I’m reading bibliography for my book on sons’ memoirs about fathers, which is now beginning to pass its first preliminary stage, though I still have no title, contract, or a delivery date. My current target is checking whether my intuitions can be transformed into a solid working hypothesis and a sound thesis. I believe that the men of the Anglosphere of the generations born from 1930s onwards have gradually articulated a general protest against the model of traditional fatherhood that still survived WWII but that collapsed between the late 1960s and the 1970s. Younger men have followed that anti-patriarchal stance, to consolidate two generations later a model of fatherhood characterized by its emotional availability and capacity to care and not just provide.
I’m not saying that this model never existed before, but that it was not prevalent. In past times, fathers were expected to be providers (breadwinners) and protectors, but also disciplinarians rather than friendly educators. My thesis is that, beyond what sociologists and psychologists have gathered in their research, literature has been contributing a very rich fund of evidence about this collective transition towards a far more flexible fatherhood, mainly through the memoirs written by sons about their fathers. My concern, however, is that good fathers are very much underrepresented, as the memoirs I’m analysing are mainly prompted by the son’s need to display his well-adjusted masculinity despite the absence of the father or the conflicts with him.
In the kind of monograph I’m preparing, which is part of Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities, sociological research is a necessary foundation. Today I’ve been browsing through a number of key titles, and I’ve taken a good look at Leonard Benson’s Fatherhood: A Sociological Perspective (1968), published by Random House, for this was a book intended to be of general interest. From what I gather, Benson’s was a pioneering book, paving the way for the many 1970s books addressing the issue of the father’s function in households reshaped by feminism, the availability of divorce, and a new sense of individualism that made fatherhood far less compulsory for men than it was in previous decades. By the way, the author, born in 1925, belongs to the generation of US men who became husbands and fathers right after WWII, the age group that drove women back into the home and ultimately caused the discontent that originated Second-Wave feminism. Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique (1962) was born in 1921, the same decade as Benson.
The passages I have chosen are from Chapter IV, “The Passing of the Patriarch” (90-110), a title which carries a lot of weight. The stilted ‘father’ became ‘dad’ in the 1960s and although patriarchy is by no means dead, it’s hard to imagine any child calling his father by a more formal appellation than ‘dad’. “Father,” Benson wrote in 1968, “is now expected to be supportive in his relations with children: he is doing quite well if he succeeds in being a pal to his son and a courtier to his daughter. Ideally (…) the quality of ‘expressiveness’ is developed by men as well as mothers in their parental capacity” (93). When he claims that the similar functions of mothers and fathers make boys “more submissive and dependent,” Benson possibly means that the son’s anti-paternal rebellion is less justified, and a new model of generational transmission of masculine values is being put in place.
Benson notes that “the trend away from patriarchy” is not just about “redressing the balance of conjugal power” but a much deeper change in “family authority” linked to “social discipline and community management” (93). He observes that as women and children are “allowed more opportunity to express themselves” power is also redistributed “among classes and social institutions” (94). In this context, the father struggles because what might give him authority in the home, “his career competence,” is not directly seen by his family. The point of view is here directly middle-class, though as the daughter of a working-class man, I was very much aware that whatever my father did outside the home was the foundation of family life.
Benson continues his analysis explaining that children do not “appreciate the pressure exerted upon them by demanding parents—unless it is moderated by a sustaining and warm relationship” (95). This the conundrum that the new 1960s father faced: that “the very things that endear father to his children tend to undermine his authority” though at the same time “the persistence of patriarchy within the family” was already seen as “symptomatic of childrearing pathologies” (95), specially in the case of boys. Excessive discipline was associated “with a lack of intimacy and confidence between parent and child” (96), values that trumped patriarchal authority for the first time. The autocratic father was seen as a danger, for he was “not likely to promote high educational aspirations in his son” (96) (nothing is said about daughters), thus putting a hamper on national social progress.
The argument about how the Industrial Revolution and the ensuing 19th century bourgeois capitalism separated fathers from the home and made them strangers to their children is still invoked by Benson in the context of the late 1960s. Benson quotes previous researchers at work in the immediate aftermath of WWII, being aware that the impact of the father’s absence during that war was a key element in the renovation of the family. Many children, some very young, resisted in the late 1940s and the 1950s the authority of war veteran fathers they hardly knew, which would set the foundation for the new figure of the teenager. Although Benson does not mention women employed outside the home, whether from the working class or from the new feminist middle-class, he comments that “Children increasingly can, and must, make decisions for themselves without reference to family considerations” (97), seeking models in teachers, and, I would add, public figures, from politicians to entertainers. Fathers who could not offer the attractive qualities those other figures offered, found themselves discarded by their boys as role models.
