REVIEWS
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1983.tb02523.x |
| Date | 01 May 1983 |
| Published date | 01 May 1983 |
REVIEWS
COME
WHOAM
TO
THI
CHILDER
AN’
ME
THE
SUBVERSIVE
FAMILY.
By
FERDINAND
MOUNT.
[London: Jonathan
THE
ANTI-SOCIAL
FAMILY.
By
MICHELE
BARRETT
and
MARY
MCINTOSH.
IT
would be
a
hasty generalisation to claim that we are more obsessed today
with the family-with its rights and wrongs, its future, its place in society-
than in past times. But it is safe to say that modern concerns with the family
have
a
distinctive
new
focus. In the nineteenth century, moral regeneration,
especially
of
the working-class family, was the dominant theme. In the
twentieth, filtered through an eugenicist preoccupation, the emphasis has
shifted somewhat, towards the quality
of
life produced in and by the family,
and
to the psychological
as
well
as
physical well-being
of
family members, in
particular of children. Lawyers have played an overt role in dealing with
pathological families, though responsibility and competence for developing
normalising strategies has been dispersed across
a
more diverse field
of
experts: educators, social workers, the medical and psychiatric professions
and police. Yet what is this family, to which we devote
so
much time and
attention? What is its history, function and future? and Durkheim
*
offered images
of
the past and the present, and refined conceptions
of
possible
and desirable futures, which dealt with the family in sweeping, and from an
historical point
of
view, rather casual, terms. Even Weber, the most sophisti-
cated if least systematic
of
the Grand Masters, did not entirely escape
the
Gerneinschaftliche
images of the communal nature
of
family
life
in past times.s
The modern family was perhaps an obvious target for incorporation within
Parsonian functionalism and systems theory? Mirroring the current antipathy
Cape.
1982. 282
pp.
(inc.
index)
€9.50.1
[London:
Verso/NLB.
1982. 164
pp.
(inc.
index)
63-95.]
Early social theorists like
Le
Play,’ Engels? Tonnies
Frkd6ric le Play was the originator
of
the term
“
stem family
”
(la
famiile souche);
Peter Laslett describes him as
“.
.
.
the strongest single influence on the historical study of
the family,”
“
Introduction
”
in Laslett and Wall (eds.)
Household and Family in Past
Time
(1972),
p.
16.
Le Play considered the
“
nuclear family
”
to be unstable
(la
famllle
instable)
and as liable to bring about the decline
of
the nation. Social regeneration required
the restoration of the authoritarian stem family. Laslett’s
“
Introduction,”
op.
cif.,
pp.
16-21,
contains a useful discussion and references
to
further reading. Barrett and
Mclntosh dismiss him as
“
an ignorant sociologist
”
(p.
87).
The Origins
of
the Family, Privafe Properfy
and
the State
(Lawrence and Wishart
eds.,
1972).
What is to be made
of
this (unjustifiably?) famous work? For a recent
appraisal, see Maurice Bloch,
Marxism
and
Anthropology
(1983),
pp.
43-62.
Cf.
Peter
Aaby,
“
Engels and Women
”
(1977) 9
and
10
Crifique
of
Anfhropology
25-53;
Carol
MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern (eds.)
Nafure, Culture and Gender
(1980).
Gemeinschafr und Geseilschaft
(1887,
Eng. transl.,
Communify and Association
(1955)).
For
a
combative view on Tonnies’s thought, see Cahnman and Heberle (eds.), Tonnies,
On
Sociology: Pure, Applied, and Empirical
(1971),
pp. ix-xiv.
Apart from
The Division
of
Labour
(see
infra,
note
9),
see
the discussion of his lecture
course
on
the family in Steven Lukes,
Emile Durkheim
(1973),
Chap.
8.
ti
This seems inherent in some
of
the sub-types of his concept of
*‘
traditional authority.”
But, characteristically, Weber drew attention to a range of constitutive elements
of
communalrelationships, and,in particular, to theplaceofcoercionwithin them: seeEconomy
and
Society
(1968),
Vol.
1.
pp.
40-42.
’
For
an accessible treatment, see
D.
H.
J.
Morgan,
Social Theory and the Family
(1975).
Chap.
1.
363
364
THE
MODERN LAW REVIEW
[Vol.
46
towards Parsonian sociology, many contemporary
"
critical
"
theorists have
come to see the
famdy
as, in various ways, pathogenic.?
