Vintage Photos Show How Fatherhood Has Evolved in America

Before the industrialization of the US, and going back to the colonial period, fathers were seen as directly responsible for their children’s upbringing.

“If the children ‘went bad,’ it was blamed on the father,” Regina Morantz-Sanchez, a history professor at the University of Michigan, told the university.

This social standard meant fathers often took an active role in shaping a child. For many, especially in rural areas, this also meant training their children in skills needed to contribute to their communities, such as farming or hunting.

The rise in industrial jobs, which were predominantly taken up by men, led to a change in social dynamics, where fathers now faced the financial responsibility of feeding their families, leading to the rise of the “breadwinner” trope.

“The new economic structure separated the home and the workplace, which led to a new fatherly ideal,” Morantz-Sanchez said. “The men became the breadwinners, and the women stayed at home. This took child-rearing out of the traditional male role.”

Although it didn’t become a national holiday until 1972, Father’s Day was first marked in the early 1900s. It began being more widely celebrated in the 1920s after the Great Depression, a time when many men spent long hours away from their families, while other men had faced the challenges of losing their jobs.

The Great Depression also promoted Father’s Day as a gifting holiday, as reported by the Old Farmer’s Almanac, as this helped stimulate the economy.

As World War II escalated in Europe by 1940, America implemented a draft that, initially, didn’t include married men, leading to a “marriage boom,” as reported by the Oregon Secretary of State.

By 1943, fathers became eligible for the draft, and many men had to leave their families as they went off to war, continuing a trend of absent fatherhood in American society, whether it was caused by economic dynamics or, in this instance, a draft.

After WW2, when women largely joined the workforce, working mothers became a more familiar concept for American society. By the 1960s, more married women worked than ever before in American history, as reported by PBS. Having two working parents became more typical, and with that came a heavier burden on housework and childcare.

While mothers continued to serve as the main caregivers even while working themselves, some men began “helping” mothers, as reported in a 2009 report from the National Council on Family Relations.

A new type of fatherhood began to emerge in the 1970s as men took on more of a nurturing role in their children’s upbringing. This new archetype, named “the new nurturant father” at the time, as noted in a Cornell University study, was used to describe fathers who, although still serving as the main breadwinner of the house, also took on an active role in the emotional development of their children.

Part of this came as a response to a rise in absent fathers after no-fault divorce began being legalized by 1969, which drew much criticism from the growing feminist movement as well as scrutiny from the psychological community.

It was a time of shifting attitudes toward parenting, as feminists highlighted the invisible labor traditionally done by mothers, and as fathering researchers studied the effects of emotional detachment from absent fathers on both the children and the fathers themselves.

A movement for “new fatherhood” began emerging in the 1980s as fathers continued to become more involved in their children’s lives, as reported by Psychology Today.

Between 2003 and 2006, the rate of stay-at-home dads increased by 50%, as reported by the American Psychological Association. This aligned with the rise in women’s wages, along with a growing sentiment of not wanting someone else to raise their children, per APA.

Despite their growing presence in childcare, stay-at-home dads also reported feeling isolated from other stay-at-home parents, who were predominantly women.

While rates of stay-at-home dads have fluctuated over the past 50 years, they have consistently increased during periods of high unemployment, per the Pew Research Center. After the 2008 financial crisis, many men stayed at home and provided childcare for their children.

“In the aftermath of the Great Recession, we saw the share of all stay-at-home parents go up by several percentage points to about 29%,” Pew Research Center’s director of social trends research, Kim Parker, told CNBC in 2021.

Still, the rates of stay-at-home have remained low — around 7% in 2021 — and their reasons to stay home differ from stay-at-home moms, with more men staying at home because of disability, retirement, inability to find a job, or going to school, according to the Pew Research Center.

As people left the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic, many men were presented with the opportunity to stay home with their children. As many as 7 million men between 25 and 54 did not return to the workforce after the pandemic, as reported by The Spectator.

Today, per The New York Times, fathers spend more time with their children than previous generations, and parenting trends continue to shift toward a more balanced version of parenthood, where mothers and fathers share more of the responsibilities and joys of raising a child.