Does
the American Family Have a History?
Family
Images and Realities
Steven
Mintz
University
of Houston
A revolution has taken
place in family life since the late 1960s. Today, two-thirds of all married
women with children--and an even higher proportion of single mothers--work
outside the home, compared to just 16 percent in 1950. Half of all marriages
end in divorce--twice the rate in 1966 and three times the rate in 1950. Three
children in ten are born out of wedlock. Over a quarter of all children now
live with only one parent and fewer than half of live with both their
biological mother and father. Meanwhile, the proportion of women who remain
unmarried and childless has reached a record high; fully twenty percent of
women between the ages of 30 and 34 have not married and over a quarter have
had no children, compared to six and eight percent, respectively, in 1970.
These changes have
produced alarm, anxiety, and apprehension. They have inspired family values crusaders
to condemn careerist mothers, absent fathers, single parents, and unwed parents
as the root cause of many of society's ills: persistent poverty, drug abuse,
academic failure, and juvenile crime. This is a situation that begs for
historical perspective.
Recent scholarship has
demonstrated that diversity and change have been the only constants in the
history of the American family. Far from signalling the family's imminent
demise or an erosion of commitment to children, recent changes in family life
are only the latest in a series of disjunctive transformations in family roles,
functions, and dynamics that have occurred over the past three centuries.
Few subjects are more
shrouded in myths, misconceptions, and misleading generalizations than the history
of the family. Students will find the history of the family an eye-opening
window on the past. They will discover that:
-- It
was only in the 1920s that, for the first time, a majority of American families
consisted of a breadwinner-husband, a home-maker wife, and children attending
school.
-- The
most rapid increase in unwed pregnancies took place between 1940 and 1958, not
in the libertine sixties.
-- The
defining characteristics of the 1950s family--a rising birth rate, a stable
divorce rate, and declining age of marriage--were historical aberrations, out
of line with longterm historical trends.
-- Throughout
American history, most families have needed more than one breadwinner to
support themselves.
In recent years,
families have gone through many disconcerting and disruptive changes. But if
family life today seems unsettled, so, too, was family life in the past. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had the highest divorce
rate in the western world, and one child in ten lived in a single-parent home.
Hundreds of thousands of children spent part of their childhood in orphanages,
not because their parents were dead, but because their mother and father could
not support them. Infant mortality, orphanhood, and early widowhood affected a
distressingly high proportion of families. Between 35 and 40 percent of all
children lost a parent or a sibling before they reached their twenties.
Americans are prone to
romanticizing the past and confusing historical fantasy and reality. This is
especially true when Americans ponder our society's "bedrock"
institution, the family. Among the most potent myths that pervade contemporary
society are that divorce, domestic violence, and single parenthood are recent
phenomena; that throughout American history, most families consisted of a
breadwinner-husband and a homemaker-wife; and that in the past strong, stable
families provided effective care for the elderly and other dependents. Only
careful historical analysis can correct such myths.
In few areas has
susceptibility to mythmaking been more detrimental than with the family. Highly
romanticized images of the past have contributed to unrealistic expectations
about family life. Ahistorical thinking has also led Americans to downplay the
genuine improvements that have taken place in family well-being: especially the
fact that smaller families mean that parents can devote more time and resources
to each child. Even worse, a lack of historical perspective has encouraged
scapegoating of families that diverge from the dominant norms; and it has
blinded Americans to the social, economic, demographic, and ideological
pressures that have contributed to familial change--and made transformations in
gender roles and family structures irreversible.
Far from being a
stable, unchanging institution, the family is as enmeshed in the historical
process as any other social institution. The family's roles and functions, size
and composition, and emotional and power dynamics have all changed dramatically
over time.
In colonial America,
the family was, first and foremost, a unit of production. It also performed a
variety of educational, religious and welfare functions that were later assumed
by other private and public institutions. The family educated children in basic
literacy and the rudiments of religion; it transmitted occupational skills; and
it cared for the elderly and infirm.
Family composition was
far more elastic and porous than in later American families. Even in the most
healthful regions during the seventeenth century, three children in ten died
before reaching adulthood; children were likely to lose at least one parent by
the time they married. As a result, a majority of colonial Americans probably
spent some time in a step-family. Family size and composition also varied
according to the household's economic needs. Many children left their parents
homes before puberty to work as servants or apprentices in other households.
