226 Varieties

intellectually, it was part also of a wider suspicion of approaches which prioritized material
experience. The consequence was a displacement of the ‘totality’ of class, or at the very least its
complication by notions of gender, race and sexuality which were thought not through their
materiality but their identities, memories and linguistic categories (see Chapter 14).
Where has this left class? Some historians have argued that with the loss of manufacturing in the
West the working class has effectively vanished, and that we no longer live in a class-based society.
Such obituaries, however, are almost certainly premature for unless we adhere resolutely to the
view that the working class is defined by manual labour, the proletarianization of white-collar
workers may actually have swollen the ranks of the working class. For the historian Jon Lawrence
this may be the time to revisit the language of class politics (Lawrence, 2013). Whether this
happens, and whether historians return to class, remains to be seen.

SECTION 3: THE FAMILY IN HISTORY

Given its near universality, and existence since the earliest records of human activity, the family has
attracted the enthusiastic attention of social historians, sociologists and anthropologists in
considerable numbers. The essential problem was to explain this universality and longevity, and in
attempting to do so scholars have studied why the family has been found in a such a wide variety
of forms in different regions of the world, what functions they served, and what prompted their
change over time (Wiesner-Hanks, 2011). It is evident since the mid-nineteenth century that such
approaches necessarily required the application of social theory in identifying familial forms. Thus
in L’organisation de la Famille (1871), an early and much cited study by the French sociologist
Frédéric Le Play, distinguished among patriarchal, unstable and stem families, largely on the basis
of the fate of their sons. In the patriarchal family, found in nomadic and herding societies, married
sons remained within the household. Here the emphasis was on stability, authority, lineage and
tradition. In the unstable family (or nuclear in modern parlance), on the other hand, which is most
characteristic of urban manufacturing populations, independence and freedom are stressed with
children leaving the parental household on marriage or as soon as they have the means to do so.
The third family type, found in European peasant societies, tended to retain patriarchal features but
normally allowed only one son and his family to stay (Anderson, 1980, p. 23).
Despite this early work, the interest expressed by Durkheim and Weber, and by subsequent
generations of sociologists and social anthropologists, the family did not attract serious work
among historians until the rise of social history in the 1960s. Since then the number of studies
has increased exponentially. The volume of this literature renders futile any attempt to provide
even a rudimentary assessment of its worth; instead, we wish to outline briefly some of the main
approaches to the study of the family with reference to specific examples drawn from the
experience of the West.
The most immediate and pressing problem faced by social historians in approaching the
Western family is its sheer diversity. Even within the Western experience – let alone that of Africa
and Asia – a wide diversity of family forms has been found. Peasant families in premodern France,
for example, differed sharply from those in Germany, England and Sweden in terms of their size,
patterns of inheritance and structure, and in most modern countries forms existed which seem to
challenge any societal norms. French Canadian or religious communities such as the Mormons in
North America followed their own distinct rules. Such diversity has tended to frustrate any
attempts to identify general historical trends (Anderson, 1980, p. 14). Frustrate but not entirely
 Social history 227

prevent – for historians have shown little evidence of abandoning the family – and so it is worth
devoting attention to what Michael Anderson has identified as the three main approaches to
tackling this problem, namely, demographic, sentiment and household economic.
E. A. Wrigley and his colleagues in the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and
Social Structure (whom we met in the last chapter) have for the past forty years or so pioneered
work on demographic history, particularly in England. They started by rejecting the use of literary
sources, which had previously formed the basis of family history on the grounds that it was
unreliable and narrowly focused. Instead, they turned on the one hand to parish registers which
since the sixteenth century had been compiled by parish priests and officials, and which recorded
details of the baptisms, marriages and burials of the parish population, and on the other to censuses
which since 1801 had amassed details of individual household. These sources were neither wholly
complete nor reliable, and yet they were able to build up a solid database upon which much
subsequent work has relied (see, for example, Wrigley and Schofield, 1981, Wrigley, Eversley and
Laslett 1966, and Wrigley et al., 1989). Their work suggested that from medieval times the family
forms of Western Europe were almost unique in world history. Among characteristic features we
might include:

1 Marriage tended to be late, and this combined with long birth intervals before the late
nineteenth century led to smaller family sizes. In England at least, large, extended and
complex families had never been the norm for mean household sizes from the sixteenth
century had remained fairly constant at 4.75 members. From this Peter Laslett concluded that
the nuclear family has been one of the fundamental and enduring aspects of Western society,
with profound implications for the role of the family and the dynamics of family relationships
(Laslett, 1977).
2 Apart from small variations, comparative rates of premarital pregnancies between, say, England
and North America have displayed remarkably similar trends. During the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries numbers grew steadily, but then halted and until the Second World War
fell. Since the end of the war there has been a dramatic rise.
3 While systems of inheritance in premodern western societies have differed in detail, most
displayed powerful continuities over time, and have had a major bearing on the age of
marriage, rates of illegitimacy and family structures (Goody, Thirsk and Thompson, 1976).

