Epilogue

Abstract

So, have the preceding pages brought us any closer to defining paternity, fatherhood and the relationship between the two? Undoubtedly not: twenty-four different writers have suggested at least twenty-four different ways of understanding who or what the ‘father’ is. Does this then suggest that the whole notion of fatherhood as we in the West understand it is in crisis, falling apart? Far from it, because, as this book has shown, ‘fatherhood’ as a concept has always been in process, tugged this way and that between the discourses of art, science and the law, its definition and redefinition being crucial elements both in the establishment of social stability and in movements for cultural change. As our authors have discussed, each historical moment, including our own, reworks the father’s role and there is no reason to suppose that this process will not continue. However, changes in the respective socio-economic positions of adult women and men and their children — those not-quite-adult ‘young people’ — over the past fifty years or so have introduced a new element into our current redefinitions of fatherhood, of which this book itself is a manifestation. Over at least the last millennum and a half, the father’s place and authority were established largely by fathers themselves, whether the biological variety or their symbolic counter-parts, fathers of religion, clan or nation.