Joseph K. Folsom - The Family and Democractic Society

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The International Library of Sociology

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THE FAMILY AND DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY

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Founded by KARL MANNHEIM

The International Library of Sociology

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THE SOCIOLOGY OF GENDER AND THE FAMILY
In 15 Volumes

I	Adopted Children	McWhinnie
II	Britain's Married Women Work is	Klein
III	Families and their Relatives	Firth et al
IV	The Family and Democrauc Society	Folsom
V	The Family and Social Change	Rosser et al
VI	The Family Herds	Gulliver
VII	Family Socialization and Interaction Process	Parsons et al
VIII	Foster Care	George
IX	From Generation to Generation	Eisenstadt
X	The Golden Wing	Yueh-Hwa
XI	In Place of Parents	Trasler
XII	In Retirement	Bracey
XIII	Middle Class Families	Bell
XIV	Nation and Family	Myrdal
XV	Women's Two Roles	Myrdal et al

THE FAMILY AND DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY

by
JOSEPH KIRK FOLSOM

With Chapters in Collaboration with
MARION BASSETT

First published in 1949 by
Routledge

Reprinted 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002 by
Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

1949 Joseph Kirk Folsom

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

The publishers have made every effort to contact authors/copyright holders of the works reprinted in The International Library of Sociology. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies we have been unable to trace.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Family and Democratic Society
ISBN 0-415-17644-1
The Sociology of Gender and the Family: 15 Volumes
ISBN 0-415-17827-4
The International Library of Sociology: 274 Volumes
ISBN 0-415-17838-X

Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this
reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original
may be apparent

PREFACE AND PERSONAL NOTE

This book was at first intended to be a revision of my The Family: Its Sociology and Social Psychiatry, published by John Wiley and Sons, Inc., in 1934. Yet so much has happened since then, to the world and to my ideology, that the present volume emerges essentially as a new treatise, with liberal quotations from its predecessor.

Dreading above all to be called unscientific, or wishful thinkers, we sociologists, typically, have pictured social changes as something to be ascertained and understood, but not to be approved or disapproved. If we advocated anything we carefully qualified it by saying, If you want such and such an end, we recommend this means of attaining it. In other words, we left it to the reformer, the moralist, to the vast Somebody Else to determine ends and choose values.

Since 1934, we have seen a small group of determined men who knew what social changes they wanted plunge the whole world into bloodshed.

Some of us have been stirred to a fundamental reconsideration of the sociologist's relation to values. With Robert Lynd, we cry, Knowledge for What? Indeed values are chosen, not proved or disproved. Yet values have their own interrelations. Perhaps sociology is eminently well fitted to judge one value in terms of another, to say whether several values are consistent or inconsistent, and to discern any historical trend or logic in the evolution of values. Perhaps the anthropologist or sociologist is peculiarly well fitted to discern and represent the universal needs and interests of mankind, as distinguished from the arbitrary goals set by man's various cultures.

We have been encouraged, perhaps, in this bolder attitude by the configurationist anthropology represented by Ruth Benedict, which shows different societies as choosing different aims and values for emphasis; by psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalytic anthropology which suggest that value-choices may be much better or worse than one another in terms of life and health, and by progressive education philosophy which holds that it is possible for the school to play a creative role in the tides and currents of social change. Indeed the philosophy of Lester Ward has come alive again with new and better implementation.

Although I believe we should maintain even in wartime important scientific work regardless of its immediate utility, yet I personally, during these last two years of national defense and war, could not have held myself to this bookish task had I not felt that it played a direct role, however small, in the struggle for Democracy. I believe that reforms in the family system, in the relations between men and women, and between adults and children, are not to be postponed and awaited as by-products of other democratic changes; but that they are important keys for the release of other forces and constitute in themselves part of the very essence of Democracy.

In 1934 I showed that certain leading changes were irrevocable, and conceived human welfare to be promoted largely by hastening the lagging changes which would eventually have to follow. My ethical orientation, as far as I dared express it, was in terms largely of functionalist anthropology. The ethical responsibility is to keep society in good repair. [1934, p. 182.] My specific recommendations for action were mainly in terms of social psychiatry or individual adjustments, which I placed in the intellectually dramatic climax position near the end of the book.

The climax of the present volume is the study of the needed changes on the societal, cultural level. Individual personality adjustments are studied not as the only thing we can do about it, but as a source of guidance as to what social action is needed. In the spirit of Lawrence Frank's Society as the Patient, we are rather inclined to take human needs as revealed in case studies as our guide to social reconstruction and the creation of new cultural values.

General, sociological treatises on marriage and the family have been written chiefly by male scholars. Although these, and also the women scholars who are non-mothers, have all been participant observers of family life in the concrete, still we need more of the wisdom of the observing participant. Yet few are the women who have given many years to homemaking and motherhood as a full-time job and who have also written about it. The homemaker's intellectual ambitions usually succumb to drudgery, distractions, or the struggle for prestige; and when eventually she finds time to concentrate her mind, she also finds herself many years behind the men and the career women of her own level of ability.

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