Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power, Augustine Sedgewick’s new dad book about dads, is a cleared-eyed look at a fuzzy idea. In Sedgewick’s telling, fatherhood is a deeply felt personal relationship and a process through which men and children come to accept ideas – some smart, some absolutely ridiculous – about what they should expect from themselves and from the world. Unlike most bullshit parenting books, it suggests that “domestic labor” occurs takes place in a historical context as well as the context of love.
Those ideas shift frequently and Sedgewick describes the feeling that leak through the cracks that result. There’s joy and love, sure, but also resentment, confusion, and that sullen anxiety prosperous dads pass to their desperately overachieving, CBT-dependent children.
Upper Middle spoke to Sedgewick by phone. The interview has been editing for length and clarity.
The idea of ‘The Breadwinner’ is core to our understanding of fatherhood, but you argue in the book it’s a relatively new concept that papers over the fact even successful modern fathers cannot guarantee outcomes for their children. What does it mean to win bread?
When we talking about the economic aspect of fatherhood, we're generally talking about the ability to provide. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, fathers provided for their families mostly through heritable things – land, status, or skills – passed down generation to generation. With the emergence of industrial wage work, the value of agricultural real estate and many skills collapsed at the same time status was disrupted. The value fathers had to children collapsed.
‘The Breadwinner’ emerged as an identity at the beginning of the 19th century in England. Bread is not something that can be passed down so with the identity comes the constant need to go out and get – and thus the threat of failure. The idea of being a breadwinner is paired with the fear of being a loser, which never goes away.
As you describe it, that anxiety comes to define the role of wage-earning fathers who aren’t in a position to pass down concrete skills or fruitful pastures. Why did even well-educated, kinda tweedy Americans – you give Ralph Waldo Emerson as an example – get obsessed with toughness?
Emerson received a great inheritance from his first wife's family, but the path there was not easy and he feared his son was going to have to cross the same ground. And, look, Emerson was not a stupid man. He was right. In the early 19th century, there was a cycle of booms and busts. Emerson accepted the idea that no fortune was safe – an idea we all kind of accept – because it wasn’t. He wanted to toughen his kid up because he knew what he didn’t know.
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