‘Some fathers make good mothers, and I hope I was one of them.’ After his wife died suddenly in 1964, the novelist J. G. Ballard was determined to bring up his three small children himself. Each morning he would get them breakfast, drive them to school, then at nine sit down at his desk and begin writing, with his first whisky of the day as company. In the afternoons he would help them with homework, play with them in the garden, then rustle up a favourite like sausages and mash for dinner. It was extremely rare to find a single father caring for his children in the 1960s, and he did it in his own style. ‘I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen to do housework,’ Ballard wrote in his autobiography, ‘and too often to be found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other.’ Despite the lack of dusting, he was undoubtedly a loving and supportive parent. ‘He was both daddy and mummy to me,’ recalled his daughter Fay of her childhood in the London suburbs. ‘I never felt that I couldn’t talk to him about anything, be it boyfriends, clothes or make-up. He has no barriers at all. We have been a very close family, always the best of friends.’
The warmth and intimacy he sought to create for his children contrasted with his own youth, growing up in 1930s Shanghai. Ballard’s parents spent most of their time downing Martinis at the country club with other British expatriates, and their home was a bastion of formality and conversational silences, as was common amongst the upper-middle classes. The little family life they had was disrupted between 1943 and 1945, when they were interned in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp – an episode fictionalised in his novel Empire of the Sun (1984) – and once the war ended he was shipped off to boarding school in England, spending his teenage years deprived of parental care. These experiences formed the psychological backdrop to his devotion as a father. Ballard actively took part in the home births of his two daughters, ‘almost shouldering the midwives aside’, and wept throughout both deliveries. Family always came first, followed in the distance by his writing. ‘Perhaps I belong to the first generation for whom the health and happiness of their families is a significant indicator of their mental wellbeing.’1
Ballard, who died in 2009, may have been an unusually dedicated father, but he was wrong to believe that his generation was historically unique in the value placed upon family life. Its importance echoes through millennia of mythology and storytelling, from the tale of Odysseus, who longs to return to his family in Ithaca, to Medieval Icelandic sagas, from the novels of Tolstoy to films like The Godfather. Negotiating the complexities of family relationships has been a constant challenge in the art of living. Whether dealing with neglectful parents, sibling conflict, generational divides or jealousy, being part of a family has never been easy, raising questions about how best to play out our roles in our personal family dramas.
Today Ballard appears a forerunner of the modern father who is not only at ease changing nappies or doing the ironing, but may even be a stay-at-home dad whose wife or partner goes into the office each day while he takes care of the kids. Despite their growing numbers, they remain an exotic species: in the United States full-time housewives outnumber househusbands by a ratio of forty to one, while in Britain only around one in twenty fathers is the main carer.2 But in historical terms, such domestic dads are not nearly as rare as you might think: the house-husband had a surprisingly prominent place in pre-industrial society. Understanding this forgotten history matters because it challenges the powerful and pervasive ideology, sometimes known as ‘separate spheres’, which assumes that a woman’s natural place is the home, bringing up children and doing the household chores, while a man’s natural place is as the main breadwinner for the family in the paid economy. In fact, there is nothing ‘natural’ about this arrangement at all.
The famine of conversation in Ballard’s childhood home is familiar today, because in most families the art of conversation still fails to flourish. Parents can’t get a word out of their teenage children. Couples spend more time watching television together – an average fifty-five minutes a day in Britain – than directly talking to one another.3 The plague of divorce in the West is closely linked to the silences between couples, and in many families you can find relatives who refuse to talk to each other, often for days and sometimes for years. Conversation is the unseen thread that binds families together and it is time we took it more seriously. So after revealing the role that fathers once had in the home, we need to consider what we can learn from the past about making family conversation more nourishing.
‘So, are you getting any sleep?’ This was the most frequent question I was asked by friends after my twins were born. Most young parents feel starved of time to sleep, time to relax, time to be alone. On top of this, however, is the issue of time inequality between women and men in running the typical family household. In Britain, women do twice as much cooking, cleaning and childcare as men, and in total perform two-thirds of all domestic work, on which they spend an average three hours a day. It’s no wonder that many women complain that their husbands don’t even know how to turn on the washing machine, or where the cot sheets are kept. Even in families with both parents working full-time, women are still doing at least a third more of the housework and childcare than men.4 In other words, once they walk in the door from the office, they may face a ‘second shift’ in the home. This fundamental time imbalance can place a strain on any couple’s relationship: my partner and I often bicker over my failure to do my ‘fair share’ of the housework. The issue is constantly raised in mothers’ discussion forums on the internet. The most popular British site, Mumsnet, recently contained the following message, which received scores of sympathetic responses:
It has just dawned on me that my husband has absolutely no idea how hard I work looking after three kids under four whilst running my own business. I want to punch the useless twat!!5
Time is not the only problem. There is also the question of responsibility. ‘Let me take him off your hands for a while,’ a father might say to his wife, trying to be helpful but unwittingly revealing that he thinks the ultimate responsibility for the child lies with her. She’s the one who must make sure the baby has a good stock of winter clothing or gets immunised when due. He sees his main role as giving temporary relief, an extra hand. The secret fear of many young fathers is to be left completely alone with small children for a whole day, solely responsible for their wellbeing. They lack the confidence – and often the competence – to do it. Women are also faced by family-related career dilemmas. Around 70 per cent of women now work in the paid economy, so if they want to have children, they have to consider how doing so will affect their careers.6 The stay-at-home dad may be on the rise, but it is still rare to find a man who has sacrificed his own career so his partner can quickly get back to work after the baby is born.
