ESSAY 2

·.• women's reading group

':GENDER IN HISTORY

"I _,,

Global Perspectives Second Edition

MERRY E. WIESNER-HANKS

~WILEY-BLACKWELL A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This second edition first published 2011 © Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks 2011

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Wiesner, Merry E., 1952- Gender in history : global perspectives/ Merry Wiesner-Hanks. - 2nd ed.

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Chronological Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

Sex and Gender Gender History and Theory Structure of the Book The Origins of Patriarchy

2 The Family

Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia The Classical Cultures of China,

Mediterranean ( 600 BCE-500 c Africa, the Americas, and Southe;

Premodern Era (600 BCE-1600 Medieval and Early Modern Eure

Mediterranean (500 CE-1600 c The Colonial World (1500-1900) The Industrial and Postindustrial

3 Economic Life

Foraging, Horticultural, and Herc (20,000 BCE-1800 CE)

Agricultural Societies (7000 BCE-·. Slavery (7000 BCE-1900 CE) Capitalism and Industrialism (15( Corporations, the State, and the S

(1900-2010)

, The Origin of the Family, Private Property ock (New York: International Publishers, tten over 20 books, most of which include the goddess; her definitive work is The

•e World of Old Europe (San Francisco: r work has been the inspiration for Merlin i (New York: Dial Press, 1976) and Riane : Our History, Our Future (San.Prancisco: , been criticized in Lucy Goodison and ,ddesses (Madison: University of Wisconsin frica, see the many works of Chiekh Anta Jnity of Black Africa: The .Domains of issical Antiquity (London: Karnak House, pecially Re-inventing Africa: Matriarchy, '.ed Books, 1997). Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University portant discussion of the origins of patri- es by anthropologists and archaeologists nding of this issue; these are discussed in mkey, Engendering Archaeology (Oxford: lledge Nelson, Gender in Archaeology: ~nd edn., Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira,

ggested readings, along with links to orig- iated with this book: www.wiley.com/go/

CHAPTER Two

The Family

anthropologists and historians have made clear, the structure, function, even the definition of "the family" have varied tremendously from cul-

i'e to culture, and for different social groups within each culture. In some laces there is (or was) no exact equivalent for the modern English word

11 family"; the more important unit was instead the "household," people Who lived and often worked together, whether or not they were related. In )ther places "family" included those nonrelated individuals, so that slaves

· servants were considered part of the family. For some groups, the most portant unit was the nuclear family of a man, a woman, and their chil- en, while for others the extended kin network was most important. In

tmme groups, the family was primarily a unit of reproduction, while in oth- .~l'S it was primarily a unit of production. Some groups practiced polygamy t01d others monogamy. Among some groups, married couples lived with the husband's family (patrilocality), in others they lived with the wife's (matrilo- cality or uxorilocality), and in others they set up their own household (neolocality). Adoption or godparentage created significant kinship-like ties ( termed fictive or spiritual kinship) in some places while in others only blood .ind marriage mattered. Marital partners in some cultures were chosen by parents or the family as a whole and in others by the individuals themselves.

··· ln some groups a woman brought goods or money to her husband or hus- band's family on marriage (a dowry) and in others a man gave goods or money to his wife's family (bridewealth). Marriage was forbidden to certain segments of the population among some groups while among others nearly everyone married. In some groups divorce was easy and in others impossi- ble. In some groups premarital sexuality was acceptable or even expected · and in others it was harshly punished. The oldest son inherited everything in some cultures (primogeniture) and in others all children or at least all sons

· ilhared in inheritance (partible inheritance). In some groups marriage was trnrly and in others it was late. People in some places married within their

2 6 The Family

group (endogamy) and in others outside of their group (exogamy). In some groups spouses were about the same age while in others they were very dif- ferent ages. Contraception, abortion, and even infanticide were acceptable practices for limiting the number of children in some cultures, while in oth- ers these were strictly prohibited. Death was a rupture in family life among some groups, while in others deceased ancestors were part of the household, venerated and honored. All of these variables interacted, and often changed over time because of internal developments or contacts with other cultures.

Despite all of this variety, there are certain generalizations we can make about the family in history. Though patterns and structures differed tremen- dously, every group had ideas about the proper relations among spouses, parents and children, and other kin that were reinforced through law codes, religious prescriptions, taboos, education, or other means. Most individuals followed these expectations, which is why we can make generalizations about issues such as those noted in the paragraph above. This tendency for people to follow certain patterns means that family history can often be por- trayed in charts and graphs of quantitative measures such as average age at marriage, average number and frequency of children, rates of remarriage for widows and widowers, inheritance patterns, rates of divorce, and so on.

