Fatherhood and Politics are Intertwined in Professor’s New Book

It’s safe to say most thoughts about fathers and fatherhood are personal. Dr. H. Howell Williams, associate professor of Political Science at WestConn, spent half a decade thinking in a different way, doing a deep dive on fatherhood in the U.S., it’s role in politics, and how the country is governed.

In this country, Williams’ research showed, the concept of fatherhood involves more than just how a man raises children, and the result is Fatherhood, Race and the American State: The Politics of Patriarchal Anxieties, published in August by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

The “anxiety” in the title refers to society, not individual dads. Williams posits that societal embrace or rejection of the role of fatherhood since the founding of the country has played an oversized role in how the U.S. is governed, with preservation of traditional power bases at the heart of the politics.

“The argument of the book is that white patriarchy has formed the basis of political authority in the United States since the founding,” Williams said. “But I think that observation does miss a fact about political history, which is that our political community has changed dramatically in that time. While it is true that the model of who should rule remains white men, I still was curious about how to account for political change amid that reality.”

The book begins with a 2008 speech by then Sen. Barak Obama in which he states that one of the issues plaguing Black America is absent Black fathers.

“That obviously has a very long history, is a very deep and abiding trope in American politics,” Williams said. “How do we make sense of this path-breaking political figure reiterating some pretty historically nefarious racist tropes? And I argue that it is precisely the regulation of fatherhood and how we think about fatherhood, and the norms that shape policy responses to fatherhood, that really contribute to the reproduction of white patriarchy as a political ideology, even when the political community changes.”

Williams’ research is primarily in a subfield of Political Science called American Political Development, which focuses on questions of change and continuity in political history.

“I do think that there is this kind of cultural freak-out about fathers and particularly whether fathers are or are not upholding their traditional responsibilities,” Williams said. “For me, patriarchal anxieties are this kind of change mechanism. They’re this moment when there is a collective — I would call it sort of paranoia or kind of collective anxiety.”

He identifies examples of patriarchal anxiety that have resulted in three distinct reactions within U.S. society and governance.

• Non-interventionism, or leaving fathers alone to govern their families as they see fit.

• Retributive, or punishing fathers for being absent.

• Habilitative, or shaping the behavior of by giving them to the tools to be better parents.

“Traditionally the fathers that we say, ‘Leave them alone,’ are White middle-class fathers, and so in that chapter, I look at the father’s rights movement in the 1970s and ’80s as a case study,” Williams said.

“The retributive approach, the idea that we need to punish fathers, is sort of wrapped up in this image of Black men as criminal. In that chapter, I look at child-support enforcement, and particularly the efforts in the late ’80s and early ’90s to make the enforcement of child support more punitive. And this was a bipartisan project. This was a Republican and Democratic project of making absenteeism more costly and not just financially, but also with your ultimate liberty in the form of jail time.”

With federal welfare reform in 1996, the government devised “responsible fatherhood programs.”

“They created something called the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse, which is a national resource for fathers to help them become better dads,” Williams said. “And a lot of these programs were either implicitly or explicitly targeting fathers of color. The idea of patriarchal anxieties is so deeply embedded in these policy responses.”

The answer, Williams said, is not to abandon the concept of responsibility.

“I do believe strongly that responsibility is important,” Williams said. “What I am trying to do with this project is instead question what we mean by responsibility in the first place. It is a built on assumptions of what is good and bad, and those good and bad assumptions are not free of politics. They are the site of politics. While I have no problem on paper with programs that are about promoting responsibility, we have to think deeply about how we think about responsibility, who we identify as responsible or not.”

Williams has organized an “author meets critics” panel at the American Political Science Association meeting in September, where he will summarize the book, followed by commentary from the panelists.

“I’ve invited some fairly prominent people who work in the same area to be a part of that,” Williams said. “I haven’t really been nervous about speaking, but I am nervous about that because it’s a project that’s lived in my brain for a long time, and the idea of people reading it and responding to it feels somewhat daunting.”

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