Au nom du père? Rethinking the History of Fatherhood in Quebec

Abstract

This article presents a reading of the literature on North American fatherhood as a category of gendered historical experience and as an area of inquiry within masculinity studies. The main focus is on Quebec, where the scholarship in this area has developed more slowly than in English Canada or the United States. The discussion is framed around three key questions: (1) Does the literature suggest that American and Canadian fathers shared in common understandings of their paternal identities in the twentieth century?; (2) Was French-speaking, Catholic Quebec thoroughly distinct in this area or were there common North American ideologies of fatherhood in which Quebecers participated?; and (3) Do Quebec historians of masculinity and fatherhood continue to write in a theoretically impoverished way (Vacante 2005a, 2006) or can we discern the beginnings of a more sophisticated approach that situates the paternal experience within the power dynamics of patriarchy?