FRAGMENTING FATHERHOOD – A SOCIO‐LEGAL STUDY by RICHARD COLLIER AND SALLY SHELDON

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2009.00475.x
Published date01 September 2009
Date01 September 2009
FRAGMENTING FATHERHOOD ± A SOCIO-LEGAL STUDY by
RICHARD COLLIER AND SALLY SHELDON,
(Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2008, 274 pp., £30.00)
There was a time back in the twentieth century when the popular view of
the `good father' was a married man who in peacetime lived an honest
and industrious life in order to carry out his obligation to obtain wife and
children and who in war time enlisted to serve King and country while the
state maintained the family. A `bad father' was one who neglected his
family, indulged in domestic violence, drank heavily, and often gambled
away the wage packet or social security money: a man who generally
lived a disreputable life. These simplified stereotypical images charac-
terized the two sides of the patriarchal family and were particularly
ascribed to those from the poor and labouring classes. Even today they
continue to exert a powerful hold on social reformers ± child savers,
familists, and feminists alike ± and have served to shape much family and
social security law.
But while amongst older generations mythic images of traditional
fatherhood in the marital family remain strong, in post-modern Britain they
are crumbling and fragmenting under the influence of rapid, cultural,
economic, and demographic change and associated social values. The
developing economic emancipation and education of women and the virtual
disappearance of the notion of the male breadwinner is one set of factors.
Another is the growing popularity of cohabitation and the positive part
played in children's lives by many thousands of unmarried fathers offering
them tenderness, warmth, and empathy. While fifty years ago behavioural
scientists such as John Bowlby, Melanie Klein, and Donald Winnicot
stressed the importance of the mother/child bond, today developmental
psychologists increasingly focus on the psychological importance for the
child of an affectionate stable parental partnership. Moreover, the concept of
father in modern times is increasingly being extended to families created by
assisted reproduction. The practice of donor insemination, in particular,
raises tricky moral and legal issues concerning, on the one hand, respect for
the donor's wish for anonymity and, on the other, the child's right to know
the identity of its biological father.
Given the rapidity of social change and the many interdisciplinary aspects
of fatherhood, the task of bringing a diverse mass of relevant material from
law, social policy, and social history into a single focus was inevitably
challenging and ambitious. On this score alone, Richard Collier and Sally
Sheldon, respectively law professors at the Universities of Newcastle and
Kent, are to be congratulated. They adopt a largely social constructionist
approach in considering modern fatherhood in a number of different
contexts. This they see as fragmenting the traditional concept. Yet one could
equally say that it is merely widening its scope and redefining it. In their
social analysis, the authors draw heavily on sociological literature concepts
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ß2009 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2009 Cardiff University Law School

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