Preliminary Programme

The focus of this paper is to explore the changing expectations of paternal responsibility upon fathers of illegitimate children under the Old and the New Poor Law in England in the first half of the nineteenth century. Under the Old Poor Law, legislation placed the onus of responsibility for the care and maintenance of illegitimate children upon both the mother and the father, the latter being held to account through a system that enforced maintenance or 'affiliation' payments from absent fathers. This system worked with varying degrees of success across the English regions, yet in 1834 the Poor Law Commissioners roundly condemned it as failing. In consequence, under the New Poor Law, responsibility for the care of illegitimate children was thrust almost entirely upon the mother.
Drawing upon evidence from both legislative and parochial sources, this paper highlights the divergence of views between centralised legislators, who perceived a moral imperative in reducing the incidence of unmarried parenthood, and parish officials, who were faced with the actualities of administering relief to unmarried mothers and children. Parochial officials desired not a diminution in expectations of paternal responsibility, but greater powers to enforce it. In short, the paper suggests that understanding paternity in nineteenth-century England cannot
be a question of only looking at fathers within families: notions of fatherhood were also shaped by expectations of the rights and duties of absent fathers. (Show less)

This paper investigates the construction of the paternal role in a range of writings by working women in England and Scotland in the 1860s, much of it prescriptive in tone. Working women have rarely been examined as the purveyors of familial ideology, the making of which has been associated predominantly with the nineteenth-century middle class and its espousal of domesticity. In recent years attention has been paid to the ways in which working-class men adopted the ‘separate spheres’ ideal to secure their industrial authority as breadwinners and their political enfranchisement as heads of household. The paternal aspects of these roles were emphasized repeatedly by the exponents of manhood suffrage and the Reform Act of 1867 has been read as conferring the rights of citizenship on resident householders as family men. While the Act seems to have confirmed the political authority of fatherhood, in its aftermath the rights and duties of paternity became the subjects of even closer public scrutiny, especially in relation to the campaigns for women’s suffrage and for the abolition of the Contagious Diseases Acts. These debates might be seen as heralding the ‘end of paternal deference’ and the masculine ‘flight from domesticity’ that John Tosh has detected in last three decades of the nineteenth century.
In the light of the growing uncertainty about the place of the father, it is remarkable that the women examined in this paper, all acknowledged his role as ‘head of the family’ and insisted on the observation of both wifely and daughterly duties but this did not preclude necessarily a commitment to women’s rights. Indeed, the father represented for some of these writers an exemplary model for their own political, religious or creative independence and integrity. Importantly, their understanding of the reciprocal rights and duties of family members was grounded in their own familial experience in which women were seen as vital contributors to the household economy and this informed their construction of a distinctive model of working-class domesticity. The paper compares the writers’ representation of the paternal role in political, improvement and Christian literature with autobiographical depictions of their own relationship to fathers as daughters and mothers. While their autobiographical reflections idealize the good father and mourn his absence, they also betray the frustrations and tensions involved in deferring to paternal authority. Their writings signal therefore, neither the end of paternal deference, nor the flight from domesticity, but rather the desire to reconstitute and regenerate the productive, dutiful and nurturing Christian family. (Show less)

Analyses of working-class cultures of death have notoriously fixed upon burial rather than bereavement, notably the juxtaposition between pauper and respectable burial. Explorations of grief are noticeable by their absence. Where the impact of death upon families has been considered, it has focused overwhelmingly on the death of a male breadwinner and the material consequences for the widow and her children.

This paper shifts analysis to consider the gendering of grief in working-class families. In particular, it explores the experiences of widowed men and bereft fathers. Contrary to Carl Chinn's assertion that families rarely survived intact following the death of a mother, I argue that working-class fathers often struggled to fulfil roles of breadwinner, carer, and house 'wife' in a bid to keep their families intact. Likewise, this paper shifts the focus of analysis away from a pre-occupation with the material benefits of infant mortality ('one less mouth to feed') to suggest that working-class fathers frequently took an active role in caring for sick children and that they grieved when they died. This is not to detract from the role of mothers in nursing sick offspring, but, rather, to draw out the complexities of how grief and loss are articulated and, significantly, how we read them. (Show less)

The aim of this paper is to explore the masculine role in the eighteenth
century
Brazilian family. The historiography has shown that Brazil had an unusual
household structure, with a large proportion of female breadwinners,
reaching nearly 50% in some regions of the country. At the same time, there
was a tradition of strong patriarchs holding the power in the household. In
an attempt to understand the
functioning of this apparently dual society, this work will present an
analysis of both the "Codigos Phillipino" (colonial right codes) and the
Nominative Lists of Inhabitants and parochial registers. The study of these
sources will allow a comparison between the legal norms and the social
practices in this apparently contradictory society. (Show less)