Quantitative sources make clear that the experience of family life was gendered. Age at first marriage was often very different for men and women, as was life expectancy, rate of remarriage after widowhood or divorce, and amount of inheritance; plural marriage (polygamy) was much more likely to involve men with multiple wives (polygyny) than women with multiple hus- bands (polyandry); kin networks involving the father's family (agnatic kin) were generally more important than those involving the mother's (morga- natic kin); inheritance may have been divided among children, but· if one child inherited, it was almost always a son; in some cultures, such as the Bedouin of the Middle East, only the birth of a son created a true family that was counted separately. Nonquantitative sources about family life, includ- ing diaries, letters, and court records, also indicate that the experiences within the family group differed for boys and girls, men and women. Children learned (and continue to learn) what it means to be male or female first from the older people in their families, and their first experiences with gender differences were usually within the family. Gender also shaped the consequences of breaking with the accepted pattern of family life, conse- quences that might include social ostracism, outlawry, psychiatric coun- seling, imprisonment, or death.

These gender differences .within the family have been augmented by gen- der differences in other areas that will be explored later in this book, and all of these together have operated to link women's experience more closely than men's to family life in most cultures. Because of this, stories of men's actions and accomplishments often neglect to mention even whether they

were married or had children, while t family situation; for example, few bic Jacques Rousseau mention that he had put them all up for adoption, while n, England or the American suffragist Su that they were unmarried and childless marital customs and patterns, norms ai tremendous impact on men, however, a

, plete history. Because the family was th, and the first social organization child1 about gender within the family have b. to change.

Ancient Egypt an( (4000 BCE-

The discussion of explanations for thf notes some of the ways in which gender toric family life, before the developmern codes, such as that of the Babylonian 1 included many provisions regarding m what the Babylonian elite regarded as t sexes and the proper running of a house husband could divorce his wife withou- up her mind to leave in order that she rr ing her house and humiliating her husl ''has been caught lying with another n punishment for a married man who had

In both ancient Mesopotamia and arn monogamous, though men co~ld and d: economic status was high enough, espec children. Rulers of Egypt in the New F rulers in Mesopotamia at roughly the sa: ing harems of many wives and concubii when this practice began or even if it was thought; were the many women buried bines, or might they have been the queen for rulers and the very wealthy, most mar prime emphasis on procreation and ma well-being of the household. Pivorce wa

Marriage in the ancient world not on two families, so that the choice of a spous

tside of their group (exogamy). In some ~ age while in others they were very dif • a, and even infanticide were acceptabk children in some cultures, while in oth- eath was a rupture in family life among :d ancestors were part of the household, variables interacted, and often changed pments or contacts with other cultures. re certain generalizations we can make Datterns and structures differed tremen- t the proper relations among spouses, hat were reinforced through law codes, ttion, or other means. Most individuals is why we can make generalizations

he paragraph above. This tendency for ns that family history can often be por· itative measures such as average age at :ncy of children, rates of remarriage for 1tterns, rates of divorce, and so on. :hat the experience of family life was ien very different for men and women, ·iage after widowhood or divorce, and ;e (polygamy) was much more likely to rgyny) than women with multiple hus- )lving the father's family (agnatic kin) those involving the mother's (morga- n divided among children, but if one a son; in some cultures, such as the

,irth of a son created a true family that tive sources about family life, includ- s, also indicate that the experiences r boys and girls, men and women. n) what it means to be male or female nilies, and their first experiences with n the family. Gender also shaped the xepted pattern of family life, conse- tracism, outlawry, psychiatric coun-

family have been augmented by gen- be explored later in this book, and all 1k women's experience more closely tres. Because of this, stories of men's :glect to mention even whether they

The Family 2 7

rried or had children, while those of women usually discuss their ituation; for example, few biographies of the French thinker Jean 'Rousseau mention that he had several drilclren out of wedlock and

. all up for adoption, while no biography of Queen Elizabeth I of or the American suffragist Susan B. Anthony neglects to mention

y were unmarried and childless. Family structures and relationships, ,customs and patterns, norms and traditions •of family life also had a dous impact on men, however, and ignoring these provides an incom- . story. Because the family was the earliest form of social organization,

first social org11nization children encountered, the lessons learned .t gender within the family have been the most difficult for both sexes

Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia ( 4000 BCE-600 BCE)

· discussion of explanations for the origins of patriarchy in chapter 1 s some of the ways in which gender distinctions first emerged in prehis-

c family life, before the development of writing. The earliest written law cs, such as that of the Babylonian king Hammurabi (1792-1750 BCE),

luded many provisions regarding marriage and family life, setting out at the Babylonian elite regarded as the proper relationship between the es and the proper running of a household; according to its provisions, a

sband could divorce his wife without returning her dowry if she "made .her mind to leave in order that she may engage in business, thus neglect-

:· her house and humiliating her husband," and could drown her if she .as been caught lying with another man." (The code does not mention nishment for a married man who had sex with a woman not his wife.) Jn both ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, marriage was generally

jonogamous, though men could and did have more than one wife if their onomic status was high enough, especially if their first wife had not had

Jildren. Rulers of Egypt in the New Kingdom (1570 BCE-1075 CE) and ulers in Mesopotamia at roughly the same time are often described as hav- . 1g harems of many wives and concubines, though historians are not sure when this practice began or even if it was as extensive as later commentators {hought; were the many women buried in royal tombs the king's concu- bines, or might they have been the queen's servants? Whatever the situation

:,for rulers and the very wealthy, most marriages were monogamous, with the .}Jrime emphasis on procreation and maintaining the economic and social well-being of the household. Divorce was possible, but difficult.

· Marriage in the ancient world not only linked two individuals but also rwo families, so that the choice of a spouse was much too important a matter

2 8 The Family

to be left to young people to decide. Marriages were most often arranged by one's parents, who assessed the possible marriage partners and chose some- one appropriate. Arranged marriage did not preclude the possibility of spousal affection and romantic love, however. Among the tax lists, funerary inscriptions and legal codes that are the most common records left from early civilizations, there is also some erotic love poetry. Though we have no way of knowing whether this was written as a prelude to marriage or to someone outside of marriage, we do know that husbands in New Kingdom Egypt often referred affectionately to their wives on their tomb inscriptions and that couples were portrayed arm in arm.

Portrayal of spouses side by side may seem odd given the unequal status of men and women in marriage, but it also can serve as a visual demonstra- tion of two aspects of ancient marriage. One is that in actual practice, women may have made more family decisions and controlled more of what went on in the household than the laws would indicate. Laws always depict an ideal situation, one the lawmakers hope to create, rather than reality. We know from more recent societies in which women are far more restricted than they were in ancient Mesopotamia that they actually oppose, subvert, and ignore restrictions in ways that reading the laws alone would never indicate were possible. A second aspect of ancient marriage which these statutes hint at is the fact that though in some later societies of the Middle East concern about women's honor would mean their total seclusion, this was not true in ancient Mesopotamia or Egypt. Despite the preference for male heirs, high death rates often left women sole heirs, and the good of the family and preservation of the lineage required that they have some legal rights. Thus though they were always a tiny minority of those appearing in legal records, women did control their own property to some degree, act as independent legal persons bringing cases to court, serve as guarantors for the loans of others, and work in public. Husbands did not assume total control of their wives' property in all cases - probably when the wife had come from a more prominent or wealthier family, and had powerful broth- ers or other male relatives - so that women independently bequeathed prop- erty to their sons and acted on their behalf. Women were most independent in Egypt; the Assyrians, on the other hand (one of the many empires that conquered Mesopotamia), required respectable women to wear a veil in public and forbade them to own property.

Because a woman's identity was more closely tied to her husband's than a man's to his wife's, a husband's death often brought great changes in a wom- an's situation. She became a widow, a word for which there is no male equivalent in many ancient languages and one of the few words in English and other modern languages in which the male, widower, is derived from the female instead of the other way around. At that point she often become more active legally, buying and selling land, making loans, and making

donations to religious establishm because she was often the guardi: family finances, but she was also under direct male control.