These kinds of tensions and challenges arise because having a family is like managing a small business. Although nobody is out to make a profit, there are services to provide, financial and time constraints to deal with, staff roles to negotiate, and some very demanding customers. Few of us have received appropriate training for the task: we may have to pass a test to drive a car, but not to have a child. So we could all do with some advice. An unexpected source of wisdom for understanding how men and women relate in the household economy is the history of the househusband, both in the European past and in indigenous societies. This neglected history offers rare insights into how couples today might rethink their domestic arrangements. It all starts in the jungles of the Western Congo Basin, home to the Aka Pygmies.
Aka men are the world’s most dedicated fathers. For an estimated 47 per cent of each day, they are either holding their children or within arm’s reach of them. Although women still do a majority of the childcare, the men are fully involved in almost every aspect of it and share most tasks with the mother. Fathers wash their babies and wipe their bottoms. When their children cry out in the night, it is often the men who will comfort them, even to the extent of offering a gentle suck on their nipples. Aka women preparing the evening meal do not carry their babies on their hips like women in many other hunter-gatherer societies, nor do they hand them over to older siblings; instead the father takes hold of them. When Aka men go out drinking palm wine with each other, they may take their children along. An anthropologist – and father of seven – who has spent two decades studying the Aka suggests that the high level of paternal involvement may be due to the peculiarities of their traditional subsistence activity, the net hunt, a year-long family venture to trap small animals. Both men and women take part, and the babies come too, with men having primary responsibility for carrying them over the long distances involved. The more childcare Aka men do, the more attached they become to their children, which reinforces their desire to care for them.7
Although the Aka are at the extreme end of the spectrum, they are not alone amongst indigenous cultures in their approach to child rearing. The Arapesh people of New Guinea and the Mbuti of the African Ituri forest are known for fathers’ involvement in childcare, and when Europeans first arrived in Tahiti in the eighteenth century, they were shocked to find that women could become chiefs while men routinely did the cooking and looked after children. In around one in four cultures, men have historically played a nurturing and involved parenting role. That still leaves a clear majority of societies in which women bear most of the burdens of infant care, and in one-third of cultures, men barely lift a finger to help. The point, however, is the variety of parenting arrangements found in human societies. It is not biology that explains these variations, but context and culture. Men have been more likely to take on domestic responsibilities in societies where women are highly involved in food provision, where there is matrilineal descent and property rights for women, and where the men are not too busy being warriors – a constraint facing few men in the developed world today.8
Both men and women in the West frequently claim that the natural role of the mother is to take care of the child, while fathers are not genetically programmed for child rearing and that their natural role is to be a ‘provider’ for the family. In effect, to guard the cave entrance while the mother holds the baby. The courts reinforce this idea, disproportionately awarding children to mothers in custody disputes (although this practice is gradually declining). We must certainly acknowledge important biological differences: it is women, not men, who give birth and breastfeed, and this undoubtedly creates a special bond and intimacy between mother and child that a father does not enjoy. But once you know about the Aka and other paternally inclined peoples, it is no longer so obvious that it is ‘natural’ for fathers to remain at a distance from the practicalities of childcare.
One could try to counter this with evidence from the animal kingdom: ‘What about all those male wildcats that sow their seed then disappear off to find another mate while the female has to raise the litter alone? Surely that’s the natural way of things.’ Not so. Like humans, non-human species are striking for the variety of their parenting systems. Many animals – butterflies, turtles, spiders – provide no parenting care whatsoever. Around 90 per cent of bird species, including owls, share parenting equally. Male marmosets and siamangs care for and carry their babies day and night. Parenting responsibilities can also shift: amongst kestrels and partridges, he hunts while she feeds, but if the mother dies the father takes complete care of the young – like J. G. Ballard.9 Neither the natural world nor indigenous cultures provide easy justification for the doctrine of separate spheres.
It might seem difficult to translate the parenting approach of the Aka and other indigenous peoples into your own family life. When was the last time you took your kids out on a jungle hunting expedition? That is why we also need to trace the history of household management in the West and discover how men’s and women’s roles have evolved. The great revelation is that today’s hands-on fathers are reincarnations of fathers from our pre-industrial past. We have not always been as different from the Aka as we like to imagine, and the distribution of domestic work between men and women was once more balanced than it is in the present.
