After examining the ideological movements and conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries—the French Revolution, socialism, feminism, communism, and fascism—Wyndham Lewis concluded:  “The male, the Father, is, in all these revolutions, the enemy.  It is he that has been cast to represent authority.  Therefore in modern revolutionary Europe, it was he, the male head-of-family, who has been aimed at in every insurrection.  The break-up of the Family…must begin and end with the eclipse of the Father principle."^[1]

CHRISTIAN PATERNITY

The details have been different, but the main themes the same, here in America.  So, in order to understand the contemporary position of fatherhood in America, it is necessary briefly to review the history of paternity in Christendom.  In pre-Christian Europe, the Roman household regularly included several generations of one family, along with servants.  But it was always the father who exercised absolute authority as head of household.  Indeed, as a kind of small-scale absolute monarch, he held in his hands the power of life and death.  As two historians have explained:

A new recruit to the household, whether a newborn infant, a bride, or a new servant or slave, had to gain the formal acceptance of the pater familias.  The newborn was laid before him; if he picked it up, it was admitted into the family and given a name; if not, it was ‘exposed,’ that is, abandoned with the chance that it might be rescued.^[2]

The exercise of “choice,” if you will, was in the father’s hands.

The spread of Christianity into the Roman empire altered some aspects of this patriarchal system, and strengthened others.  On the one hand, wherever the powerful voice of the Christian church could be heard, infants no longer lived or died at the decision and mercy of their fathers.  On the other hand, Jesus forcefully introduced the language of Father and Son into our understanding of the nature of God, and of God’s love.  Moreover, the New Testament affirmed the authority of loving Christian fathers over their wives and children.  As Paul wrote in Ephesians 5 and 6:

Wives, submit yourselves under your own husbands, as unto the Lord.  For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church….Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church, and gave himself for it….and ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath; but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

At the same time, though, this paternal authority was bonded by Scripture to the obligation to support the household.  As Paul wrote to Timothy (1 Tim. 5:8):

If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.

Fifteen hundred years later, Martin Luther emphasized the doctrines of marriage and fatherhood.  Luther criticized adult celibacy and the monastic orders as unbiblical, seeing them as ways in which both men and women sought to escape their obligation to marry and rear children.  In a lengthy letter addressed to the celibate Knights of the Teutonic Order, Luther stressed that marriage was not a secondary, inferior state for men, but rather the highest of estates, “the real religious order on earth,” divinely established and “pleasing to God and precious in his sight.”  Moreover, Luther said that the decision to have children was more than an option.  Rather, God’s words in Genesis 1:28, “Be fruitful and multiply,” were “a divine ordinance which it is not our prerogative to hinder or ignore.”  Luther’s own marriage to Katharine von Bora, and the leadership and attention given to his own household, served as the example for the generations of Protestant patriarchs which followed.  Importantly, he called not only for paternal leadership of the family, but also for attention by fathers to practical, daily duties.  As Luther wrote, in a tender passage:  “God, with all his angels, smiles upon the father who washes the baby’s diapers, because he does so in Christian faith."^[3] 

Over the following centuries, Protestant Christianity was a home-centered religion.  This was particularly true in North America, beginning with the Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay colonies of the 17th century.  For over 200 years, daily family prayer, Bible reading, and the religious training of children and servants were central activities for Americans, with the father in the informal role of domestic priest and family prophet.  This understanding carried well into the 19th century.  As the Rev. John Power explained in his 1854 book, Discourse on Domestic Piety and Family Government, the family should be viewed as a miniature Christian empire, over which the father ruled by Divine appointment.^[4]  The Ladies Depository, a popular women’s magazine from the 1870’s, declared that the father served “as priest of the family,” the mediator with God who presented a family’s prayers to Heaven, and so became “the crowning glory of domestic piety and devotion.”  As prophet, moreover, the father made religious statements and offered biblical interpretations to his family and expected their obedience.

Theological developments in the nineteenth century intensified Roman Catholic consideration of the family, with notable effects in America.  Proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 was followed within four years by reported appearances of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes and in 1879 of Mary, Saint Joseph, and Saint John in County Mayo, Ireland.  Devotion to Mary and the use of the rosary increased during this period, particularly among women who empathized with the healing and nurturing roles of the Blessed Mother.  In the encyclical Fidentem piumque animum (1896), Pope Leo XIII urged whole families to say the rosary together, which represented a new form of home-centered Catholic activity.  Quamquam pluries (1889) enhanced devotion to Saint Joseph, and in 1893, Leo designated special indulgences for those who prayed before the image of the Holy Family.