Perhaps the biggest
difference between families then and now is that colonial society placed
relatively little emphasis on familial privacy. Community authorities and
neighbors supervised and intervened in family life. In New England, selectmen
oversaw ten or twelve families, removed children from "unfit" parents,
and ensured that fathers exercised proper family government.
In theory, the
seventeenth-century family was a hierarchical unit, in which the father was
invested with patriarchal authority. He alone sat in an armed chair, his
symbolic throne, while other household members sat on benches or stools. He
taught children to write, led household prayers, and carried on the bulk of
correspondence with family members. Domestic conduct manuals were addressed to
him, not to his wife. Legally, the father was the primary parent. Fathers, not
mothers, received custody of children after divorce or separation. In colonial
New England, a father was authorized to correct and punish insubordinate wives,
disruptive children, and unruly servants. He was also responsible for placing
his children in a lawful calling and for consenting to his children's
marriages. His control over inheritance kept his grown sons dependent upon him
for years, while they waited for the landed property they needed to establish
an independent household.
In actuality, the
ideology of patriarchy co-existed with a high degree of blurring of gender
boundaries. Colonial women shouldered many duties that would later be
monopolized by men. The colonial goodwife engaged in trade and home
manufacturing, supervised planting, and sometimes administered estates. Women's
productive responsibilities limited the amount of time that they could devote
to childcare. Many childrearing tasks were delegated to servants or older
daughters. Ironically, the decline of patriarchal ideology was accompanied by
the emergence of a much more rigid domestic division of labor.
There were profound
differences in the family patterns in New England, the Middle colonies, and the
Chesapeake and southern-most colonies. In New England, a patriarchal conception
of family life began to breakdown as early as the 1670s. In the Chesapeake and
the Carolinas, a more stable patriarchal structure of relationships did not
truly emerge until the mid-eighteenth century.
Demography partly
explains these regional differences. After an initial period of high mortality,
life expectancy in New England rose to levels comparable to our own. A
healthful environment contributed to a very high birthrate (over half of New
England children had nine or more siblings) and the first society in history in
which grandparents were common. In the Chesapeake, in contrast, a high death
rate and an unbalanced sex ratio made it impossible to establish the kind of
stable, patriarchal families found in New England. During the seventeenth
century, half of all marriages were broken within eight years, and most
families consisted of a complicated assortment of step-parents, step-children,
wards, and half-brothers and half-sisters. Not until the late-eighteenth
century could a father be confident about his ability to pass property directly
to his sons.
Religious differences
also contributed to divergent family patterns. Not nearly as anxious as the
Puritans about infant depravity, Quaker families in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and
New Jersey placed a far greater stress on maternal nurture than did Puritan
families. Quakers also emphasized early autonomy for children. They provided
daughters with an early dowry and sons with sufficient land to provide a basis
for early independence.
During the eighteenth
century, New England fathers found themselves less able to influence their
sons' choice of occupation, when or whom their children would marry, and their offsprings'
sexual behavior. By mid-century, sons were moving further away from the
parental home, fewer daughters were marrying in birth order, and rates or
illegitimacy and pregnancy prior to marriage were rising markedly.
One force for change
was ideological. The mid- and late-eighteenth century saw repeated attacks upon
patriarchal authority by such popular writers as Samuel Richardson, Oliver
Goldsmith, and Henry Fielding, who rejected the idea that a father should
dictate a child's career or choice of a marriage partner and who argued that
love and affection were superior to physical force in rearing children and that
women were more effective than men in inducing children's obedience. Economic
shifts further contributed to an erosion of paternal authority. Rapid
population growth, which resulted in plots too small to be farmed viably,
weakened paternal control over inheritance. New opportunities for
nonagricultural work allowed many children to marry earlier than in the past.
By the early
nineteenth century, a new kind of urban middle class family had begun to emerge
as the workplace moved some distance from the household and as many of married
women's productive tasks were assumed by unmarried women working in factories.
