Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0013
J. Martschukat
The twelfth chapter discusses the transformations of the nuclear family ideal, of its gendered and heteronormative patterns in the wake of the women’s movement and the LGBT movement. At its center stand a lesbian couple and their daughters in San Francisco, supported by the gay fathers who also take responsibility in the family. The author interviewed both couples. The chapter presents their life and the politics of queer families, gay marriage, and the so-called gayby boom in relation to the powerful recent discourse on the “crisis” of the family and to the fatherhood movement, its different and often revisionist subgroups and their politics. At the same time, the chapter presents a queer family as the embodiment of a slow but persistent transformation of the hegemonic nuclear family model that has come about since the 1970s. They represent a historic change toward a greater recognition of patchwork families in general and of many different kinds of living arrangements, particularly in metropolitan centers. Yet the chapter also shows how the current politics of gay marriage and queer families oscillates between a total disintegration of the nuclear family on the one side and the reassertion of its values of love and mutual responsibility on the other side.
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Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0007
J. Martschukat
Chapter 6 depicts the history of urban bachelorhood and discusses the different visions and representations of the bachelor as non-father: from the pious Christian shepherd to the urban bohemian and the incorporation of modern masculinity out of control. These many potential facets of being a bachelor in turn-of-the-century urban America merge in the life course of YMCA director Robert R. McBurney. Historical writings by and on him as well as his archival papers provide ample material to unfold the history of unmarried men in the context of the history of sexuality and of what historian George Chauncey called “the gay male world.” The chapter also discusses how the perception of bachelorhood changed against the backdrop of the evolving sexual and social sciences, which depicted fatherhood as the “natural” development of every man’s life and pathologized any other form of male existence.
第六章描述了城市单身的历史，并讨论了作为非父亲的单身汉的不同愿景和表现:从虔诚的基督教牧羊人到城市波西米亚人，以及与现代失控的男子气概的结合。在世纪之交的美国城市里，作为一个单身汉，这些潜在的方面在基督教青年会(YMCA)会长罗伯特·r·麦克伯尼(Robert R. McBurney)的一生中融合在一起。有关他的历史著作以及他的档案文件提供了丰富的材料，可以在性史和历史学家乔治·昌西所说的“男同性恋世界”的背景下，展现未婚男性的历史。这一章还讨论了在不断发展的性学和社会科学的背景下，人们对单身的看法是如何变化的。这些科学将父亲的身份描述为每个男人生命的“自然”发展，并将任何其他形式的男性存在病态化。
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Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0008
J. Martschukat
Chapter 7 follows a young Jewish immigrant, Minnie Goldstein, and her family as they make their way from Warsaw, Poland, to New York City’s Lower East Side in 1894. Based on her personal and autobiographic account of her life story in America, the chapter juxtaposes the girl’s memories of her family life in America and of the Jewish diaspora in general with the derogatory depiction of life in the Lower East Side tenements by progressive reformers such as Jacob Riis. The chapter also discusses how perceptions of ethnically and religiously diverse family concepts served to make the so-called “new immigrants” an exotic and pathological other in a culture and politics increasingly focusing on the idea of “racial purity.” Thus, the chapter argues that modern concepts and practices of ethnicity and race were closely related to specific understandings of family life.
{"title":"Immigrant Families in Urban America, 1880–1920","authors":"J. Martschukat","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 7 follows a young Jewish immigrant, Minnie Goldstein, and her family as they make their way from Warsaw, Poland, to New York City’s Lower East Side in 1894. Based on her personal and autobiographic account of her life story in America, the chapter juxtaposes the girl’s memories of her family life in America and of the Jewish diaspora in general with the derogatory depiction of life in the Lower East Side tenements by progressive reformers such as Jacob Riis. The chapter also discusses how perceptions of ethnically and religiously diverse family concepts served to make the so-called “new immigrants” an exotic and pathological other in a culture and politics increasingly focusing on the idea of “racial purity.” Thus, the chapter argues that modern concepts and practices of ethnicity and race were closely related to specific understandings of family life.","PeriodicalId":127547,"journal":{"name":"American Fatherhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126570578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0009
J. Martschukat
Chapter 8 relates nuclear family and fatherhood ideals to the history of the American Indian. It takes off from the “crisis” of modern fatherhood in early twentieth-century America that was seen as the consequence of constantly weakening ties between fathers and their families, seen as dangerous for the nation. A back-to-nature movement and a temporary “going native” of fathers and sons promised to provide a solution to this problem. In the early 1900s, when almost extinguished, American Indian men among all people were presented as role models to modern Anglo-American fathers. Indian fathers were taken as embodying a “naturalness” that was described as being at the heart of the relationship between fathers and sons. The protagonist of this chapter is Joe Friday, an Ojibwe who served as front man for the YMCA Indian Guides program. This most successful program was meant to bring together “tribes” of suburban fathers and sons playing Indian. Thus, based on files at the YMCA archives, the chapter shows how a stereotypical image of “the Indian” was employed to depict a bond between fathers, sons, and the family as natural and to overcome what was perceived as a crisis of fatherhood and modern family life in general.
