Abstract
This paper utilizes family leisure photographs to examine New Zealand society’s changing representations of fatherhood. Photographs are a useful lens for addressing such issues, as they can be interpreted as ways of understanding human life. They document sociological aspects of lives that we are unable to see easily from other sources. Over 100 years of family leisure photographs (a combination of archival family photograph albums and more recent albums sourced privately through advertising and snowball sampling) were analysed using visual qualitative thematic analysis. For analysis, a structured chronological approach was adopted to make the findings easy to follow and show the changing representations of fatherhood discourses over time. The findings show that family leisure photographs reflect a shift away from father as an invisible breadwinner in the early twentieth century, to participating in leisure consumption with the family in the post-war years, to visible and involved during the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, to the position of playmate-teacher in more recent decades.
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Notes
It is important to recognize that historians identify archival material as primary rather than secondary data, reflecting the blurred division between the two types of data, something that is not generally acknowledged in social science studies.
The ‘six o’clock swill’ was traditionally a part of the New Zealand way of life. In the short period between the end of the working day and closing time at the pub, men crowded together to drink as much beer as they could before bar service ended. A desire for change began to emerge in the 1960s. The growing restaurant and tourism industries questioned laws that made it difficult to sell alcohol with meals. When the government held a national referendum in late September 1967, nearly 64% of voters supported a move to 10 p.m. closing for pubs and bars (NZHistory 2017).
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Saadat Abadi Nasab, P., Walters, T. & Carr, N. Changing Representations of Fatherhood through the Lens of Family Leisure Photographs. Int J Sociol Leis 3, 197–218 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41978-020-00055-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41978-020-00055-2