Fathering a settler society (is not that easy): Laura Y. Merrell, Settler Colonial Fatherhood in New South Wales and Ontario During the Long Nineteenth Century, PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2023 | settler colonial studies blog

Fathering a settler society (is not that easy): Laura Y. Merrell, Settler Colonial Fatherhood in New South Wales and Ontario During the Long Nineteenth Century, PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2023

16Aug23

Abstract: “Settler Colonial Fatherhood in New South Wales and Ontario During the Long Nineteenth Century” is a comparative study of Indigenous, white, and mixed-race fathers in the British Empire as they navigated, and in turn, shaped cultural ideas of fatherhood. Using child custody cases, popular medical guides, newspaper articles, correspondence, memoirs, and wills, this project analyzes men’s lived experiences against the backdrop of colonial institutions and imperial ideologies. Examining race, respectability, and reproduction, it uses fatherhood as an entry point into the broader theme of settler colonialism, including the formation of settler states and the reach of their authority. To interpret constructions of colonizer fatherhood, I examine legal and medical institutions. In addition, I analyze the effects of settler colonization on nonwhite fathers and the strategies they used to counter dispossession. In existing narratives of nineteenth-century colonial power relations, white male colonizers were at the top of the gendered, racialized hierarchy. They are assumed to have benefited from privileges withheld from non-white men and white women. In the arenas of medicine, law, and lives, I argue that settler colonialism put fathers under pressure. While the typical agents of colonial power—government officials, judges, missionaries, and medical professionals—make their appearance in this project, informal political actors also materialize. When confronted with families who blurred racial lines, white relatives and neighbors policed colonial boundaries. In addition, my dissertation argues that, in many instances, white men were unwilling or unable to meet normative fatherhood expectations. They placed pressure on settler colonial structures and justifications for rule.

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