The Irish-American politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan knew all too well how painful it is to have a bad father. As a 10-year-old boy during the Great Depression, he watched his alcoholic and unemployed dad leave home for good. In between tearful nightmares and therapy sessions, the future New York senator recalled feeling “literally overwhelmed by simple, tender, childish emotions” if he ever saw men and their offspring together.
When Moynihan began lobbying three successive US presidents (John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon) for policies that promoted responsible fatherhood, however, he got a mixed reception. His claim that poverty in African American communities was largely caused by deadbeat dads saw him accused of racial stereotyping. He also attracted criticism for suggesting a link between firm parenting and masculine self-respect. “The very essence of the male animal,” he wrote, “from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut.”
As the Harvard-educated historian Augustine Sedgewick shows in this erudite, stimulating but overly earnest book, fatherhood has always been a divisive issue. One of the world’s oldest texts, The Instructions of Shuruppag, describes a Sumerian king giving his son such useful tips as: “You should not make a well in your field ... you should not place your house next to a public square ... you should not have sex with your slave girl.” Few modern-day readers will be surprised that Shuruppag often finds himself pleading for the boy’s attention and obedience.
Like many men, Sedgewick’s own ideals about parenthood have been challenged by real-life experience. Shortly before the author’s first child was born around a decade ago, his dad suffered a stroke and required round-the-clock care. The resulting upheaval left him with an age-old question: what’s the correct balance a father should strike between being a friend, teacher, disciplinarian and (ultimately) dependent?
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Sedgewick’s investigation takes the form of 10 potted biographies (some stand-alone, others intermingled), profiling gifted or powerful individuals who expressed strong views on the matter. He begins with Plato’s radical plan to eliminate traditional parenthood in ancient Greece, organising “public festivals of polygamous sex” and taking the resulting babies away to be raised by nurses. Aristotle spent 20 years studying at Plato’s Academy but reached the opposite conclusion, arguing that strong ties between individual fathers and children were key to a healthy society.
In lucid but solemn prose, Sedgewick explains how fatherhood has constantly been redefined by political, economic and religious changes. Patria potestas (power of the father) was the fundamental principle of Ancient Roman law, giving men extraordinary privileges such as the right to kill a daughter and her suitor if they were caught “in the act” on family premises. The author’s namesake, St Augustine, pushed back against this with his doctrine of Original Sin that maintained “God the Father” deserved far more reverence than any earthly one.
While England’s King Henry VIII was no great philosopher, his search for a male heir eventually led to a huge expansion of fathers’ legal powers. He found an unwitting ally in Martin Luther, the Protestant theologian who supposedly once declared, “I would rather have a dead son than a disobedient one”. By signing the 1540 Statute of Wills that gave fathers the freedom to choose who would inherit their property, Henry ushered in a new age of “paternal absolutism”.
Even the wisest of men, Sedgewick ruefully notes, find it hard to put their parenting theories into practice. President Thomas Jefferson, widely revered as one of the “Founding Fathers” of the United States, publicly preached that a man must not try to dominate his offspring but instead prepare them for independence. In private, sadly, he blotted his historical reputation by fathering six children with an enslaved woman and refusing to acknowledge them.
Sedgewick sees the Industrial Revolution as a watershed moment for fatherhood, forcing most men to abandon the land for cities and become permanently insecure “breadwinners”. Many of his case studies here, however, had loftier intellectual ambitions.
Charles Darwin lovingly studied the 10 children he fathered for evidence to support his theory of evolution. Sigmund Freud formulated the Oedipus complex, insisting it was perfectly healthy for a child to hate or even fantasise about murdering their dad.
Bob Dylan might well have agreed, since the rebellious young beatnik called strait-laced Abe Zimmerman “a miserly tyrant” and cut off all contact with him. (For his part, Abe regarded the future Nobel Prize winner as “a shiftless bum”.) But when Dylan had kids of his own, he became fiercely paternal and wrote the heartfelt “sung prayer” Forever Young about wanting the best for them.
Filled with vivid character sketches and clever connections, Fatherhood still feels like less than the sum of its parts. At 267 pages, it can only offer an overview of this vast subject and a summing-up chapter on being a 21st-century dad is frustratingly vague. Sedgewick’s worthy but flawed book does, however, reach one firm conclusion: no father has ever managed to do the job perfectly – which for some of us comes as a deeply comforting thought.