The first clues about the historical origins of the househus-band lie in language. The term ‘housewife’ emerged in English in the thirteenth century, and ‘housewifery’ referred to the work traditionally done by women – cooking, laundering, sewing and nursing children. Less well known is that a ‘husband’ was originally a man whose work, like a housewife’s, took place in and around the home. This is revealed in its linguistic roots: ‘hus’ is the old spelling of ‘house’ and ‘band’ refers to the house to which he was bonded – that he leased or owned. One of his main tasks was farm work, which used to be known as ‘husbandry’, a term still sometimes used today.10
This tells us something important. Before the industrial revolution, both economic life and family life in Europe and colonial North America were largely centred on the home, especially for independent agricultural families – the growing yeoman class. Men and women worked together in joint enterprise. While women cooked or sewed, men might be ploughing a nearby field they owned or rented. Men would also be chopping wood for the fire, making shoes, doing leatherwork, whittling spoons and occasionally going off to market to sell the family’s produce. Household tasks were highly integrated: no cooking could be done without firewood, and while women tended infants, men built the cradles and cut the hay they lay on. Many household chores were done by both men and women – weaving, milking cows and carrying water. The practice of the man going off to work outside the home did not become widespread until the arrival of factories in the nineteenth century, which might explain why the word ‘housework’ did not emerge until then: all work had, to that point, been housework. And most husbands had been househusbands.11
Pre-industrial men were often directly involved in childcare. Since they were around the house much more than today, it is not surprising that they might have shared tasks such as caring for sick children. An eyewitness account from England in 1795 recorded that ‘in the long winter evenings the husband cobbles shoes, mends the family clothes and attends the children while the wife spins’.12 In the United States in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Mary Frances Berry writes, ‘fathers had primary responsibility for child care beyond the early nursing period’.13 They not only directed children’s education and religious worship, but decided what clothes they would wear and hushed them to sleep when they woke at night. Men frequently became child carers due to force of circumstance, especially because so many women died in childbirth. Today one in twelve single-parent households in Britain are headed by men, but between 1599 and 1811, the figure was one in four. While men would tend to remarry or employ domestic help if they had the means, it is estimated that one-third of lone fathers in pre-industrial Britain had no live-in support from other adults. In the 1820s, when the journalist William Cobbett clopped on his horse through rural England, he noticed that many male labourers cared for their small children. ‘There is nothing more amiable, nothing more delightful to behold, than a young man especially taking part in the work of nursing the children,’ he remarked.14
But could fathers really have had so many domestic responsibilities? There is a widely held belief that we used to live in extended family households, in contrast with the nuclear families that abound today. We imagine the kitchens of old full of aunts and grandparents jiggling children on their knees or feeding them porridge, reducing the burdens on the mother and leaving the father to his craft or leisure. Few people realise, however, that this is a myth. In fact, the nuclear family has been the norm in Europe for hundreds of years. The average household size in England has been remarkably constant, averaging 4.18 people in the seventeenth century, 4.57 in the eighteenth and 4.21 in the nineteenth. A study of England and North America between 1599 and 1984 showed that for most of this period – apart from a temporary increase in the late Victorian era – only around 8 per cent of homes contained members from the extended family.15 While multi-generational households were not usual, relatives were often close at hand rather than in the same house, even until recent times. Interviews with 200 East Londoners in the 1950s revealed that between them they had 2,700 relatives living within a mile.16 The strains of domestic life were also eased by the culture of hired help: even poor households might have had a servant or two. Nevertheless, the reality was that if the mother was ill or at the loom, the father was the most obvious alternative caretaker for the children.
I don’t want to give the impression that pre-industrial fathers were all domestic goddesses doing most of the cooking, cleaning and childcare. Women were usually the main child carers and worked tirelessly to feed and clothe their families, even when they had maids working by their sides.17 They also faced the extreme dangers of giving birth and were often on the receiving end of domestic violence. While some men spent considerable time with their children, others preferred the alehouse, while many were away for much of the year working as hired farm labourers, pedlars or soldiers. In the upper classes, men frequently had little contact with their offspring, since they were placed in the charge of nursemaids and governesses. Still, it should now be clear that the superdads of the twenty-first century had their predecessors – the generations of fathers who shared in the struggles and strains of domestic work and child-care as ‘husbands’, bonded to their homes.
So how did we end up with today’s stark household inequalities between men and women? Why do young mothers so often feel guilty if they want to return to their careers, and fathers feel so inept at settling a crying child in the night? The immediate answer lies in the colossal economic and social changes of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A sharp decline in subsistence agriculture and home industry, and the invention of waged labour on the factory floor, forced a new separation between work in and out of the home. In the early industrial period both men and women could be found in the textiles mills and labouring in the mines, but soon men dominated the industrial workforce. Why was it men who became the designated ‘breadwinners’ – a term first used in the nineteenth century – while women became enveloped in a cult of domesticity which dictated that a ‘good mother’ rocks the baby and bakes cakes?
