Families, History And Social Change

Life Course And Cross-cultural Perspectives

Tamara K Hareven, Barbara Trepagnier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813390871
• eBook ISBN: 9780429980206
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

One of the prevailing myths about the American family is that there once existed a harmonious family with three generations living together, and that this "ideal" family broke down under the impact of urbanization and industralization. The essays in this volume challenge this myth and provide dramatic revisions of simplistic notions about change in the American family. Based on detailed research in a variety of sources, including extensive oral history interviews of ordinary people, these essays examine major changes in family life, dispel myths about the past, and offer new directions in research and interpretation. The essays cover a wide spectrum of issues and topics, ranging from the organization of the family and household, to the networks available to children as they grow up, to the role of the family in the process of industralization, to the division of labor in the family along gender lines, and to the relations between the generations in the later years of life. While discussing family relations in the past and revising prevailing notions of social change, these interdisciplinary essays also provide important perspectives on the present.

Part One
Family and Kinship

Continuity and Change

1
The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change

Recent historical research on the family has revised some widely held myths about family life in the past as well as generalizations about the impact of the grand processes of social change on the family and society. Family history has complex roots in both the historical demography of the early 1960s and the "new social history" of the same period. Particularly in the United States, it has shared with the latter a commitment to reconstructing the life patterns of ordinary people, to viewing them as actors as well as subjects in the process of change. Out of such concerns has come research that explores previously neglected dimensions of human experience such as growing up, courting, getting married, bearing and rearing children, living in families, becoming old, and dying, from the perspective of those involved. Contemporary historians of the family have sought to reintroduce human experience into historical research and to emphasize the complexity of historical change (see Hareven, 1971, 1987a; Stone, 1981; Tilly and Cohen, 1982; Tilly, 1987; Plakans, 1986).

The challenge for such scholars is the reconstruction of a multitiered reality—the lives of individual families and their interactions with major social economic, and political forces. This enterprise is complicated by our increasing appreciation of the changing and diverse nature of "the family," rendered fluid by shifts in internal age and gender configurations across regions and over time. The formidable goal is to understand the family in various contexts of change, while allowing the levels of complexity to play themselves out at different points in historical time. In short, it represents an effort to understand the interrelationship between "individual time," "family time," and "historical time" (Hareven, 1977b; Elder, 1978,1981).

Before systematic historical study of the family began, various social-science disciplines had generated their own myths and grand theories about continuities and changes in family behavior in the past. Sociologists in particular argued that in preindustrial societies, the dominant household form contained an extended family, often involving three coresident generations, and that the "modern" family, characterized by a nuclear household structure, family limitation, the spacing of children, and population mobility, was the product of industrialization. Also associated with these generalizations was the popular myth that industrialization destroyed familial harmony and community life. But historical research on the family has provided a perspective on change over time as well as on family behavior within specific social and cultural contexts in discrete time periods. It has led to the rejection of these assumptions and to the resulting questioning of the role of industrialization as a major watershed for American and European history (Wrigley, 1972, 1977; Laslett, 1972, 1977a; Goode, 1963; Smelser, 1959; Anderson, 1979).

Over the three decades of its existence, family history has moved from a limited view of the family as a static unit at one point in time to an examination of the family as a process over the entire lives of its members; from a study of discrete domestic structures to the investigation of the nuclear family's relations with the wider kinship group; and from a study of the family as a separate domestic unit to an examination of the family's interaction with the worlds of religion, work, education, correctional and welfare institutions and with processes such as migration, industrialization, and urbanization (Hareven, 1977b, 1987a; Stone, 1981; Vinovskis, 1977).¹

As research in this field developed, efforts to explore decisionmaking processes within the family have led to an investigation of strategies and choices that individuals and family groups make. The life-course approach added an important developmental dimension to the history of the family by focusing on age and cohort comparisons in ways that link individual and family development to historical events. As historical research on the family developed further, new findings and approaches led to the revision of the pioneers' findings. Research also expanded chronologically to ancient Greece and Rome and geographically from Western Europe, North America, and Japan to Northern and Eastern Europe, to Southern Italy and the Mediterranean, and to China. The cumulative impact of studies in the history of the family has been to revise simplistic views of both social change and family behavior. These revisions have generated a host of new questions that have been answered only in part. Given the richness and diversity of research in family history, it would be impossible to cover here all the aspects of this large volume of scholarly endeavor. I will try to follow the main strands of research and will illustrate them with select examples (Hareven and Plakans, 1987; see also Soliday et al., 1980; Cox, 1988; Hunter, 1989; Cantarella, 1987; Hallett, 1984; Raw son, 1986; Dixon, 1988; Rheubottom, 1988; Peristiany, 1976; Duben. 1985; Wolf and Huang, 1980; Pasternak, 1983; Hanley and Wolf, 1985; Ebrey, 1981, 1986; P. C. Smith, 1980; Hareven, 1987b).

