FAMILY

HISTORY   Andrejs Plakans

FUTURE   Frank F. Furstenberg

HISTORY

Historical research on individual families in the Western world was carried out by genealogists long before the field was systematized in the 1960s and 1970s. In those two decades, however, as a result of the confluence of new initiatives and organizational developments in several disciplines, family history established itself as a specialized endeavor with strong links to cognate disciplines such as demography, sociology, and anthropology. The "new social history," proceeding from the influence of the French Annales school, pursued the history of "structures of long duration," including micro-structures such as families, households, and kin groups.

The pioneering essays in Population in History (Glass and Eversley 1965) demonstrated the potential of the historical study of populations, and John Hajnal's essay on European marriage patterns in that volume put forth a seminal hypothesis about an important aspect of the long-term evolution of European family life. The formation of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure in 1967 resulted in an inclusive program for both historical demography and family/household structural analysis on the basis of historical sources such as parish registers and household listings. Independently of these initiatives, Philippe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood (1962) pointed to important historical shifts in the manner in which children were socialized.

By the early 1970s these initiatives had coalesced into a research agenda that dealt with the family, broadly defined, in both the distant and the recent past and used a wide variety of analytical concepts and approaches. Over the next 30 years the agenda widened to include questions not dealt with by the "founding generation."

Family Households and Historical Demography

In the decades between 1970 and 2000 historical demography and family history developed simultaneously, with findings on historical patterns of mortality, fertility, marriage, and migration creating in any historical period the context in which the family as a social structure had to be understood and with the historical sources used in family history (house-hold listings, parish registers) providing much of the raw data for historical-demographic generalizations. It was clear that decisions about marriage, childbearing, and geographical movement always involved the family in some fashion; death, by contrast, was not a result of personal decisions but did have wide ramifications for family structure and life.

Changes in marital, childbearing, and migration behaviors were shown to be interrelated with changes in family size and structure over time. In pre-modern, pre-contraceptive societies, in which births outside wedlock brought stigma for both the mother and the child, most births took place after marriage. Consequently, the age at first marriage was identified as an important variable influencing the ultimate size of the nuclear family group. Normally, women bore children every two years; hence, marriage in the late teens, in contrast to the late twenties, could result in a size difference in offspring groups of four or five, assuming the same levels of infant and child mortality.

Hajnal's (1965) hypothesis of "western" and "eastern" marriage patterns on the European continent proposed that in the western half of the continent marriages on average took place when both partners were in their late twenties, whereas in the eastern half women tended to marry in the late teens. The larger number of ever-born children per couple in the east, however, was offset by higher levels of infant and child mortality. In the east both long-and short-distance movement was restricted by institutions such as serfdom so that localities retained more of the human material out of which cultural choices often fashioned families that were more complicated than those in the west. The survival into later life of the initially somewhat larger sibling groups and the reduced pace of dispersion of those groups meant that there were more related adults in a given locality who could live together if they chose to do so. Mean family household size in Western Europe averaged four to five persons, whereas in the east it was closer to eight to nine. In the west the proportion of family households with more than two generations and with complex structures was low; in the east, by contrast that proportion tended to be high.

These pre-modern interrelationships between demographic patterns and family structures were dissolved during the "demographic transition," when mortality, and later fertility, started to decline. The timing of the onset of the transition and its duration were the subject of the Princeton Fertility Project that was initiated in the 1970s. Although the project failed to show convincingly the precise relationship between demographic, cultural, and socioeconomic change, it did demonstrate that the timing of the beginning of the decline varied substantially across the continent. The transition started first in Western Europe, notably in France, in the early nineteenth century. Central Europe experienced it in the middle decades of the century, and it did not take hold in the eastern part of the continent until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project also noted the presence of "pioneering" localities where fertility decline began earlier than in the surrounding areas in all of Europe's regions.

