Child-rearing, said the German socialist leader Clara Zetkin in 1906, “must not just be the work of mothers, but the common work of parents.”99 But in the writings of feminists of the prewar era, such positive views of the father’s role were few. Indeed, campaigners for the legal right of mothers to control their children often painted a dismal picture of the father as a remote, uncomprehending, drunken, or abusive figure. Utopian fantasies of heroic single mothers and matriarchal communities conveyed the message that children flourished in the absence of their fathers. Interwar feminists shifted their support to the egalitarian married couple and the cooperative two — parent family. But if he was no longer an authoritarian patriarch, how did the father fit into this new family unit?
During this era, the paternal role evolved in response to long-term changes in family structure. With the transformation of independent craftsmen and farmers into wage-earning employees, fathers no longer controlled their children’s labor power. The shortening of workdays and the provision by many employers of paid vacations—a new policy during this period—gave fathers more time and opportunity to interact with their children. And the domestic servants upon whom middle — and upper-class mothers had depended were now much less available. All of these changes created conditions in which the erstwhile patriarch could become a parent.
But feminist educators insisted that fathers must be educated to assume this new role. And the first lesson must focus on discipline in general, and corporal punishment in particular. “It is hard to believe that one still has to campaign against the beating of children,” wrote Schreiber, “but surveys show that this is still the most popular educational method, because it is the easiest.”100 Dora Russell regretted that the typical father was “a symbol of money and power rather than love,” who was known to his children only as “someone who comes home only for a short time and then is either tired and cross or else full of loving indulgence.” And though men were “responsible for this state of affairs,” she believed that it was often “harder upon them than it is upon their children.”101 Popular psychological theories admonished parents that harsh discipline often motivated antisocial behavior, but that reasonable treatment encouraged confidence, self-esteem, and independence.102
When appropriately exercised, paternal authority was presented as a necessary corrective to the flaws and shortcomings of mothers. Fatherless families now acquired a negative image. Single mothers, said the British socialist Margaret Cole, tended to “so exaggerate their function of protective love that the child cannot get loose or grow up at all.”103
Psychologists held up the more distanced and objective masculine style as the best antidote to excessive motherliness. According to Freud, a shift in orientation from maternal nurture to paternal authority was a necessary stage in the growth of both boys and girls. One of Madeleine Vernet’s correspondents remarked that parenthood should be a “happy collaboration” in which the mother’s indulgence was balanced by the father’s “firmer authority and clearer sense of purpose.”104 Dora Russell likewise called on fathers to save children from maternal overprotection. The mother, she said “wants her child for herself just as long as she can have him. . . . Fathers, from the fact of their longer absences, are not so intimately tangled with their children. They see them more as the outsider sees them, and judges them more objectively.”105
Most theorists did not prescribe the fusion of parental roles, but rather a new division of parental labor. As shortened workdays and paid vacations made leisure and tourism available even to working-class people, the father became the leader of the family’s sports and recreational activities.106 And amid this era’s cult of health and physical vitality, this role acquired a high prestige. Adele Schreiber’s calendar for mothers was full of photographs of healthy, smiling, naked children enjoying beaches and woodlands with their fathers. “The healthy, tough, and enterprising child is usually also the intelligent child,” read the caption of a picture of a child frolicking in the ocean, “an earlier era encouraged an indoor life and torpid passivity; today we recognize the value of balanced training of body and mind, and especially for girls.”107
Recreation could have an educational purpose; Schreiber admonished the father to be “a laughing teacher, a sunny educator. . . and as a comrade in sport and play, on walks through nature, in planting the garden.”108 In Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse, which told the story of a large family, the Ramseys, on vacation, Mr. Ramsey (though hardly “sunny”) embodied the same conception of the paternal role. By leading his children on an adventurous expedition to a lighthouse, Mr. Ramsey also (symbolically) led them out of the shelter of maternal love and into the more demanding adult world, a trip that required “above all, courage, truth and the power to endure.”109
Most feminist authors assumed that the father, however important his influence, would never replace the mother. “Even though, in modern society, the father may not have a good deal of time to bring up his offspring directly, the time which he does give and the attitude which he takes up can be of quite disproportionate effect,” wrote Margaret Cole.110 A few, however, contended that the sharing of parental responsibility would provide the basis for the emancipation of the mother to pursue professional or personal interests outside the home. In 1938, Alva Myrdal spoke to parents in a radio broadcast provocatively titled “The Forgotten Father.111 She believed that only the sharing of parental responsibility would “make children possible” for working women. “Greater participation by fathers in child care, greater willingness to take turns in awakening early in the morning and staying at home on recreational nights,” she suggested, “would certainly adjust parenthood much more easily into modern life.”112 But Alva Myrdal herself did not have such a partner; Sissela Bok wrote that Gunnar Myrdal “was the opposite of the fathers Alva called for in her talks about parenting.”113
Madeleine Vernet insisted that parental roles must be different—the father’s job was to provide material, and the mother’s to provide moral security. But some of her readers advocated a more flexible division of labor.114 “I must say, much to the credit of my companion,” wrote one correspondent, “that he has never been afraid of dressing or bathing Baby, in order to leave me free to attend to an occupation away from home.”115 “Why don’t fathers take part in the cares and responsibilities of parenthood?” asked another correspondent. “Why does he almost always leave the mother exhausted, worn out by pregnancy, childbirth, breast-feeding, and the total care of small children? This is another aberration of our double sexual morality!”116 Dora Russell asserted that parenthood must rest on “mutual cooperation,” and was confident that “men unhampered by masculine pride and women without foolish dignity or feminist bias [would] find all the arduous and trifling activities involved in this task both exciting and delicious.”117
Only a nonsexist approach to child-rearing and education could prepare the new generation for this momentous change in the gender division of labor. The first step, said feminist educators, was to involve children of both sexes in the same household chores. Schreiber observed that boys were often willing and adept participants in the domestic work that was usually loaded on girls, stunting their physical and educational development. “The full comradeship of the sexes in later life,” she added, “and the basis for a marriage of equal comrades can be built or destroyed by the child’s upbringing.”118 The school, too, was given a role in the teaching of gender equality. Feminists of this era generally supported school instruction in child-rearing for girls, and a few declared that boys, too, should take these courses. Vera Brittain regretted that “very little attention is given in girls’s schools to mothercraft, and none at all in boys’ schools to fathercraft.”119 And the American-born lawyer and birth-control activist Chrystal Eastman commented in the British feminist periodical Time and Tide that home economics should not be only for girls. “Why not welcome the idea of a compulsory course in Domestic Science, but insist that it be general for boys and girls alike? Those who like it, of either sex, can take it up as a trade. Those who do not like it (and this will be the vast majority of both boys and girls) will not be injured by having learned to take care of themselves. . . . And it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of such common training in freeing the women of generations to come.”120