The Classical Culture Mediterranea

Many of the gender patterns in farr est civilizations carried over into th, were often made more rigid becau and the development of religious . clear gender distinctions. (These w family was generally regarded as t positions were often limited to mf Mesopotamia and Egypt, most pe, tain marriages, such as those bet, person, or between persons of dif these cases other legal forms were c cions, such as concubinage or the F nia. These forms were gender spe, allowed a higher status woman tc lower status man; such relations , Size of the household was often df households containing more relati tlxtended families lived in a large households were nuclear. Whateve: ryone living within it, including ad authority of the male head of hou came under the authority of her el, than acting independently. In some brother of her dead husband- a prac if her husband had not had a son; b t'egarded as belonging to her decea:

Weddings were central occasion. carefully by parents, other family rr of a family's resources often going the new household. Marital agree1 were stipulated with contracts betw eontinued for centuries throughout today. Opportunities for divorce v~

· eultures it was nearly impossible, s<

[arriages were most often arranged by ,le marriage partners and chose some- did not preclude the possibility of

owever. Among the tax lists, funerary the most common records left from rotic love poetry. Though we have no :itten as a prelude to marriage or to now that husbands in New Kingdom ·heir wives on their tomb inscriptions narm. LY seem odd given the unequal status also can serve as a vis~al demonstra - age. One is that in actual practice, ~cisions and controlled more of what , would indicate. Laws always depict ,ope to create, rather than reality. We

" ·hich women are far more restricted a that they actually oppose, subvert, eading the laws alone would never ,ct of ancient marriage which these in some later societies of the Middle )uld mean their total seclusion, this or Egypt. Despite the preference for omen sole heirs, and the good of the required that they have some legal

. tiny minority of those appearing in Jwn property to some degree, act as es to court, serve as guarantors for ic. Husbands did not assume total :ases - probably when the wife had ier family, and had powerful broth- ten independently bequeathed prop- _alf. Women were most independent and. (one of the many empires that pectable women to wear a veil in ty. closely tied to her husband's than a en brought great changes in a worn- word for which there is no male

1d one of the few words in English :he male, widower, is derived from .nd. At that point she often become land, making loans, and making

The Family Z9

donations to religious establishments. A widow's actions were acceptable because she was often the. guardian for her children and in control of the fllmily finances, but she was also somewhat suspect because she was not under direct male control.

· The Classical Cultures of China, India, and the Mediterranean (600 BCE-500 CE)

-...,_)!

Many of the gender patterns in family life that developed in the world's earli- 1:!.St civilizations carried over into the classical cultures of Eurasia, though they Were often made more rigid because of the expansion of written law codes

. 1md the development of religious and philosophical systems which posited

. "1lear gender distinctions. (These will be discussed in chapters 4 and 5.) The Jainily was generally regarded as the basis of society, and rights to political · J)ositions were often limited to men who were the heads of families. As in Mesopotamia and Egypt, most people married, though in some places cer- tain marriages, such as those between slaves, between a slave and a free person, or between persons of different social classes, were prohibited. In these cases other legal forms were often established to legitimate sexual rela-

. rio11s, such as concubinage or the Roman slave "marriage" called contuber- uia. These forms were gender specific, for they never included one which · i:1Howed a higher status woman to have legitimate sexual relations with a '. lower status man; such relations were instead often punishable by death. ; Size of the household was often dependent on social status, with wealthier

households containing more relatives, servants, and slaves; in some areas :,Jx;tended families lived in a large family compound, while in others most :; households were nuclear. Whatever a household's size or composition, eve- , ryone living within it, including adult children and servants, was under the i.lUthority of the male head of household. When he died, his widow often

{Ctln1e under the authority of her eldest son or her husband's brother rather (than acting independently. In some cultures she was expected to marry the

•·· brother of her dead husband-a practice called levirate marriage- particularly ff her husband had not had a son; her sons by her new husband were legally

· regarded as belonging to her deceased first husband. Weddings were central occasions in a family's life, with spouses chosen

Nrefully by parents, other family members, or marriage brokers, and much · of a family's resources often going to pay for the ceremony and setting up

rhe new household. Marital agreements, especially among the well-to-do, .· were stipulated with contracts between the families involved, a practice that

~:ontinued for centuries throughout the world, and in many areas continues today. Opportunities for divorce varied in the classical world, but in many ~:ultures it was nearly impossible, so the choice of a spouse was undertaken

30 The Family

very carefully after much consultation with relatives and often astrologers or other types of people who predicted the future. Weddings themselves were held on days determined to be lucky or auspicious, a determination arrived at independently for each couple.