At the family level, the transition meant that couples could count on more of their children surviving past the childhood years, increasing pressure on family resources. One response to this pressure was to begin to limit childbirth, initially by spacing births and then with the aid of artificial means of birth control. This had the effect of delinking age at first marriage from the start of childbearing: the end of a historical pattern. The increased probability of survival of each individual child, entailing educational expenses first for boys and later for girls as well, meant that the ideal number of children per couple fell steadily.

Coinciding with the demographic transition were political reforms that lifted restrictions on movement, especially in Eastern Europe. As the industrial and service sectors grew and as urban areas became more capable of absorbing in-migrants, the dispersion of sibling groups became a more common occurrence, diminishing the scope for complex families. Large multi-generational complex family groups remained important only in those areas, such as Serbia, where cultural imperatives for their creation were particularly strong. These shifts were not as meaningful in Western countries where even in earlier times family complexity had for the most part manifested itself in elderly parents coresiding with married children rather than as the coresidence of married siblings.

Relationships between demographic patterns and family structures still existed in the twentieth century but the connection was weakening. By the end of the century, in the domains of marriage, family formation, and childbearing, cultural imperatives and personal choice seemed to have moved into positions of dominance in all the regions of Europe. Marriage was no longer a prerequisite to sexual gratification, as the stigma of premarital sex had nearly vanished and cohabitation of unmarried persons had become widely accepted. The timing of marriage became increasingly disconnected from the question of offspring, which was determined more by the economic and professional readiness of couples to "begin having children." Divorce had lost it stigma as well. Net reproduction fell below one (the replacement level) first in Western and then in Eastern European countries. Low fertility, together with increased life expectancy, meant that most European populations were aging, with steadily increasing proportions of elderly persons and falling proportions of children.

Historical Changes in Family Structure

Although it was possible to trace from historical demographic trends the different consequences for different aspects of family life, changes in the structure of family groups as groups required different kinds of evidence. The systematic study of family household structure over time began in the late 1960s with the work of the Cambridge Group, particularly the investigations by Peter Laslett of the "listing of inhabitants." Thousands of those listings were uncovered throughout the Continent and were mined for their content. In some localities, nominal listings were randomly spaced over time; in others, they were made at systematic intervals.

In these listings it was possible to research family structure at moments in past time or in a series of moments. Occasionally communities recorded information about family groupings continuously, permitting the tracking of changes in family groups over long stretches of generations. Some listings carefully recorded the relationship between each member and the group head, whereas others left it unspecified. Some lists distinguished between groups, whereas in others such boundaries had to be interpreted. Successful record linkage involving household listings and parish registers sometimes could be used to enrich both kinds of evidence.

Research on these sources demonstrated the flaws in various earlier claims about structural changes, expanded geographical coverage of family research, and showed that the boundaries of the family in the past were much more porous than had been thought. Geographically, Europe and North America rapidly became the best-researched parts of the world, but historical sources revealed significant historical information about China and Japan as well. Within Europe the western countries and Scandinavia became the most thoroughly researched regions, with southeastern Europe, Italy, and Iberia in second place and Eastern Europe not yet explored fully. Several typologies of European patterns, an east-west division, and a four-part division, served as useful guides to research but were questioned with regard to oversimplification. Chronologically, research was most thorough for the centuries between the seventeenth and nineteenth, with the classical world remaining to be described fully. For the twentieth century, questions of family dynamics largely supplanted questions of structural change.

Broadly speaking, research on Europe since the early 1970s has shown that although nineteenth-century sociological theories of familial evolution describing a trajectory from simple to complex structures held in some regions, they misrepresented the history of other regions. The simply structured two-generational family (father, mother, children) everywhere and always accounted for a significant proportion of all family groupings, and in the European west this structure was predominant ever since the availability of historical records. Elsewhere in Europe the story was more complicated. In the European east (including Russia), under conditions of serfdom that limited movement, and in some regions of the Balkans where local traditions celebrated joint ownership of land and property, complex family structures (coresidence of married siblings and of parental couples with married children) historically represented a significant proportion of any community's total family households. Similar statistical importance of complex groups was found in localities of such widely dispersed countries as Finland, France, and Italy, where these patterns usually were associated with labor needs and inheritance patterns. Wealthier family households were generally more complex than poorer ones, though there are many exceptions to this generalization. The growing size of the "middle class" during the nineteenth century introduced value-based preferences that favored the small nuclear unit.

