in its initial phases. The creation of large standing armies in an era of intense national competition also required the detachment of males from family responsibilities.

But even before the First World War, Western societies were becoming concerned that the displacement of patriarchy had gone too far, and that fatherless families as well as familyless men might constitute a danger to themselves and even to civilization itself. The liberalization of family, marriage, and divorce law, which had gone hand in hand for most of the 19^th century with the liberalization of the industrial economy, was henceforth approached with greater caution. Marriage, which had become in the course of liberal reform more and more a private contract between individuals, once again became a public concern. At the turn of the century, Europeans and North Americans found themselves again legislating family norms, partly through the introduction of new welfare and schooling measures, but also through the direct criminalization of certain kinds of behavior. New laws against homosexuality normalized the relationship between manhood and heterosexuality at the same moment that non-support and desertion of families by so-called ‘home slackers’ was criminalized. By the 1920s and 1930s, there were a raft of regulations and laws on the books that not only reinforced the middle-class norm of husband/father as provider, but underlined the linkage between manhood and fatherhood.⁶

The superior ability of middle-class men to fulfill the provider role made their fatherhood seem less problematic than that of working-class men, who bore the brunt of the new punitive legislation. But both groups felt the loss of institutions that had previously sustained a notion of manhood apart from marriage and family.

The 19^th century had produced a host of men’s organizations – fraternal orders, sports clubs, men’s clubs – that were, in effect, men’s families, homes away from home. Until early in the 20^th century, it was perfectly acceptable for men to have their own version of domesticity, to dine, lodge, and vacation together. Men felt comfortable nurturing other men, an outlet for paternal feelings that seemed to have no place in highly feminized Victorian family life (Bly 1990). But by the 1920s the clubs and fraternal orders were themselves in decline and the male companionship had been reduced to the “boys night out” (Clawson 1989, Griswold 1992). Non-domestic forms of fatherhood continued to linger on in the tavern, the pub, and the locker room, but they were no longer culturally sanctioned.

By the 1950s and 1960s, the so-called “New Fatherhood,” yoked to marriage and thoroughly domesticated, had become the norm at all class levels. It was in these decades that throughout the Western world marriage rates achieved a historic peak. The marriage age had fallen, and nuptiality had become the gateway to the fullness of strongly gendered adulthood for both men and women. Bachelorhood was stigmatized as abnormal, even deviant; homosociality hinted at homosexuality, which by this time had been driven underground. The gendered division of labor still removed men from the household, but never before had fathers been so child and home-centered when it came to their leisure activities (Griswold 1992).

This century’s depressions and wars repeatedly separated men from their families, but each era of prosperity and peace brought renewed expectations of a revitalized fatherhood. Post-1945 welfare policy was perhaps the most determined attempt in history to ensure the domesticization of men by providing veterans with the resources (education, good jobs, cheap home mortgages) to become good providers. It seemed for a moment that the ‘Good Family Man’, defined as the dutiful breadwinner father, would be a permanent feature of the affluent society. Yet, even as the trend toward companionate marriage and family togetherness intensified, the contradictions between good husbandhood and good fatherhood became painfully apparent. Companionate marriage made better husbands, but the gendered division of labor that was part of the bargain made men’s connection to their children even more dependent on the quality of their relationship with their wives.⁷

The home had become even more feminized and men remained strangers in their own homes, competitors for the housewife’s attention, rivals to their own children (Demos 1986).⁸ This may have been one of the causes of a noticeable infantilization of male behavior over the century. Boyishness became increasingly acceptable among adult men.⁹ As early as the 1950s, there were signs that the domesticization of men was failing (Ehrenreich 1983). But it was not until the Good Family Man was confronted with the realities of the new global economy in the 1970s that the full dimensions of this crisis of fatherhood became apparent.

4.The Current Crisis

There are those who would still insist that the rapid rise of fatherless families from the 1970s onwards is a temporary or cyclical phenomenon, but I think not. The current crisis of the breadwinner father cannot be separated from the restructuring of the capitalist economy on a global scale. The relocation of so much of manufacturing to the non-Western world and the vast increase of service sector jobs have radically altered the gendered division of labor that emerged in the course of the Industrial Revolution and reached its apogee in the postwar period. The re-entry of women, especially married women with children, into the workforce has many different causes, but one was most certainly the declining ability of men, particularly working-class men, to fulfill their role as breadwinners from the 1970s onwards. In the USA, there has been an unprecedented drop in men’s real earnings. A dual income, now increasingly dependent on more than two jobs, had always been a necessity for most working-class people, but now it became the norm for all social classes. Women still earn only about 75 percent as much as men, but, had they not entered employment, few families would have been able to manage. Still, despite nominal full employment, 80 percent of American families have experienced a decline in real income over the last two decades. In Europe, where unemployment levels are higher, this drop has been cushioned by higher levels of state family benefits, but almost everywhere in the capitalist world the gap between the richest fifth and the poorest fifth of the population has been growing, with middle-income groups losing ground as well.