A new pattern of marriage arose, based primarily on companionship and
affection; a new division of domestic roles appeared, which assigned the wife
to care full-time for her children and to maintain the home; a new conception
of childhood arose that looked at children not as little adults, but as special
creatures who needed attention, love, and time to mature. Spouses began to
display affection more openly, calling each other "honey" or
"dear." Parents began to keep their children home longer than in the
past. By the mid-nineteenth century, a new emphasis on family privacy could be
seen in the expulsion of apprentices from the middle-class home, the increasing
separation of servants from the family, and the rise of the family vacation had
appeared as well as such family-oriented celebrations as the birthday party and
decorating the Christmas tree.
The new urban
middle-class was based on a strict segregation of sexual spheres, on intense
mother-child bonds, and on the idea that children needed to be protected from
the corruptions of the outside world. Even at its inception, however, this new
family form was beset by certain latent tensions. One source of tension
involved the paternal role, which was becoming more psychologically separate
from his family. Although fathers thought of themselves as breadwinners and
household heads, and their wives and children as their dependents, in fact
men's connection to their family was becoming essentially economic. They might
serve as disciplinarian of last resort, but mothers replaced fathers as primary
parent.
Another contradiction
involved women's domestic roles. In their youth, women received an
unprecedented degree of freedom; increasing numbers attended school and worked,
at least temporarily, outside a family unit. After marriage, however, women
were expected to sacrifice their individuality for their family' sake. In a
society that attached increasing value to individualism and equality, the
expectation that women should subordinate themselves to their husbands and
children was a source of latent tension. Women's subordinate status might be
cloaked with an ideology of separate spheres and true womanhood, but the
contradiction with the ideal of equality remained. A third contradiction
involved the status of children, who remained home far longer than in the past,
often into their late teens and twenties. The emerging ideal was a protected
childhood, shielding children from knowledge of death, sex, and violence. While
in theory families were training children for independence, in reality, children
received fewer opportunities than in the past to express their growing
maturity. The result was that the transition from childhood and youth to
adulthood became more disjunctive and conflict-riven.
These latent
contradictions were apparent in three striking developments: a sharp fall in
the birth rate, a marked and steady rise in the divorce rate, and a heightened
cultural awareness of domestic violence. The early nineteenth century saw the
beginnings of a sharp fall in the birth rate. Instead of giving birth to seven
to ten children, middle class mothers, by the end of the century, gave birth to
only three. The reduction in birthrates did not depend on new technologies;
rather, it reflected the view that women were not childbearing chattel and that
children were no longer economic assets. An emerging ideology deemed children
to be priceless, but the fact remained that the young now required greater
parental investments in the form of education and other inputs.
During the early and
mid-nineteenth century, the divorce rate also began to rise, as judicial
divorce replaced legislative divorce and many states adopted permissive divorce
statutes. If marriages were to rest on mutual affection, then it divorce had to
serve as a safety valve from loveless and abusive marriages. In 1867, the
country had 10,000 divorces, and the rate rose steadily: from per thousand
marriages in 1870, to per thousand in 1880, to per thousand in 1890.
A growing awareness of
wife beating and child abuse also occurred in the early nineteenth century,
which may have reflected an actual increase in assaults and murders committed
against blood relatives. As families became less subject to communal oversight,
as traditional assumptions about patriarchal authority were challenged, and as
an expanding market economy produced new kinds of stresses, the family could
become an arena of explosive tension, conflict, and violence.
Various groups have
developed different family strategies in response to their social and economic
circumstances. No group faced graver threats to family life than enslaved
African Americans. Debt, an owner's death, or the prospects of profit could
break up slave families. Between 1790 and 1860, a million slaves were sold from
the upper to the lower South and another two million slaves were sold within
states. As a result, about a third of all slave marriages were broken by sale
and half of all slave children were sold from their parents. Even in the
absence of sale, slave spouses often resided on separate plantations or on
separate units of a single plantation. On larger plantations, one father in
three had a different owner than his wife; on smaller plantations and farms,
the figure was two in three.
In spite of the
refusal of southern law to provide legal protection to slave marriages, most
slaves married and lived with the same spouse until death. Ties to the
immediate family stretched outward to an involved network of extended kin.
Whenever children were sold to neighboring plantations, grandparents, aunts,
uncles, and cousins took on the function of parents. When blood relatives were
not present, "fictive" kin cared for and protected children. Godparenting, ritual co-parenting, and informal
adoption of orphans were common on slave plantations. To sustain a sense of
family identity over time, slaves named children after grandparents and other
kin; slaves also passed down family names, usually the name of an ancestor's
owner rather than the current owner's.
