The Family and the History of Public Life

Abstract

The Family and the History of Public Life Since the I960s, history has benefited by adopting some of the problems, concepts, and methods from other disciplines in the human sciences and from other subfields in history. This article argues that history's interdisciplinary character is likely to continue, and that at least part of its future success will come from dialogue with subfields that are not traditionally associated with history. The fact that some of the most interesting questions now facing historians of the lie at the intersection of private and life is illustrated by exploring families' relations to the larger community in which they live. Although our understanding of how the Western evolved in the modern period has been marked by an emphasis on the family's increasing privatization, seen from a different approach, there is ample evidence that life in the West was and is very much a part of the public sphere of social life. Consequently, ideologies about the family's role in society, as well as the empirical realities of life, deserve greater attention from historians as well as historians of political culture. Similarly, integrating the history of people who were either temporarily or permanently without families into the agenda of history promises to give a more realistic, balanced view of the importance of experience, roles, and family values in the past as well as the present. Using examples from my own and from other recent research, this essay demonstrates how understanding the as a mediator between the lives of individuals and larger communities promises to help us understand the social history of the Western world in richer detail.