Some Research Possibilities and Historical Materials for Family and Kinship Study in Britain

Abstract

T IKE most sociologists, I have never regarded kinship as a major | structural and organizational feature of British society since industrialization, and my interest has been restricted to the structure and functions of the elementary family. I confess, too, that behind some work which reflects anthropological influences and interests in the study of the contemporary family, I have seemed to hear the ghost of Dodie Smith whimpering east of Temple Bar. But the purpose of this paper is not to air such unworthy suspicions. When I was asked to contribute to this Conference, I explained that I had no original work to report and could only attempt to indicate some items which social history can suggest for inclusion on the agenda for future investigations in this field. 'Ideally,' as our Chairman has said, 'we should no doubt prefer that the historians should do our work for us, but such work, rubbing our noses hard in the material of social change, is not only salutary in itself and rewarding in the new data which emerge: it cannot but bring us back again to the theoretical problems of social change and the social structures which undergo these changes.'l It is relevant to begin by explaining why the historians are not doing our work for us and by emphasizing one danger of doing it ourselves. Social history in this country ceased long ago to be a description of manners and customs although traces still survive as, for example, in a war-time best-seller's reference to 'the history of a people with the politics left out'.2 It has now become the history of men and women in their social relationships and groupings. As such, the subject derived from economic historians driven to seek explanations of the causes and consequences of economic change in fields outside their own immediate province. For a time it seemed likely that economic and social history would develop a division of labour in their related interests and yet retain their early unity of outlook. That hope has been falsified in recent years as the economic historians who work in the modern period have become fishermen trawling for quantitative data with nets manufactured by economists. They have rejected the view of Professor Tawney's inaugural lecture that 'the future of history, and, in particular, of economic history, depends on its ability to acquire a more