Rituals surrounding marriage became more complex in the classical period, particularly for the wealthy. In China during the Han dynasty (202 BCE- 220 CE), for example, marriages included a number of prescribed steps, of which the most important was the presentation of betrothal gifts from the groom and the groom's family to the bride and the bride's family, an occasion of conspicuous consumption for the rich and sometimes near- bankruptcy for the poor. The bride's family then often countered with a dowry, sometimes of goods purchased with the money in the betrothal gift; using a betrothal gift for family financial needs rather than reserving it for the bride was viewed as dishonorable because it made it appear that the bride had been sold. A marriage with no betrothal gift or dowry was also dishonorable, with the woman often considered a concubine rather than a wife. Once all these goods had been exchanged, the bride was taken to the ancestral home of the groom, where she was expected to obey her husband and his living relatives, and to honor his ancestors. Confucian teachings required upper-class men tQ carry out specific rituals honoring their ancestors and clan throughout their lives, and to have sons so that these rituals could continue. Their names were inscribed on the official fam- ily list, and women's on the list of their marital families once they had a son; women who had no sons disappeared from family memory, unless they could arrange to adopt one, perhaps from a concubine or slave of their hus- band. Women continued to belong to their marital families even if they were widowed; if a widow's birth family wanted her to marry again, it often had to ransom her back from her deceased husband's family, and her children by her first husband stayed with his family.

In India, religious ideas about the importance of family life and many children meant that all men.and women were expected to marry, and that women in particular married very young; widows and women who had not had sons were excluded from wedding festivities. Parents, other relatives, or professional matchmakers chose one's spouse, and anything that interfered with procreation, including exclusively homosexual attachments, was frowned upon. The domestic fire· had great symbolic importance; husband and wife made regular offerings in front of it. Children, particularly boys, were shown great affection and developed close attachments to their par- ents, especially their mothers. These mothers often continued to live in the house of their eldest son upon widowhood, creating stresses between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law; cruel and angry mothers-in-law were standard figures in the stories of classical India, reflecting what was often harsh treatment of young women in real life. (In the Mediterranean and the

rest of Europe, widowed mothers sons, so the spiteful old woman i than a mother-in-law.)

In the classical Mediterranean, and secular aims than it was in C marital practices and family forms common patriarchal and patriloc: the Greek city-state of Sparta, in military ends. Citizen boys left the: in military camps until they were 2 their own age; they married at abc but saw their wives only when the) was harsh - this is the origin of viewed as necessary to prepare me Athens and to control the Spart; which vastly outnumbered the citi

In this militaristic atmosphere, c all classical cultures, there was an e leadership viewed maternal health strong children, and so encourage< eat well. With men in military se owned property and ran the hous, or secluded. Marriage often began the couple could have children, \ course if they were unsuccessful. I on procreation, homosexuality w: relationships in particular viewed fight more fiercely in defense of th,

The unusual gender structures c however, for the dominant city-st cally, and intellectually was Athe1 were more like those of women ir

• neighbors in Sparta. Athenian dem bitizen and noncitizen, with citize

' symbolized by a ceremony held or · which the father laid his son on the · this ceremony marked a boy's leg Athenian citizen men that their s, focreasingly secluded in special par only for religious festivals, funen

bate about this among historia1 decade or more older than their w formal and informal institutions fo

th relatives and often astrologers .the future. Weddings themselves :y or auspicious, a determination

ore complex in the classical period, iring the Han dynasty (202 BCE- !d a number of prescribed steps, ~sentation of betrothal gifts from e bride and the bride's family, an :or the rich and sometimes near- mily then often countered with a with the money in the betrothal mcial needs rather than reserving ble because it made it appear that 1h no betrothal gift or dowry was bn considered a concubine rather ~n exchanged, the bride was taken .ere she was expected to obey her ) honor his ancestors. Confucian arry out specific rituals honoring ir lives, and to have sons so that were inscribed on the official fam- arital families once they had a son; from family memory, unless they 1 a concubine or slave of their hus- r marital families even if they were ed her to marry again, it often had sband's family, and her children by

portance of family life and many were expected to marry, and that widows and women who had not

;tivities. Parents, other relatives, or ouse, and anything that interfered r homosexual attachments, was ~at symbolic importance; husband of it. Children, particularly boys,

ed close attachments to their par- hers often continued to live in the ,hood, creating stresses between 1el and angry mothers-in-law were .I India, reflecting what was often life. (In the Mediterranean and the

The Family 3 I

rest of Europe, widowed mothers generally did not live with their married sons, so the spiteful old woman in stories is generally a stepmother rather than a mother-in-law.)