The same economic conditions are reflected in the tendency for young people to postpone and sometimes avoid marriage altogether. They also account for rates of unwed parenthood, which have reached unprecedented levels in North America and Europe. The further down the social scale one goes, the more children that are born outside marriage, and the more paternity goes undocumented. Whether one talks about the rising levels of fatherlessness in terms of moral breakdown, or, more sensibly, as a crisis of “marriageability” among certain sectors of the male population, the shift is quite stunning.¹⁰

Both the age of marriage and the rate of marriage have returned to preindustrial levels. The percentage of never-marrieds has risen sharply; and a trend toward voluntary childlessness, especially among men, has also been documented. It seems that marriage and children are no longer viewed as the requirements of adulthood. And, while it is important to keep in mind that the demography of the late 20^th century is radically different from anything that has gone before, the parallels between the fatherlessness of the preindustrial era and fatherlessness today are striking, with the major difference being that in the early modern period the patriarchal household provided a place for all children, regardless of their paternity.

The restructured global economy has affected not only the “marriageability” of men, but their ability to fulfill the father role once married. If the problem for working-class males is too little rewarding work, the problem for their middle- and upper-class counterparts is too much work under conditions that remove them even further from home and family. While the tendency to increase the hours and intensity of work has been most noticeable in the USA, the pressure on family time is evident everywhere in the Western world (Gillis 1996, Shor 1991). No less striking is the fact that many women as well as men are finding they are more ‘at home’ at work than with family. The domestication of the workplace, a conscious strategy of corporate management, has led to what Arlie Hochschild has described as an “emotionally downsized“ family life (Hochschild 1996: 221).

Working-class men now have to scramble to assemble the material resources required of them to make a marriage and a home, and to have children. They remain overwhelming committed to the conventional notion of fatherhood and are often the strongest supporters of the new revitalization movements like the Promise Keepers, but their good intentions lead to what the sociologist Frank Furstenberg calls the “good dads – bad dads“ complex (Furstenberg 1988: 193-218). More men want to be good fathers, but standards of good fatherhood, defined as breadwinning and secondary parenting, have had to keep pace with the standards of good mothering, which have increased spectacularly (Thurer 1994). The current single standard for parenthood is admirable, but men are far less prepared than women to achieve it. Girls are socialized for parenting in ways boys are not. Their passage to motherhood begins well before pregnancy, whereas males experience fatherhood mainly at the moment of birth. Efforts to involve men at earlier stages of reproduction appear to have been only partially successful, producing among many an even greater sense of inferiority and frustration (Jackson 1987, Lewis 1986).¹¹ To be sure, men are now familiar figures in the delivery room, where since the 1970s their attendance has been almost obligatory (Jackson 1987). Yet, because they are there mainly to assist, they feel marginal at best and sometimes wholly useless. In many cases the bonding between father and child is only temporary (Jackson 1987, Lewis 1986). Men retreat soon after birth into the old definitions of fatherhood, showering mother and child with attention and material support, but, in order to do so, they work longer hours and are less available than before. The unwillingness of men to take advantage of even the most generous paternal leave policies in Denmark and Sweden must be attributed to the persistence of the definition of fatherhood exclusively in terms of how well men can provide.¹²

However, there is another group of men, roughly equivalent to the top 20 percent of the income bracket, who are moving away from fatherhood for an entirely different set of reasons. Ironically, this group, who now command an ever greater share of the world’s wealth and power, find themselves deprived of the time and the emotional reserves to sustain a marriage and family. It is this group which manifests what Bob Connell has called the new “transnational business masculinity,“ characterized by “increasing egocentrism, very conditional loyalties (even to the corporation), and a declining sense of responsibility for others (except for the purposes of image making)“ (Connell 1988: 16). Unlike the bourgeois males of an earlier generation, they are less likely to be owners than managers, less in control of their own time and location. Their upward mobility is dependent on geographical mobility, not just within but across national boundaries. Often they too make a good faith effort to be Good Family Men, but, after several divorces and bitter custody battles, they often abandon the project and come to rely on commercial substitutes for sexual pleasures, domestic comforts, and even emotional gratification (Connell 1988).

What we may be witnessing here is the revival of a non-familial masculinity, which characterized military and religious elites in the past, but which virtually disappeared in the first phases of industrial capitalism and now returns in a new form suitable to the conditions of the global age. While the remaining 80 percent of males continue to be (though ambivalently) dependent on home and family for material comforts and emotional satisfactions, this new elite finds them elsewhere, outside marriage and beyond fatherhood itself. Their self-indulgent lifestyles are reminiscent of the premodern aristocracy, except for the fact that all traces of the social responsibility that went with older forms of patriarchy have vanished, exorcised by the market ideology which is the core of the new elite’s value system.

