ABSTRACT
Following the end of the Second World War, family life had to reorganise around the inclusion of fathers returning from the world of combat. Contemporary studies of the family did not include any difficulties this reinstatement had involved, and also ignored variations in gendered family practices—ways that men and women might have behaved within the privacy of the family that were different from roles publically assigned for “mother” and for “father”. Idiosyncratic contradictions that might have been tolerated and even enjoyed in family life in the 1950s were not reported, so that how fathers “behaved” in families is recorded under broad research agreements on how family life was put together. During the Second World War, when masculinity outside the home was largely determined by a capacity to fight for country, the author chooses, and hungs on fiercely to, pacifism. As family-systems thinking developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s, the predominant influence, other than sociology, was psychoanalytic thinking.
