The Authority of Motherhood in Question: Fatherhood and the Moral Education of Boys in Victorian England

Women’s History Review (forthcoming, December, 2009)

Late nineteenth-century children were taught about their future roles through popular periodicals. Specifically, components of the manly domesticated father were highlighted: from the domestic goal of evangelical manliness, to the requirements of the ideal husband, the moral and pious centrality of the domesticated father, the rhetorical demonstration of fatherly failure and male weakness and women’s duties in relation to domesticated manliness. The result is a clear expression of the significance of male domesticity in the era of supposed ‘flight’, and a call to historians to reconsider the importance usually ascribed to the moral influence of mothers at the expense of fathers.

Towards the Modern Man: Edwardian Boyhood in the Juvenile Periodical Press

Childhood in Edwardian Fiction: Worlds Enough and Time, Adrienne Gavin and Andrew Humphries, eds. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Daddy's Come Home: Evangelicalism, Fatherhood and Lessons for Boys in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain

Fathering  5, 3 (2007), 174-196

Fears in fin-de-siècle Britain that fathers were absenting themselves from the home prompted a reaction from the evangelical periodical press, orchestrated by the Religious Tract Society, in an attempt to preserve "traditional" domestic ideals of fatherly men. These journals creatively deployed narratives, both fictional and non, that re-emphasised the centrality of male influence in the home, importantly within the idiom of Evangelicalism. Not only was the message—a refashioning of the Holy Trinity: the heavenly Father, the earthly father and the surrogate father (as replacement for the absent father)—critical in upholding the virtues of domesticated men, but the media themselves became crucial "surrogates," guiding boys in fatherly ways to compensate for the perceived absence of real fathers. The preponderance of literature on the subject of domesticated, moral and religious fathers ought to make us question the "flight from domesticity" to suggest, perhaps at least rhetorically, that "Daddy's Come Home."