If you have read Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", which took place in the 1400's, only 100 years before Shakespeare's time, you can get a very good picture of father-daughter relationships.
Until very recently and even now in some parts of the world and even among rich families in the developed world, women are often seen as "chattel", that is, property, to be used for personal gain of families (read: males in the family).
They were/are used to secure a good relationship between families, gain land or servants, and as general "bargaining chips" to help their fathers get whatever it was they wanted from other leaders. Usually, the more power a man had, the higher the stakes and the further a woman could be sent from her family, without her consent, to marry another ruler.
Consider Queen Katherine of Arragon, first wife of King Henry VIII of England. Katherine was first married off to Henry's older brother, who died. Then she was given to him, when he was just a teenager. The marriage was not a happy one, particularly since she only bore him a daughter. Even though Henry divorced her by re-working the entire Catholic Church in England, he still beheaded her successor, Ann Boleyn, for not bearing him a male hair.
A woman's status was not based on looks, charm or intelligence, but on her family's power and, primarily, on whether or not she could deliver a healthy, male heir to her husband. Very few queens enjoyed the freedom of someone like Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II. Her strength of ego enabled her not only to fight off most restrictions on women of that day, but to mount several near-successful campaigns to wrest the throne from her husband. He finally locked her up to keep her from besting him!
In the story of Romeo and Juliet, an old fable that Shakespeare re-worked, Juliet falls in love with the son of her family's rival clan, the Montagues. Despite her father's insistence that she marry a man she barely knows and dose not love, Juliet resists him and marries Romeo secretly, hoping to cement the two families. It ends in tragedy, which, though it may seem contrived to us now, was quite believable in those days. Women rarely married for love successfully and a man might disown his daughter if she did not comply, as was the case with Juliet's own father.
In one essay, a study by Lawrence Stone is much-quoted:
Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800.
"According to Stone, before 1500 the English family, both aristocratic and middle class, had little in common with the 'nuclear family' of contemporary England and America. The family was a large, loose network based on kinship relationships. In other Words, kinship ties and economic interest, rather than love or friendship, determined who lived together. "Families" were large; a household might involve 25-30 members." (1)
The overall ties of kinship were more important than those of the immediate family (i.e., father and daughter). Stone goes on to write that:
"Marriages, a group decision by the "kinship group," were negotiated by the senior members of the household in which a young man or woman lived; often, patrons rather than biological parents arranged marriages."
This arrangement actually makes Juliet's father look much more involved in her life than the average 14th Century dad! If one remembers the play, her mother had almost nothing to do with Juliet, and was merely a facilitator between the daughter and father, especially when it came to marriage arrangements. When Romeo kills Juliet's violent, meddling cousing, Tybalt (which supports the above claim about families having more say), both parents are much more distressed about his death than about their daughter's happiness in future love, even though neither of them appear to like Tybalt much! (They both yell at him during the famous ball scene, for making a fuss that Romeo and friends crashed the party). Yes...he is still "family" and that is what really matters to them.
One may look at this and think: "How could these people even function or call themselves a family?" Yet we must remember that this was a vast improvement on how women (and men, for that matter) were treated by their elders, including parents, in medieval times!
As Stone points out, the Catholic church gave a sense of belonging to something greater, but more importantly, the knowledge that ANY "sin" could be forgiven! This is, in my opinion, what makes transgressions such as Romeo and Juliet's "illicit" love plausible and even forgivable. They could, literally, go to the parish priest (which they do, numerous times, not only to get advice, but even to be married and to fake a death!), and he would take care of everything.
The priests replaced the father figure in Renaissance Europe, until the Reformation, according to Stone, and in Shakespeare's world, it seems to have worked out (if not for the happiness of all). When Juliet is beset by her father's unwillingness to budge, whom does she seek? Not her mother, nor even the nurse who raised her. She goes to the friar. Granted, his plan goes horribly awry, but his intentions are good.
When Romeo kills Tybalt, he does not seek out his father or best friend to weep and moan, but again, Friar Lawrence, who finally tongue-lashes him into sense! One has the feeling, reading this, that as teens came of age and had to deal with all the confusing issues their parents would not touch, their only solace was each other...and the Church!
Stone maintains that after the Protestant Reformation was in full swing, people lost all those comforts (confessors, images, miracles, the notion of Purgatory rather than going straight to Hell...and so forth). Some have argued against this, but remember that this had been the established order of the day since the Roman Empire! People's moral compass was set on end and if one thinks about it, the play of Romeo and Juliet was almost a fortelling of how much suffering would come from the near-dismantling of this Catholic system in Europe.
Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
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