Fatherhood A history of love and power

Augustine Sedgewick

Book - 2025

"A bold and original history of fatherhood, exploring its invention and transformation from the Bronze Age to the present through a collective portrait of emblematic fathers who have helped to define how the world should be ruled and what it means to be a man. Fatherhood is one of the most meaningful aspects of human culture, but we know little about when or where fatherhood first emerged, or even how or why. Despite its enigmatic beginnings, fatherhood has, for centuries, given shape to ideas about the world, defined human experiences, and provided the foundation of patriarchy. The history of fatherhood is not just the story of one of humanity's great values: caring for those who cannot care for themselves. And it is not merely t...he story of patriarchy--"the power of fathers"--which is arguably the oldest and most widespread form of social hierarchy and political oppression. It is the story of how these twin strands of history became so entangled that they are often indistinguishable. In Fatherhood, celebrated historian Augustine Sedgewick explains how this style of parenting emerged in the first place, why it has changed over time, and whether it will endure as we know it, despite its extraordinary costs. Told through the lives of emblematic fathers like Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Henry VIII, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud, this is an ambitious yet intimate look at how masculinity has evolved and how men have come to hold disproportionate power by expanding and reinforcing the power of fathers in times of crisis. Sedgewick, acclaimed for his "literary gifts and prodigious research" (The Atlantic), takes us from the Bronze Age to the present to revolutionize our understanding of fathers and challenge the fictions that have surrounded them for centuries. Fatherhood transforms our understanding of this fundamental idea, experience, and institution, allowing us to better know our past and re-envision our common future." -- Inside front cover texts.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Scribner [2025]
Language
English
Main Author
Augustine Sedgewick (author)
Edition
First Scribner hardcover edition
Physical Description
xi, 305 pages ; 20 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781668046296
9781668046302
Contents unavailable.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Fathers' role in upholding the social order and their struggles with unruly sons are probed in this winsome and erudite study of patriarchy. CUNY historian Sedgwick (Coffeeland) offers biographical sketches of famous dads and their children, from an ancient Sumerian named Shuruppag, who wrote a querulous, plaintive advice-tablet to his son--"The instructions of an old man are precious: you should comply with them!"--to Bob Dylan, who stoked rebellion in young people yet himself became, Sedgwick notes, a doting, apolitical paterfamilias rather like his own middle-class father. Along the way Sedgwick explores Aristotle's belief that the state rested on a foundation of fathers ruling over households, Thoreau's longing to escape from his father's Massachusetts pencil factory, and Charles Darwin's rapt study of his 10 children for insights on how they inherited traits from him. Sedgwick teases out the contradictions between patriarchy as a doctrine of benevolent control and its reality as a form of constraint and domination that often breeds resistance. He plays on these ironies in elegant, evocative prose, as in his analysis of Sigmund Freud's Oedipal complex ("From a child's perspective, Sigmund Freud's theories made it natural, even healthy, to despise your father. From a father's perspective, Freud made it normal, even good, to be hated"). It's a fresh and insightful meditation on the paternal dilemma. (May)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

From here to paternity. Sedgewick, the author of a history of coffee, scrutinizes the lives of thinkers, writers, and leaders in an effort to understand how fatherhood and paternalism have changed over time. This is a sharp yet limited book, focused almost exclusively "on Western culture because," for the past several thousand years, "the West has been the world's dominant patriarchal tradition." Mainly, Sedgewick's subjects "could now be described--though not simply or without ambivalence--as white dads." While some readers will consider this approach a nonstarter, the author is an undeniably talented prose stylist with estimable dot-connecting abilities. His throughline comes into view in the second chapter, which contrasts ideas held by his first chapter's subjects--ancient Greek philosophers--with those of Saint Augustine, whose framing of fatherhood is still important in Christianity: "As Augustine conceived it, Original Sin is a patrilineal legacy of evil--a vision radically opposed to Aristotle's idea that fathers were the origin of good." Augustine's "paternalistic logic" also stoked the Catholic church's epoch-shaping "call for salvation by force." Centuries later, Thomas Jefferson "manipulated fatherhood" for "personal and political" reasons, infamously declining to acknowledge that he had fathered children with an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, and, in a lesser-known act, labeling indigenous Americans "children" who should emulate white families. Likewise, racialized paternalism influenced outspoken abolitionist Henry David Thoreau's self-serving views on his family's pencil-making business, which relied on trees felled by enslaved people. For his part, Bob Dylan, who had a difficult relationship with his father, wrote songs that foregrounded "the emotional turmoil of the postwar white family" but said he sought a wife "who can cook and sew." Though constrained in its focus, this book engages in interesting ways with assumptions about fathers of nations, faiths, and families. An intelligent but circumscribed look at what it means to be a father. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.