Coontz - The social origins of private life : a history of American families 1600-1900

Frustrated by the fact that most texts on women treated the mans world as the given and then simply asked where and how women fitted in, I decided to undertake a survey of American gender roles: this was the starting point of the present book. My initial approach was to conceptualize the predominantly male public world as being dependent upon and made possible by womans private work, and my attention began to focus on the family as the place not only where men and women were brought into interaction but where the private and the public spheres of life intersected and affected each other.

Simultaneously, however, doing research with Peta Henderson on the origins and history of sexual inequality, I began to realize that neither the publicprivate dichotomy of modern life nor the special association of women with the family was universal. In some societies the private sphere controls the public, and political decisions are subordinate to domestic ones. Thus, for example, male Iroquois sachems declared war, but unless female household heads agreed to arrange provisions for the war party, hostilities could not be commenced. In other societies the distinction between public and private has not existed, or has been qualitatively different from our own. In some groups men are thought to have a special association with the family, while women are considered individualistic or unconcerned with family needs. In others, both men and women share responsibility to the family and are intimately involved in interactions with wider networks of kin.

My interest shifted, accordingly, to variations in family life over time. Stimulated by the burgeoning research into family history, I began to look at the family as a cultures way of coordinating personal reproduction with social reproduction as the socially sanctioned place where male and female reproductive activities condition and are conditioned by the other activities into which human beings enter as they perpetuate a particular kind of society, or try to construct a new one.

As soon as I looked at the family in this way, of course, it ceased to make sense to define it as a private institution, whatever the social ideology about its supposed inviolability or apartness may be. Nor did it make sense to define the family purely in terms of women, ignoring the impact of men on family life and the impact of family life on men. For both men and women, the family offers access to, or attempts to force acceptance of, certain rights and obligations involved in the production and consumption of societys resources. It provides people with an explanation of their rights and obligations that helps link personal identity to social role. At the same time, the family constitutes an arena where people can affect their rights and obligations; it is also, therefore, a place where people resist assignment to their social roles or attempt to renegotiate those roles. The family is thus a major intersection between personal choice and social compulsion. It is, in other words, part of the mode of social reproduction.

In the following chapters I attempt to grapple with some of the connections between the evolution of American families and major transformations in the larger system of social reproduction. This book represents an initial and still tentative synthesis of recent research on the history of the American family rather than an in-depth study of primary sources about a particular time and place. For this reason I can only anticipate correction as more detailed case studies emerge, and there are certainly gaps in my treatment of particular regions and subgroups. I have tried to indicate in the text the limits of many of my generalizations and the variations in family life by class, region, and ethnic group.

The book begins with an overview of the problems in defining the family and understanding the evolution of family life over the past 300 years of Western history. Our tendency to seek a proper or natural family type in history flies in the face of the historical and cross-cultural record, which reveals an astonishing variety of successful family arrangements. I attempt to identify some salient aspects of family change in the West while criticizing linear conceptions or one-sided evaluations of such change. shows, families were based on private property and were the very bedrock of state authority. They were also, however, embedded in a corporate, hierarchical community of households that subordinated family independence to the authority of household and community heads. By the mid eighteenth century, increasing social differentiation and the erosion of corporate controls had begun to change family patterns and the age and gender hierarchies that accompanied them.

In explores how these new patterns interacted with the spread of wage labor and market production to create new family strategies and gender relations, especially in the northern middle class. The ideal of the independent republican household was challenged after 1815 by accelerated economic, political, and social change. This threatened social order, undermined patriarchal power, eroded the economic independence of the middle-class household or at least posed a crisis of succession within it and created a host of new anxieties and opportunities. Middle-class women moved to center stage in the elaboration of new family and gender roles, creating a domestic but not yet a private family in response to changing relations with other classes and regions.

trace the divergent development of middle-class, working-class, and ethnic families, including the special case of Blacks, from 1870 to 1890. I argue, nonetheless, that the family played a more direct role in social and class reproduction for all classes in this period of industrialization than it had done earlier or was to do later.