The emergence of the history of the family as a special area of inquiry received its major impetus from the publication of Philippe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood (1960 in French and 1962 in an English translation), Ariès argued that childhood as we know it emerged only in the early modern period and that its discovery was closely linked to the emergence of the "modern" or conjugal family, in which parents' private relationships with their children were more important "than the honor of a line, the integrity of an inheritance, or the age and permanence of a name." Looking back to premodern France and England, when the family was actively involved with the community and the household was open to nonrelatives engaged in familial activities, Ariès idealized the family's sociability in the "big house." "The big house fulfilled a public function. . . . It was the only place where friends, clients, relatives and protégés could meet and talk." In the big house, "people lived on top of one another, masters and servants, children and adults, in houses open at all hours to the indiscretions of the callers. The density of society left no room for the family. Not that the family did not exist as a concept," but its main focus was sociability rather than privacy. The "modern" family, he argued, emerged as sociability retreated. In thus lamenting the loss of earlier sociability in the family, Ariès laid the foundation for a debate as to which family type best prepares children to function in a complex, modern society: the family of the past, which exposed children from a young age to a diversity of role models, or the contemporary, private, intimate family (Ariès, 1962, p. 393, pp. 405–406; Sennett, 1970).

By linking the "discovery" of childhood to transformations in family and social structures as well as economic and demographic changes, Ariès inspired a whole new generation of scholars (Ariès, 1962; Demos, 1970; Stone, 1977; Shorter, 1976; Wheaton, 1987). His emphasis on sentiment and privacy as the defining characteristics of the "modern family" was emulated by John Demos, Edward Shorter, and Lawrence Stone, among others. Equally influential was Ariès's integration of diverse, previously neglected sources with demographic data, especially his use of iconography and art. In recent years, however, historians have challenged Ariès's thesis that West European society before the eighteenth century was characterized by indifference to children (Pollock, 1983). Shortly before his death, Ariès himself acknowledged that if he had looked at medieval sources, he might have modified his conclusions about the emergence of sentiment in the early modern period (Ariès, 1980). Ariès's focus on attitudes toward children and the concept of childhood remains nevertheless the major reference point for studies of the historical transition to the "modern family," especially for historians who employ cultural rather than socioeconomic and demographic approaches. Centuries of Childhood has served as a catalyst for family history in the same way Henri Pirenne's Medieval Cities affected medieval and early modern European history (Pirenne, 1946).

Although historians often point to Ariès's book as the first major work in family history, historical research on the family was rooted in several disciplines, such as psychology, anthropology sociology, economics, and most notably historical demography, which preceded it (Wrigley, 1966a; see also Wheaton, 1987; Goubert, 1954, 1960; Henry, 1953, 1956, 1968; Imhof, 1976,1977; Mitterauer and Sieder, 1979; Ägrent, 1973; Kälvemark, 1977; Andorka and Balazs-Kovács, 1986; Kahk, Palli, and Uibu, 1982; Hayami, 1973; Hayami and Uchida, 1972; Cornell and Hayami, 1986; T. Smith, 1977; Demos, 1965, 1970; Greven, 1970; Henrepin, 1954; Landry and Légaré, 1987; Charbonneau, 1975; Charbonneau et al., 1987).² In the early 1960s, historical demographers in France provided family historians with a powerful "new weapon" for the analysis of vital processes related to life and death in the past. Louis Henry and Pierre Goubert had developed a family-reconstitution technique in the 1950s that, in E. A. Wrigley's words, enabled historians "to assemble all the information about the vital events in a given family which can be gleaned from the register of a parish or a group of parishes" (Wrigley, 1966b, p. 82). The Institute National des Études Démographiques took the lead in the development of this new methodology. Using first genealogies and then marriage, baptismal, and death records from parish registers, demographers reconstructed aggregate patterns of fertility, nuptiality, and mortality for vast numbers of people and, in some instances, over several generations (Flandrin, 1976; Burguière, 1978, 1987; LeRoy Ladurie, 1976; Segalen, 1980, 1983; Wheaton, 1980).

In France, historical demography and family history developed into two parallel but interrelated streams from the 1960s on. One stream continued to concentrate on demographic analysis, along the lines of Henry and Goubert; the other, influenced by Ariès, anthropology, and the French social history tradition, integrated demographic analyses with patterns of family and sexuality, linking community and social and cultural variables with mentalité, as exemplified in the work of Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, André Burguière, and Jean-Louis Flandrin, among others. Family reconstitution subsequently became a powerful tool in the hands of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Established in 1964, the Cambridge Group adapted the family reconstitution method to English parish registers, while also pursuing analysis of a seventeenth-century nominal household register for Clayworth, which Peter Laslett had discovered. In an analysis of Colyton from 1538 to 1837, Wrigley found—in the decline in seventeenth-century fertility and the eighteenth-century recovery—evidence that rural births and marriages responded to changing economic conditions. As Wrigley explained, the demographic transition did not involve a change from uncontrolled fertility to its reduction by the "exercise of prudential restraint" but "from a system of control through social institution and custom to one in which the private choice of individual couples played a major part in governing the fertility rate." This family reconstitution for Colyton in East Devon and the analysis of the Clayworth household register became the base for Laslett's book The World We Have Lost (1965) (Laslett, 1977a; Wrigley, 1966b, 1968, 1974, 1977; Wrigley and Schofield, 1981).