Patriarchy is one standard explanation. Men exerted their traditional power over women inside the family by taking the relatively high-status and skilled jobs available in the paid economy, leaving women with the Sisyphean domestic tasks of sweeping floors, preparing meals and boiling soiled nappies (women also often took on low-skilled, low-paid work to make ends meet). This division was sustained by an ideology of ‘true womanhood’ supported by male-dominated trade unions and other social institutions such as the Church, which promoted the belief that a woman’s ‘proper sphere’ was the home. Such attitudes, it is argued, gradually became internalised by many women themselves – especially those from the expanding middle class – and seeped into everyday culture.18 The bestselling Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, published in 1861, was addressed directly to women, not men. ‘There is no more fruitful source of family discontent,’ wrote the author, ‘than a housewife’s badly-cooked dinners and untidy ways.’ Learning how to cook, clean and run the house are skills that ‘particularly belong to the feminine character’.19 The ideology of separate spheres became so ingrained that by the mid-twentieth century housework and childcare had come to be viewed as distinctly unmanly. In the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, when the hot-blooded James Dean bursts into the family home, he is disgusted to see his father wearing an apron over his suit and tie. There was nothing worse than an emasculated man.20
An alternative and equally plausible way of looking at the emergence of separate spheres has been offered by historians of domestic technology. They argue that fathers were ‘deskilled’ by the industrial revolution. The jobs they used to do around the home became obsolete due to technological change, while women’s work was largely untouched, or became even more burdensome. The invention of the enclosed iron stove in the eighteenth century, for example, meant that men no longer had to spend so much time gathering and cutting firewood for cooking and heating. When coal replaced wood as the standard fuel, it then became necessary for them to go out and earn cash to buy enough of it. Other traditional male tasks, like making shoes, tools and furniture, were gradually taken over by the manufacturing industry – but there were no machines invented to nurse a wailing child. As men entered the paid workforce, the old household craft skills that they once passed on to their sons were lost, just as their previous role in looking after children became a distant memory.
While some new technologies, such as pulley-driven butter churns and egg beaters, reduced women’s housework, other technologies conspired with the growth of consumer culture to expand it. In the pre-industrial era most people had few clothes and washed them infrequently, but with the introduction of manufactured cotton cloth, which was hard to clean, and the expectation that you should regularly change your shirt and own several sets of sheets, women were suddenly doing more laundry than ever. The institution of Monday ‘wash day’ did not exist until the nineteenth century, and the amount of time women spent on housework remained constant into the mid-twentieth century. Hence the popularity of the expression ‘a woman’s work is never done’.21
Ever since the birth of industrialisation, fathers have been only sporadically involved in housework. During the economic slump of the 1840s, an observer recorded that men who lost their jobs in Manchester and Bolton were ‘taking care of the house and children, and busily engaged in washing, baking, nursing, and preparing the humble repast for the wife, who is wearing her life away toiling in the factory’.22 But once the economy picked up, women went back to the double burden of industrial work and kitchen duties. In the early twentieth century, around a third of men in East Anglian fishing communities regularly did housework, often because they might be at home for months at a time outside the fishing season. But such figures were untypical of most working-class communities, where men were usually less involved in household tasks.23
The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a challenge to the stereotypical division between men’s and women’s labour. The arrival of the Pill and feminism spurred more women into the professional workplace, and it started making financial sense for men to become the main carers if their earning power was comparatively lower. The exponential rise of divorce, with more and more fathers gaining custody of children, compelled a new generation of men to become domestically reskilled, a change depicted in the 1979 movie Kramer Versus Kramer, in which workaholic Dustin Hoffman is left by his wife and must care for his son. These shifts were reinforced by the historically unprecedented phenomenon of fathers being present at childbirth itself. Even up to the 1960s British men were banned from most hospital births, but by the 1990s nine out of ten saw their child being born, offering these fathers a new kind of emotional attachment.24 The idea of the nurturing father slowly began to re-enter our cultural consciousness: the rugged cowboy image of Marlboro Man was eventually replaced by advertisements showing fathers confidently changing nappies and cooking tasty dinners. For all the hype, however, the stay-at-home dad remains a statistical anomaly, more talked about in the media than seen in reality. When I take my kids to their Monday morning play-group, there are at most one or two other men in the room.
Having discovered the lost history of the househusband, we should consider how it might help us rethink our family roles. Could more men regain the domestic skills of their pre-indus-trial forebears, or even model themselves on Aka fathers?
