‘The family’ is still often implicitly taken to be an essential and nat- ural entity. And behind this exclusion is the unspoken assumption that the family is about women and children, about femininity and infancy.1
Introduction
How do we imagine the family in the past? And how do we think about women’s rela- tionship with this primary social institution? Women (and children) are so frequently associated with the family – contained within it, isolated without it, defined by it – that it has become common to talk about family in terms of the functions and roles closely associated with femininity. Hence, the family of the historical imagination is a domes- tic, nurturing and intimate unit, governed by women’s concerns: reproduction, nurture, socialisation and the provision of sustenance. The existence of a family in the past is dependent upon the presence and work of women; a family without an adult female was not deemed worthy of the name. Certainly, by the nineteenth century, family had become intimately associated with the idea of ‘home’ and a woman was an essential component of home-making so that the sentiment ‘A man can no more make a home than a drone can make a hive’ was widely held.2
And yet, despite the intimate association of women’s roles and functions with family, it is often implicit in discussions of women’s experience rather than made explicit: ‘Family is everywhere and family is nowhere to be seen’.3Family – as a concrete col-
lection of individuals as well as a symbol – underpins so much of personal experience in the past from childhood to old age, but its meaning is rarely explored. The family is a set of social relationships connected by blood, property, dependency and intimacy. It is a material reality as well as an ideology and a cultural practice. As a means of basic social organisation it frames domestic and work lives, and as a symbol it influences social policy. This chapter will define family as a cultural practice, a series of inter- connected rituals based upon co-residence or kin relations. It will examine how women experienced the relationships and functions implicit in family and how constructions of family – as a conduit for property inheritance for example, or as a guarantor of social stability – came to impact upon women’s choices and opportunities in western Europe from 1700. This reimagining of the family as a set of relationships and rituals,
which are determined by prevailing economic conditions and cultural and religious beliefs, may offer a more positive interpretation of women’s association with family than has hitherto been considered.
The concept of family is so ubiquitous in modern life and in modern historiography that it is hard to imagine a time when it was not. And yet, as Sarti explains, ‘family’ only began to be used in western Europe to refer to a kin group living under the same roof as late as the eighteenth century. Before then, the term ‘family’ did not necessar- ily identify blood or kin relationships but relationships of dependency on the head of the household. By the eighteenth century, it seems that the French concept famille, referring to a married couple and their children, began to be used elsewhere, but it was not until the nineteenth century that family came to denote ‘a hierarchically structured domestic community, made up of a father, a mother, children and servants [represent- ing] a fundamental building block in society’.4Indeed, for comparative purposes the
term ‘household’ is more useful as a catch-all concept that allows one to sidestep the difficulties embedded in different meanings of family over time and space. It is the rather narrow and time-specific concept of the family, analogous with the co-resident nuclear family, with which historians of the modern period in Europe are most com- fortable, perhaps because it equates most closely to the concept and reality of family with which we are most familiar (although not necessarily as part of our personal expe- rience). It is this model of family that informs the massive popularity of genealogy research in modern society, and yet we know from our own family histories that the family we live by is so rarely the family we live with. That is to say, the myths of family that inform our understandings of what family should be and how it should be expe- rienced are often unhinged from the material reality of family life.5As Gillis states in
his analysis of the relationship between family myth and family reality, the families we live with are ‘often fragmented and impermanent [and] are much less reliable than the imagined families we live by’.6It is a sentiment echoed in a recent feminist study of the
family in which the authors acknowledge that present debates about the family exhibit a yearning for a ‘golden age of stable, loving and supportive families’ which privileges the nuclear family, and yet this very narrative of family in the past ‘denies the com- plexities of familial relationships’.7
An example from the author’s own family history serves this point well. My great great grandfather Samuel Jay was born in rural north Essex in 1797 into a family of agricultural labourers. In 1830, Samuel married his first wife Sarah Sallows. The couple had five children together before she died in 1838. In 1839 he married for a second time to Sarah Butcher, daughter of a labourer in the same village as Samuel. Sarah appears to have died upon or after the birth of a son. In 1848 a third marriage to Amelia Howe was also short-lived for, in 1851, Samuel Jay was living with Elizabeth Butcher (sister of his second wife Sarah) listed variously as his lover and his lodger in the census, with whom he stayed for at least thirty years. The couple may have had an illegitimate daughter together, Ellen, who is recorded in the census as Samuel’s daugh- ter-in-law. Samuel Jay had at least seven children with his wives and partners. Each time a wife died he remarried to create a new family grafted onto the old, until the death of Amelia after which he seems to have rejected marriage while still forming a household with Elizabeth and the younger children from his previous marriages.8
Samuel’s family, which was continuously resident in the same village (although at dif- ferent addresses) for more than eighty years, was both enduring and discontinuous. At
some points it might have been described as nuclear and at other times extended. This story tells us a lot about the nature of the rural labouring family, but from the scant information available to construct this complex series of family forms we know little of the women in Samuel’s life apart from the fact that they had children and died young. Indeed, they are defined solely as wives and mothers.