In the classical Mediterranean, family life was shaped more by practical and secular aims than it was in China or India, which led occasionally to marital practices and family forms that differed dramatically from the more common patriarchal and patrilocal. The most dramatic example of this is the Greek city-state of Sparta, in which all activity was directed toward military ends. Citizen-Boys left their homes at 7 years old in Sparta and lived in military camps until they were 30, eating and training with boys and men their own age; they married at about 18 to women of roughly the same age, but saw their wives only when they sneaked out of camp. Military discipline was harsh - this is the origin of the word "spartan" - but severity was viewed as necessary to prepare men both to fight external enemies such as Athens and to control the Spartan slave and unfree farmer population, which vastly outnumbered the citizens.

In this militaristic atmosphere, citizen women were remarkably free. As in all classical cultures, there was an emphasis on childbearing, but the Spartan leadership viewed maternal health as important for the bearing of healthy, strong children, and so encouraged women to participate in athletics and to eat well. With men in military service most of their lives, citizen women owned property and ran the household, and were not physically restricted or secluded. Marriage often began with a trial marriage period to make sure the couple could have children, with divorce and remarriage the normal course if they were unsuccessful. In contrast to India, despite the emphasis on procreation, homosexuality was widely accepted, with male same-sex relationships in particular viewed as militarily expedient, leading men to fight more fiercely in defense of their lovers and comrades.

The unusual gender structures of Sparta did not leave much of a legacy, however, for the dominant city-state in classical Greece culturally, politi- cally, and intellectually was Athens, in which the lives of citizen women were more like those of women in China or India than like those of their neighbors in Sparta. Athenian democracy made a sharp distinction between citizen and noncitizen, with citizenship handed down from father to son, symbolized by a ceremony held on the tenth day after a child was born in which the father laid his son on the floor of the house and gave him a name; this ceremony marked a boy's legal birth. It was thus very important to Athenian citizen men that their sons be their own, so that women were increasingly secluded in special parts of the house and allowed out in public only for religious festivals, funerals, and perhaps the theater (there is a debate about this among historians). As in India, husbands were often a decade or more older than their wives, and clearly better educated, for the formal and informal institutions for learning that developed in Athens were

o:,m'.en married, but being unmarried did not bar a man hich was viewed as the center of human existence by

many . .• ... . In contrast to most classical societies, Athenians regarded the, i!i!,~~1\Juahman, rather than the family, as the basis of the social order, and{;:1W!tf~ntral telationship one between a younger man and an older man wl~,tr,a11iedhimin cultural and political adulthood. (Such relationships will be.dirscttssed in more detail in chapter 8.) • ,Classical Rome had very different norms of family life than either Sparta

or Athens. The word "famil}1" 1

(famiglia) in ancient Rome actually meant all those under the authority of a male head of household, including nonrelated slaves and servants. Thus just as slave-owners held power over their slaves, fathers held great power over their children and husbands over their wives. Somewhat contradictorily, the Romans viewed the model marriage as one in which husbands and wives were loyal to one another and shared interests, activities, and property. These notions were often expressed on family tomb- stones, such as the following from the first century CE: "Pythion son of Hicesius set up this common memorial to himself and to his wife Eicydilla daughter of Epicudes. He was married at 18 and she at 15 and for 50 years of life together they shared agreement unbroken, happy among the living and blessed among the dead." If the marriage was less than ideal, by the late Republic (first century BCE), divorce was possible at the instigation of either the husband or wife. Romans also idealized the role of the mother, viewing women as important in their children's education and thus worthy of an education themselves.

In all classical cultures, philosophical and religious ideals of family life had a much greater impact· on elites than on ordinary people, a situation that continued into the postclassical period when elite women were increas- ingly secluded within their households in China, India, and much of the Islamic world. In both the classical and postclassical periods, and, indeed, in most of the world's cultures in all periods, the vast majority of people were peasants who spent their days raising food. Almost all of them mar- ried, not because of Confucian principles or Hindu teachings or Islamic injunctions, but because marital couples and their children were the basic unit of agricultural production; procreation was an economic necessity and not simply a religious duty. Some historians speculate that peasant women were less restricted than upper-class women, or at least that their lives were more like those of the male members of their family - made equally miser- able by poverty and hard work - than was the case for wealthier women. Whether any woman would have regarded this as positive, and not traded her life for the more comfortable, though more restricted, one of an aristo- cratic woman, is difficult to say, for we have almost no sources that give us the opinions of peasant women or men about their families until the nine- teenth century.