The structural barriers to change remain formidable. Few Western countries offer fathers long-term paternity leave. Even if they wanted to spend more time at home after their children are born, they are unable to do so. You might be lucky enough to live in Sweden, which gives its fathers a year of unpaid paternity leave, although Swedish men still take only 14 per cent of the time allotted to them.25 Financial factors also cast a long shadow. Women still tend to earn less than men, so when children arrive in a traditional two-parent household, if anybody is going to spend more time at home, it is likely to be the mother. The exorbitant cost of childcare contributes to this pattern. My partner, who works as a development economist for a major humanitarian aid agency, takes home just £30 a day after paying taxes and childcare costs for our twins – sometimes it hardly seems worth it from a financial point of view. Only the lucky few have regular free care from grandparents and other relatives.
Yet change begins as much with our own attitudes as with shifts in employment policy or pay structures. The most effective first step to erode the ideology of separate spheres, which remains pervasive despite decades of women’s liberation, is simply to recognise that in other cultures, and other periods of history, family arrangements have been rather different. Yes, women have the wombs and breasts and always will. But there is no special female gene for sterilising bottles, buying Babygros, ironing a shirt or cooking mushy peas. History tells us that most childcare and housework can be done competently by both men and women. Men might embrace the fact that in becoming part-time house-husbands they are entering a long and proud tradition of domestically engaged fathers. Women who do most of the child rearing and household chores could free themselves from the cultural expectation of being ‘perfect homemakers’ or ‘superwomen’ who hold down demanding jobs while also running the home.
Expanding a man’s domestic role may also help him thrive as a human being. Although I don’t believe that having children is necessary for a fulfilling and purposeful life, I do believe that most men who have joined the great chain of being by having children will benefit if they become more involved in their lives. I certainly have. Amongst other things, my responsibilities as a father have made me much more emotionally sensitive, so I feel sorrows more deeply but also joys more strongly – a change for which I am grateful. It is as if my emotional range has increased from a meagre octave to a full keyboard of human feelings. Do you want to know why Aka men want to look after their children, even when they keep them up at night? Because caring for them, holding them in their arms, breeds a love and attachment that adds meaning to their lives. Once they start, they don’t want to stop.
‘All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion,’ Tolstoy famously wrote to open his novel Anna Karenina. For all the varieties of family friction – the jealousies, insecurities and clashes of personality and authority – a common underlying problem is the quality of family conversation. Conflicts can rarely be resolved unless people learn to talk to one another. Jealousies fester until they are voiced. I think of conversation as a dialogue that creates mutual understanding. It is different from superficial talk about the weather, a heated argument or a one-sided monologue. Conversation has the potential not only to forge family bonds, but to inspire new ways of thinking and living together.
In most families, however, the art of conversation remains in its infancy. The family dinner table can be a conversational battlefield, where simmering tensions, secrets and lies play themselves out in a combination of sharp words and even sharper silences. Teenagers often feel there is no point talking about personal problems with their parents, who spend more time trying to discipline them than understand their troubles, while the most frequent reason given for divorce in the Western world is women being frustrated that their husbands don’t talk to them or listen to what they have to say.26 Many of us dread family reunions, where old roles and wrangles so quickly resurface to blight the occasion. Moreover, while the traditional nuclear family has deep historical roots, an increasing number of step-parents, half-siblings and same-sex couples are adding new layers to the complexities of family life.
It would be comforting to look into the past and discover a moment in history when family conversation was abundant, nourishing and brimming with mutual understanding. Indeed, the popular claim that the family meal is in sorry decline assumes that we all used to happily eat and talk together around the dining table – if only we could return to the good old days. But this nostalgic utopia never existed. Even in the 1920s – when we assume family dinners were the norm – a mother from a small town in Indiana lamented that ‘meal-time as a family reunion time was taken for granted a generation ago’ and there is growing desire to ‘save meal-times, at least for the family’.27 That such better times are largely in our imaginations becomes clear once we recognise the three historical barriers that have stood in the way of enriching family conversation: segregation, silence and emotional repression. The first of these can only be understood by returning to the origins of conversation itself.
If there was one individual responsible for the invention of conversation in the Western world, it was Socrates. The pug-faced philosopher had the habit of cornering both friends and strangers in the marketplaces of ancient Athens and asking them their opinions on every subject under the Greek sun, from justice and religion to love and metaphysics. His method was to interrogate their assumptions and question the consistency of their beliefs. At its worst this was a form of conversational bullying. But at its best, Socrates helped people rethink their approach to the art of living. One admirer, the politician and playboy Alcibiades, thanked him for ‘turning all my beliefs upside down, with the disturbing realisation that my whole life is that of a slave’.28 For Socrates, conversation was a dialectical process in which the dance of ideas could help people inch closer towards their own personal truth.
