Fatherhood and the British Fathercraft Movement, 1919–39

Fathercraft and Fathers' Councils ‐ male adjuncts to Maternity and Infant Welfare Centres ‐ reacted to the maternal dominance in infant welfare and parenting in interwar Britain by arguing that fathers should play a crucial role in the upbringing of children. This article outlines how rigid ideas about the 'public' and 'private' spheres meant that education schemes for fathers had to be explicitly and recognisably 'masculine' and were often focused on public functions that reinforced a man's traditional function as a breadwinner and provider. Yet, at the core of the fathercraft message was the idea that these traditional functions were insufficient. Fathers, it was argued, should have an active and involved role in their children's lives and men could no longer adequately fulfil their duties from the margins of the family. However, within a culture that placed great emphasis on motherhood and gender differences, the idea of instructing men in parenting was fraught with contradiction, confusion and resistance. Fathercraft was one version of fatherhood that attempted to reconcile these contradictions in a desire to involve fathers more fully with their children for the good of the Infant Welfare Movement, mothers and, indeed, for men themselves.     

Muscles,Nerves, and Sex: The Contradictions of the Medical Approach to Female Bodies in Movement in France, 1847–1914

From the early nineteenth century in France, the treatment of hysteria was connected to both physical and moral development. As a result, therapeutic treatments envisaged by medical practitioners were influenced by and related to the formulation of precepts of medical gymnastics. This article considers how ‘physical education’ for women became part of medical discourse, specifically the elaboration of ‘body treatment’ as a remedy against nervous disorders including hysteria. From the Second Republic (1848) to the years of the belle epoque (1914), the discourse concerning the medical cause of ‘hysterical madness’ is marked by the progressive discrediting of reflections that located the causes of pathology in the genitals. However, the shaping of a neuro‐cerebral etiology did not fully replace discussions of the relationship between hysteria, female bodies and the uterus. While the current historiography emphasises the participation of doctors in the production and legitimation of physical exercises in the nineteenth century, some aspects of this process are not yet fully explored. We examine the ambivalences of medical discourse, between the rhetoric of the eternally wounded woman and the need to develop women's abilities (intellectual, moral, and physical) to ensure healthy children. And despite the shadows that still obscure the etiology of nervous disorders, there is, in our period, a genuine dynamic favouring experimental therapeutics. The ‘movement disorders’, such as chorea, hysteria or neurasthenia, were handled by increasingly well‐established regimes utilising physical exercise. The introduction of gymnastics in the hospital played a fundamental role in this process; it enabled experimentation and lent legitimacy to physical exercise as therapy.