Family

Family. As a complex social institution, the family is affected by both the processes of social and historical change and by natural variables such as biological and psychological processes. Society affects the family through cultural values, market conditions, demographic changes, industrial institutions, churches, government, and welfare agencies. The relationships of individual family members with each other and with the collective family unit are defined differently under various cultural and historical contexts, the meaning of “family” can even differ among various members of the same family. A historical understanding of the family involves consideration of courtship, marriage, life stages, gender roles, sexuality, emotions, and human development.

Throughout American history, the family has been seen as the linchpin of the social order and the basis for stable governance. Though the family has changed more gradually than other institutions in response to external forces, educators, social planners, and the media have long expressed fear of family breakdown under the pressures of social change. Since the founding of the nation, every generation has voiced anxiety over what were perceived as threats to the “traditional” family.

This essay discusses historical changes in the American family, drawing upon research on the history of the family since this field emerged in the 1970s.

Households and Kin

. A nuclear family is a unit consisting of parents and their children, a childless couple, or one parent and his or her children. In a nuclear household, the domestic group may include non‐relatives as well, including apprentices, “life cycle servants” (typically teenagers placed by their own parents), or dependent members of the community.

In considering continuity and change in family behavior, social scientists and laypersons alike long assumed that “modern” family structures and demographic behavior such as nuclear households, family limitation, and the spacing of children were by‐products of industrialization, and that in preindustrial society the extended household form predominated, often with three generations co‐residing. According to this view, industrialization destroyed the three‐generation family structure and replaced it with an “isolated” nuclear family more compatible with the demands of the industrial system. Industrialization was thus considered a major watershed in family structure and demographic behavior. Historical research has revised these myths.

Contrary to such assumptions, households in the Colonial Era were nuclear in structure. They were, however, enmeshed in close ties with extended kin, who usually resided nearby. Aging parents rarely shared the same household with their adult children, but lived in the vicinity, often on the same land. Thus industrialization did not break down a preindustrial extended family or produce an isolated nuclear family type. Indeed, owing to migration and housing shortages, industrialization and urbanization may actually have increased the proportion of households containing extended kin.

Nuclear families of the past did, however, differ from contemporary ones in their age configurations and economic function. Because of higher fertility, children were spread over a larger age spectrum. Older children often took charge of their younger siblings; older sisters served as surrogate mothers. The preindustrial household also served as the basic site of production, vocational training, and welfare. Households collectively formed the fiber of neighborhoods and communities. Before the twentieth century, solitary residence was rare. Men and women expected to live out their lives in familial or surrogate familial settings. Through their control of housing space, family members engaged in economic exchange relations with both kin and non‐relatives. Households could expand and contract over the life course of their members in accordance with the family's needs.

The distinguishing historical feature in the organization of households was not its extension through the presence of other kin, but its augmentation by non‐relatives, such as boarders and lodgers, including young men and women in the transitional period between departure from their parents' households and marriage. For migrants and immigrants, boarding could provide both access to jobs and surrogate family arrangements. For older couples or widows whose children had left home, accommodating young boarders served as a social equivalent of the family while providing young migrants to the city a form of family life. Taking in boarders also provided middle‐aged or older couples with supplemental income, and families with young children alternative sources of child care. By enabling homeowners to pay mortgages or wives to stay out of the labor force, the additional income from boarders made it easier for families to adhere to their traditional arrangements without slipping into poverty.

Families occasionally took in kin as well, usually for a limited time during periods of need or at specific stages in the life course. Increased urban migration over the nineteenth century brought a corresponding increase in co‐residence with extended kin. Newly arrived migrants or immigrants usually stayed with relatives for a limited time until they found jobs and housing. In turn, after having established themselves, they took other kin into households on a temporary basis. In the years around 1900, about 12 to 18 percent of all urban households contained relatives other than nuclear‐family members. By 1950, however, the proportion of such households had declined to 7 percent.

During the era of industrialization, such kinship arrangements played an integral role in mediating between family and societal institutions. Kin organized migration, facilitated newcomers' settlement, helped them find employment, and cushioned the shock of the new industrial world. In the absence of a public welfare system, kin served as the major safety net for migrants. Stretching over several communities, kinship networks of migrants and immigrants assisted local communities in crisis.

The overall pattern of historical change, however, has been from family collectivity to individual goals and aspirations, reducing the integration of individuals into extended kinship networks. The pace and nature of these changes have varied considerably among various classes and ethnic groups.

Changes in the Timing of Life Transitions

. From the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, despite greater societal complexity, the timing of life‐course transitions in American society became more uniform and more closely articulated to age grading and age norms. In the nineteenth century, young people often followed “erratic” patterns, unconnected to specific age norms, shuttling between school and work and in and out of the parental home. Even after marriage, young couples returned home temporarily if their parents needed assistance, or during housing shortages. The timing of early life transitions was shaped by a continuum of practical considerations and familial obligations.

Later life transitions were even more “erratic”. When older men could no longer work at their physically demanding occupations, they alternated between periods of employment and joblessness. Women's work patterns fluctuated over their entire life course because of marriage, childbearing, child rearing, and widowhood. The continuing presence of adult children or others in the household meant that widowhood did not necessarily result in an empty nest.