While the urban
middle-class family emphasized a sole male breadwinner, a rigid division of
sexual roles, and a protected childhood, urban working-class families
emphasized a cooperative family economy. Older children were expected to defer
marriage, remain at home, and contribute to the family's income. It was not
until the 1920s that the cooperative family economy gave way to the family wage
economy, which allowed a male breadwinner to sport his family on his wages
alone. Contributing to this new family formation were the establishment of the
first seniority systems; compulsory school attendance laws; and increased real
wages as a result of World War I. The New Deal further solidified the male
breadwinner family by prohibiting child labor, expanding workmen's
compensation, and targeting jobs programs at male workers.
Over the past three
centuries, Americans have gone through recurrent waves of moral panic over the
family. During the late nineteenth century, panic gripped the country over
family violence and child neglect, declining middle-class birthrates, divorce,
and infant mortality. Eleven states made desertion and non-support of families
a felony and three states instituted the whipping post where wife-beaters were
punished with floggings. To combat the decline in middle-class birth rates, the
Comstock Act restricted the interstate distribution of birth control
information and contraceptive devices, while state laws criminalized abortion.
In a failed attempt to reduce the divorce rate, many states reduced the grounds
for divorce and extended waiting periods.
Mounting public anxiety led to increased government
involvement in the family and the emergence of distinct groups offering expert
advice about childrearing, parenting, and social policy. To combat the
exploitation and improve the well-being of children, reformers pressed for
compulsory school attendance laws, child labor restrictions, playgrounds, pure
milk laws, and "widow's" pensions to permit poor children to remain
with their mothers. There were also concerted efforts to eliminate male-only
forms of recreation, campaigns that achieved success with the destruction of
red-light districts during the 1910s and of saloons following adoption of
Prohibition in 1918.
To strengthen and
stabilize families, marriage counselors promoted a new ideal: the companionate
family. It held that husbands and wives were to be "friends and
lovers" and that parents and children should be "pals." This new
ideal stressed the couple relationship and family togetherness as the primary
source of emotional satisfaction and personal happiness. Privacy was a hallmark
of the new family ideal. Unlike the nineteenth century family, which took in
boarders, lodgers, or aging and unmarried relatives, the companionate family
was envisioned as a more isolated, and more important, unit, the primary focus
of emotional life.
During the Depression,
unemployment, lower wages, and the demands of needy relatives tore at the
fabric of family life. Many Americans were forced to share living quarter with
relatives, delay marriage, and postpone having children. The divorce rate fell,
since fewer people could afford one, but desertions soared. By 1940, 1.5
million married couples were living apart. Many families coped by returning to
a cooperative family economy. Many children took part time jobs and many wives
supplemented the family income by taking in sewing or laundry, setting up
parlor groceries, or housing lodgers.
World War II also
subjected families to severe strain. During the war, families faced a severe
shortage of housing, a lack of schools and child-care facilities, and prolonged
separation from loved ones. Five million "war widows" ran their homes
and cared for children alone, while millions of older, married women went to work
in war industries. The stresses of wartime contribute to an upsurge in the
divorce rate. Tens of thousands of young people became latchkey children, and
rates of juvenile delinquency, unwed pregnancy, and truancy all rose.
The late 1940s and
1950s witnessed a sharp reaction to the stresses of the Depression and war. If
any decade has come to symbolize the traditional family, it is the 1950s. The
average age of marriage for women dropped to twenty; divorce rates stabilized;
and the birthrate doubled. Yet the images of family life that appeared on
television were misleading; only sixty percent of children spent their
childhood in a male-breadwinner, female homemaker household. The
democratization of the family ideals reflected social and economic
circumstances that are unlikely to be duplicated: a reaction against Depression
hardships and the upheavals of World War II; the affordability of single-family
track homes in the booming suburbs; and rapidly rising real incomes.
