SOURCE: “Where Have All the Fathers Gone?,” in Tikkun, Vol. 15, No. 2, March-April, 2000, pp. 73-5.

In the following review, Smith offers a positive evaluation of Stiffed.

Around the beginning of the nineteenth century in the United States a remarkable shift occurred. Advice guides on parenting, almost always in earlier times addressed to fathers, changed audience and targeted mothers. They did not merely expand the table of contents; they virtually wrote fathers out of the text. Reading through the “parenting advice” literature, I was so struck by this sudden switch that I eventually emailed a historian of my acquaintance and queried him. Was my observation accurate? And, if so, what had happened to fathers? He wrote back a couple of days later confirming the textual phenomenon (real fathers were probably more present in family life of the era than the books manifest, he opined), and suggesting that to understand more...