Fathers in America:  100 Years of Change

By Harriet Shaklee, Family Development Specialist
University of Idaho Cooperative Extension

A look at the past 100 years of family life in America shows constantly evolving roles for adults and children.  In order to succeed as a society, children need to be  socialized into the culture (childrearing), and families need to meet their physical needs (breadwinning).  Families have tried many strategies in meeting these goals since the turn of the century in America.   Here we focus on father’s family roles, with special interest in the interplay between breadwinning and childrearing functions.   A look at family history tells the story.

Breadwinning

Before the Civil War, men commonly earned family income in home-based work, as craftsmen and farmers.  Earning an income was fully integrated with family roles, including plenty of contact between fathers and their children.  Families looked to Dads for moral guidance and education of the children, as well as training their sons in their craft.  Rearing children was seen as a process of nurture and growth, with central roles for fathers in the process.

However work moved out of the home with the industrial revolution, and fathers had less time to spend with their children.   With dads spending long days out of the home, occupational ties between father and son were severed.  Rather than learning a trade from dad, sons spent their days in school preparing for occupations with little relationship to their father’s work.  Dad time away from home also strengthened mothers’ bonds with their children, often leaving dad on the margins of family life.  Mothers provided a warm and loving home for children to grow up in.   Dad’s function was to finance the consumer goods necessary to support this way of life. 

With these developments, the contrast between rural farm and urban family life grew.  While urban middle-class homes became havens for nurturing children, farm life remained work-centered, with children and parents all involved in the production process.  Compared to their urban peers, farm children were surrounded by family in both work and relaxation.  Like the families of the 1850’s, there was plenty of opportunity for parental influence on children.  Fathers and sons especially had extensive time together, as the craft of farming was passed from one generation to the next.  However, the declining ability of farm children to sustain themselves in farming life meant that many rural young people were forced to move to urban areas.

Also different from the middle class were working class families, similarly caught up in the industrial revolution.  Here men lived in a country that increasingly defined a man according to his role as breadwinner, but work was sporadic, with frequent layoffs.  Unemployed fathers often left home to find work. Low income families continued to involve husband, wife, and children in work to support the family.  A study between 1910 and 1920 showed that the average male worker in a Chicago slaughterhouse earned only 38% of that needed to support a family of 4.  In the late 1800’s, Irish children in Philadelphia contributed 40% of the total family income. With family members all involved in so many hours of paid employment, family time with mom or dad was limited.

At the turn of the century, concerns mounted about the exploitative nature of child labor.   By 1900, 1/6 of children 10-15 years of age were in the workforce, curtailing their education and exposing them to working hazards as well.  However, children’s income was a necessity in these low-income families.  Furthermore, many immigrant cultures considered contributing to the family income to be a family obligation for older children, and integral to their family roles.   However, in the early 1900’s the state restricted child labor in a set of laws considered by many at the time to be an infringement of the government on family autonomy.  With children prohibited from work, the burden increased on working class fathers as breadwinners.

 What’s a father to do?

 Family experts in the early 1900’s viewed these transitions with concern.  As work moved out of the home, Dads’ contact with their children was limited.  Some commentators feared that fathers of the 20’s and 30’s had become mere visitors in the home. Special concerns were raised about the development of boys, who had little time to spend with dad, but developed strong bonds with their mothers during the long days at home.  With such limited contact with their fathers, how would sons learn what it means to be a man?

 Advice columns, radio programs, and child study classes evolved at this time, promoting a new vision of fatherhood of special appeal to middle class fathers.  Child experts envisioned a new function for dads, providing emotional support and affection, and serving as role models for sons and daughters.  Dad’s role was to be one of love and involvement, not discipline and authority.  Though an important function, dad’s role would supplement the essential family role provided by mom, the nurturer.

 Fathers became increasingly cast as home helper rather than primary parent.  In many cases, dads were deemed to be ill qualified on the essential matters of child rearing.  Attitudes that fathers were incompetent in the home are evident in a 1928 study of 60 motherless families, which concluded that fathers were virtually incapable of raising their children without help.  Far better, the author surmised, to break up the family, or allow the state to serve as mother surrogate at home.

 Ups and Downs

 The 1930’s brought America face-to-face with the downside of the strong identity of fatherhood with breadwinning: i.e. unemployment.  Working-class fathers had already known the despair of being unable to support their families.  The depression of the 1930’s spread that experience to men of all classes.   Unemployment in 1929 was 3.2%; by 1933 it rose to 24.9%.  At that point, America had spent over 50 years defining fathers in the provider role.   With that provider role gone, what would happen to families in the country?

 With no income to bring home, many fathers abandoned their families.  Unemployed fathers who remained at home often found their authority challenged, especially by older children.  Teenagers left home in increasing numbers, preferring to make their way on their own to being dependent on a destitute family.