The post-war family
was envisioned not simply a haven in a heartless world, like the Victorian
family, but as an alternative world of satisfaction and intimacy. But this
family, like its Victorian counterpart, had its own contradictions and latent
tensions. Youthful marriages, especially among women who cut short their
education, contributed to a rising divorce rate in the 1960s. The compression
of childbearing into the first years of marriage meant that many wives were
free of the most intense childrearing responsibilities by their early or
mid-thirties. Combined with the ever rising costs of maintaining a middle-class
standard of living, this encouraged a growing number of married women to enter
the workplace; as early as 1960, a third of married middle-class women were
working part- or full-time. The expansion of schooling, combined with growing
affluence, contributed to the emergence of a separate youth culture, separate
and apart from the family. The seeds of radical familial changes were planted
in the 1950s.
Since the 1960s,
families have grown smaller, less stable, and more diverse. At the same time,
more adults live outside a family, as single young adults, divorced singles, or
as older people who have lost a spouse. As recently as 1960, seventy percent of
the households in the United States consisted of a breadwinner father, a
homemaker mother, and two or more kids. Today, the male breadwinner, female
homemaker family makes up only a small proportion of American households. More
common are two-earner families, where both the husband and wife work;
single-parent families, usually headed by a mother; reconstituted families,
formed after a divorce; and empty-nest families, created after a children have
left home. Declining birth and marriage rates, the rapid entry of married women
into the work force, a rising divorce rate, and an aging population all
contributed to this domestic revolution.
Despite the changes
that have taken place, the family is not a dying institution. About ninety
percent of Americans marry and bear children, and most Americans who divorce
eventually remarry. In many respects, family life is actually stronger today
than it was in the past. While divorce rates are higher than in the past, fewer
families suffer from the death of a parent or a child. Infants were four times
more likely to die in the 1950s than today and older children were three times
more likely. Because of declining death rates, couples are more likely to grow
into old age together than in the past and children are more likely to have living
grandparents. Meanwhile, parents are making greater emotional and economic
investment their children. Lower birth rates mean that parents can devote more
attention and greater financial resources to each child. Fathers have become
more actively involved in their childrearing.
Nevertheless, the
profound changes--such as the integration of married women into the paid labor
force--have taken place in the late twentieth century resulted in a
"crisis of caregiving." As the proportion of single parent and two-worker
families has increased, many parents have found it increasingly difficult to
balance the demands of work and family life. Working parents not only had to
care for their young children, but, because of increasing life spans, aging
parents as well. In an attempt to deal with these needs, the United States
adopted the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, entitling eligible employees to
take up to twelve weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave in a twelve-month period
for specified family and medical reasons. Yet despite widespread rhetoric about
promoting family values, many "reforms," such as welfare reform,
weakened social supports for families. Whether the early twenty-first century
will witness a wave of family-related reforms comparable to the Progressive Era
remains to be seen.
Teaching
Family History:
An
Annotated Bibliography
Steven
Mintz
I. THE CHANGING FAMILY: A CHRONOLOGICAL
APPROACH
Over time, virtually every aspect of
American family life has undergone farreaching transformations. The family's
roles and functions, organizational structure, demographic characteristics,
emotional dynamics, and childrearing practices have changed profoundly over the
past three centuries. So, too, has the American home, its design, furnishings,
and technology. A chronological approach to family history underscores the ways
that shifts in social values, health, and the nature of the economy have
transformed the most intimate aspects of American life.
Overviews and Interpretations
Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women
and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York:
Oxford University, 1980). Demonstrates that the "traditional"
family--the emotionally-intense, child-centered unit consisting of a male
breadwinner, a full-time mother, and their children--is a product of the
pre-Civil War era.
John Demos, Past, Present, and
Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History (New York:
Oxford University, 1986). Provocative interpretive essays on such topics as the
history of adolescence, child abuse, fatherhood, and old age.
Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic
Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: Free
Press, 1988). Argues that the only
constants in the history of American family life have been diversity and
change.
Handbooks and Research Guides
Joseph M. Hawes and Elizabeth I.
Nybakken, eds., American Families: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook
(New York: Greenwood, 1991). Examines the history of the family as a scholarly
discipline, the methodologies for the study of family history, the family in
successive historical era, and the special topics of women and the family,
African American families, Native American families, and immigrant and working
class families.
Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner,
eds., American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook (New
York: Greenwood, 1985). Analyzes aspects of childhood experience from the colonial
era to the late twentieth century.
