Reflections on the History of the Family: A Review Essay

Abstract

It is, I trust, no longer necessary to defend the inclusion of family life among the proper concerns of historical scholarship. Work on the subject has been accumulating for about a decade, and from all indications the trend will accelerate in the near future. Still, the sum of the results to date is relatively modest. As with any new field of research, many of the outer boundaries and much of the internal topography remain to be explored. So far a single line of research has been notably-almost exclusivelydominant. I mean, of course, the demographic one. Beginning with the work of the 'sixieme section' in France, and ably followed by the members of the Cambridge (England) Group for the Study of Population and Social Structure, a broad range of ingenious techniques has been developed for the statistical analysis of families in pre-modern Europe. More recently, the movement has crossed the ocean, and already a new generation of historical demographers is busy with similar materials from the American past. Because, however, the achievements of this research are so tangible, and also because the methodology is so dazzling, there is danger of a certain loss of intellectual balance. Too often nowadays scholars refer to the history of the family as if it comprised the demographic history of the family, and little more. The shortsightedness of this perspective will be immediately acknowledged, but the problem is a real one nonetheless. This is not to belittle the place of demography in the study of the family. Such work has been, and will continue to be, of undeniable importance. Indeed it was especially important in the initial phase of this inquiry: one had to know the statistical contours of pre-modern families before one could deal adequately with their structural and psychological elements. Thus the distribution of power between spouses has depended, in part, on their respective ages at marriage. Patterns of inter-generational contact