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UK funding (£29,606): The Fond and the Feckless: Paternity, Sentiment and Poverty in late Victorian and Edwardian Culture Ukri1 Feb 2011 UK Research and Innovation, United Kingdom
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The Fond and the Feckless: Paternity, Sentiment and Poverty in late Victorian and Edwardian Culture
| Abstract | This study achieves two inter-related aims to provide an innovative and unique approach to understanding of paternity among the working classes and the poor in late Victorian and Edwardian culture. First, it examines the ideological underpinning of the 'father' identity and the extent to which conceptions of paternity were inextricable from understandings of manliness and men's rights and responsibilities. Secondly, the research examines fathers within the inter-personal context of domestic family life. Crucially, the research establishes a relationship between these two threads of fatherhood to demonstrate that whilst the duties of fatherhood were instrumental in claims for citizenship and welfare, fathers also used their role as providers and protectors to articulate attachment to their families. Overwhelmingly, the historiography of working-class family life has tended to privilege the relationship between mothers and their children. Within this framework, the working-class father has featured primarily as a wage earner whose livelihood defined the status of his dependents. This research questions the supposedly peripheral role of fathers within the emotional and domestic life of the working-class family. In particular, it challenges the tendency to examine working-class childhoods through the lens of maternal relations with offspring. \nThe research identifies fathers' space, material and imagined, within the gendered dynamics of the working-class home. By pursuing fathers' engagement with family life, the home as a maternal domain became less clear. Nonetheless, men's (and children's) perceptions of the domestic interior as a feminised space enabled fathers and children to indulge in horseplay, coddling and, sometimes, weeping without compromising men's masculine status. Similarly, the everyday routine of domesticity and childhood pivoted around father time: when men got up for and returned from work, when they ate, washed and had time away from paid employment. Conceptions of masculinity rooted in domestic absence (because of work) were renegotiated when old age forced men to adapt or resign their working selves. Likewise, welfare records suggest that (especially widowed) grandfathers were pivotal in some family formations as providers of childcare and advocates for the family in encounters with official or charitable organisations. \nCrucially, welfare and institutional records suggested that, beyond breadwinning, fathers were not deemed particularly necessary or even desirable to family life. The status of a breadwinning father could act as guarantor for a family's respectability but, where breadwinning faltered, the presence of the father actually became a potential obstacle to welfare; women could negotiate charitable networks more easily without having to account for an unemployed man. Conversely, when agencies sought donations towards schemes for sheltering and feeding homeless men, the only way to constitute the adult homeless male as a sympathetic subject was, first, to depict him as a helpless child and, secondly, to disassociate him from any possible dependents. Furthermore, the sheer extent to which fathers were presumed to be absent at the bottom of the social scale meant that welfare agencies focused on these families adopted a language of paternalism that shaped philanthropic rationale and their engagement with families. The research also locates the absent or abusive father in relation to dominant narratives of paternity. Even where the presumption of absentee fathers does not resonate with records of charities' recipients, welfare agencies tended to categorise 'fathers' as breadwinners whilst men who failed to provide lost their legitimacy as fathers. Absence in this sense could operate in both a literal and imagined context. \nSince an ESRC funded pilot project on the Northwest of England on breadwinning, further research was completed. The application seeks support for writing up the extended project. |
| Category | Fellowship |
| Reference | AH/I001875/1 |
| Status | Closed |
| Funded period start | 01/02/2011 |
| Funded period end | 31/05/2011 |
| Funded value | £29,606.00 |
| Source | https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FI001875%2F1 |
Participating Organisations
| The University of Manchester |
The filing refers to a past date, and does not necessarily reflect the current state. The current state is available on the following page: The University of Manchester, Manchester.
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