Not only money crossed the ocean: letters between the French orphans and their benefactors went in each direction across the Atlantic. The correspondence between France’s orphans supported through the FCFS and their American benefactors revealed both the power of the connection and the power dynamic between the recipients and the “godparents.” Letters from the fatherless children of France told of the moral and psychological support that accompanied the financial assistance that sponsorships provided. And while it seems that the correspondence helped open an ocean of hope and fostered the conviction that France was not alone in its fight against Germany, the letters from France also reflected the power dynamic of the sponsorship: those in need had to keep the assistance coming. The letters also show the FCFS at work: the instructions to the recipients of aid as to how they were to communicate with donors; the typed transcription and translations of the letters, most likely carried out by women in the Paris and New York offices; and the messaging to the benefactors, who were reminded that mothers needed money, but children cared more for the attention from a far-away friend.

This chapter examines Harriet Martineau’s approach to gender politics through her understanding of ‘manliness’ as explored in a selection of her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832−4). It was a concept essential to her configuration of male leadership fit for the testing times of the early 1830s, and highly topical. Published when the pressures experienced by men of all classes were being highlighted in periodicals and novels, the tales address the differences between ‘personality’ and ‘character’ in crises faced by fathers and husbands, magistrates and petty criminals, trades union activists, landowners, and slave-owners, at home and in the colonies, as they debate the injustices of their living and working conditions. This chapter argues that Martineau’s interventions in contemporary debates about masculinity shift the focus to a new kind of conscientious working man whose values are tested in cross-class dialogues in public places. It explores the ways in which the Illustrations show how men collaborate and compete within their communities, and the ambiguous gender messages arising from patterns of reward and punishment that seem to devalue otherwise positive characteristics.

This chapter considers the child’s right to identity. It is for good reason that the Convention on the Rights of the Child requires that core aspects of a child’s legal identity are in place soon after birth. A legal identity secures the child’s place in society, nation and family, providing the foundations for the child’s sense of self and relationships with others. The fact that these crucial aspects of identity are put in place when the child is an infant means that particular care must be taken to ensure that the child’s interests are not lost; not least because adults often have powerful interests in the way in which a child’s identity is determined and recorded. This chapter considers the formation of a child’s legal identity through recognition of parenthood and the challenges posed by changing reproductive technology and social norms such as the growth of international surrogacy arrangements. Further, a child’s knowledge of their genetic origins and the circumstances of their birth may be important to their sense of self and personal identity. The extent to which the right to identity incorporates a right to knowledge of origins is also considered.

This chapter begins by clarifying the distinction between social parenthood and parenting and explain how the longstanding but malleable association between social and biological parenthood depends upon social and legal conventions determining who is eligible to parent. One way in which to place oneself in that situation is to conceive a child biologically – however, biological parenthood often comes apart from social parenthood. I explore the significance of clinical assistance, money, and distance, in navigating this separation in the context of assisted reproduction. The second part of the chapter incorporates gender into the analysis, looking in detail at the social roles of motherhood and fatherhood, and the interplay of biological parenthood and moral parenthood with the expectations associated with these roles – for example, the effect of the visibility of pregnancy on attributional parenthood, the characterisation of fatherhood as more detached and less sentimental than motherhood, the persistence of associations between fatherhood and breadwinning, and so on. In this chapter, I explore the findings of sociological, psychological, and anthropological research into motherhood and fatherhood in order to demonstrate that one can inhabit a social role comprised in part by normative standards, even if one does not conform to those standards.

Chapter 6 surveys all of the dozen passages in which Pseudo-Hegesippus mentions King David within his narrative. This chapter shows how David is both a classical and a Christian construct within De Excidio and explores the many semantic and rhetorical functions that David performs within the narrative.

Chapter 4 describes how women, under participatory constitutionalism, are succeeding in broadening the constitutional agenda in the current century in ways that foreground the inequalities rooted in the “private sphere,” thus calling for a new form of gender transformative constitutionalism. In particular, new constitutional agendas are flourishing around the world, covering topics such as intimate partner violence and violence against women; the fuller recognition of women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy; constitutionally grounded assistance to motherhood and reproduction; and the importance of a care-centered understanding of fatherhood challenging hegemonic masculinities, removing the remaining sex-based, care-related differentiations, and challenging of gender-neutral legal norms that shape interpersonal relations and implicit gender role assumptions.