 The response of the country to economic disaster focused on restoring the breadwinner role to men.  The government’s plan to help families was the WPA, a  program designed to provide jobs, not relief.  Furthermore, that work was for men in particular, with limited access for women.  Only one member of a family could be employed by WPA; women with employable husbands were deemed ineligible. Women working for the WPA were also paid less than men, making $3 a day, compared to $5 for men. Male heads of households would bring in the family income once again, restoring order to American families.

 World War II finished what WPA started in putting men back to work.  Men were needed as defenders of the republic.  Those who couldn’t fight were essential at home in factories and offices.  Full employment was the norm once again, in this case drawing women and youth into the job market as well.

 While employment was up, social commentators worried about all of the fathers who had left families to support the war effort.  Rising sexual promiscuity of teenage girls and delinquency of boys was blamed on father absence during the war.   Working fathers and homemaker mothers were deemed essential for healthy child development.  With dads off to the war and moms in the workplace, many wondered about harm to children.  Such discussions functioned to reassert the centrality of fathers in family life. 

 With World War II and its aftermath, the position of fathers as family breadwinner seemed secure, with women returning to homemaking after their war work, and fathers able to support a family again on a single income.  However,  the ability of a father to support his family depended on the regularity and salary of his work.  As was true earlier in the century, low income families continued to struggle to make ends meet, with both mom and dad in the workplace. 

 With the 1960’s, several trends combined to bring increasing numbers of women into the workplace.  Shrinking family sizes and modern conveniences in the home meant that women spent less time in child rearing and homemaking.  Increasing education for women and delay of marriage raised women’s commitment to and interest in work.  Finally, falling wages for men meant that fewer were able to support their families as sole breadwinners.   The stability of those trends over the years suggest that working women are here to stay.

 Breadwinning Revisited

 When fathers left their homes for work over 100 years ago, the role of family breadwinner was established to secure a key place for men in the family.  As we have seen, men’s ability to support their families has had its ups and downs over the decades since the turn of the century.  However, males as sole family supporters continued to be held as the ideal over that time period.

 But recent changes in family work participation threaten that model.  Employment rates of married women and mothers has increased at a steady pace in recent decades, with moms of ever younger children working.   What do these changes bring to the identity of fathers as family breadwinner?

 Men’s struggle to accommodate outside employment of wives has not come without costs.  Surveys showed that American men with working wives were unhappier and had more mental distress than those with homemaker wives.  Some men experienced a sense of inadequacy as a provider.  Women’s work destroyed traditional assumptions about manhood and fatherhood.  The model of male as sole family breadwinner was being challenged.

 Two diverging trends for American males may reflect the demise of the breadwinning role for males.  If a traditional role is under threat, one response would be to separate oneself from that role.  Recent years show males marrying at a later age, having fewer children, and increasingly likely to get divorced.  Babies fathered out of wedlock with minimal involvement of father, and lack of support by fathers to children of divorce are part of the trend.  Between 1960 and 1980, there was a 43% reduction in the time men spent living in a family with children.  With family roles for men in transition, these men have separated themselves from family life.

 The second trend reflects the reverse process.  That is, males are increasingly likely to identify significant family involvement as critical to their happiness.  Many American men want more time with their families and are willing to sacrifice advancement at work to attain this end.   For example, a 1977 poll of working men found that 12% found conflict between work and family life to be a problem.  By 1989, 72% complained of work/family conflicts.   A 1990 poll by the Los Angeles Times found that 43% of fathers would be willing to cut back at work to spend more time with their children.   These fathers responded to the demise of the breadwinning role by embracing their relationships with wife and children at home.  This is an especially promising development for working women, who have been frustrated with their extra burden of family work at home.

 It’s interesting to compare this reaffirmation of father roles in family life to the strong roles for males in the family in the 1800’s.  When home was the center of work, fathers played a central role in child nurturance and family life.  Once work left the home, dads were marginalized in childrearing.   Now that mom has also left the home to work, the need for significant involvement of men in their children’s lives is becoming clear once again.   These dads may feel quite different from their fathers in family role, but may find comfort in their similarity to their great-grandfathers.

 The history of fatherhood demonstrates several lessons of family life:

 ·          There has been continual evolution in the strategies families employ to meet their needs.  Over the past 100 years, men learned to accept and take pride in their role as sole breadwinner of the family, leaving the work of home and children to their wives.  However, recent decades have brought change once again to definitions of adult family roles for males as they learn to share both breadwinner and childrearing roles with their wives.

·          Changes in family roles for men and women are fueled by changes in the conditions of work.   The shift of work out of the home in the mid-1800’s and the more recent participation of mothers in the work force have led to many changes in home life for adults and children alike.

·          Though the male as sole family provider has been held as the American ideal for over 100 years, there have always been families who lived outside of the model.  Low income families in particular have needed the income of mothers and even children in order to meet their family needs.

This discussion was based on Fatherhood in America by Robert Griswold, NY: Basic Books, 1993