{"title":"Indigenous and Modern Fathers, 1890–1950","authors":"J. Martschukat","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 8 relates nuclear family and fatherhood ideals to the history of the American Indian. It takes off from the “crisis” of modern fatherhood in early twentieth-century America that was seen as the consequence of constantly weakening ties between fathers and their families, seen as dangerous for the nation. A back-to-nature movement and a temporary “going native” of fathers and sons promised to provide a solution to this problem. In the early 1900s, when almost extinguished, American Indian men among all people were presented as role models to modern Anglo-American fathers. Indian fathers were taken as embodying a “naturalness” that was described as being at the heart of the relationship between fathers and sons. The protagonist of this chapter is Joe Friday, an Ojibwe who served as front man for the YMCA Indian Guides program. This most successful program was meant to bring together “tribes” of suburban fathers and sons playing Indian. Thus, based on files at the YMCA archives, the chapter shows how a stereotypical image of “the Indian” was employed to depict a bond between fathers, sons, and the family as natural and to overcome what was perceived as a crisis of fatherhood and modern family life in general.","PeriodicalId":127547,"journal":{"name":"American Fatherhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115888396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0006
J. Martschukat
The fifth chapter depicts the conflicting demands addressed to young men as family fathers on the one hand and as citizen-soldiers on the other hand. It discusses the Civil War and its effects on fathers, mothers, and family life through close readings of the diary and letters of Confederate soldier John C. West, who saw himself as fighting this war for his family and his country. While West was scared to death by the bloody battles and the fierce fighting of the Civil War, he nevertheless romanticized the war as a struggle for southern family life and patriarchal masculinity in his diary and letters. He portrayed his service in the Confederate Army as fulfilment of his masculinity in the name of white womanhood, southern culture, and family life, a message he sought to send to his wife and, in particular, to his four-year-old son back home.
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Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0003
J. Martschukat
Chapter 2 zooms in on the ideal of a loving two-generation family and how it was shaped and embedded in the republican society and its structures. The chapter unfolds this story from a contemporaneous critical perspective by presenting it through the eyes of John H. Noyes, the leader of the Oneida Community, which provided a religious and sexual countermodel to life in a nuclear family. Yet by looking at Noyes and his utopian and seemingly progressive commune, the chapter unfolds the meanings and significance of religion and sex in the republic, and it also shows how patriarchal patterns persisted in the new American society. The chapter draws on Noyes’s many writings and the papers of the Oneida Community in the Syracuse University Library.
第二章聚焦于一个充满爱的两代家庭的理想，以及它是如何在共和社会及其结构中形成和嵌入的。这一章通过奥奈达社区领袖约翰·h·诺伊斯(John H. Noyes)的视角，从当时的批判视角展开了这个故事，奥奈达社区为核心家庭的生活提供了一个宗教和性的反模式。然而，通过观察诺伊斯和他的乌托邦式和看似进步的公社，本章揭示了共和国中宗教和性的意义和重要性，也展示了父权模式如何在新的美国社会中持续存在。这一章借鉴了诺伊斯的许多著作和锡拉丘兹大学图书馆奥奈达社区的论文。
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Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0011
J. Martschukat
Chapter 10 turns to World War II and the Cold War, and it is one of two chapters in the book with a nuclear family, as commonly understood, at its center. If there ever was an age of the nuclear family, it was in the long 1950s with the expanding American consumer and Cold War culture. The chapter is written from the perspective of Tom Rath, the main character of a 1955–56 best-selling book and movie, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a character who became an iconic figure in public and sociological discourse immediately. The chapter shows how in the 1950s the heteronormative ideal of family, work, and consumption was praised louder than ever and at the same time blamed for paralyzing American men in the conformity trap of their suburban homes and their inner-city offices. Thus, again, the chapter revolves around conflicting demands addressed to American men, here to serve as a reliable father on the one side and as an energetic explorer on the other side. The author shows how these demands are expressed by ambiguous understandings of how American manhood should safeguard the stability and progress of American society.