For all of Socrates’ scintillating talk, there are no records of his conversations with his wife or parents. Typical of Greek men of his day, he seemed to save his verbal energies for his public promenades or display at a symposium – a conversational banquet at which supper was followed by a serious boozing session, with the words flowing as readily as the wine. At the most famous of these drinking parties, recorded by Plato in the fourth century BC, Socrates spent the evening with half a dozen male friends discussing the nature of love. While sipping from his terracotta cup and popping olives into his mouth, the playwright Aristophanes declared, ‘Each of us is a mere fragment of a man; we’ve been split in two, like filleted plaice. We’re all looking for our other half.’ While this may have been an imaginative comment on the idea of the soulmate, it was quite clear where their other halves really were: the diners’ wives were stuck at home with the slaves. The only women permitted at a symposium were flute players and dancing girls, who attended the men like Japanese geisha. While freeborn women in ancient Greece had their own feasts, usually connected with religious festivals, they were vigorously excluded from conversational dining with their menfolk, just as they were denied the right to political participation. Most of their lives were spent confined to the gynaikeion, the women’s apartments in their home.29
This culture of segregation prevented the ancient Greeks from making any major advances in family conversation. The classical symposium anticipated the separate-spheres ideology of the nineteenth century, with women confined to work in the home while men stepped out into public life. But it also reflects a long tradition of segregated family dining in Western history. According to historian Beatrice Gottlieb, in Europe between the Black Death in the fourteenth century and the industrial revolution, ‘sitting down together [as a family] for a formal meal may have been almost as rare as eating meat’.30 In peasant households in nineteenth-century France, women would serve the men at table, but have their own dinner standing up or eat off their laps by the fireside, perhaps feeding a child at the same time. And in times of scarcity, who was most likely to sacrifice the food on her plate? The woman. Other historians report that in poor families, women and children would often eat at no special time and in no special place. In the upper-class dining rooms of Victorian England, it was not that children were ‘seen but not heard’. They were frequently not even seen, since they ate their meals separately in the kitchen or with a nursemaid. Once the meal ended, men might stay to smoke a cigar, drink port and talk politics, while women were shooed out into the drawing room.31
The Family Meal by the Le Nain brothers. In this seventeenth-century painting of a French peasant family, only the father has his meal at the table while mother and children hover around the edges, destined to eat after he has finished. Family dining was not yet in vogue.
Venturing beyond Western culture, it becomes apparent that family dining is far from the historical and social norm. The Nuer people in East Africa have traditionally associated eating – like excreting – with feelings of shame, so a husband will not dine with his wife for the first few years of their marriage. In Vanuatu, some men join ranked male societies, where members of each rank cook and eat with one another rather than with their families. Anthropologists have noticed that the Bakairi of the Amazon basin eat their meals alone, a practice also followed in some parts of Indonesia in homes which have no dining room. In many Muslim communities today, especially on religious occasions, women may eat in a separate room from the men – although some claim that such arrangements offer women the social space to discuss personal issues in privacy.32
Segregated meals are now, in the West at least, a relic of the past. This is good news, since it permits the dining table to become an arena where families can practise the art of conversation, without anybody being excluded because of their sex or age. Of course, there is no guarantee that we all use this historically unique opportunity granted to us. In fact, we don’t. Nearly half of British families eat dinner in front of the TV, only one-third eat together regularly each evening, and the typical family spends more time in the car than at the dinner table. Figures are similar for the United States. When a family eats at a fast food outlet like McDonald’s, the average meal lasts around ten minutes.33 Yet we should beware those who tell us that the sacred ritual of the family meal is in rapid decline. Taking the historical long view, it never was ascendant.34
If you’ve ever experienced stony silences at a family dinner, you are in good historical company. Along with segregation, eating in silence has an established pedigree as a barrier to family conversation. For centuries, meals in European peasant households ‘were silent occasions’, argues Beatrice Gottlieb. Foreign visitors to Elizabethan England were particularly struck that there was little if any conversation at dinner, and Italian etiquette manuals advised that ‘talk is not for the table, but for the piazza’.35 At some level, this silence makes biological sense: my toddlers rarely talk during dinner simply because they are busy eating, stuffing themselves with the staff of life. But silent eating is also a cultural practice, with roots in early Christianity. The Rule of St Benedict, which has guided the life of Benedictine and other monks since the sixth century, asks its followers to ‘avoid evil words’ and spend much of the day, including meals, in silence. Dinner is a time for listening to readings from uplifting spiritual texts rather than having conversations, even about God. Such religious reverence for silence, which can also be found amongst Quakers and Buddhists, may help explain why medieval villagers spoke little while eating.36
On the other hand, silence is as much a matter of geography as religion. ‘Scandinavians are of the opinion that you only speak when you have something to say,’ according to communication experts, and talkativeness is associated with being egotistical and unreliable. So don’t expect an exuberant discussion if dining with a family in Finland – Europe’s most conversationally reserved country – although they will probably listen to you with unusual attention.37
Silence has certainly not ruled in all cultures, as anybody who has sat down with a conversationally vigorous Neapolitan family for Sunday lunch can testify. But whether we would rather aspire to the kind of family meals that take place in Naples or Helsinki, we still need to think about what happens to our family conversations away from the dinner table, and what we can do to improve their quality. For that, we must turn from segregation and silence to a third historical barrier, emotional repression, and trace its development over the last 300 years.