Demographics
Robert V. Wells, Uncle Sam's
Family (Albany: SUNY, 1985). An introduction to American demographic
history, which discusses such topics as the "demographic transition"
and migration.
Domestic Environment
Karen Calvert, Children in the
House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (Boston:
Northeastern: 1994). Examines material artifacts to reconstruct the way that
children were perceived and treated.
Clifford Edward Clark, The American
Family Home, 1800-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1986).
Analyzes changes in architectural style and interior space, decor, and
furnishings.
Historical Eras
Colonial Family Life
Barry Levy, Quakers and the
American Family (New York: Oxford University, 1992). This study of Quaker
families in the Delaware Valley from 1650 to 1765 argues that the Quaker
emphasis on family privacy and child nurture set the pattern for American
family ideology.
Jan Lewis, Pursuits of Happiness.
Illustrates how a shift in sensibility reshaped relations within the homes of
eighteenth century Virginia's planter elite.
Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family
(New York: Harper & Row, 1990). The classic study of religion and domestic
relationships in Puritan New England.
Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the
Great House (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1995). Traces the shift from a
patriarchal, authority, and emotionally restrained family intoa more inteimate,
child-centered family life in the colonial Chesapeake.
Helena M. Wall, Fierce Communion:
Family and Community in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University,
1995). Deliberating downplaying colonists' regional and religious diversity,
this book stresses the high degree of community interference in disputes involving
childrearing, marriage, and slander.
Nineteenth-Century Families
Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the
Middle Class (Cambridge University Press, 1980). A case study that
illustrates how dramatically family life changed during the early nineteenth
century.
Twentieth-Century Families
Elliott West, Growing Up in
Twentieth-Century America: A History and Reference Guide (New York:
Greenwood, 1996). Examines children's lives at home, at play, at work, and at school,
along with changes in children's health and the legal treatment of childhood.
Contemporary Families
Judith Stacey, Brave New
Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth-Century America
(Berkeley: University of California, 1998). Vivid descriptions of the new kinds
of familial relationships not defined by biology or traditional gender roles.
Primary Sources
Robert H. Bremner, ed., Children
and Youth in America (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1970-1974). A
documentary history of children's experience, childrearing, and public
provision for children.
II. AMERICA'S MULTICULTURAL FAMILIES: A
COMPARATIVE APPROACH
Since the seventeenth century, a
diversity has been a hallmark of American family life. Family size and
structure, roles and functions, and emotional and power dynamics have varied
not only according to historical era, but also along class, ethnic, regional,
and religious lines. A multicultural approach to family history allows teachers
to underscore the extraordinary richness and complexity of the American mosaic.
Anthologies
Stephanie Coontz, ed., American
Families: A Multicultural Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998). Illustrates the
wide variety of family forms, values, gender roles, and parenting practices
that have prevailed in America across lines of race, ethnicity, class,
geographical location and historical period.
African American
Anthologies
Jay David and Bill Adler, eds., Growing
Up Black (New York: Avon, 1992). A collection
of childhood experiences by such figures as Booker T. Washington, Malcolm X,
Ralph Abernathy, and Maya Angelou.
Overviews and Interpretations
Donna L. Franklin, Ensuring
Inequality: The Structural Transformation of the African-American Family
(New York: Oxford University, 1997). Traces the evolution of black family
lifefrom slavery to the present, highlighting the differences in black and
white marriage and family patterns.
Herbert Gutman, Black Family in
Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Random House, 1977). Challenging
the traditional view that slavery devastated the African American family, the
book argues that most slave children grew up in two-parent households and that
most slave marriages remained intact unless disrupted by sale.
Families Under Slavery
Wilma King, Stolen Childhood:
Slave Youth in 19th Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University,
1995). Examines slave children's early entry into work; forms of play;
religious experiences; and the punishments they experienced and their
separation from families.
Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot:
Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1996). A detailed analysis of
household composition in rural Louiosana from 1810 and 1864 demonstrates that
slave households were diverse and highly adaptable.
Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in
Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford,
1997). A thorough examination of family life, gender roles, courtship,
marriage, and parenting in Loudoun County, Virginia, from the 1730s through the
1850s, which argues that the harsh realities of slavery made it difficult for
slaves to maintain nuclear families.
