In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the third Sunday in June would henceforth be celebrated as Father’s Day. It was a symbolic gesture aimed at strengthening paternal bonds, as well as a tacit rejection of the policies recommended by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had just left Johnson’s administration in disgrace after his controversial report on Black family life and poverty was leaked. “As we know it,” Scholar contributor Augustine Sedgewick writes in his new book, “Father’s Day is an unintended consequence of the fractious American politics of race, gender, and class.” Sedgewick’s book, Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power, is the story of how such politics ensnarled parental care, and of the men who expanded the domain of fathers across generations of crisis and change, from Aristotle and Henry VIII to Freud and Bob Dylan.
Go beyond the episode:
- Augustine Sedgewick’s Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power
- The far right’s signature style is less about dad pants and more about fatherhood: read Sedgewick’s essay “Ku Klux Khaki”
- “Thoreau’s Pencils,” Sedgwick explores the abolitionist’s relationship with his family—and his family business’s ties to slavery
- For more on the Moynihan Report and political discourse on parenting, read Melinda Cooper’s Family Values
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