While the medieval period may be known for its silence, by the eighteenth century conversation was being transformed into an art form. London’s flourishing coffee-house culture brought together educated men to discourse on politics, business, art and literature. Conversation clubs – the equivalent of the ancient Greek symposium – sprang up around the city, amongst them the Turk’s Head Club in Gerrard Street, Soho, co-founded by Dr Samuel Johnson, generally acknowledged as the most brilliant talker of the Georgian era. Johnson deserves our praise because he realised that conversation could be a pleasure rather than a mere exchange of information. Yet, contrary to reputation, he was actually one of history’s most disastrous conversationalists, and we have barely recovered from his legacy. ‘None of the desires dictated by vanity is more general, or less blameable, than that of being distinguished for the arts of conversation,’ he once said. In doing so, he admitted that his preferred form of conversation was largely about showing off, just as it was in the literary salons that had begun to appear in France during the same period, where you were expected to be au fait with the latest poetry or opera. Johnson’s own talk was full of clever quips and witty epigrams which served to end conversations rather than open them out and invigorate them. He taught us nothing about how families might use conversation to ease the inevitable tensions and conflicts which arise from living together under the same roof.38
So the eighteenth century was the era of clever conversation. It was followed in the nineteenth by the era of hidden emotions. This began with the rise of the Romantic movement, which offered great conversational promise. Poets such as Coleridge and Keats willingly bared their tortured souls and unrequited love to the world. But they mostly did so on paper. The emotional sensitivity and popularity of romanticism was unable to permeate family conversation in reality. During the Victorian era a stark divide arose between how men and women expressed themselves, especially amongst the British middle and upper classes. Men came to prize cool rationality and emotional reserve, while women were more likely to display their inner thoughts and feelings – at least to each other – and showed a greater capacity for sympathetic listening. Just think of Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (1813), who is unable to reveal his feelings for Elizabeth Bennet, held back by pride, social convention and emotional reticence. Virginia Woolf’s father, the Victorian gent Sir Leslie Stephen, was known for his ‘ineffable and impossible taciturnity’.39 Family conversation became dominated by the stern paterfamilias who revered reason and distrusted passion. Under such conditions, conversation could be intellectually edifying but not emotionally sophisticated or empathic. Marriage guides advised wives not to burden their husbands with their personal troubles, while children were encouraged to repress their feelings and ‘keep a stiff upper lip’ – an idiom originating in a nineteenth-century nursery poem.
The psychological damage this could cause is evident in the case of the philosopher John Stuart Mill. Born in 1806, by the age of three his father had begun teaching him ancient Greek, and on their regular morning walks the precocious youngster was expected to give a detailed dissection of what he had read the previous day. Mill was trained to cultivate reason and sublimate his emotions, and there was little intimacy in their relationship. Recalling his father, Mill wrote:
The element which was chiefly deficient in his moral relation to his children, was that of tenderness. I do not believe that this deficiency lay in his own nature. I believe him to have had much more feeling than he habitually showed, and much greater capacities of feeling than were ever developed. He resembled most Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs of feeling, and, by the absence of demonstration, starving the feelings themselves.40
Deprived of nurturing family conversation and suffering under immense pressure from his father and himself to achieve intellectually, at the age of twenty Mill had a mental breakdown. ‘My father, to whom it would have been natural to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person to whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help.’41 He was only cured of his emotional starvation several years later, when he fell in love.
The barrier of emotional repression began to wither away in the twentieth century, which became the era of intimate conversation. This great transformation originated in a new culture of self-reflection in the West, first encouraged by the birth of psychoanalysis, and later by the therapy and self-help industries. At last it was becoming acceptable – especially for men – to talk openly about their emotions with friends and family. Following the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s reports on sexual behaviour in 1948 and 1953, and the sexual revolution of the 1960s, couples were also able to speak more freely about the touchy topic of sex, which lay at the root of so many relationship difficulties.
The impact of these changes on family conversation was uneven and often slow to materialise. When the actress Jane Fonda was a teenager in the 1950s, she found it almost impossible to communicate with her father: ‘I can remember long car rides where not a word would be spoken. I would be so nervous that my palms would be sweating from riding in absolute silence with my own father.’42 There are still plenty of parents who don’t know how to speak to their kids, just as there are couples who are experts at avoiding discussing sexual problems or feelings of jealousy. The idea of visiting a relationship therapist makes many modern men experience a wave of nausea. Nevertheless, by the end of the twentieth century a conversational revolution had occurred, with families being able to talk to each other in ways unimaginable in the Victorian era, mainly because men had become – emotionally speaking – a little more like women.