Papal pronouncements on the role of the family in society also made their marked appearance.  In a series of encyclicals, Leo XIII tied more closely the health of the family to the safety of the modern world.  He affirmed "the natural and primeval right of marriage" and "the society of the household" as the proper foundations for social and economic theory in the new, industrializing age.^[5]  Although the Church did not establish an ideal family size, large families were viewed as signs of fidelity to Church doctrines prohibiting the restriction of births and were praised from the pulpit and in print.  By way of contrast, small families or childlessness were labeled as "sad," "incomplete," or "tragic."

Mid-nineteenth century Catholic writers in America embraced these themes, labeling the family "the nursery of the nation" and the source of virtuous citizens.  Home, they said, was a sample of "the joys of Heaven," the spot where angels find a resting place," a "sweet image of God's home on high."  Monsignor Maurice de Hulst saw the family replicating the Trinity:  "The majesty of the heavenly Father has descended upon the head of the family circle; the beauty of the mother is illuminated by the splendor of the Son; and love, the work of the Holy Spirit, unites the father and mother, and brings forth the fruit that will cement their union."  The Catholic mother became a "home hero," a woman "cloistered in her home," a "priestess of the domestic shrine" who "cultivates religion in her family and instructs her children in its truths."  Private chapels, oratories, and religious lithographs also found their way into Catholic homes.  Some enthusiastic Catholic writers passed beyond the bounds of orthodoxy and elevated the family above the Church, seeing the former as a vehicle effecting salvation and the latter as a structure primarily designed "to secure the existence, the honor, and the happiness of every home."^[6]

THE REAL AMERICA

For all their differences, Catholics and Protestants agreed on paternal authority, and its strong presence during America’s first century meant strong families.     Nevertheless, some recent historians have claimed that the family was always weak in America; that, in contrast to Europe, we’ve always been a nation of individualists, without meaningful ties to family and community.  If one looks only at our 20th century, that argument is fairly strong:  our epidemics of divorce, illegitimacy, and abortion, and the nation’s low birthrate, suggest a mass defection from family life.  However, if we look at America in another time—from 1780 to the mid-19th century, when our Constitution was written and the American Republic formed—then we see a very different picture of American family life, and of the father’s place in the family.

The American family system in this critical time period is exhibits five qualities:

• The first quality was the dominance of the family economy.  In the family system of this era, most Americans organized their economic lives around the home.  It is important to note that about 90 percent of Americans lived on farms.  Even those who lived in towns and villages made most of their own goods, from candles to clothing.  Fathers enjoyed the legal possession of property and custody of children and counted their own offspring as part of the family enterprise.  In turn, adults were dependent on the children for support in old age.  In this home-centered economy, men and women performed different, although mutually necessary, tasks focused on the survival of the household as both a biological and an economic unit.^[7]

• The second quality of traditional American social life was the power of religious communities and kin over the family.  Loyalties to extended families—to grandparents, to uncles, to cousins—remained strong, as did the sense of community provided by churches.  In both cases, leadership by fathers was unquestioned: these elders ruled, in town halls, on vestry councils, and among extended families.^[8]

• The third quality of American social life was the importance of land and the desire to pass family property on to the next generation.  In a study of eastern Pennsylvania, for example, one historian found a population committed to the creation of families and the rearing of children as “tender plants growing in the Truth.”  Fathers aimed at acquiring productive property—above all land—not as a speculative venture, but as the necessary foundation for the Godly home, and for the preservation and security of their posterity.^[9]

• The fourth quality of American social life was the abundance of children.  America, in 1800, was a land swarming with children.  One half of the population was age 15 or under, a situation seen today only in a few high-fertility lands such as Kenya.  The average American woman of that time bore more than seven children.  Fathers counted their blessings in healthy sons and daughters.^[10]

• The fifth quality of traditional American social life was the power of intergenerational bonds.  Under the general authority of fathers, duties and rights crisscrossed the generations and the sexes, as the family unit strove to perpetuate the line and the family name.  The family unit set constraints upon individuals, and bound them both to the past and to the future.^[11]

STATE AND FACTORY vs. FATHER

But in the mid-19th century, a series of assaults on the meaning of fatherhood and of manhood commenced.  And the authority of the father—both secular and religious—began a retreat, symbolically completed with the Supreme Court’s abortion decisions in the mid-1970’s.