Women’s relationship to the family is so often framed by their relationships to others: fathers, husbands, children. This approach does highlight important ways in which women’s lives are defined in some way by their familial ties but also limits our understanding of women’s identities and experiences over the life course. The history of the family is not the same as the history of women. As the Jay family story illus- trates, families in the past no less than today were continually changing shape. The relationships within the co-residential group and beyond to kin outside the residential core were in constant flux. For women at all times and in all places this meant frequent adaptation to different sets of economic and cultural circumstances.
Historiography
In 1987 Louise A. Tilly asked whether the relationship between women’s history and family history was characterised by ‘fruitful collaboration or missed connection?’9
Her quest was informed by a sense that these two vibrant fields of historical research had more to say to each other than had hitherto been the case for a combination of methodological and ideological reasons. Family history, until quite recently, tended to be dominated by demographic and structural approaches. The study of population movement and change is of course central to understandings of family forms and rela- tionships, but until the 1970s debates about fertility changes, for instance, were carried out with little or no reference to gendered power relationships. As Alison Mackinnon has argued, demographers see fertility as ‘a characteristic of populations rather than persons’.10 Structural approaches, dominated by the spectre of late
nineteenth-century ethnologist Frédéric Le Play, who almost single-handedly invented a language and a series of ideal family models (for example, the stem family, the com- plex household, the nuclear household), have similarly downplayed the role of women and of men as social actors informed by ideas about gender roles. The families alluded to by the historical demographers and the stucturalists are disembodied and imper- sonal. Women and their roles as childbearers and nurturers are implicit rather than explicit in these analyses and the tendency to treat the family as a single social and economic unit in its relationship to the rest of society resulted in the silencing of ‘inter- nal’ relationships within the family as well as the disregarding of non-kin relations outwith this institution.
Arising from the structural and demographic approach to family was the theory that modernisation fundamentally altered family structures and relationships, notably that the family became more nuclear in character as opposed to kinship oriented and more centred upon affective relations as opposed to instrumental or economic relationships. The debate between those who argued for changes of this kind and those who empha- sised continuity did address issues of gender, often in a controversial way. The proposition of Shorter and Stone that, before the rise of the nuclear affective family, parental and more especially maternal relations with children were characterised by instrumentalism and lack of affection or sentiment certainly placed women’s role in the
family in the spotlight, but the debate in general perpetuated the tendency to downplay or ignore what family meant to those who experienced it.11And in any case, the focus
on parent–child relations was regarded by these historians as a means of advancing a more general position rather than of gaining deeper insight into the material realities of familial relations.
Women’s historians, on the other hand, traditionally had little time for the family. First-wave feminists of the late nineteenth century and second-wave feminists of the 1970s both regarded the public sphere – education, paid work and citizenship – as the key to women’s emancipation. Nineteenth-century feminists focused their energies on reforming women’s subordinate legal position in the family in respect of property and child-custody rights. By the late twentieth century, marriage was regarded by many second-wave feminists as the keystone of women’s oppression. The family as a legal and an ideological construct was regarded by historians of women as a hindrance to women’s claims to participation in the economy and the polity. And the discursive con- struction of woman since the Enlightenment as wife and mother, domestic angel and homemaker has long been considered a constraint upon women’s opportunities beyond the family and the home. The resilience of the ideology of separate spheres, of the notion of a gendered public and private, within historical writing on gender has tended to perpetuate the subordination of family to lesser importance in the disciplinary hier- archy. Notwithstanding vigorous debates amongst historians of women and gender about the value and the persistence and chronology of separate spheres as a discursive power or organising principle in social, cultural, economic and political life, the con- tinued association of the private sphere with the domestic and the personal presents challenges for the historian of women if he or she wishes to privilege this sphere as a site of female consciousness and power.
Since the 1980s, women’s historians have embraced the family in a more positive fashion, as a legitimate site of women’s experience and identity. Arising from a recog- nition that most women’s lives were structured by the ideology and the material reality of family – its demands, its structures and its relationships – historians of the labour- ing classes placed family centre stage and repositioned it as a complement to work. The family in these studies is imagined as a strategic unit, incorporating variable roles and relationships interacting with the outside world.12The family was contingent upon its
position within the wider economy, and relations within the family unit as well as beyond it were influenced by ideas about appropriate gender roles, by cultural assump- tions and by material circumstances. In this literature then, the family is conceived as neither necessarily oppressive nor emancipatory for women, but rather a social unit that provides the context for women’s reproductive and productive experiences. Thus, for example, in the proto-industrial economy in France, the declining income to be gained from home-based handloom-weaving undertaken by men forced women into waged work to ensure the family’s survival. The family economy, in these circum- stances, was adaptable to the needs of the market.13 In the industrial economy,
however, familial ideology, which categorised the husband as breadwinner and wife as homemaker, impacted upon women’s experiences in the workplace as they were treated as secondary or subsidiary workers, a development discussed in more detail by Deborah Simonton in Chapter 5.
