1. In what has become one of the standard surveys of the field, Michael Anderson's Approaches to the History of the Western Family (London: Macmillan, 1980) divides historical research on the family into three approaches: the demographic, the affective, and the domestic economic. We discuss examples of the first two schools in this chapter while reserving discussion of the third for chapter 6. We will not observe distinctions quite so precise as Anderson's, however, since in recent years historians in each group have drawn on the research conducted in the other areas. In addition to surveys of the debate on the history of the family discussed in this chapter, other discussions can be found in Tamara K. Hareven, "Modernization and Family History: Perspectives on Social Change," Signs 2 (1976): 190-206; Mary Lyndon Shanley, "The History of the Family in Modern England," Signs 4 (1979): 740-50; Mark Poster, Critical Theory of the Family (New York: Seabury Press, 1979); Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of the American Family (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 7-40.

2. Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982), p. 73.

3. Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450-1700 (London and New York: Longman, 1984), p. 156.

4. Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 82.

5. Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 28.

6. See, for example, Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). In a similar vein is Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300-1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). This study of expressions of parental joy upon the announcement of pregnancy or birth may be added to the work of Houlbrooke, MacDonald, and McLaren. Indeed Macfarlane's earlier work on the unchanging nature of the individual and the English family system from 1250 to the present day is often cited by historians in support of attempts to place certain aspects of family life outside of history. See his Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). For an important critique of Macfarlane's selection and interpretation of data that extend the middle-class family backward in time, see Stephen D. White and Richard T. Vann, "The Invention of English Individualism: Alan Macfarlane and the Modernization of Premodern England," Social History 8 (1983): 345-63. Seeking to defend her view of children, Linda Pollock finds different grounds for the modern middle-class family's universality, Forgotten Children, pp. 1-32. See also Houlbrooke, English Family, 14-15, and MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 89 n. 77.

7. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 2d ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971). Our citations are to this edition, which has a revised text and updated bibliography and footnotes. The first (1965) and second editions have been the most influential in promoting the sentimental view of the history of the family. Although its argument is consistent with that of the first two editions, the third edition was so substantially rewritten as to require a modification in the title: The World We Have Lost—Further Explored (London: Methuen, 1983).

8. This account of the genesis of Laslett's book is based on the preface to The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure: Essays Presented to Peter Laslett on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith, and Keith Wrightson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. viii-x.

9. In a general note to the second edition, Laslett explains: "The specific source in unpublished documents for the first edition of The World We Have Lost was the embryo of the collection of listings of inhabitants of English communities before 1801, which has now become one of the files (File 3 in the succeeding notes) of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. This file remains the most important for the development of the studies described in an introductory way in the present work, but all the other files of the Group are relevant to them, and have been used in this second edition" (254). Although his book was not written in the format associated with the demographic approach, in it Laslett relies on the same data on which he relies in his later work in historical demographics.

10. Peter Laslett, introduction to Household and Family in Past Time, ed. Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 46.

11. Peter Laslett, "Mean Household Size in England since the Sixteenth Century," in Household and Family in Past Time, ed. Laslett and Wall, p. 127.

12. In the third edition of The World We Have Lost, this statement was dropped; however, all the other passages we quote are retained. Thus the same model of the family continues to inform the third edition.

13. This has proved to be one of the most hotly contested notions Laslett put forward in the book. For a review of the various attacks and counterattacks, see R. S. Neale, Class in English History, 1680-1850 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp. 68-99. For an analysis of the paternalistic myth that underlies the Laslett model, see E. P. Thompson, "Eighteenth-century English Society: Class-Struggle without Class?" Social History 3 (1978): 133-65.

14. Laslett writes: "When all allowance has been made for the very different assumptions about the very different kinship relations too, it remains the case that there ordinarily slept together under each roof in 1600 only the nuclear family with the addition of servants when necessary" (249). Laslett finds support for this conclusion in the fact that "the evidence we now have suggests that household size was remarkably constant in England at 4.75 persons per household from the late sixteenth until the early twentieth century" (93). He further elaborates: "No two married couples or more went to make up a family group.... When a son got married he left the family of his parents and started a family of his own" (94). See his "Mean Household Size'' for an account of how he arrived at this conclusion. Neither Laslett's conclusions nor his method have been universally endorsed. For a brief survey of the criticism, see Anderson, Approaches, pp. 27-38. A useful cautionary can be found in Lutz Berkner, "The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household: An Eighteenth-Century Austrian Example," American Historical Review 77 (1972): 398-418. Berkner argues that while statistics may lead one to believe the overwhelming majority of households were organized around a nuclear family, in many societies the nuclear family was in fact a phase through which the extended family passed, or else another model organized the household even when it is not visible as a statistical mean. Also critical of Laslett's normative assumptions is Tamara K. Hareven, "Cycles, Courses, and Cohorts: Reflections of Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to the Historical Study of Family Development," Journal of Social History 12 (1978): 97-109. Another challenge to Laslett's ideological assumptions comes from Miranda Chaytor, "Household and Kinship: Ryton in the Late 16th and Early 17th Centuries," History Workshop Journal 10 (1980): 25-60. Keith Wrightson responds in "Household and Kinship in Sixteenth-Century England," History Workshop Journal 12 (1981): 151-58. A response to Wrightson and Laslett's response on the ideological implications of their demographic categories is offered by Olivia Harris, "Households and Their Boundaries," History Workshop Journal 13 (1982): 143-52.

