Fatherhood in America: A History

Culminated from diaries, letters, magazines, surveys, and the transcripts of congressional hearings, this history of fatherhood in America traces the fundamental shift from nineteenth-century patriarch, a man whose position as breadwinner was more or less unquestioned, to the late-20th-century Dad, a man who now shares the breadwinning with his wife. The study argues that economic and social forces rooted in the Industrial Revolution have gradually nudged fathers from their central role in family life.