In most localities a family household almost always contained various nonrelated members: farm-hands, apprentices, lodgers, and paupers. Family structure varied with the age of the household head, exhibiting the "family developmental cycle" (from simple to complex to simple as the head aged). Over time until the twentieth century, complicated groups tended to change the nature of their complexity from horizontal to vertical: married siblings earlier in the developmental cycle and aging parents coresident with a married child later. A unilinear evolutionary pattern (from wholly complex to wholly simple) at the local level, however, could not be found anywhere, as family groups responded to crises by expanding their ranks, becoming simple again when times turned less threatening. The association of particular familial structures with particular ethnic or nationality groups was shown to be irrelevant, and so claims about the "typical French family" or the "typical German family" fell by the wayside. From the functional viewpoint, familial units everywhere reacted to plenty and to adversity generally in the same fashion.

During the twentieth century, however, there was a convergence of structural patterns throughout Europe, though this question has yet to receive a conclusive answer. Also, since the mid-twentieth century new forms of cohabitation have emerged that have required redefinition of what a "family" and a "household" are. The definitions that served to keep research comparable for the pre-twentieth century period have been revealed to be increasingly time-specific.

The early programs of the Cambridge Group to systematize historical family research and make it comparative eventually were criticized as researchers turned increasingly to the study of family dynamics in the past. It was suggested that the constant changes in family life made talk of "structures" irrelevant because any family could experience numerous structural changes in the course of its existence. Some researchers shifted the focus from the family group to individuals within the family group, underlining the interconnectedness between the group's evolution and the individual lives of the persons within the group. Indeed, in the course of time research on the history of the family tended to leave the question of "structure" behind, preferring to look instead at the intergenerational transmission of property (inheritance) within the family group, the distribution of power (patriarchal authority) within it, the effects on it of state policy (public welfare institutions), the experience of crises within the group (widowhood and widowerhood), and the play of emotions within it (parent–child relationships). Some researchers have begun to investigate other social groups of a quasi-familial nature, such as guilds and brotherhoods. The study the of history of the family presents a clear example of a field developing new research directions before early questions were fully answered.

Household, Family, and Kin Group

Successful studies of kinship within the family core-sidential group in the European past showed that when kin beyond the head's immediate family were present, they tended to be kin of a certain kind, for the most part patrilineal. Thus, in the European context there was a higher probability that the coresident parental couple would be the husband's parents, that the coresident siblings of the head would be the husband's brothers, and that the coresident married offspring would be the sons rather than the daughters. These configurations were all predictable from knowledge of the way patrilineal societies worked at any time and in any place. What was always of interest in the European past was who was excluded from the domestic group and on what basis. From the very beginning this question hovered just offstage: If kinship within the domestic group was important, what was the significance of kin ties that crossed household boundaries?

The strongest argument for looking beyond the family household for important family connections lay in already documented behaviors. Aristocracies of various kinds as well as wealthy urban patriciates had always had a keen interest in their lineages, and a similar preoccupation existed in some peasantries, in France for example. In some areas of Europe such as Albania, clan-like organizations were said to have continued to exist well into the twentieth century. Unfortunately, the functioning of larger kin groups is poorly documented in the European past. Whether the influence of the larger kin group on families was peripheral and weak or strong but subtle was an empirical question and could not be answered with any certainty unless such larger kin ties were mapped and the dynamics of domestic units within them were explored.