Much of this work has been contested on the grounds that demographic characteristics are only
part of a complex picture of how the family is positioned within society and that too much should
not be read from them. And if the use of parish registers and census data constituted a major
advance on previous approaches, these sources – let alone the less complete and reliable sources in
other countries – need to be treated with rather more circumspection than they have by family
demographers.
Mindful of the limitations of this approach, writers in the sentiments tradition prefer to focus
not on the family as a reality but as it has been imagined. A key text here has been Edward Shorter’s
The Making of the Modern Family (1976) in which he argued that changes in family structure and
dynamics could be explained better by exploring ways in which attitudes to and within the family
have shifted over time. Within the same family structure, he contended, we find many different
sentiments across cultures. As far as the nuclear family is concerned, it is a ‘state of mind rather than
a particular kind of structure’, and therefore what distinguishes it is ‘a special sense of solidarity that
separates the domestic unit from the surrounding community’ (Shorter, 1976, p. 205).
228 Varieties

Shorter was a sociologist, and can perhaps be forgiven for erecting hypotheses from somewhat
fragmented bodies of historical evidence gleaned from different periods and regions, and so for us
a better representative of social history here is Lawrence Stone’s influential The Family, Sex and
Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1990). Stone’s central argument is a strong one. Radical shifts in
views and value systems occurred in England between 1500 and 1800. If we assume that family
relationships reflected these changes, then the family itself was a microcosm and can be used to
throw light on the broader landscape of cultural transformation. Thus Stone launches into an
extended study of how family members related to each other in terms of formal arrangements,
structure, power, emotion and sex. How did they think about and treat each other, and look on
their relationship with various levels of societal organization from the family to the state?
Examining the evidence, he concludes that in the early modern period there was a change from
relationships based on distance, deference and patriarchy to what he terms affective individualism,
which was not only fundamental but arguably the most important in social attitudes seen in the last
millennium of Western history. Thus by 1750 families of the middle and upper classes shared
features which were recognizably modern. These included enhanced emotional bonding among
members of the nucleus at the expense of friends and wider kin, a sense of personal autonomy,
belief in freedom to pursue happiness, enjoyment without guilt of sexual pleasure, and felt a need
for physical privacy. By the end of the nineteenth century, these features had spread to the
aristocracy at the one end, and the mass of respectable working-class at the other.
So what was distinctive about this approach to the family? Stone actually starts with
demographics which, he declares, determined many of the basic features of the family, including
seemingly independent variables such as emotional commitment. Furthermore, they are necessary
in order to distinguish between the social elite and the mass of the population. Using parish
registers and the occasional survey, he proceeds to chart changing patterns of marriage, birth and
death. Many of the conclusions confirmed earlier findings. Over this period marriage was typically
later than in any other known society, and infant mortality rates remained high. Indeed, death was
such a part of life that the early modern family was little more than a loose association in which
any sense of permanence was constantly broken up by the deaths of its members. Stone denies,
however, that there was a direct correlation between demographic trends and what he terms
the affective relationships within the family. To take one example, there was no necessary link
between levels of infant mortality and the emotional relationships surrounding children. Thus to
understand better changes in the family we need to look closer at the cultural norms and
expectations of the wider society.
Occupying the large bulk of his study, these cultural features are charted with great care,
primarily in their impact on the bourgeois family (much less is known about family life for the mass
of the population). In the early modern period high mortality rates placed severe limits on the
composition and structure of the family, shaped patterns of inheritance and discouraged material
and emotional investment, particularly as far as the children were concerned. There was little sense
of domestic privacy, and relationships between husbands and wives on the one hand, and parents
and children on the other were emotionally and psychologically remote. From the early seventeenth
century the rise in the power of the state, the spread of Protestantism, and unprecedented levels of
social and geographical mobility focused increasing attention on the nuclear family as the basis of
order and spiritual worth. Moral theologians began to urge the importance of marital and parental
love, but paradoxically stressed the need for patriarchal and authoritarian ideologies which installed
the husband – acting by proxy as king and priest – as the head of the household. Although the
emphasis on the nuclear family remained undiminished, by the eighteenth century the principles
 Social history 229

