Protestant Pastors in Late Eighteenth-Century Zurich: Their Families and Society

Abstract

Protestant Pastors in Late Eighteenth-Century Zurich: Their Families and Society Stone has described the closed domesticated nuclear as a product of the rise of affective individualism in early modern times, specifically in the eighteenth century. It was a family organized around the principle of personal autonomy, and bound together by strong affective ties. Although the concept of family in the early eighteenth century was not based on the intimate association of husbands and their wives, by the end of the century, emotion was clearly a major constituent of the nuclear family, if only in theory. Many scholars corroborate this point of view, all of them subscribing more or less to the same transitional model. Brunner and Hausen describe a shift from extended households (including relatives and servants) to nuclear families and the resulting dissociation of families from economic activities. For Mitterauer and Sieder, the deliverance of families from the burden of economic tasks was the most important factor in the historical development of modern families and the concept of partnership grew out of that change.1 Rosenbaum summarizes these ideas by arguing that middleclass families were characterized by the greater intimate relationship of married couples. Love-not economic necessity or political advantage-became a central ideal in marriage. Children