This caused a crisis at many levels that, the way I see it, has not been solved yet, sixty years later or more. “Men,” Benson continues, “are now asked to bring patience, understanding, and gentleness into their human dealings (qualities formerly reserved for women) yet they must still be strong in their relationship with women” (106) for, I’ll add, not even the most feminist woman idealizes weak men; the idea is that women should become as strong as men, not that men can become weaker, if you know what I mean. Benson notes that since a man is “expected to be a sturdy oak—big, strong, and comforting, more self-controlled than his wife, and better able to cope with psychological pressures” (106) there is lower tolerance, for instance, for symptoms of mental illness in men. As for the relationship with sons, I’ll add, the father is now asked to provide a model combining strength with vulnerability in ways that are quite complicated to combine, though it could be argued that women have managed to show both with total coherence for decades.
In the last chapter, “Fatherhood and the Emerging Family,” Benson considered a topic that initially baffled me: the “inverse relationship” (319) between the father’s breadwinner function and the welfare state. As a European I see no contradiction between the safety net provided by the state through social security, funded with taxes mainly coming from work, and the function as providers of both parents (not just the father). As an American, however, Benson expresses the fear that if the US average family grows too dependent on welfare, fathers might not be as committed as breadwinners (an argument he uses to explain why Black fathers are more likely to leave their state-dependent families). If a man, in short, takes no pride in being a breadwinner, he might feel redundant and become an absent father. This is why Benson insists that fathers must be disconnected from their function as breadwinners, though he can’t clarify what he means when he argues that “other proofs of manhood will surely be established, and men will continue to serve as models for boys” (323).
In fact, I think that the root of the problem still today is that, as Benson writes, “emphasis on the breadwinner has been displaced but the breadwinner role has not; thus father is psychologically tied to a role whose ethical validity is not nearly as strong as it once was” (319). Fathers who, for instance, abandon altogether the breadwinning role to become main care providers in the home do not enjoy a high status, nor are they seen as role models for their sons. Fathers must be now both providers and caregivers, as mothers usually are, but we still need to see how the youngest generation of boys will respond to that masculine role model, as the father as caring co-breadwinner is still a relative novelty, just generalized among the millennial generation (30-45 years). We may be seeing the total end of inequality between fathers and mothers, though we should brace ourselves for a vindication of the lost patriarch among extreme right-wing young men.
Benson closes his volume concluding that father is “ideally an integrated member of the family and, as such, an agent of family and social stability, but he is also a source of value, of productivity, to society,” thus stressing that men’s identity is necessarily tied to their work (ignoring women’s aspirations in that sense). “As such,” he warns, “he stands in need of all the support that his family and the community at large can provide” (324). I’m not sure what kind of warning this is, but it seems to imply that there is a price to pay for men’s abandonment of patriarchal fatherhood in favour of a more flexible model, somehow tied to their accruing “support” from wife and children, as if they were self-sufficient. I wonder how many divorces have been caused by women’s refusal to offer even more support to men who demanded it after becoming caregivers. Perhaps a key question is that while feminism offers women external support in the form of a sisterhood of like-minded strong women, men have never articulated their own need for mutual support into progressive collective action, possibly because of their individualism.
Going back to my object of study, the son’s memoir about the father, this is a testimonial of how men finally understood the relational nature of their position but still failed to articulate a common discourse. I may be seeing, in short, a pattern men are not seeing because, as a feminist woman, I have been made aware of the idea that lives change in interpersonal, relational ways rather that on the basis of individual experience. Mothers have plenty to share with each other as such, but how are men sharing their experience of fatherhood (or sonhood) with each other, now in 2026? My answer is that memoirs are key in this process (together with self-help books), but, indeed, very far from sufficient.
To sum up, I hope to have shown that fatherhood shifted significantly away from the traditional patriarchal model in the late 1960s and that sociologists like Benson were paying close attention, quite concerned that with no breadwinning role to defend men would feel lost. They saw in new-style fatherhood a compensation for that loss, but also a loss of prestige (not necessarily of authority) that required some kind of family support as compensation. Asking for that when women were combining so many different roles in and outside the home may not have been the wisest move and, in many ways, I think we’re still stuck at this point. Aren’t we?