This is a book review that I have submitted (by request) for publication in the journal Religious Studies Review. Once published, I will put the URL to the final edited version; DADDY ISSUES: LOVE AND HATE IN THE TIME OF PATRIARCHY [Review of the book, Daddy Issues: Love and Hate in the Time of Patriarchy] by Katherine Angel. New York, Verso, 2022. Pp. 81. Paper, $11.98.
Patriarchy has shown that “Daddy Issues” is really a “blaming the victim” approach to the father-daughter relationship. The author quickly turns “Daddy Issues” on its head with the thrust of the thesis, “what of the father’s daughter issues?” This is such a relevant question and a more reasonable approach to this important relationship. Parenting is tough and if the father needs love from the daughter in order to feel real, then this issue is more of a father issue than a daughter issue. Fathers, in patriarchy, view daughters as property and, as the author poignantly demonstrates, subconsciously as a lover. Hence, jealousy arises when the daughter starts to find other men to love outside of the father. For the father, this other man elicits fears, a need to protect, and a loss of a relationship rather than seeing such as a natural step in a woman’s life: to find love outside the family in which she was raised, to become her own person and be independent, to understand that she does not need another to be a whole person and to couple, if she desires, for her own emotional growth. If the father can survive these attempts at independence without jealousy overshadowed by patriarchy, then the daughter can see the father as real, and only then can she exist as herself.
Dale V Wayman
Capella University