Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Industrializing America

The image of the cold and distant Victorian patriarch, whose domestic roles were limited to those of provider and disciplinarian, is one that still dominates the way we think about nineteenth-century fatherhood. In Family Men, Shawn Johansen reveals that this myth has very little to do with the complex domestic lives these men actually led. Fathers routinely engaged in numerous domestic chores, cared for children, and took a far more active role in parenting then previously thought. Using a...