The first major challenge to the position of the father was economic in nature:  the rise of the factory system, or industrialization.  In the beginning, the application of industrial measures—including the rational management of resources, production for market sale, and the use of the division of labor—remained in the home, and under the father’s coordination and control.  Household manufacture, in areas such as weaving, dominated the new system from 1800 to 1840, preserving to some degree the economic unity of the family.

Yet as the central factory grew in importance, the family economy faltered, with vast consequences.  As wages paid by third parties grew more common, sons grew less dependent on their fathers as teachers of a trade, and fathers less dependent on their sons.  Parents—both men and women—were lured away from the home to earn their livings and the status of children grew precarious.  The production of goods in the home quickly vanished, leaving families to function only as consumers.^[12]

Legal changes in the mid-19th century further altered fathers’ authority and responsibility.  An 1839 Pennsylvania court decision created a new doctrine in American law called parens patriae, or “the parenthood of the state.”  Declaring it legal for state reform schools to take children from their parents if the former were deemed “delinquent” or “neglected,” the court for the first time judged the government’s power over children to be superior to, and prior to, that of fathers.^[13]  Several decades later, another ancient aspect of Anglo-American jurisprudence fell by the wayside, as child-custody laws were altered.  For centuries, common-law principle had given preference to the father.  As the American legal scholar James Kent explained in the 1820’s, “The Father (and on his death, the mother) is generally entitled to the custody of the infant children, in as much as they are their natural protectors, for maintenance and education.”^[14]  The 1859 Constitution for the state of Kansas set a new model, rapidly adopted elsewhere, requiring the legislature to provide “for the protection of the rights of women…[including] their equal rights in the possession of their children.”  By the early 20th century, however, custody awards commonly went to the mothers involved, marking the complete reversal of the old rule and a denial of fathers as the “natural protectors” of children.

Compulsory school-attendance laws were another 19th-century tool used to strip the rights of parenthood in general, and fatherhood in particular.  Public-school advocates mocked concern about “the sacred rights and personal privileges” of parents who kept their children at home.  As one educator wrote:  “Those who deny the right of the State to compel the parent to send his child to school are too frequently the offending parents themselves, sentimental theorists, or vacillating politicians.”^[15]  It is interesting to note that state court decisions in the late 19th century approving compulsory school-attendance laws referred with admiration to new U.S. Supreme Court interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment, particularly the new view of law as “a progressive science,” which must always alter a settled principle with a liberal interpretation that would meet “advancing and changing conditions.”  The same legal principle would later be used to undermine fathers’ rights in abortion.

Actions in the early 20th century further stripped the control exercised by fathers over their children.  The press for a Federal child-labor law, for example, rested on the conscious repudiation of states’ rights, parental rights, and the family-centered economy.  Other actions further advanced the attack on the “father principle.”  The old-age benefits portion of the Social Security system socialized the insurance value of children, subverting the power and authority of fathers.  Indeed, it is no coincidence that the U.S. Supreme Court decision validating the Social Security system rested on an appeal to the parens patriae, the parenthood of the state, as superior to the parenthood of fathers and mothers, and the bonds of kin.^[16]

The federal welfare system, resting on the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, tore men away from affected households.  Over time, AFDC created a rival “mother-state-child family” system, discouraging young men from marrying and supporting children.

RELIGIOUS DRIFT

The religious aspect of fatherhood has also suffered.  In the late 19th century, as men moved into factories and offices, their role as religious leader declined.  Paternal leadership of Bible study and prayer became increasingly rare, and mothers—by default—commonly became the religious leaders in the home. Christianity, in general, became less muscular, more feminized.

In this century, the theological drift of many Protestant churches has compounded the problem.  Attacks by progressive theologians on so-called “paternal tyranny” and “masculine language and imagery” have been common, as have portrayals of the home and family as institutions in decline.  Luther’s model of the loving Christian patriarch fell into disfavor; so too, his stridently pro-natalist or pro-birth sentiments, replaced by the contraceptive mentality.

The treatment of fatherhood in the recent abortion debate falls in line with this long, continuous assault.  When the pro-abortion movement began to win changes in some state abortion laws in the late 1960’s, paternal rights were usually protected. That is, while women gained greater access to abortion, a husband’s prior consent was commonly required.

But the U.S. Supreme Court was also crafting its new privacy doctrine, with important implications for the legal status of fathers.  In 1965, when the court first discovered the “right to privacy” in the shadows of the Constitution, it placed this right within the context of marriage.  As Justice Blackmun explained in the Court’s opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut:

Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.  It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects.

