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The American Family: Past, Present--and Future?
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14975 |
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BOOK WORLD
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9 / 1988 |
4,710 Words |
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John Braeman
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DOMESTIC REVOLUTIONS
A Social History of American Family Life
Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg
New York: Free Press, 1988
400 pp. $22.50
Family history has become one of the major academic growth areas in the last quarter century. The now-formidable body of work on the American experiences has inspired the husband-and-wife team of Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg to try for a new synthesis in their Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life.
Unfortunately, however, the work reflects rather than resolves the disarray afflicting the field of family history. The first problem that strikes the reader is the skewed attention given different aspects of the American family experience. Colonial New England receives fuller treatment than colonies south of the Mason-Dixon line, while the so-called middle colonies appear lost in the shuffle. For the nineteenth century, the longest chapter (twenty-three pages) deals with the rise of the middle-class or Victorian family--which the authors, following Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, call the "democratic family." Seventeen-plus pages examine the shaping of the Afro-American family. White working-class family life receives approximately the same amount of space, but only slightly more than one page deals with the varying family patterns among different ethnic groups. Although constituting a majority of the population until the beginning of the twentieth century, rural families are allotted only seven pages (most of which deals with the Great Plains)--roughly the same as for coal mining villages. Three-fifths of the text is devoted to the twentieth century: the "companionate family" emerging from the upper-middle class in 1890-1930, the impact of the Great Depression and World War II, the so-called golden age of the family in the 1950s, and the changes that have--or at least are believed to have--taken place since.
The fault is not wholly the authors'. Their coverage accurately mirrors the strengths and limitations of existing scholarship, Part of the difficulty lies in regions various in the availability of sources. There are, for example, far more abundant records from New England than from the southern colonies. These are major differences in the amount of documentation available on different social classes. There are simply more that can be known about the urban middle class than about immigrant workers. The recent intensified politicization of family-related issues ahs further contributed to shaping the direction of work in the field. Extensive research into the slave experience was sparked by the debate over the plight of the black family triggered by Daniel P. Moynihan's controversial 1965 report. And the plethora of writing about the Victorian family owes much to that institution's identification by the feminist movement as the leading source of women's oppression.
Family History in Disarray
A broad consensus exists that, long before industrialization, the standard household in northwest Europe, and thus in early America, was not the extended family but rather the nuclear family consisting of parents and children. There is similar scholarly agreement on the changes marking the emergence of the modern--or bourgeois--family; a decline of influence of
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