Several hypotheses about these matters emerged in the course of research. Laslett (1988) contended that people who lived in nuclear families encountered difficulties when faced with crises such as widowhood, unemployment, sickness, and senility. Accordingly, they sought support from their kin or, in the absence of kin, from friends, neighbors, or institutions in the community at large. Yet in the European historical record kin groups were not simply exemplars of the "ethic of amity" (Fortes 1969); they involved antagonisms and divisions as well, especially when disputes involved property, position, or other forms of wealth. Moreover, large kin-linked formations could experience internal shifts. In his explorations of kinship formations in the German village of Neckarhausen in the period from 1600 to 1900, David Sabean (1990, 1998) showed that large kin configurations could undergo transformations of emphasis even while retaining general characteristics such as "patrilineality." Marriage choices within large configurations changed, as did the persons whose job it was to cultivate and maintain kin relations. Sabean's larger point is that the characterization of a kinship system as bilateral or patrilineal was only the first step because historians confronted historical kinship not as a full-blown "system" but as a collection of concrete acts and transactions, each of which had to be understood and interpreted. The temporal changes that are worth knowing about could occur without changing the general "tilt" of the entire system. However, in order to understand the meaning of the change-producing decisions, those decisions have to be laid against a reconstructed network showing how the makers of everyday decisions, within the domestic group context and outside it, were related to each other. A full understanding of the growing autonomy of the domestic group and its growing tendency to make collective decisions without reference to any outside persons required knowledge of the larger group from which autonomy was sought. If the modern state gradually assumed many of the functions that supportive kin networks may have served in earlier times, this transfer of obligations did not cancel, even as it may have weakened, kin ties, and such ties continued to stand ready to be reactivated when the state failed in its duties. Important questions of this kind remain largely unanswered for most of the European continent.

See also: Family Reconstitution; Henry, Louis; Historical Demography; Household Composition; Laslett, Peter.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Michael. 1980. Approaches to the History of the Western Family 1500–1914. London: Macmillan.

Ariès, Philippe. 1962. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick. New York: Knopf.

Coale, Ansley J., and Susan Cotts Watkins, eds. 1986. The Decline of Fertility in Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fortes, Mayer. 1969. Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. Chicago: Aldine.

Glass, David, and D. E. C. Eversley, eds. 1965. Population in History. Chicago: Aldine.

Hajnal, John. 1965. "European Marriage Patterns in Historical Perspective." In Population in History, ed. David Glass and D. E. C. Eversley. Chicago: Aldine.

Hareven, Tamara K. 1996. Aging and Generational Relations over the Life Course. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Kaser, Karl. 1995. Familie und Verwandschaft auf dem Balkan: Analyse einer Untergehenden Kultur. Vienna: Suhrkampf.

Kertzer, David. 1991. "Household History and Sociological Theory." Annual Review of Sociology 17: 155–179.

Laslett, Peter. 1966. "The Study of Social Structure from Listings of Inhabitants." In An Introduction to English Historical Demography. New York: Basic Books.

——. 1983. "Family and Household as Work Group and Kin Group: Areas of Traditional Europe Compared." In Family Forms in Historic Europe, ed. Richard Wall, J. Robin, and Peter Laslett. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

——. 1988. "Family, Kinship, and Collectivity as Systems of Support in Pre-Industrial Europe: A Consideration of the 'Nuclear-Hardship' Hypothesis." Continuity and Change 3: 153–175.

Laslett, Peter, and Richard Wall, eds. 1972. Household and Family in Past Time. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Plakans, Andrejs. 1984. Kinship in the Past: An Anthropology of European Family Life 1500–1900. Oxford: Blackwell.

Ruggles, Steven. 1990. "Family Demography and Family History: Problems and Prospects." Historical Methods 23: 22–33.

Sabean, David. 1990. Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

——. 1998. Kinship in Neckarhausen 1700–1870. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Segalen, Martine. 1985. Fifteen Generations of Bretons: Kinship and Society in Lower Brittany 1720–1980. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, Daniel Scott. 1993. "The Curious History of Theorizing about the History of the Western Nuclear Family." Social Science History 17: 325–353.

Wall, Richard, J. Robin, and Peter Laslett, eds. 1983. Family Forms in Historic Europe. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Wetherell, Charles. 1998. "Historical Social Network Analysis." International Review of Social History 43, Supplement: 125–144.

Wrigley, E. A., ed. 1966. An Introduction to English Historical Demography. New York: Basic Books.

