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Robert L. Griswold's Fatherhood in America: A History is not a psychoanalytic book. It is, however, a book that every psychoanalyst should read.
Cited by the New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 1993, Griswold's chronicle is a social history of fatherhood in the United States from 1800 to the present—with particular attention paid to transformations occurring in the 20th century. Its objective, Griswold states in his introduction, is to “analyze the complex connections among fatherhood, masculine identity, patriarchy and American culture over time” and thereby to understand how “today fatherhood has become politicized…its terms contested, its significance fragmented, its meaning unstable” (p. 9). While he apologizes for his inability to treat all the variations on the problems posed by different fathers' efforts to reconcile the demands of their work, their role as breadwinners and their functions within the family, the author does a very good job indeed of presenting the infinite variety of hardships faced by men in taking care and charge of their families. The volume draws on an array of historical evidence—diaries and letters, census figures, advice columns, real wages and migratory patterns, “expert” proclamations of the moment, manifest legal and political documents. Bringing the trends, attitudes and facts of life revealed in these archival remnants vividly to life, Griswold recreates for his readers the changing and often harsh realities of men's attempts to parent their children during the past two centuries while negotiating economic, political, and familial systems increasingly inimical to their paternal prerogatives. The book offers up scenes of farming fathers trying to keep their children on the land in the face of industrialization and the mushrooming of American cities; of