Introduction

Two decades have passed since Dieter Lenzen observed that a history of fatherhood had not yet been written (Lenzen, 1991, p. 20). Bibliographies on the theme of fathers have now become considerably longer, and include works that cross the boundaries of epochs. Maurizio Quilici recently published a substantial monograph tracing the history of fatherhood and its roles from prehistory until the present, based on the traditional periodisation (Quilici, 2010). His interest is in, among other things, philosophical and intellectual stances on issues around childrearing; thus, John Locke and Comenius represent the seventeenth century, Diderot and Rousseau the eighteenth. In a study focusing on the legal status of fathers, Marco Cavina draws an arc from classical antiquity into the present day (Cavina, 2007), thus writing – as his title indicates – a history of the disempowerment and dethronement of the father. He characterises the nineteenth century as the ‘revolution of the sons or of the children’ and as marking the death throes of the patriarch. Alain Cabantous (2000) situates that process between 1750 and 1920. This was the period of transition from a primarily vertical to a horizontal orientation in kin relationships, a transition that has been observed particularly for the middle-class milieu at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. It arose from an intensification of sibling and parent–child relationships and changes in paternal roles (Sabean & Teuscher, 2007; Johnson, 2002; Opitz, 2002; Trepp, 1996). Although paternal authority – still underpinned by law – continued to shape the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century, with the state and nation addressing and instrumentalising images of the father (Banti, 2005; Bonnet, 2000), overall the range of possible roles had by then diversified (Broughton & Rogers, 2007).