"Family" ... "families" ... "the family." These minor twists of language open issues basic to this area of history. No one has come up with a definition that can adequately grasp this elusive subject; indeed, the word "family" did not even enter the English language until the fifteenth century, and then it was used to denote a household with servants. Today, family is most often used to refer to a particular set of people related by blood or marriage. But just who counts as family varies widely and may not be limited by ties of marriage, biology, or adoption. Other definitions emphasize sentiments of love and activities of caregiving, especially across generations. But families may be sites of violence and neglect, while nurturing, including the care of children, also takes place in other contexts. Finally, the word "family" evokes images of households, of people living together and pooling resources. But those who call one another family do not always live in the same household or share material goods. And members of some households do not pool resources.
Whether focusing on kinship, sentiments, or households, most scholars agree that throughout U.S. history, family arrangements have always been diverse and changing. The plural word, "families," suggests this variety, whereas the widely used, monolithic terminology, "the family," incorrectly implies that there is one natural form—a fixed, bounded unit of father, mother, and children. This moralizing ideology persists, but there is ample evidence that families are social, not biological, groupings and that their composition, size, boundaries, sentiments, and material activities vary by culture and change along with economic and social conditions.
Such variation was sharply evident in the seventeenth-century United States. Native American cultures organized kinship and residence in a variety of ways. All had marriage rituals and parental ties to children, but they did not give marriage primary significance, and nuclear families were not set apart from larger kinship and household groups. Among the Iroquois, eight to ten conjugal families lived together in longhouses, and older women organized the growth and distribution of corn and exercised strong influence over the all-male tribal council. There was no private ownership of land or resources, no distinction between "domestic" and "public."
European settlers established families based on private property, which reproduced social-class hierarchies. Although more bounded than those of Native Americans, early colonial families were also enmeshed in larger communities; village and church officials governed many activities, including sexual conduct and the behavior of disobedient children. Households were primary sites of economic activity, social welfare, education, and religious instruction. While strongly patriarchal, households varied in size and composition. Some consisted of a married couple and their children. Some included servants, who did not have separate family households, and children as young as seven who were "sent out" by their own families to learn a trade or to perform housework in another home. Because death and remarriage rates were high, many households contained blended families, with children from previous marriages.
With the spread of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the range of families became even more complex. Slave traders brought Africans to the United States as commodities and deliberately severed the Africans' family ties to prevent revolt. Enslaved parents often were compelled to live separately from each other, and spouses and children were sold to other, sometimes geographically distant, owners. Although they could not legally marry, slaves created their own marriage rituals and actively worked to develop networks of kin, some not related by blood or marriage but nonetheless regarding one another as family. In patterns that have continued to the present, African Americans relied upon broad, women-centered kinship networks and a more collective approach to child rearing to sustain a sense of human dignity and to survive in harsh circumstances.
During the nineteenth century the process of industrialization gradually shifted production from households to wage labor. More and more men, and some women, left their households to work in factories, which altered the dynamics and meaning of family life. The notion of separate spheres, of a division between public (associated with male breadwinners and masculinity) and private (associated with wives, mothers, and femininity), took hold as an ideal, especially among the white and affluent. Middle-class families began to ritualize everyday practices such as family meals and to turn the anniversaries of their members' births and marriages into celebratory occasions. The family became a sentimentalized concept, idealized as a haven from the marketplace.
Government officials, social workers, teachers, ministers, and missionaries worked to impose this middle-class ideal upon the increasing waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, working-class people, and surviving Native Americans. But crowded living conditions, the dependence of the impoverished on whatever additional earnings women and children could contribute to their precarious subsistence, and the persistence of alternative cultural notions of family (e.g., emphasis on extended kin among Native Americans and among Italian immigrants) sustained wide variation in the forms and meanings of family. Exploitive labor practices, often tied to racism, disrupted the cultures and families not only of African Americans but also of conquered Mexicans and immigrants from China and Mexico. In a labor and family pattern that continues in parts of the United States, Chinese and Mexican men migrated to the United States to build railroads or to work in mining or agriculture. Their parents, wives, children, and other kin often remained in the country of origin, in part because of overtly racist U.S. immigration policies. These "sojourner families" maintained split households that crossed national boundaries.