of affective individualism gained strength. Marriage partners were now decided largely by free
choice, the patriarchal authority declined, there were moves toward greater equality between the
sexes, and children attracted more care and attention.
What needs explaining, concludes Stone, is not change in the structure or organization of
the family, but in sentiment. Here the specificity of this historical experience of the English
bourgeois family challenges the application of any general sociological theory of modernization. The
progressive erosion of a sense of community, authority and deference, social stability and tradition,
all of which have been identified as key features, impose a uniformity and linearity on family
change which never existed. Likewise the transition from a traditional ‘moral’ economy to
industrial capitalism, the values of which have been seen by Shorter and others to encourage
changes in family sentiment – except that this explains neither the chronology nor the class
specificity of such changes. Better explanations may derive from consideration of the rise of the
spirit not of industrial capitalism but of capitalism itself: here religious, philosophical and political
thought championed the values of democracy, independence and individualism their various
manifestations, thereby steering the course of the bourgeois family over the early modern period.
The third main approach to study of the family has focused on the role of economic factors, in
particular their role in determining the behaviour of its members. This approach seeks to determine
how economic resources were made available to the family, how its members exploited them, and
how these strategies helped shape power relations within the family. Much of this work has been
comparative, usually looking at the experience of different cultures across the same period, has
leaned heavily on social science theory and has opened up the use of novel sources including
probates, property holdings and family budgets. Among its important themes are the family
economy and patterns of inheritance, both of which are worth discussing, albeit briefly.
The transition from a medieval to industrialized economy has provided a useful vehicle with
which to the mode of production sets limits to the generation of resources. At the heart of
challenges faced by peasant families was access to land, thus it is important to understand how law
and local customs regulated the ownership of property, and how land impacted on the size and
structure of the family, particularly in striking a delicate balance between having enough to provide
labour but not too many to feed, on the employment of its individual members, and on the patterns
of inheritance which determined how property was passed on from one generation to another. The
early stages of industrialization disrupted these family economies. Increasing numbers of landless
labourers together with the proletarianization of factory labour created a large reservoir of male,
female and child labour with no rights to land and no inheritance. Families became independent
households which acted as units of labour – often working away from the household – the rewards
of which were paid to individual members.
The fine study by Tilly and Scott (1989) investigated the changing role of women within English
and French families from the beginnings of industrialization in the mid-eighteenth century to the
present. Industrialization, they argue, impacted on the economy, demographics and structure of
the family in complex ways. In the preindustrial economy the family was typically small and
had low productivity. Tasks were differentiated according to age and gender. Fertility was high
but effectively controlled by comparable mortality rates, late marriage and enforced celibacy for
some members. Industrialization led to an increase in family productive units, members of which
moved beyond the confines of the household to the factories and workshops, and were paid in
wages. High fertility and mortality rates continued, and married women alternated productive and
reproductive activities, working for the most part when necessary to supplement the family
income.
230 Varieties

By the end of the nineteenth century, industrial production and organization had raised
productivity and the standard of living for the majority of the population. The family economy
continued to allocate labour to its members, including children after leaving school, but increasingly
married women turned away from paid employment, and devoted their time to nurturing children
and organizing consumption. This process was promoted also by improved infant and maternity
care which resulted in lower levels of infant mortality and restrictions on fertility. Smaller families
required investment of more time to the survival of their children. Over the whole of this period,
therefore, the changing role of women was the outcome of the shifting relationship between their
responsibilities for production and reproduction.
To conclude, we have outlined three broad approaches to the family adopted by social
historians. Each has emerged as a response to perceived inadequacies in previous work. Historians
developed an interest in sentiments because they felt that the demographic approach failed to take
account of the extent to which the family was shaped by perceptions and ideologies, while those
exploring the family economy do so because the family is not simply an ideological construct, it is
a functioning economic and social unit. But we must be careful not to draw strictly defined
boundaries around them; in practice, they draw upon one another, and the future of work in this
area depends upon continuation of this constructive interplay.

SECTION 4: THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF FAITH

Victorians had views about religion. It almost defined them; it was everything they were for and
everything that they were against. The cathedral, church and chapel were the landmarks of their
lives and the points of navigation for a morality that was encoded in every almost every thought
they had, in almost every individual or social act. It moved their souls and offended their reason at
one and the same time. As religion or popular faith declined and then transformed, it would remain
at the very heart of what social history (old and new) was created to understand. We shall see in
this section that as religious attachment was expressed through attending the various houses of
worship, the working class was singled out by contemporaries and then by sociologists and
historians as lacking religious attachment. Yet neither church nor theology was free-standing, set
apart from society or history. Perhaps urbanization and industrialization were structurally
incompatible with religion, throwing up rival associations that detracted from the church or chapel.
Social historians then have been interested in religion and the structures of religion but have felt
compelled to frame some of the more complex questions into theories that allow religion and faith
to be examined in more systematic ways. Once again sociology has proved more than useful for
historians. Looking at the founders of sociology – Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber –
we find that religion has been taken seriously. For Durkheim (1858–1917) religion and belief were
key parts of every society. His Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) recognized the utility of
religion to every society and its ability to express a universal or collective consciousness. He
theorized the conditions in which the sacred and profane existed with different societies behaving
in slightly different ways depending on their varying levels of sophistication. Durkheim thought
that demands for justice and new moral demands would diminish the separate space given to things
mystical. It is this assumption, that secularisation is solely about a retreat from Christianity, that
this retreat is progressive and ongoing and that it is essentially equated with modernization. Marx
(1818–1883) thought religion would fade away as science came to determine contemporary
thinking, a process that had begun when the newly powerful bourgeoisie had embraced materialism