Some anthropologists, notably Malinowski, sounded early warning shots
against such romantic conceptions
of
"
primitive
"
life.s
Some historians
suggested that our
I'
organic
"
conceptions
of
the past might need revisi~n.~
It
is,
however,
onl:y
quite recently, with the development
of
new historical
methods of reconstituting the past, that assumptions about the nature
of
family life in the past have come radically to
be
challenged, and the need
arisen to contemplate substantial revision
of
our theories
of
the family,
whatever the facts
of
contemporary family life might happen to be.1o
In England, sociologists, historians and demographers, most notably
Laslett, Hajnal and Wrigley, have made an important contribution
to
our
understanding
of
marriage patterns, family and household size, infant and
adult
mortality, age of menarche, fertility, length of marriage and
so
on."
The literature now provides considerable support for the view that a distinctive
"
European marriage pattern
"
stretches back well into the past-though how
far back is still uncertain.12 It does seem reasonable to suppose, however, that
well before the early modern period, the majority of households in England
and in much of France were small and two-generational
at
most, and mar-
riages late (except among the upper classes, where marriage alliances had
political functions).13 Thus in terms of household size, the
''
nuclear family
"
is not a creature of modernity, nor can we simply
assutne
that in the past
families looked after the old, the sick, the crippled and the mad.14
It is necessary to stress that this type
of
household may have been confined
to, or dominant only in, North-western Europe. In the Pays d'Oc, multi-
family households 'linked on the basis of fraternity may have been common
16;
the Russian and Slavonic experience may also have been different.'6
See Mark Poster,
Critical Theory
of
the Family
(1978); Morgan,
op. cir.
Chap.
4.
*
See,
e.g.
the blislering introduction to
Crime and Custorn in Savage Society
(1926).
On the institution of marriage itself, see
E.
R. Leach,
Rethinking Anthropology
(1961),
Chap. 4.
Eileen Power offered a more careful appraisal
of
family relationships among different
social groups long
ago:
see her lecture notes,
Medieval Women
(1975), posthumously
edited by
M.
M.
Postan. The conventional
use
of the term
"
organic
"
here should not,
of
course, be confused with Durkheim's deliberate reversal of the traditional-modern
distinction in
De la division
dir
travailsocial(1893;
Eng.
trans].
1933).
lo
See,
e.g.
Young and Willmott,
The Symmetrical Family
(1973); Oakley
The Sociology
of
Housework
(1974); Edgell,
Middle Class Couples
(1980).
For
the seminal literature, see P. Laslett,
The
World
We
Have Lost
(1965); Laslett
and Wall (eds.),
op.
cit.;
J.
Hajnal,
"
European Marriage Patterns in Perspective
"
in Glass
and Eversley (eds.),
Popirlarion
in
History
(1965), pp. 101-143; E.
A.
Wrigley,
''
Family
Limitation in Pre-Industrial England
"
(1966) XIX Econ.Hist.Rev. (2nd ser.)
82-109.
l2
See especially
FI.
M.
Smith
"
Some Reflections on the Evidence for the Origins of
the
'
European Marriage Pattern
'
in England," in Harris (ed.) The
Sociology
of
fhe
Family
(1979), pp. 74-112.
l8
See Eileen Power,
op. cit.,
pp. 38-40; C.
N.
L.
Brooke,
"
Marriage and Society in
the Central Middle Ages," in
R.
B.
Outhwaite (ed.)
Marriage and
Society(1981), pp. 17-34.
l4
Laslett observeithat
". . .
mean household size remained fairly constant at 4.75
or
a
little under, from the earliest point for which we have found figures, until as late as 1901.
There is no sign
of
the large, extended co-residential family group
of
the traditional
peasant world giving way to the small, nuclear, conjugal household of modern industrial
society."
"
England: The Household over Three Centuries," in Laslett and Wall (eds.)
up. cir.
p. 126.
l6
The
frkreche;
see
Jean-Louis Flandrin,
Fomilies
in
Former
Times
(1976;
Eng.
trans].
1979), pp. 72-73, 83; Laslett,
"
Introduction
"
in Laslett and Wall (eds.),
op.
cir.
pp. 30-31.
A useful discussion of the Central Europfy position can be found in Mitterauer and
Sieder,
The European Family
(1982). Laslett's Foreword
"
summarises the contrast with
the British experience. For Russia, see
ibid.
p. 29. For the Serbian
Zadruga,
see Laslett,
"
Introduction," pp.
37-38
and Chaps. 14-16 in Laslett and Wall
(eds.)
op.
cit.
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