15. This argument seems to arise on all fronts. For example, in a study of the history of divorce, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 362, Roderick Phillips argues that men and women put up with one another—indeed required each other—for economic survival. Thus "expectations were low and flexible, and there was a correspondingly high tolerance of what we might think of as negative behavior." It was the growth of the factory system that made it possible for individuals to survive economically. Phillips does point out that the conjugal relationship had other functions besides the economic one. The entire thesis is doubly suspect, however. Phillips not only assumes that the increase in divorce, "consensual unions," homosexuality, and nontraditional relationships within the last one hundred and fifty years means that industrialization destroyed the family as Laslett imagines it. He also assumes that in earlier cultures men needed women and women needed men to survive economically. Why, one might ask, should heterosexual monogamy be the only basis for ensuring collective survival?

16. The World We Have Lost, p. 167. In a review essay, Christopher Hill declared that every serious historian since the seventeenth century has either agreed with Oliver Cromwell that there was a revolution or with Clarendon that there was a great rebellion. "A One-Class Society," in Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 205-18.

17. Stone declares that what he calls the restricted patriarchal nuclear family "began in about 1530." The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 7. It is surely more than a coincidence that, without specifying why, Stone dates the origin of the change in family structure close to 1528. His earlier book on the causes of the English Revolution had identified that as the year in which originated the first of the causes of the English civil war.

18. Stone admits that his data favor "a small minority group, namely the literate and articulate classes, and has relatively little to say about the great majority of Englishmen," but he justifies this bias as favoring "the pacemakers of cultural change" (12).

19. In A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), John Demos contends that "from the very beginning of settlement at Plymouth the family was nuclear in its basic composition and it has not changed in this respect ever since" (181). He also assumes that Laslett is essentially correct in his views on the distant history of the nuclear family (62). Thus he does not consider the fact that the founding of Plymouth Colony was a social experiment and that life there was meant to differ in certain important respects from life as it was lived back in England. Even so, his chapter on household membership has to deal with the fact that servants were part of the structure of the family. The mere presence of the "servant" category along with those of "husband," "wife," and "children" in the family should alert us to the fact that this is not exactly the modern nuclear family.

20. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 37-69.

21. Beyond the Pleasure Principle in vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 14-16. Freud named this game after observing his grandson's habit of throwing a wooden reel over the edge of the bed to make it disappear ( fort ) and then pulling it back with the attached string to make it appear ( da ). Freud reads the game in this manner: "The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child's great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within reach" (15).

22. Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude (New York: Basic Books, 1957) and Love, Hate, and Reparation (London: Hogarth Press, 1937).

23. Martin Ingram's Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), for example, concludes from the records of church court cases that romantic love motivated individuals during the early modern period (103-26). For an important critique of the assumptions that lie behind E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield's The Population History of England, 1541-1871 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), see Henry Abelove, "Some Speculations on the History of 'Sexual Intercourse' During the 'Long Eighteenth Century' in England," Genders 6 (1989): 125-30. Typical of the modern assumptions used to make the categories for reading earlier material is Ralph Houlbrooke's English Family Life, 1576-1716: An Anthology from Diaries (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Houlbrooke's selections are arranged according to categories that emerged only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in narratives of personal development: "Courtship and Marriage," "Married Life and Widowhood," "Pregnancy, Childbirth and Infancy," ''Childhood," "Adolescence and Departure from Home," "Parents' Old Age and Deaths," and "Other Kinsfolk."

24. Roland Barthes describes a popular proverb as "a rural statement of fact, such as 'the weather is fine.' " "Myth Today," in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 154.

25. Laslett defines the family for the purposes of a "history of the domestic group" in the introduction to Household and Family in Past Time: "A preliminary definition of the family in this sense in contrast to the other senses which are possible is to be found in everyday experience. The domestic group is the family which the suburban worker leaves when he catches his bus in the morning, and returns to in the evening; it was the family which the English husbandman or petty farmer of our pre-industrial past sat with at table and organised for work in the fields. It consists and consisted of those who share the same physical space for the purposes of eating, sleeping, taking rest and leisure, growing up, childrearing and procreating (those of them belonging to the class of person who society permits to procreate)" (24-25). Stone defines the family on pp. 21-23. In a particularly harsh review of the book, E. P. Thompson shows how "the modern family" is the hero of Stone's study: "The prospective purchaser [of Stone's book] is supposed to squeal excitedly: 'Darling, look, the history of us! ' " "Happy Families," Radical History Review 20 (1979): 42-50 (reprinted from New Society, 8 September 1977, 499-501). The quoted material is found on pp. 43-44.

26. The fact that this model of the family is white as well as elite is demonstrated by its absence from the emergent human sciences; there, other races and ethnicities are seen to lack this particular family structure. See, for example, Anita Levy, "Blood, Kinship, and Gender," Genders 5 (1989): 70-85.

27. Nowhere is this clearer than in Engels's idea of emancipated humanity. He cites with obvious approval Lewis Henry Morgan's answer to the question as to whether this form of the family "can be permanent in the future. The only answer that can be given is that it must advance as society advances, and change as society changes, even as it has done in the past. it is the creation of the social system, and will reflect its culture. As the monogamian family has improved greatly since the commencement of civilization, and very sensibly in modern times, it is at least supposable that it is capable of still further improvement until the equality of the sexes is attained. Should the monogamian family in the distant future fail to answer the requirements of society it is impossible to predict the nature of its successor." Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, ed. Evelyn Reed (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), p. 89.

28. Barthes, "The Great Family of Man," in Mythologies, p. 100.

29. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, ed. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 31.