——. 1969. Population and History. New York: McGraw-Hill.

ANDREJS PLAKANS

FUTURE

Changes in the institution of the family probably occur more rapidly in modern and modernizing societies than in the past, but historians and anthropologists have long been aware that shifts in kinship and marriage practices take place even in traditional societies, albeit at a slower pace. What is also true in the early twenty-first century, far more than in the past, is that through social science research, government reports, and stories in the mass media, people are acutely conscious of the changes that are taking place in family norms and behaviors. It is known that the family is changing, but it is nonetheless difficult to project the course of that change beyond a decade or two. Charting the future of the family, then, is an exercise in imagination or science fiction.

Having conceded an inability to read the future, there are certain straws in the wind that can provide some clues of what might be in store for the Western family. Also, it may be worth revisiting ideas about convergence in family forms that were popular in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Future of Marriage in the West

The widespread practice of cohabitation, the rising age of marriage, and high levels of marital instability have lead some observers to question the viability of the institution of marriage. Certainly, the practice of lifelong monogamy, which became the cornerstone of the Western family with the spread of Christianity, has given way to more varied arrangements: consensual unions not sanctioned by state or church; single-parenthood; homosexual unions; and conjugal succession or "serial marriage." Such arrangements have always existed in many societies, but without the legitimacy that they are accorded today.

The conditions that have given rise to greater variation in family forms in which childbearing or, at least, childrearing occurs can be traced to many different factors. The decline of church and state authority to shape public morality is one important source of family change. The breakdown of strict gender roles that once created a high degree of interdependence between spouses is another powerful impetus for revising matrimonial arrangements. The spread of education and of the ideology of choice is a third reason for increasing variability in family forms and in the roles of family members.

It appears unlikely that any of these conditions that have undercut the hegemony of the nuclear family are going to recede. Yet it is entirely possible that customs and fashions, economic forces, or the growth of state authority may influence the distribution of family types within and between Western nations. In the United States, for example, politicians are mounting strenuous efforts to promote marriage. Whether public policies or official rhetoric are likely to have any effect on marriage practices is at best dubious.

According to David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks (2001), variation in family forms in the United States is much more conspicuous as one goes down the socioeconomic ladder. Over the past several decades, family behavior among the privileged has changed little, while in other social strata rates of marital instability and single-parenthood have increased, especially among the poor. This observation suggests that the flux in marriage may be partly produced by economic strains or, perhaps, by gender discord resulting from changing expectations of men and women. The exploration of class differences in family forms is an intriguing area for further investigation.

Future of Fertility in the West

If the fate of marriage is unpredictable, low fertility within marriage appears to have a more secure future. Technological developments in fertility control have increased the ability of couples to manage fertility effectively. Given the high cost of children and low levels of mortality during childhood, large family size is becoming a relic of the past. It is difficult to imagine conditions that will produce, once again, a demand for large families.

The challenge of raising fertility to replacement levels has become an urgent issue of public policy in many Western nations. More than any other, this policy problem is likely to have important effects on the family. The difficulty of combining work and family roles and the high costs involved in rearing children are leading many parents to severely restrict childbearing. It seems likely that societies will experiment with arrangements that alleviate the private costs of rearing children and with building institutions that enable parents to combine work and family roles more easily. Innovations in these areas are already evident, but there is likely to be a good deal more institutional invention as technology allows parents of children to work in the home, or as day-care arrangements permit parental monitoring of children's safety and comfort.

Techniques of Reproduction

Nowhere has reality come closer to science fiction, if not actually surpassing it, than in the area of reproductive technology. Fertility has become ever-more controllable through new medical and biological procedures. The capacity of parents to predetermine at least some of their children's physical characteristics is just around the corner; however, it is not at all clear how different societies will handle the potential benefits and abuses of new reproductive technologies. It seems likely that legal prescriptions will be developed to impose rules on the use of new reproductive technologies, and equally likely that such regulations will create a black market in the use of proscribed practices.