Such demographic analyses for France and England revealed that in the preindustrial period, age at marriage was later than had been generally assumed, couples practiced some form of family limitation and child spacing as early as the seventeenth century, households were predominantly nuclear rather than extended, and preindustrial populations experienced considerable geographic mobility (Wrigley, 1977; Laslett, 1965; Goubert, 1977). From today's perspective, it is difficult to recover the excitement of being able to re-create such patterns from the past. The evidence about the practice of family limitation in particular demonstrated the control that couples exercised over their own lives and the implicit choices (what Wrigley called "unconscious rationality") that they followed in relation to changing social and economic conditions.

Similarly, the discovery of late age at marriage helped explain the timing of household and family formation. Late marriage served as a method of family limitation. It was also closely related to the expectation that a newlywed couple would establish a separate household. Hence, marriage was contingent on a couple's ability to accumulate resources that would enable them to live independently, as well as contribute to their families of orientation. Linking late age at marriage to the nuclearity of the household, John Hajnal developed his thesis of the "West European Marriage Pattern," which served as the basic model for the analysis of West European families until recently (Hajnal, 1965, 1983).³

Using nominal census records, Laslett found evidence of continuity in nuclear household structure in England, at least since the sixteenth century. In 1969, he convened a demographic conference on family and household structure, concentrating on Europe and North America but also including papers on Japan, China, and Africa. The conference essays were published in Household and Family in Past Time (Laslett and Wall, 1972), with an extensive introduction from Laslett that provided a classification scheme of household types. The essays from Western Europe and North America affirmed Laslett's findings for England that there has been little variation in mean household size and a continuity in the predominance of the small nuclear family since the sixteenth century Akira Hayami and Robert Smith also found evidence for the existence of nuclear household structures in certain regions of Tokugawa Japan. The volume's conclusions, combined with those deriving from subsequent analyses of nominal censuses for urban communities in the United States and Canada, dispelled the previously held assumption that industrialization brought about a nuclear family form. The myth of what William Goode termed "the great family of Western nostalgia," namely, the coresidence of three generations in a single household, was laid to rest. Subsequent studies showed that coresidence with extended kin tended to increase, not decrease, after the "industrial revolution," because of the need of newly arrived migrants to industrial cities to share housing space (Laslett and Wall, 1972; Goode, 1963; R. J. Smith, 1972; see also Sennett, 1970; Griffen and Griffen, 1978; Hareven, 1977b; Hayami and Uchida, 1972; Anderson, 1971).

Subsequently, David Herlihy traced a nuclear household structure in medieval Tuscany back to the twelfth century, and Richard Smith, using poll tax lists for the village of Suffolk from 1377 to 1381, concluded, "There seems to be good reason to suppose that the general shape and membership of the familial group differed very little from that of early modern England." This conclusion was reinforced by Smith's analysis of manorial contracts for the same period: Three-fourths of the contracts contained proof of separate residence of the two generations (Herlihy, 1985; Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, 1978; Macfarlane, 1978; R. Smith, 1979a, quoted in Macfarlane, 1978, p. 31). In an imaginative reconstruction of family and community life of the medieval village of Montaillou in Southern France, LeRoy Ladurie found a variety of forms of family structures in the domus (household), ranging from ordinary nuclear families to families including an aged widowed mother or father to some groups of brothers sometimes coresiding with an elderly mother or with both parents. "The purely nuclear family was perhaps the most common, but it did not have a local monopoly." Most important, family structure varied over the life cycle of its members. The Vidal family, for example, was nuclear at first; then, with the death of the father, "we have a truncated nucleus, which soon becomes a phratry, the position of the brothers gaining in importance" as the mother withdraws and lives in a semiseparate room by herself and one of her sons succeeds to the position of headship. The family becomes more or less "extended" again when one of the brothers—Bernard—marries and the new couple lives with the mother and the other brothers. After the mother's death, all the brothers leave the parental house and set up separate households or join other households, except for Bernard, who now heads a nuclear family (LeRoy Ladurie, 1978, pp. 47–48).

Scholars' emphasis in the 1960s on the continuity of nuclear households and the subsequent wave of studies inspired by them had several limitations that left their mark on the new field for at least a decade. Although Laslett's early work implied that the nuclear "family" persisted over historical time, the major unit discussed was the household, not the family. A nuclear household ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 Family and Kinship: Continuity and Change
• Part 2 Studying Lives in Time and Place
• Part 3 Comparative Perspectives
• Part 4 Broader Perspectives
• Notes
• References
• Credits
• Index