African American Families Today
Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No
Children Here (Doubleday, 1991). The story of two boys struggling to
survive in a Chicago public housing project.
Asian Americans
Anthologies
Maria Hong, ed., Growing Up Asian
American: An Anthology (New York: Avon Books, 1994). A collection of
stories, essays, and excerpts from memoirs that examine childhood and
adolescence across generational, class, and ethnic lines from the late
nineteenth century.
Immigrants
Selma Cantor Berrol, Growing Up
American: Immigrant Children in America Then and Now (New York: Twayne,
1995). Chronicles the experience of immigrant children from the eighteenth
century to the present.
Latinas/os
Anthologies
Harold Augenbraum and Alan Stavins,
eds., Growing Up Latino: Memoirs and Stories (New York: Houghton,
Mifflin, 1993). Presents fictional and non-fictional accounts of coming of age
by writers of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and other Latin American ancestry.
Joy L. De Jesus, ed., Growing Up
Puerto Rican: An Anthology (New York: Avon, 1998). Leading Puerto Rican
writers portray the problems that beset the passage from childhood to
adulthood.
Tiffany Ana Lopez, ed., Growing
Up Chicana/o (New York: Avon, 1994).
Autobiographical essays and stories that examine the experiences of
family life, discrimination, education, and rites of passage.
Histories
Robert Griswold Del Castillo, La
Familia: Chicano Families in the Urban Southwest, 1848 to the Present
(South Bend: University of Notre Dame, 1984).
Native American
Anthologies
Patricia Riley, ed., Growing Up
Native American: An Anthology (New York: Avon, 1994). Short stories, novel
excerpts, and autobiographical essays examine Native American childhood and adolescence
from the nineteenth century to the 1990s, including life in boarding schools
and foster care and the transition from native languages to English.
III. THE LIFE-CYCLE APPROACH
The objective of this approach is
three-fold: to understand the differing ways that Americans have understood the
life stages; to examine the changing experience of the stages of infancy,
childhood, youth, early adulhood, middle age, and old age; and to explore the
changing rituals of family life, such as courtship, and marriage.
Overview and Interpretations
Howard Chudacoff, How Old Are
You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1989). Examines the growing awareness of age and the way it has shaped
entry into school, marriage, legal adulthood, and the workforce.
Infancy
Richard Meckel, Save the Babies:
American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850-1929
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1998).
An examination of the discovery of infant mortality as a social problem
in the 1850s through the limited federal funding for infancy and maternity
programs in the 1920s.
Childhood
Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Growing
Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850-1890 (New York: Macmillan,
1997). Emphasizes diversity in children's experiences in family life,
schooling, employment, and play, and the efforts of reformers and educators to
improve children's well-being and create more uniform patterns of childhood.
Gary Cross, Kid's Stuff: Toys and
the Changing Worlds of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University,
1997). Traces the impact of commercialization on children's toys and the nature
of play.
David Macleod, The Age of the
Child: Children in America, 1890-1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1998). Emphasizes a tug ofwar between different
conceptions of childhood, from the varied experiences of farm children and
working-lcass urban youths to the Progressive reformers' ideal of a sheltered
childhood.
Joseph M. Hawes, Children Between
the Wars: American Childhood, 1920-1940 (New York: Macmillan, 1997).
Examines the rise of the peer group, the emergence of the child guidance
movement and the U.S. Children's Bureau, and the impact of Great Depression.
Elliott West, Growing Up with the
Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico, 1989). Describes the varieties of childhood experience along the
overland trails, in mining towns of the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada,
and the farms of the Great Plains and Southwest from 1850 to 1900. Potrays
children as a conservative force who encouraged parents to rpeserve
pre-migration culture.
Elliott West and Paula Petrick,
eds., Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America (Lawrence:
University of Kansas, 1992). Historical essays examine regional, class, gender,
and ethnic diversity in childhood experience from 1850 to 1950.
Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the
Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton:
Princeton University, 1994).
Youth
Joe Austin and Michael Nevin
Willard, eds., Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in
Twentieth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
Examines cultural expressions of youth including hip-hop, fan clubs, dancing, low
riding, and graffiti.
Michael Barson and Steven Heller, Teenage
Confidential: An Illustrated History of the American Teen (Chronicle Books,
1997). Uses movie posters, comic books, advertising art, advice columns, and music
paraphernalia to trace the evolution of the teenager from the "Kleen
Teens" of the thirties.