Future of Kinship in the West

High rates of divorce and remarriage reshaped kinship arrangements in last half of the twentieth century. Rising levels of cohabitation and nonmarital childbearing have added complexity to the family as broadly defined. The links across households produced by nonresidential parents and their partners, not to mention their siblings, parents, and children, have created wider but shallower family bonds. Moreover, gay couples and their families have established new kinship arrangements not formed by blood or marriage–the traditional ways of constructing a family. Western societies allow greater latitude in defining family but, in doing so, may be attaching lower levels of obligation to kinship.

Kinship has always been socially constructed, even if members of a society come to think of these ties as "natural." Parent and child relationships based on biological and genetic ties tended to be seen as fundamental, while in-law relations created by legal arrangements were accepted as socially binding. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, both of these axes of kinship had become more questionable in law and practice. The father who sires a child but never lives with him or her has less relevance than the sociological parent (man or woman) who is the mother's partner and helps in raising the child. Moreover, this partner's family becomes part of the child's family, with views of rights and obligations to the child that may be highly variable. Relatively little research exists on new family forms, especially on the way that these forms affect family members' relations with each other in every day practice.

The charting of kinship bonds over time within nontraditional families is an attractive way of understanding how such bonds are created and maintained, and illustrates the strength of relationships in families that are not established by blood or marriage. Students of the family should examine the transfer of property, the keeping of family albums, the frequency of family reunions, and many other everyday aspects of behavior as ways of establishing the meaning of kinship in alternative and traditional families. As yet, virtually no literature exists on this topic.

Convergence of Western and Non-Western Families

In the 1960s some social scientists argued that family systems were converging across the world, gradually moving toward a Western model. The sociologist William J. Goode argued that the fit between the nuclear family and the needs of a modern economy would ultimately force different kinship systems to take on the Western form. Although there is abundant evidence of change in kinship systems worldwide, the evidence suggesting convergence to a Western model of the family is equivocal at best.

It may be still too soon to detect the movement away from complex to simpler forms of the family. However, the thesis put forth by family sociologists in the mid-twentieth-century seems naive in light of what has occurred in the West. In the first place, the assumption of a uniquely appropriate fit seems doubtful in view of the vast changes that have taken place in the Western form of the family and the continuing stresses that are evident between work and family. Moreover, it is clear that traditional forms of the family persist even as economic change takes place.

Will plural marriage–polygamy–where it still exists survive economic development and the spread of Western corporate institutions? Can multi-generational households co-exist with modern economic markets that promote the interests of individuals over aggregates? It seems likely that some accommodations will occur as economic development advances and the market economy spreads to non-Western nations. Clearly, fertility has declined and may continue to drop, forcing changes in household structure and living arrangements. It remains to be seen, however, whether the kinship arrangements that result will have a Western look.

Variations in family forms worldwide have been more resilient than many observers predicted. Goode's thesis that the Western, nuclear family would be imported to nations of varied kinship arrangements has not yet come true, even though changes in marriage and divorce practices and fertility are evident in many developing nations. The hegemony of the nuclear family is less evident and variety is more apparent. In this respect, kinship is proving to be a more durable feature of culture than was thought by those who predicted the demise of the family or the convergence of family forms to a single model.

See also: Childlessness; Cohabitation; Divorce; Fertility, Below-Replacement; Fertility, Nonmarital; Marriage; Parenthood; Partner Choice.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ellwood, David T., and Christopher Jencks. 2001. "The Growing Differences in Family Structure: What Do We Know? Where Do We Look for Answers?" Paper prepared for the New Inequality Program. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Goode, William J. 1963. World Revolution and Family Patterns. New York: Free Press of Glencoe.

Johnson, Coleen. 1988. Ex Familia: Grandparents, Parents, and Children Adjust to Divorce. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Popenoe, David. 1996. Life without Father. New York: Free Press.

Waite, Linda, and Maggie Gallagher. 2000. The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better off Financially. New York: Doubleday.

Weston, Kath. 1991. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wilson, James Q. 2002. The Marriage Problem. New York: Harper Collins.

FRANK F. FURSTENBERG