So family conversation had triumphed, overcoming the formidable barriers of segregation, silence and repression. But in the mid-twentieth century, just as conversation was starting to flourish in the home and around the dining table, another barrier arose that threatened to take the quality of family conversation back to the Middle Ages. This was the advent of new technologies, which brought other people’s voices into our houses but cut short our own. George Orwell was one of the first to recognise the potential damage that technology could cause. Conversation is being replaced by the ‘passive, drug-like pleasures of the cinema and radio’, he wrote in 1943. A few years later, he detected a sinister development:
In very many English homes the radio is literally never turned off, though it is manipulated from time to time so as to make sure that only light music will come out of it. I know people who will keep the radio playing all through a meal and at the same time continue talking just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent.43
Just imagine what Orwell would have written had he lived to see the rise of television in the 1950s, when it began to colonise both the Western household and the Western mind. Within a generation, 99 per cent of US homes had one, and by the 1970s they were on for an average of six hours a day.44 People in the US and Europe now give over most of their leisure time – on average four hours a day – to watching TV, which amounts to around nine years of continuous viewing by the age of sixty-five.45
Some media sociologists claim that it is a mistake to assume that television has eroded family conversation: not only can documentaries, soap operas and other programmes spark lively discussion amongst family members, but watching TV together is an important ritual that brings families into the same domestic space.46 Such arguments miss the point about what a quality family conversation looks like. Can you really have a proper discussion with your spouse about whether she should leave her job if you are both half-watching the box? While television has potential to stimulate the mind and emotions, it is essentially a passive medium which draws us away from human interaction, whereas conversation is in essence an active form of engagement with others. Or, as the cultural critic Jerry Mander put it back in the 1970s, the effect of the television revolution is ‘to have substituted secondary, mediated versions of experience for direct experience of the world’.47
Other technologies have been similarly winding back the conversational clock, or at least failing to advance it significantly. A US study showed that children aged eight to eighteen spend on average seven hours and thirty-eight minutes a day wired into digital media – video games, iPods, DVDs, social networking sites, email, as well as finger-happy texting.48 There is no doubt that some of these technologies enable and expand ‘communication’ – that is, people staying regularly in touch with one another. They certainly help me keep in touch with my relatives in Australia. But again the quality of the interaction is an issue: how many of the billions of text messages sent between family members each year are nurturing and adventurous conversations?
We’ve come a long way in the history of family conversation and should try to preserve what we have gained, and expand its potential. The first obvious move may be to ration television time. My own attempt to do so involved keeping the TV in a cupboard at the top of the house. The thought of having to carry it down two flights of stairs was a good test of whether my partner and I felt a programme was really worth watching, and our weekly viewing hours fell substantially. Apart from a rationing regime, another option could be to put yourself on a digital diet while eating with others – turning the TV off and leaving mobile phones on silent in the hallway, just as polite medieval diners used to leave their weapons at the door.
While the family meal was not ubiquitous in the past, we can find inspiration in those cultures – such as Italian, Jewish and Chinese – which have maintained it as a regular ritual practice. But it may not be enough simply to decree that your flock must always gather for Sunday lunch. ‘Conversation, like families, dies when it is in-bred,’ writes the historian Theodore Zeldin. ‘The family meal is made for stopping shop talk, and for mixing different kinds of talk.’49 His advice is to invite stimulating strangers to your family meals, so the conversation can become a form of exploration. Ask your guitar teacher or new work colleague to come around. As W. S. Gilbert said, ‘it isn’t so much what’s on the table that matters, as what’s on the chairs.’
Breaking the silences in family life may require something even more personal than a communal meal. Simply spending time with your brother or stepmother doing something quietly pleasurable like taking a woodland walk is a way to allow your conversation to wander along new pathways – as long as nobody has to recite Greek verse like John Stuart Mill. But if you seek more invigorating conversational exercise, you could embark on a project like interviewing your parents or grandparents about their pasts and what they have learned about the art of living. When I did this with my father, over a period of seven years, I was not only preserving family memories for posterity. It was a way of bringing us closer together, since our conversation led to delicate subjects which rarely arose in our daily discourse, such as his relationship with my mother before she died. I also discovered what he believed about generosity, God and freedom. It is amazing how little we can know about people we have apparently known our whole lives.
The most important lesson from history may be to remember to take off our masks. Family conversation will never thrive until we become more open with our emotions, more intimate with our conversation. Suppressing thoughts and feelings is of course useful at times, both as a mechanism of self-preservation and to protect others. But we cannot allow ourselves to act like those Victorian men who starved themselves and their families of emotional life. Otherwise we may as well eat at segregated tables like the ancient Greeks or in silence like medieval monks.
If, after experimenting with these ideas, your family conversation still remains in the doldrums, there is only one more thing I can advise. Organise a family symposium whose subject of discussion is the curious lifestyle of the Aka Pygmies.