Davidoff and Hall’s Family Fortunes, a study of the English middle classes, placed the family at the heart of middle-class life and identity formation in the crucial period
1780–1850. They regarded the family as a dynamic institution within which women and men formed social bonds, exhibited gendered roles and found ways of meeting their needs. The family in this analysis does not sit apart from business; it is not syn- onymous with the private or the personal; rather it is implicated in the middle-class economy and the idea of family as a flexible and adaptive kinship system ‘framed middle-class provincial life’.14The work of Ellen Ross on women in poor working-
class London families, and of Bonnie Smith on the women of the French industrial bourgeoisie, epitomises this approach.15For these historians, the family is the very sub-
stance and texture of women’s daily lives, more so than paid work. The women in question – whether poor and struggling in London’s East End, or wealthy and privi- leged in northern France – lived lives shaped by the material demands and the discursive construction of family. Family here incorporates a multitude of activities and experiences: marriage, childbirth, death, ritual, religion, relationships and work which, in their doing, facilitated a sense of female collective identity or at least a sense of where their common interests lay. Ultimately, some have argued that woman’s famil- ial relationships and experiences shaped her feminist consciousness in the nineteenth century, resulting in middle-class philanthropic engagement and working-class protest informed by the material conditions of everyday life.16
Historians of family and of women, particularly in Britain, have been less interested in the nitty-gritty day-to-day monotony of family life with which many women were accustomed. Ethnography has always been more integrated into the historical disci- pline outside the British Isles and, moreover, the shift to theories of gender have sidelined aspects of the past which do not appear conducive to theoretical approaches. For instance, the work of servicing the family has mostly been discussed within the context of domestic service, yet in most families this work was done by whoever was not undertaking paid work, that is, women, children and the elderly. The focus on the everyday by European historians has reoriented attention on the family as the fulcrum of private experience and as a place where individuals find meaning and assume an identity. Sarti, in her study of family and material culture in early modern Europe, demonstrates how descriptions of ‘banal objects and commonplace events’ may ‘pen- etrate the experience of men and women of the past’.17 French historian Martine
Segalen has taken this further, recognising the possibilities of material culture for pen- etrating family relationships. For instance, Segalen points to the significance of the introduction of communal water fountains and washhouses in southern France, which resulted in changes in patterns of female sociability as women used to carrying out their laundry alone now ‘found a time and a place to express their identity and some- times their solidarity’.18Studies of everyday family practices in particular religious and
ethnic cultures also highlight how delineated gender roles have been essential to the practice of family in the past. Within migrant Jewish communities, for instance, the task of providing the kosher eve of Sabbath meal with all its attendant ritual was invariably female.
Doing the laundry, cooking, eating and cleaning up, as well as decorating one’s home, visiting kin and so on, are all part of ‘doing family’ as much as property inher- itance, marriage, procreation and choice of living arrangements. And family life was part of everyday life, argues Gillis. Referring to European Protestants, he argues that their family life was ‘transparent, unreflexive, unmediated by any representations of itself, lived on a day-to-day basis, without reference to custom or tradition’.19By the
second half of the nineteenth century, however, family had become something that one consciously created. In Gillis’s words, ‘family had put itself on display’.20This empha-
sis on family practices rather than social structure is a fruitful way forwards for both historians of family and of women and gender.21It is an approach that potentially tran-
scends the divisive separate-spheres dichotomy, thus positioning the family as an institution and an idea that informs all cultural experience, and it might help us to stretch ourselves across longer timespans. Family history and women’s history are pri- marily concerned with relationships in the past – between husbands and wives, parents and children, kin and non-kin, family and community – expressed as a series of rela- tional practices which may include care of and responsibility for others and the protection and control of family members within a complex web of kin and non-kin relations.22Such an approach allows one to move beyond the supposedly ‘natural’
association of woman with family in her role as mother, wife, care-giver, homemaker, and so on (an approach that tended to hide or silence women’s role) and forces a rethinking of women’s familial relationships and responsibilities over the life course and over historical time and space.
For women’s historians then, the family occupies an ambiguous place in our con- struction of the past. For a long time, historians of women saw the family and those concepts so intimately associated with it – the home, the household, the private sphere, moral discipline – as a source of historical oppression, a place where women were con-