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of childhood and on teaching childhood history.
A typical example of this research (authored by myself) is below.
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Lloyd deMause
"THE MISSING FATHER IN HISTORICAL FAMILIES
The historical family, it turns out, cannot remotely be termed a
"patriarchy" until modern times. It is in fact a gynarchy, composed of the
grandmother, mother, aunts, unmarried daughters, female servants, midwives,
neighbors called "gossips" who acted as substitute mothers, plus the
children. Fathers in traditional families may sometimes eat and sleep
within the gynarchy, but they do not determine its emotional atmosphere,
nor do they in any way attempt to raise the children. To avoid experiencing
their own domination and abuse during childhood by females, men throughout
history have instead set up androcentric political and religious spheres
for male-only group-fantasy activities, contributing to the family gynarchy
only some sustenance, periodic temper tantrums and occasional sexual
service.
Evidence of fathers playing any real role in children's upbringing
is simply missing until early modern times. In antiquity, I have been
unable to find a single classical scholar who has been able to cite any
instance of a father saying one word to his child prior to the age of
seven. Little children were occasionally shown as used by fathers as
sensuous objects-as when in Aristophanes' Wasps the father says he
"routinely enjoys letting his daughter fish small coins from his mouth with
her tongue" -but otherwise, scholars conclude, "In antiquity, women [and
children] lived shut away [from men]. They rarely showed themselves in
public [but] stayed in apartments men did not enter; they rarely ate with
their husbands...they never spent their days together." In Greece, for
instance, "women had a special place. Larger houses at any rate had a room
or suite of rooms in which women worked and otherwise spent much of their
day, the women's apartments, the gynaikonitis, which Xenophon says was
"separated from the men's quarters by a bolted door." In two-story houses,
the gynaikonitis would usually be upstairs." The men's dining-room, the
andron, was located downstairs near the entrance, guarding the women's
quarters: "Here men in the family dined and entertained male
guests...Vase-paintings do not depict Greek couples eating together." This
mainly vertical organization of most homes lasted well into the eighteenth
century, when a new "structure of intimacy" began to be built, with rooms
connected to each other on the same level.
The women's area held the grandmother, the mother, the concubines, the
mistresses, the slave nurses, the aunts and the children. Thus Herodotus
could assume his reader would easily recognize families where "a boy is not
seen by his father before he is five years old, but lives with the women,"
and Aristotle could assume his readers' assent that "no male creatures take
trouble over their young." Ancient Greek, Roman and Jewish men had
all-male eating clubs where women and children were not welcome. Plato has
Socrates suggest a possibly better home arrangement, with "dinners at which
citizens will feast in the company of their children....In general,
however, children ate with their mothers, not their fathers...Eating and
drinking, far from offering the whole family an opportunity for communal
activity, tended to express and reinforce cleavages within it." Boys
tended to remain in the gynarchy of their own or others' homes until their
middle teens.
The husband is usually missing from the homes of most earlier
societies, and not just during their frequent military service. Evelyn Reed
describes the early "matrifamily" as everywhere being ruled by mothers:
"The family in Egyptwas matriarchalThe most important person in the
family was not the father, but the mother. The Egyptian wife was called the
'Ruler of the House'there is no corresponding term for the husband." In
rural Greek villages even today the mother owns the house, passes it on to
her daughter as dowry, and continues to rule the house when her daughter
has children. Indeed, the husband was rarely with his family in
antiquity-legislators sometimes suggest that in order to prevent population
decline it would be a good idea for husbands to visit their wives
occasionally and not just have sex with boys, as in Solon's law "that a man
should consort with his wife not less than three times a month-not for
pleasure surely, but as cities renew their agreements from time to time."
But for the most part, as Plutarch puts it, "Love has no connection
whatsoever with the women's quarters;" it is reserved for pederastic
relations with boys. As Scroggs summarized Greco-Roman practice, "To enter
the 'women's quarters' in search of love is to enter the world of the
feminine and therefore is effeminate for a male." Xenophon says "the
women's apartments [are] separated from the men's by a bolted door" As
Plutarch wrote, "Genuine love has no connections whatsoever with the
women's quarters." When Socrates asks, "Are there any people you talk to
less than you do to your wife?" his answer was, "Possibly. But if so, very
few indeed." Men stayed in the thiasos, the men's club, with other men,
and had little to do with their children. Greek boys stayed in the gynarchy
of their own home until they at the age of about ten were forced to be
eromenos, sexual objects, in the andron of a much older man's home. Greek
girls stayed in the gynarchy until they were about twelve, when they too
were raped by a much older man, a stranger chosen for them by their family
to be their husband. Brides went into marriages with large dowries, which
remained their property for life. The husband might try to enforce an
occasional dominance in the gynarchy by beating the women and children-as
Seneca described his father doing, usually, he said, for the most "trivial
actions" -but normally it was the women of the household who wielded the
family whip on the children."
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