Introduction

As sociologists engage more with the diversity and complexity of fathers, fathering and fatherhood exciting possibilities appear to be emerging for future research.

This chapter explores key themes in a journey from the rigidity of role models to contemporary work around intimacy, the ‘meaning’ of children, the body, and feminist and pro-feminist work particularly in relation to masculinities. The latter highlights how crucial it is that individual practices by men as fathers, including the kinds of knowledge they draw on, are located within wider social relations.

The ‘role’ of the father

European sociology had its origins in the social upheavals and intellectual aspirations of the 19th century with its foundation as a discipline usually attributed to Comte (Marsh et al, 1996). His establishment of the Positivist Society in 1848 was rooted in his concern to search for order and progress. Like psychology, sociology was formed in a period where the superiority of the methods used by the natural sciences was accepted and it was hoped that such methods could also be used to study the social world. Furthermore, like psychology, sociology has been, and continues to be, a broad church. However, most of what is taught today is at a considerable remove from concerns with measurement and testing, unlike psychology. Therefore it has not been judged necessary to explore its very early history, as has been done with the subjects in previous chapters.

The concept of role is one of several that have a dual origin in sociology and psychology, as we saw in the last chapter (Rogers and Rogers, 2001). Sex role research generally has its origins in 19th-century debates about differences between the sexes (Connell, 1995). In a project founded on resistance to demands by women for emancipation, a ‘scientific’ doctrine of innate sex differences stimulated research into such differences. This gave way to sex role research. The use of the concept of ‘role’ provided a way of linking the idea of a place in the social structure with the idea of cultural norms. This work dated from the 1930s and, through the efforts of anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists, the concept had, by the end of the 1950s, become a key term in the social sciences.