Historical Perspectives on Family Studies

Abstract

This article explores the relationship of historical research to contemporary family studies. Family history was influenced greatly by fields such as sociology and anthropology, leading it to make several contributions to those fields in turn. The continuing collaboration of these disciplines can significantly enrich current family research, practice, and policy making. History's specific contribution lies in its attention to context. Although historical research confirms sociologic and ethnographic findings on the diversity of family forms, for example, it also reveals that all families are not created equal. The advantage of any particular type of family at any particular time is constructed out of contingent and historically variable social relationships. Historical research allows researchers to deepen their analysis of family diversity and family change by challenging widespread assumptions about what is and what is not truly new in family life. Such research complicates generalizations about the impact of family change and raises several methodological cautions about what can be compared and controlled for in analyzing family variations and outcomes.

Changing household patterns of young couples in low- and middle-income countries

“…By contrast, at present a larger number of co-resident extended families would embody just a tiny fraction of potential multigenerational households. For the same token, the privacy that is greatly valued by nuclear families today is fairly recent as in the earlier days it was quite common for servants, borders, lodgers to move freely in and out of the household and for more distant family members to visit (Ruggles 1994;Coontz 2000).…”

“…Indeed, later research demonstrated that there had indeed been a decline of extended families (Coontz 2000), although as a result of high mortality rates and second marriages, step-families were much more numerous than we today suppose (Segalen 1981;Coontz 2005). However, the explanation given was that as lives were shorter in the past, comparatively few families had had enough living members to potentially reside as a multigenerational household, but the ones that did represented a high proportion of all such potential arrangements.…”

“…In particular, if the younger generation profits from expanded economic opportunities, we would expect a reduced frequency of co-residence in traditional patriarchal multigenerational families (but see also Coontz 2000), since the alternatives to familial employment would become more attractive. At the same time, however, the rise of wage labour could contribute to an increase of landless elderly with no means of support, and the rising income of younger-generation wage earners could actually increase their capacity to take in destitute parents.…”

“…As extended education becomes the primary route to finding a job that provides a wage one can survive on, one spin-off of the rise in the age of economic and educational independence has been the emergence of a youth culture that crosses geographic borders, as well as some racial, class, and gender boundaries (Coontz 2000). New ways of looking at the world can come from the schooling process itself, as new ideas and attitudes are portrayed in the educational curriculum, but they can also be gained from new access to the mass media, including television, internet, newspapers, magazines, and movies (Thornton & Lin 1994).…”

“…A brief run through the historical and anthropological literature sheds light on the great plasticity of familial systems in the variegated cultures of which we have knowledge (Coontz 2000). This flexibility arises in the majority of cases from the necessities of adaptation to diverse environmental, biological, geographical economic, political and social pressures (Fox 1967).…”