The purpose of this chapter is to offer an evolutionarily framed overview of human male reproductive health. The chapter is situated within key themes of the overall volume: the relevance of evolutionary and life history theory; sex differences in reproductive effort and their relevance to lifespan and health; the complementary distinctions between proximate and ultimate causation; the importance of context; and the consistent relevance of senescence for understanding aspects of male reproductive health. The structure of the chapter features precopulatory, copulatory, and postcopulatory sections, with key concepts and illustrations presented. The precopulatory section highlights male reproductive health consequences of intrasexual selection, courtship, and sexual coercion. These consequences include male injuries, death, and concerns over status and secondary sexual characteristics such as muscle that have shaped ancestral, if not also contemporary, reproductive success. The copulatory section covers sexual desire, erectile function, semen parameters, genetic parameters, and sexual satisfaction. Patterns in these aspects of male reproductive health commonly vary with age, health status, and partnership dynamics. Other facets of postcopulatory male reproductive health include reproductive constraints (e.g., contraception), sexually transmitted infections, and prostate cancer. Postcopulatory reproductive health touches on key domains such as partnership and sexual dynamics, metabolic consequences (e.g., physical activity and body composition), mental health (e.g., depression), and neuoroendocrine mechanisms (e.g., brain activity and hormone differences associated with paternal care). The scope of this review encompasses key concerns (e.g., erectile dysfunction, testosterone treatment, infertility) of biomedical approaches to male reproductive health while also expanding the scope to include more precopulatory and postcopulatory aspects, all framed within an overarching evolutionary and life history perspective.

The present chapter advances the view that women’s mate preferences can be grouped into at least two overarching domains: competitiveness and fatherhood. Theoretical and empirical considerations suggest that female mate preferences evolve in contexts of male competitiveness and often amplify the effects of male–male competition. Evidence for the importance of male–male competition and female choice for competitiveness in humans is reviewed. Evidence is likewise offered for the importance of human fatherhood as an additional domain of female choice outside of male competitiveness. Implications of more inclusive mate preferences for the evolution of cognitive architecture are discussed alongside the social and ethical implications of female choice for competitiveness.

Chapter Two, “The Social Life of Crime: Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug” reads the oppositional evolution of criminal justice in England and India by comparing the two novels. I begin with the observation that the movement toward rehabilitation and the humanization of the criminal in nineteenth century England occurs in tandem with the rise of corporal punishment and penal transportation in India. Taking the two novels as instances of this contradictory impulse, I examine the figure of the thug as a cipher for racialized fears of Indian criminality. In particular, I look at representations of paternity and masculinity within both novels. I show that Abel Magwitch becomes humanized in Dickens’s novel by taking on the mantle of fatherhood for Pip. By contrast, Ameer Ali is condemned for his paradigmatic inability to foster a viable childhood. I argue that criminality emerges within a Victorian matrix of race and patriarchy in which to be a father, or father figure, is to be properly human.

Late antique monasticism both participated in and disrupted familial networks of power in the Mediterranean world. The book concludes by arguing that Christian monasticism as an institution positioned itself as both rival and heir to the classical tradition of familia, challenging the ancient household’s position as the cornerstone of society’s political and economic apparatuses. Monasticism asceticized a key component of this institution – fatherhood –while maintaining that this anomaly – the celibate, ascetic father – was no innovation; the monastic father was but one node in a chain of fathers and sons stretching back into the biblical era and forward into eternity. Monasticism transformed traditions of paternity, inheritance, and genealogy. Focusing on the monastic federation of Shenoute in upper Egypt and the monastery of Cassian in Gaul, this chapter demonstrates how the coenobiumpositioned itself as a “house” or domus in late antique culture – an ancient institution that included home, household, property, and family, and required the financial, religious, disciplinary, and educational management of all of those moving parts.

This chapter describes the ways in which couples undo gender by resisting the mandate for men to prioritize paid work while women prioritize care. In contrast, in diverse cultures couples created equality when men forged an unconventional relation to paid work (e.g., working part-time or passing up promotions that interfere with family life), when they took on stereotypically maternal care tasks (e.g., diapering and comforting), when women freely shared the “maternal” role, when they insisted that their jobs/careers were as important as their partners’, and when couples shared housework.

This chapter discusses Chaucer’s reputation in the English Renaissance. This was marked by a fundamental ambivalence: while humanist scholars may have sought to reject earlier writing in favour of a return to antique models of cultural production, Chaucer remained the most substantial example of literary achievement in the vernacular before the sixteenth century. Medieval Chaucer thus represented everything that the newest tendencies of the age aspired towards. The chapter discusses the principal motifs that channelled praise of the Renaissance Chaucer (a living Chaucer, fatherhood); early editions of Chaucer’s collected works; and literary adaptations of Chaucer by the likes of Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare.

However well-regarded Chaucer’s works were during his lifetime, it was his immediate successors who fashioned him into the ‘father of English poetry’ they then bequeathed to the subsequent English literary tradition. In particular, the poets Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate not only represented Chaucer in this manner in their own, widely disseminated works, they were also instrumental in the broad dissemination of Chaucer’s works. Importantly, these activities were motivated not just by admiration but also by a politico-literary context in which Hoccleve and Lydgate, unlike Chaucer, were asked to produce works that spoke both for a prince and to a prince. Their invention of Chaucer’s literary authority cannot then be separated from their intervention into politics, and this conflation they also bequeathed to the English literary tradition, where it remained plainly visible in the works of their own successors, and where it persists, more obscurely, to the present.