Fatherhood by Augustine Sedgewick: Daddies not so cool...

This is the first time, in a longish reviewing career, that I have been given a book to review on the same subject as a book I have written myself, and what’s more, with the same title as the one I had written myself.

My own Fatherhood: The Truth, a guide to early childcare with jokes, came out in 2005, has sold 80,000 copies (my biggest seller) and is still in print. This Fatherhood is an altogether more serious volume.

Augustine Sedgewick, with a name like that, could only be a historian, and he has delved into the distant past to write about how the great and the good related to fatherhood, from ancient times to (nearly) the present day, from Aristotle and St Augustine to Thomas Jefferson, Sigmund Freud and Bob Dylan.

No one in this book has changed a nappy, or cooked a disgusting dinner of pasta shapes, as we mere mortals had to. (My own children are now 25 and 23, so those days are very much gone.)

Sedgewick begins with the American artist Norman Rockwell, who painted all those cosily domestic covers for the Saturday Evening Post. In real life, of course, his second wife was an alcoholic who killed herself, his first wife having divorced him, and nor was he much of a dad.

He ‘hid his private conflicts behind public images of fatherhood and family he could never live up to’. Sedgewick thinks we ‘need better shared stories about fatherhood’, for ‘without a deeper and more humane understanding of the role of men in the world, we will continue to struggle to know ourselves, one another, and the richest parts of our lives. The goal of this book is to find just that.’

For all these fine sentiments, I’m not sure Sedgewick’s book is really about fatherhood at all. It seems to me more a history of patriarchy, although maybe that’s not a word that sells books these days. It’s about how men came to be in charge, and how they came to stay in charge.

In Plato’s Athens, for instance, women were not eligible to govern. They were there to have babies. At a marriage ceremony, the father of the bride would announce to the groom, ‘I give you my daughter for the ploughing of legitimate children.’

This represented a commonplace view that ‘women were essentially soil in which men planted seed and cultivated produce’. Most of Sedgewick’s men seem to think the same way.

Sedgewick is, happily, an indefatigable researcher, who has unearthed many stories about these often terrible men, some of whose connections with fatherhood were at best peripheral. Both Plato and John Locke fathered no children at all, but that didn’t stop them both becoming widely read authorities on the whole business.

And the philosopher Rousseau and his partner conceived five children, all of whom he persuaded her to abandon at the door to a home for foundlings in Paris after their birth. Years later he tried to track them down but no trace of any could be found. I think he rather deserved that.