{"title":"Fatherhood in World War II and the Cold War, 1940–1960","authors":"J. Martschukat","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 10 turns to World War II and the Cold War, and it is one of two chapters in the book with a nuclear family, as commonly understood, at its center. If there ever was an age of the nuclear family, it was in the long 1950s with the expanding American consumer and Cold War culture. The chapter is written from the perspective of Tom Rath, the main character of a 1955–56 best-selling book and movie, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a character who became an iconic figure in public and sociological discourse immediately. The chapter shows how in the 1950s the heteronormative ideal of family, work, and consumption was praised louder than ever and at the same time blamed for paralyzing American men in the conformity trap of their suburban homes and their inner-city offices. Thus, again, the chapter revolves around conflicting demands addressed to American men, here to serve as a reliable father on the one side and as an energetic explorer on the other side. The author shows how these demands are expressed by ambiguous understandings of how American manhood should safeguard the stability and progress of American society.","PeriodicalId":127547,"journal":{"name":"American Fatherhood","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123371971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0005
J. Martschukat
Chapter 4 deals with the history of the westward movement. It presents life on the Overland Trail from the 1850s to the 1870s from the perspective of the girl Molly Sheehan and how she presented her life story in her memoires. Molly had lost her mother when she was a very young child. Her father was the person she was closest to in her life, even though he was often away for weeks and months at a time to make a living as a railroad worker or by selling provisions to frontier settlements and mining camps. The chapter shows how this most iconic story in American history was hardly ever experienced in nuclear families. Yet by closely reading Molly Sheehan’s memoir, the chapter also shows how nuclear family life and middle-class values have nevertheless been sentimentalized and described by her as part of the frontier life. The chapter also demystifies the heroic frontier man and explorer by presenting a father who was more often desperate than heroic and whose way westward to the Pacific Ocean was driven by his struggle for survival and his efforts to escape poverty.
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Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0002
J. Martschukat
Chapter 1 covers the era of the American Revolution and the Early Republic. As this chapter lays the groundwork for the observations to come, it is the only chapter that has no single actor in its center, even though it very much revolves around the thoughts and writings of Founding Father John Adams. The chapter shows how new understandings of the family, its composition and role, developed with the American Revolution and how the two-generation family became a powerful tool in the governance of the new American republic. In particular the chapter explores how this new kind of family related to specific notions of fatherhood. It also points to ambivalences of this new republican ideal of “governing through the family”—ambivalences that still cause political anxieties today: many men did not live up to the demands addressed to them as fathers in a liberal society, so that the state or philanthropic welfare organizations were formed to take over. The chapter also discusses the persistence of violence in American families and institutions, even though the republican family ideal professed a family of love, harmony, and parental guidance.
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Pub Date : 2019-12-31DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479892273.003.0010
J. Martschukat
The ninth chapter puts its focus on the relations among gender, fatherhood, labor, and breadwinning. Based on interviews conducted by sociologist Mirra Komarovsky with unemployed white family fathers, their wives, and their children in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1930s, the chapter explores the impact of the Great Depression on white lower middle-class families and asks how the nuclear family ideal and its gendered and generational family structures depend on patterns and practices of wage earning and breadwinning. In particular, the chapter juxtaposes fathers’ attitudes toward their unemployment and the Great Depression to statements made by their family members on the fathers’ unemployment and the new division of roles in the family. Here the chapter reveals that what was experienced as a severe and depressing crisis by most husbands obviously had the potential to open up opportunities for their wives, as power relations changed and the tables were turned.
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