Cynthia Comacchio

'A Postscript for Father': Defining a New Fatherhood in Interwar Canada

During the interwar years, the rise of family experts saw the formation of a new ‘parenting partnership’ between mothers and childrearing advisers drawn from the ranks of medical professionals, psychologists, and social workers. Far from sharing their own authority with mothers, making parenting a more equitable shared experience, or elevating maternal authority over the traditional authority of the patriarch, the experts were determined to ‘manage’ and regulate women into their ideal of modern scientific motherhood. They believed that social disorder had opened a vacuum of authority in the nation’s homes that was manifesting itself in the decline of fatherhood, a process contributing to further disarray. Paradoxically, despite the predominance of men in the ranks of family experts and child welfare advocates, fathers were not encouraged to be active partners with their wives in raising their own children, a role coveted by the experts themselves. While they made a few listless attempts to advise fathers on fathering, there is little evidence in Canadian advisory sources of the period that they were also committed to defining ‘a new fatherhood.’ Yet their effect was precisely that, if almost entirely by default.

Tending the student body: youth, health and the modern university

others, such as deans of student life who began to lobby hard for educating the ‘whole student’. By use of this terminology, these new theorists argued that students in college were learning as much, if not more, outside the classroom as they were in. Newman grasped this concept long before his time but it created a new layer of friction between Newman and his superiors and at least some of his peers. At Oxford, such transgressions and errors in judgement were tolerated by the tutors and authorities. But unfortunately for Newman, such behaviour was seen as too ‘liberal’ and too great a challenge to those in authority in Dublin. The ‘making of men’ is a significant accomplishment. It provides both a strong intellectual history, delving deeply beneath the rhetoric and into the beliefs of a significant nineteenth-century cleric and educator, John Henry Newman. There is also a subtle institutional history that lies beneath the stories of Oxford and the emergent Catholic University in the mid-nineteenth century. As noted earlier, Paul Shrimpton has made good use of his access to a voluminous historical trove of archival data in Dublin as well as in Oxford, including private papers of Newman, Cullen and others. If there is a downside, it is in the assumptions made in constructing the book. If there were significant events in Newmans early life, we do not learn of them here. We skip over his childhood and find him enrolled at Oxford in a few, quick pages. Likewise, in the final chapters, Shrimpton trusts his own interpretations to gauge what Newman’s thoughts might have been. For example, he speculates with regard to coeducation (Newman would have been supportive of women’s education, but against coeducation in residence halls). Other projections seem a bit ‘beyond the pale’, but after such diligent and careful research we can forgive the author these stretches of credibility. The book is a very good read for those interested in Cardinal Newman and his challenges as a man before his time. At 587 pages, The ‘making of men’ is not for the faint-hearted but it reads well and provides a new perspective on the challenges of innovation and change in nineteenth-century England and a very sympathetic and insightful biography of Newman and his Idea of the university not found elsewhere.