"The family" reached its most monolithic and idealized status during the 1950s cold war period. Television shows such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet celebrated breadwinner fathers, full-time mothers, and their children living harmoniously in single-family, suburban houses. Contemporary North Americans often nostalgically call this model the "traditional" American family, but it was, in fact, a historical and cross-cultural anomaly. In the United States and throughout the world, few cultures have defined marriage and motherhood as the totality of adult women's identities, in part because women have so actively contributed to economic survival. And family forms and meanings have always been diverse. Even while many working-class families achieved the Ozzie-and-Harriet form in the 1950s, family diversity continued. Economic hardship and the absence of other employment opportunities pressed many Japanese American women in California and Hawaii, African American women in the South and in northern cities, and Mexican American women in the Southwest to do paid domestic work in white households or to work in low-paying agricultural or service jobs. Even when they had their own children, these women were neither expected nor allowed to be full-time mothers. Popular images of the family also obscured high rates of poverty (at the end of the 1950s up to one-third of U.S. children lived in poverty) and government subsidies—G.I. benefits, federal housing loans, and the construction of highways used by commuters—that facilitated the apparent self-sufficiency of more affluent suburban households.
In the late 1960s the pace of family change began to accelerate, with dramatic increases in the paid employment of women and in rates of divorce. In 1950 three-fifths of U.S. households contained male breadwinners and full-time female homemakers, with or without children, but by 1990 more than three-fifths of mothers with children younger than six were in the labor force. By the late 1970s divorce surpassed death as the major source of marital dissolution, generating a complex array of familial arrangements. No one family form has achieved statistical or cultural dominance under the "postmodern" conditions of family life, in which a patchwork of diverse, and often incompatible, family ideologies and practices coexist uneasily, even within individual families. For example, even many evangelical Christian families include divorced adults and make use of new reproductive technologies.
Since the 1960s "family" has become a debated concept, and talk of "family crisis" has become an idiom for passionate social conflicts over gender, sexual, racial, and welfare politics. In 1965 Daniel Moynihan ignited the first of these family-crisis debates when he argued that rising rates of single motherhood among African Americans represented a "tangle of pathology." Soon after, the women's liberation movement began to challenge the ideology and power relations of the "normal" family, calling attention to inequalities in the division of household labor and resources, gendered patterns of domestic violence, and the discontent of many full-time homemakers. The movement also named the feminization of poverty as a social problem, one that is especially prevalent among families without a male wage earner. This problem has worsened over time; in 1993, 38 percent of families headed by women who lost the benefits of a male's income through divorce lived below the poverty line, as did a startling 66 percent of families headed by women who had never married.
During the 1970s the lesbian and gay movement also began to challenge prevailing family ideologies that made heterosexuality seem inevitable and defined other sexual identities as sinful, deviant, and even criminal. By the 1980s many lesbian and gay activists began to demand not only civil rights but also familial rights, including domestic partner legislation and full and equal access to child custody, adoption, and new reproductive technologies. Increasingly, lesbians and gay men are using the discourse of "family" to describe their intimate ties and many are now campaigning to legalize lesbian or gay marriages.
In the late 1970s the New Right waged a full-scale backlash campaign against feminists and homosexuals, whom they portrayed as "antifamily." So successful was this backlash that politicians and social movements across the political spectrum have come to speak in the name of "the family" ever since. In the late 1980s some mainstream social scientists joined middle-of-the-road politicians, such as Moynihan, to wage a secular campaign for "family values." This group blames "family breakdown," especially divorce and single mothers supported by welfare, for everything from poverty to crime and violence. The rhetoric of moral failure deflects attention from the real sources of contemporary poverty, especially global economic restructuring, racism, and the widening gap between rich and poor during the 1980s. More realistic social policies would recognize these deep-seated structural problems, acknowledge the diverse realities of American family life, and seek to enhance the basic well-being of all families, whether single, coupled, extended; lesbian, gay, or straight; or endowed with one parent, two, or more.
The United States approaches a new millennium with a proliferating diversity of family forms and values. Moreover, astonishing new reproductive technologies, which allow wombs for hire, sperm for purchase, fertility for postmenopausal women, lactation for men, and which promise (or threaten) to remove test-tube babies from the realm of science fiction, should lay to rest any simply biological or universalistic definitions of "the family." Nevertheless, it seems likely that heated debates over relations and meanings of gender, generation, sexuality, race, and economic justice will continue well into the next century.
Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600-1900 (London: Verso, 1988); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey, eds., Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency (New York: Routledge, 1994); Barrie Thorne, Marilyn Yalom, eds., and Barrie Thorne, Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions rev. ed. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993).
Judith Stacey
See also
Divorce and Custody;
Marriage;
Motherhood.