This decision, which struck down a Connecticut law prohibiting the distribution of contraceptives, appealed to the “privacy surrounding the marriage relationship” as its sustaining logic.

Yet in 1972, the Court scuttled marriage as something enjoying constitutional protection.  Writing for the majority in the case Eisenstadt v. Baird, Justice Brennan declared:

It is true that in Griswold the right of privacy in question inhered in the marital relationship.  Yet the marital couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional makeup.  If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.

In short, the right to privacy now denied that marriage was important, and theoretically separated fathers from mothers, and husbands from wives, on matters involving the birth of children.

In its Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, the Supreme Court used this understanding to maintain that a woman’s freedom to have an abortion was a “fundamental right” protected by the Constitution against state interference.  No direct attention to the father’s role was given, so the state of Missouri crafted a law providing that no abortion could be performed prior to the end of the first 12 weeks of pregnancy except with the written consent of the woman’s husband.

The law was challenged, and Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth, Attorney General of Missouri reached the Supreme Court in 1976.  In a split decision, the Court struck down the Missouri law.  Writing for the majority, Justice Blackmun explained:

Clearly, since the State cannot regulate or proscribe abortion during the first stage, when the physician and patient make that decision, the State cannot delegate authority to any particular person, even the spouse, to prevent abortion during the same period.

In effect, the Court said that husbands could only have a right to their child as a derivative right; that is, one granted by the State.  At another level, the Court also reasoned that the mother’s right to destroy a child was superior to the father’s right to protect it.  As Justice White argued in his stirring dissent:

It is truly surprising that the majority finds in the United States Constitution, as it must in order to justify the result it reaches, a rule that the State must assign a greater value to a mother’s decision to cut off a potential human life by abortion than to a father’s decision to let it mature into a live child.

The logic of the Danforth decision was chilling:  on the question of abortion, the father is irrelevant, with no more enforceable legal interest in his baby than a stranger from Mars; marriage is similarly irrelevant, a social institution without legal standing in matters of procreation and birth.  With the Roe and Danforth decisions, American fathers were finally and fully stripped of the last shred of real authority in matters of procreation.  The “choice” of infant life or death, once held by the Roman pater familias, had, after 1800 years, re-emerged, but this time granted to the mother.  In a cultural and legal sense, Christian fatherhood had failed.

WHO IS TO BLAME?

Now the odd thing, the mysterious thing, about the deconstruction of fatherhood in America is this:  None of these changes was the result of decisions made by groups of powerful women, nor by space aliens, nor by any other outside force.  These successive surrenders of paternal authority were all proposed and implemented by groups of men—most of them probably fathers. 

How might we explain this willing participation by men in the assault on the fatherhood principle?  The standard explanation focuses on a changing definition of justice, where the egalitarian premise won out over historical structures now seen as unjust.  But this is surely a confusion of effect with cause.  The latter lies elsewhere.

At one level, Wyndham Lewis was right.  The “Father principle,” and the patriarchal family it enveloped, was the only true rival facing the modernist ideologies of the last two centuries, and their consequences the modern state.  As ambitious men sought power through these new vehicles, they readily sacrificed their small household domains for the chance to rule the masses.  They knew, as well, an elite’s scorn toward the body of the people:  how we, the rulers, live is important; how others live is merely an issue of prudence and control.

Yet other forces were also at work.  Many men accepted the new order because it gave them something they thought they wanted:  freedom from responsibility.  To be a father, a husbandman, a head of household were and are difficult tasks.  To carry the burden of protecting others, of insuring their survival and education, of defense of lands and possessions:  these bear enormous risks and exact physical and spiritual tolls.  Liberty rests on this exaction:  hence, the allure of the servile state, where one tosses off these burdens in exchange for security and protection.  Men have willingly participated in this surrender, turning over possessions, wives, and children to the ministrations of the corporate state.  Even the sentimentalized elevation of motherhood in the 19th century might be explained by the self-abjuration of fatherhood:  a readiness to let women take on the duties that had naturally fallen to men a broad escape from responsibility.

So what might be done?  How might males once again become men and fathers, worthy of the name?  The task does not begin with legal or public policy changes.  Existing statutes are mere echoes of the spiritual and moral decay that set in, beginning nearly two centuries ago.  Rather, any change must begin within those realms again.  Men must first return home.  They must reclaim their roles as moral and religious teachers.  They must reclaim the art of husbandry.  They must accept their natural responsibilities.

Biblical prophecy speaks of the alternative in the closing verses of the book of Malachi:

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord:  And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.

Endnotes