William Graebner, Coming of Age
in Buffalo (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1990). This study of growing
up during the 1950s emphasizes the tension between the myth of youthful
homogeneity and the multiplicity of youth cultures and the public and
church-related efforts to socially engineer youthful experience.
Philip J. Greven, Jr., The
Protestant Temperament (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990). Identifies
three distinct patterns of childrearing, rooted in three religious
sensibilities, that pervade the period from the early seventeenth to the
mid-nineteenth centuries.
Harvey Graff, Conflicting Paths:
Growing Up in America (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1995). Demonstrates
that there were multiple paths to growing up, shaped by class, gender, region,
and time period.
Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage:
Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
Traces the expansion of adult control over youthful experience.
David Nasaw, Children of the
City: At Work and At Play (New York: Oxford University, 1986). How urban
working-class children shaped the conditions of their lives.
Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An
American History (Basic Books, 1996). Argues that the teenager is a social
invention of the Great Depression and World War II.
Young Adulthood
Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to
Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University, 1989). Traces shifting patterns of middle-class courtship from the
1920s to the 1960s, with a special focus on the distribution of power between
women and men.
Marlis Buchmann, The Script of
Life in Modern Society: Entry into Adulthood in a Changing World (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1989). Comparing the experience of white high school
graduates of 1960 and 1980, the book argues that the transition to adulthood
has become more extended and individualized.
Paula Fass, The Damned and the
Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University, 1978).
Examines the nature and extent of the rebellion of middle-class youth against
Victorian traditions.
John Modell, Into One's Own: From
Youth to Adulthood in the United States, 1920-1975 (Berkeley: University of
California, 1989). Traces the rise and
decline of dating, loosening constraints on sexuality, and the shifting meaning
assigned to parenthood.
Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and
Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
Based on extensive documentary evidence, this volume argues that couples played
a greater role in nineteenth century courtship and that sexuality was more
freely expressed a greater role than previously thought.
Old Age
David Hackett Fischer, Growing
Old in America (New York: Oxford University, 1978). Argues that economic
circumstances and religious ideology contributed to a veneration of age in the
American colonies, contrasting to the later adulation of youth.
IV. WOMEN, MEN, AND THE FAMILY: A GENDERED
APPROACH
The family is not a unitary
institution. It consists of a variety of familial roles, each of which has
undergone profound change over time. One way to organize a course, or a module
within a class, is to focus on the evolving roles of father and husband, wife
and mother, daughter and sister, and son and brother.
Women
Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden,
eds., Mothers & Motherhood (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1997). A
collection of essays examining thesocial, cultural, demographic, emdical, and
political factors that have shaped the definition and experience of motherhood.
Joan J. Brumberg, The Body
Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Vintage, 1998).
Shows how popular culture and the mass media have exploited girls' sensitivity
to their changing bodies and their appearance.
Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women
in the Land of Dollars (New York: Monthly Review, 1990). Examines women's
lives and culture on Manhattan's Lower East Side from 1890 to 1925, and looks
at how they responded to the pressures of Americanization.
Miriam Formanek-Brunell, Made to
Play House (New Haven: Yale University, 1993). An examination of the
creation, marketing, and use of dolls from 1830 to 1830.
Joan Jensen, Loosening the Bonds:
Mid-Atlantic Farm Women (New Haven: Yale University, 1986). Examines the
lives of rural women, primarily in the Philadelphia hinterland.
Susan Grey Osterud, Bonds of
Community (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1991). Focuses on the
nineteenth-century Naticoke Valley in New York, and examines the kinship
networks, work patterns, courtship, childbirth, and community activities.
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements:
Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia:
Temple University, 1986). This study shows how the rise of mixed-sex
commercialized leisure activities eroded Victorian gender norms.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good
Wives: Image and Reality in the Lies of Women in Northern New England,
1650-1750 (New York: Random House, 1991). Illustrates the diversity and
richness of late seventeenth and early eighteenth century women's domestic and
public lives.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A
Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812
(New York: Random House, 1991). The diary of an eighteenth-century Maine
midwife and healer sheds light on sexual mores, medical practices, and
household economies on the rural New England frontier.
Men
<