Over the twentieth century, by contrast, age norms and individual needs emerged as more important determinants of life‐course transitions than familial obligations. As the century ended, however, the more flexible patterns of timing of life course transitions re‐emerged, reflecting changes in family arrangements and values and new policies governing the work life. As the age of first marriage rose, young adult children once again moved in and out of the parental home. This pattern differed from the former one, however, in a fundamental way: In the late nineteenth century, children remained at home, or returned home, in response to the needs of their family. In late‐twentieth‐century society, young adult children (including divorced or unmarried daughters with their own young children) returned home in order to meet their own needs. The return of the “erratic” style of family life also coincided with changing patterns of retirement, as the once rigid end to a work career again became more flexible.

The Family and Industrialization

. As we have seen, industrialization and urbanization were long viewed as major threats to traditional family life and as causes of family breakdown. Industrialization, sociologists argued, caused familial breakdown as rural‐to‐urban migration uprooted people from their kinship networks, eroded traditional culture, and precipitated disintegration of the family unit.

Recent research on the history of the family has challenged these simplistic models of social and economic change and demonstrated that industrial capitalism did not cause family breakdown. In negotiating such larger processes as migration, urbanization, and industrialization, the family was not passive and inert, but a proactive agent in planning, initiating, or resisting change.

While following their own priorities, families facilitated the early phases of industrialization in several ways: Rural families released members to work in urban factories, or acquired machinery that transformed their own households into cottage industries. Families provided housing, employment, and training for newly arriving relatives entering the industrial workforce.

The success of the industrial system depended on a continuous flow of labor from abroad and from rural areas. Much of the recruitment and migration of workers was carried out under the auspices of kinship networks. Kinship ties with communities of origin facilitated back‐and‐forth migration of individuals and the transmission of resources. The family type that best “fit” industrialization, therefore, was not the isolated nuclear type, but a nuclear family embedded in an extended kinship network.

Domesticity and Women's Work

. Despite the large families typical of preindustrial society, women invested relatively less time in motherhood than did mothers in the industrial era. Childcare was part of the process of household production rather than women's exclusive preoccupation. Children were viewed not merely as objects of nurture but as productive members of the family. The integration of family and work allowed for the sharing of labor between husbands and wives as well as between parents and children.

Industrialization reordered the division of labor in the family along gender lines, especially in middle‐class households, which were transformed from places of production to places of consumption and child rearing. The most crucial change was the transfer of functions from the family to other social institutions. The preindustrial family and household served as “workshop,” “church,” “reformatory,” “school,” and “asylum”. With industrialization and urbanization, these functions became, in large part, the responsibility of other institutions. As the middle‐class family ceased to be a work unit, unpaid housework, no longer involving the production of visible goods, lost its economic and productive role and was devalued by a modern society that measured achievement by systematic time‐and‐production schedules.

The separation between home and workplace enshrined the former as a domestic retreat from the outside world and made the family child‐centered. The ideology of domesticity and the new view of childhood combined to revise expectations of parenthood. A clear division of labor between husbands and wives replaced the old economic cooperation, with wives concentrating on homemaking and child rearing while husbands worked outside the home. Arising in the early nineteenth century, these patterns marked the emergence of the domestic middle‐class family, as it has been known over the past century.

The ideology of domesticity, originating in urban middle‐class families, gradually became the dominant model for family life in the entire society. Second‐ and third‐generation immigrant families who had originally viewed the family as a productive unit and accepted the wife's work outside the home now embraced the ideology of domesticity and viewed women's participation in the labor force as demeaning to the husband and harmful to the children. Consequently, married women entered the labor force only when driven by economic necessity. The post‐World War II re‐entry of married women into the labor force in pursuit of a career thus represents a major historical transformation. Older attitudes toward working women and mothers' labor‐force participation and stereotypes persisted, however.

As the values of individualism and privacy triumphed, the nuclear family grew increasingly distant from extended kin network and non‐relatives disappeared from the household. This trend toward privatization of the family exacerbated the isolation of the family from the community at the very time when families could have benefited from community interaction in areas such as child care, support for aged relatives, and other critical life situations.

Family‐history research is currently examining family interaction with societal processes and institutions within specific community contexts. Although such work has already contributed to a revision of earlier generalizations, historians still face the challenge of developing a more comprehensive model of family behavior that covers a longer historical period and does justice to the full complexities of social change.
See also Abortion; Architecture: Domestic Architecture; Birth Control and Family Planning; Childbirth; Child Labor; Consumer Culture; Demography; Domestic Labor; Domestic Violence; Education: The Public School Movement; Factory System; Homework; Immigrant Labor; Immigration; Mobility; Sexual Morality and Sexual Reform; Slavery: Slave Families, Communities, and Culture; Social Class; Suburbanization; Women in the Labor Force; Working‐Class Life and Culture.

Bibliography

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Glen H. Elder Jr. , Children of the Great Depression, 1974.
Herbert Gutman , The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925, 1976.
Joseph F. Kett , Rites of Passage: Adolesence in America—1790 to the Present, 1977.
Carl N. Degler , At Odds: Women and the Family in America from Revolution to the Present, 1980.
Tamara K. Hareven , Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community, 1982.
Frances K. and and Calvin Goldscheider , The Changing Transition to Adulthood—Leaving and Returning Home, 1999.
Tamara K. Hareven , Families, History and Social Change: Life‐Course and Cross‐Cultural Perspectives, 2000.

Tamara K. Hareven