| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 269 words from this article are provided below; about 490 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Shawn Johansen. Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America. New York: Routledge. 2001. Pp. xiii, 249. Cloth $80.00, paper $21.95.
Shawn Johansen offers a careful and compassionate portrait of the roles of middle-class fathers in mid-nineteenth-century United States families. Working from a rich documentary sample of one hundred men who became fathers sometime between 1800 and 1860, Johansen gently revises some prevailing historical ideas about the effects of industrialization on elaborating a new kind of middle-class family role distribution. Whereas earlier historians, including Barbara Welter and Mary P. Ryan, suggested that the industrial workplace marginalized the previously all-powerful father of the premodern patriarchy, leaving his wife at home to discipline and educate the children, Johansen paints a different family portrait of men and women negotiating to share power and authority.	1
It should be added that Johansen does not attempt to revise the feminist-inflected historiographical picture of a persistently patriarchal society. Instead his retouched portrait suggests a new explanation for the intractable dilemma of why, if women were training their children, the pattern of male dominance persisted through generations. We do not have to resort to concepts of hegemony alone, he writes, if we accept a picture of persistent paternal involvement in children's upbringing. Fathers could, and did, "teach children to respect and perpetuate gender divisions that benefited men" (p. 11). They also exerted significant control over women, and might through their paternal authority insist on a "certain kind of childrearing technique that women, who were the primary caregivers, would then be obligated to institute" (p. 12).	. . .

There are about 490 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.