No longer constrained by the national loyalties that characterized the old middle class, this new transnational class is committed to a radical individualism that would allow market forces to take over every sphere of life, including family itself. They have been at the forefront of the attack on the welfare state, which they regard as a restraint on international capital accumulation. While this new elite preaches family values, it pursues policies which not only withdraw resources from families, but place additional barriers in the way of family formation. As politicians, corporate managers, and media moguls, these men have been conducting what one recent American book has been courageous enough to call “The War against Parents“ (Hewlett/West 1998).

Women have undoubtedly been more adversely affected by the restructuring of the global economy than have men, but nobody talks about a crisis of motherless families, despite the evidence that what we are experiencing is a massive, often involuntary, removal of women from home and family. Motherhood remains normative, indeed compulsory, in a society that still assigns the overwhelming burden of childrearing and homemaking to women. If anything, the equation of femininity with motherhood has grown stronger, even as the connections between fatherhood and masculinity have weakened.

5.Separating Manhood from Fatherhood

So here we stand on the brink of the new century, wracked with confusion and conflict. For most of the 20^th century, modernity seemed to be moving toward the New Fatherhood, a norm of masculinity that associated adult manliness with heterosexuality and fatherhood. One challenge to this came from the gay movement, which effectively questioned the equation of masculinity with heterosexuality, with marriage and family life itself. Another challenge came from radical feminism, which insisted that marriage and family are inherently patriarchal institutions, and that fatherhood was unreformable. But perhaps the most radical challenge of all has come from the so-called New Right and Christian fundamentalism, which insist on turning back the clock more than 200 years to older forms of patriarchy.

Given these dissonant voices, together with the contradictions faced by ordinary men and women, it is no wonder that the New Fatherhood seems to be failing. It may be the time to consider abandoning the whole notion of a singular norm of masculinity that it championed and to rethink the supposedly natural link between manliness and fatherhood that was so painfully forged over the last 200 years.

I would suggest that a logical step is to denaturalize and degenderize paternity and to culturally reconfigure fatherhood as a vocation to which some men are called and others are exempted. Understood as a calling, a state of becoming, of learning a certain set of skills and responsibilities, rather than as a natural state of gendered being, fatherhood could again become a workable definition of one, but not the only, kind of desirable manhood. Like the establishment of any calling, this would require the investment of public resources, money, time, and, most important, honor and prestige. Fatherhood would be a choice, but not a choice dependent on individual wealth, marital status, or sexual orientation. It would be open to all, but not without the requisite qualifications and resources that we know are necessary to successful fatherhood.

In order to end the marginalization of fathers, it will be necessary to end the universal conscription of men to a role that many are not suited to and still more do not now have the resources to accomplish successfully. But it is well to remember that in preindustrial society, restricted access to social fatherhood worked only because there were alternative institutions and selfimages for males who could not join the circle of patriarchs. Attention would have to be given to providing support, status, and responsibility to other masculine roles. Non-familial gay identities have to be given the recognition and the heterosexual bachelor restored to his once dignified status. We would need to rethink our definition of motherhood and of ‘family’ itself. And we need to imagine new ways in which women and men can participate in the existential as well as material benefits of homemaking and child-rearing without becoming biological mothers and fathers as such. For example, a world of universal aunthood or unclehood might prove much more beneficial to children than the current condition of universal motherhood or fatherhood.

In any case, the reconstruction of fatherhood as a calling would require a major rethink, not just of our legal and welfare systems, but of our most basic social structures and cultural constructs. What I offer for your consideration is nothing less than a revolutionary revision of Western civilization, for, if the crisis of fatherlessness is as catastrophic as some believe it to be, nothing less is required.

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1Copyright © 2000 by SAGE Publications (In: Childhood, Vol. 7 (2), London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi, 225-238.).

2See Herlihy (1895: 159); John Boswell cites figures for 1800 Toulouse that 25 percent of the population gave up their infant children (Boswell 1988: 11).

3On fraternal bonds, see Mosse (1985).

4I owe this citation to Frank (1992: 70).

5This process had its roots in the 17^th century, but only completed itself in the 19^th; see Merchant (1980); see also Rotundo (1993: Ch. VII).

6The term comes from Willrich (1997).

7The evolution of the ‘fun dad’ is traced by Demos (1986: 50-1) and Griswold (1983: Ch. VI). By the early part of this century, British fathers were often treated as the biggest child in the family (see Meachem 1977: 117-18, Chinn 1988: 62); the growing acceptance of childish (boyish) traits among adult men is also noted by Rotundo (1993: 257).

8See Demos (1986: 62); on the psychodynamics of this phenomenon, see Richards (1982: 70ff.).

9On this trend, see Rotundo (1993: 257-8); observers in Britain also noted that husbands had become the biggest child in the family; see Chinn (1988: 52).

10For the current debate in the USA, see DeParle (1998).

11Recent findings on envious and destructive behavior by fathers are reported in Dullea (1982: 38).

12On Denmark, see Carlsen (1994: 79-90); on Sweden, see Lewis (1986: 189); on the increasing commercialization of fatherhood, see The New York Times (1990).