Deputy Principal – Teaching and Learning  

I currently have the sheer pleasure of teaching Sylvia Plath’s poetry to my Year 11 Literature class.  The second poem we have studied thus far is Plath’s searing 1962 poem Daddy. This controversial, confessional poem depicts a woman’s struggle to free herself from the oppressive psychological influence of her deceased father. Using intense, dark imagery, the speaker characterises her father as a Nazi, a devil, and a vampire to articulate her trauma and ultimate need to break free from patriarchal domination.  The father is not a guide but a jailer.

“You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe / In which I have lived like a foot / For thirty years, poor and white, / Barely daring to breathe or achoo.” 

The image is of suffocation – a daughter entombed, voiceless, in a man’s shadow. It is a portrait of patriarchal authority at its most crushing.

It is fair to say that when I first studied this poem at the University of Melbourne in 1990, the father figure depicted here was not entirely foreign to me, or to my counterparts, because authoritarian parenting was very much in vogue. In fact, part of growing up was pushing away from the strictures of all kinds of patriarchal authority. But teaching this poem to girls now is a very different experience because, for them, that portrait of fatherhood could not be more remote. I asked my students why they thought that was and we mused that perhaps the men who send their girls to girls schools are much more likely to be on board with the message of empowerment for women, or, they are happy to align with and support the view of their daughter’s mother – either way, the fathers of our girls are powerful and important allies for them. 

We know too that high-quality father presence is directly associated with girls' resilience, psychological security and achievement (Zhou et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2024) and a 2024 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that father presence was directly and positively linked to resilience and psychological security in adolescent daughters. Indeed, a growing body of research shows that engaged fathers are among the most powerful drivers of daughters’ educational ambition and that choosing a private single-sex school is, for many, a deliberate act of investment in her voice, not a silencing of it.

The contrast with Plath’s verse is striking. Where her speaker could 'never could talk' to her father as the tongue, she says, 'stuck in my jaw'. Whereas today’s research frames the father–daughter relationship as a 'powerful site of gender construction that could be harnessed to enhance women’s empowerment' (Corleis & Lesch, 2025). Fathers who actively choose an environment where their daughter can articulate her opinions, take intellectual risks, and lead are writing a very different poem entirely.

Plath’s poem ends with a killing – a symbolic breaking free from the father who consumed, restricted and controlled her. Modern research suggests the most empowering thing a father can do is refuse to be that figure at all: present, invested, and choosing an education that teaches his daughter she can breathe.

Ms Lisa Hanlon

Deputy Principal - Teaching and Learning