The family patterns sJ related, and certain small India also followed very c western India and the M headed the households, c the family name to their 1 ued to today, although th, closely with the rest of I Lakyntieth Lyndoh, a K HWhy should we be in sw independent women wh~r increase theirs?"

Africa, the Arr the Premo

The scarcity of written so also affects our understan much of Southeast As1a an, !lnd anthropologists use a marital patterns, living arr oral history and traditions !JS Muslim traders iri Afric J)acific islands, direct int, remains, linguistic analysis provide evidence about fai their limitations; outsiders i l;lre difficult to interpret, ar tiific perspective. What is dt for family patterns are not i which are fairly close to o: Musuo were able to survive .In · areas without strong w forms and arrangements.

There are a few patterns however. The "family" was imd this kin group had a vc would marry and when the} how long they would atten< 110111ic resources, whose con, punishment. These decision tion and discussion within

I

married did not bar a man 1ter of human existence by >cieties, Athenians regarded 1e basis of the social order, 1ger man and an older man 10d. (Such relationships will

rmily life than either Sparta int Rome actually meant all ehold, including nonrelated eld power over their slaves, i husbands over their wives. iie model marriage as one in fOther and shared interests, i expressed on family tomb• ntury CE: "Pythion son of !lf and to his wife Eicydilla l she at 15 and for 50 years n, happy among the living ts less than ideal, by the late e at the instigation of either role of the mother, viewing :on and thus worthy of an

ligious ideals of family life rdinary people, a situation ·l elite women were increas- ta, India, and much of the ssical periods, and, indeed, ihe vast majority of people ti. Almost all of them mar- lrindu teachings or Islamic ieir children were the basic ! an economic necessity and culate that peasant women :lt least that 'their lives were mily- made equally miser- case for wealthier women. as positive, and not traded restricted, one of an aristo- !J.ost no sources that give us 1eir families until the nine-

me rnmuy ))

'l"he family patterns sketched here for classical cultures were thus class rda:ted, and certain small groups within the huge populations of China and ;fotUa also followed very different models. Among the Khasi people in north- Wt'l!itern India and the Musuo in southwestern China, for example, women h.l?nded the households, owned businesses, and handed down property and · family name to their daughters. These matrifocal practices have contin-

to today, although there is pressure to make these groups conform more ly with the rest of India and China. The irony of this is not lost on ntieth Lyndoh, a Khasi businesswoman, who commented in 1996:

. hy should we be in such a hurry to give up our long-fought-for rights as \\dependent women~hen most other women in the world are clamoring to ncrease theirs?"

Africa, the Americas, and Southeast Asia in the Premodern Era (600 BCE-1600 CE)

· e scarcity of written sources that limits our access to peasant family life If.lo affects our understanding of all families in Africa, the Americas, and mch of Southeast Asia and the Pacific before the modern period. Historians rid anthropologists use a variety of means to study kinship organizations,

rital patterns, living arrangements, and other aspects of family structure: ··· I history and traditions, later written records, reports of outsiders, such Muslim traders in Africa or Christian missionaries in America and the cific islands, direct interviews with living individuals, archaeological rnains, linguistic analysis of words denoting family and kin. All of these ovide evidence about families in the past, but scholars also warn about

rnir limitations; outsiders brought their own biases, archaeological remains re difficult to interpret, and oral history (like all history) represents a spe- Wc perspective. What is described as "traditional" may often be quite new, JI' family patterns are not static. They may also be quite different in groups hich are fairly close to one another geographically; if the Khasi and the usuo were able to survive in China and India, it is no surprise that groups areas without strong written traditions developed very diverse family

imns and arrangements. There are a few patterns found in most cultures over these huge areas,

iowever. The "family" was often defined as a fairly wide group of relatives, od this kin group had a voice in domestic and other matters, such as who

would marry and when they would do so, who would be sent to school and how long they would attend, who would have access to land or other eco- 1nmic resources, whose conduct was unacceptable and worthy of censure or unishment. These decisions were arrived at through a process of negotia-

tion and discussion within the family, with the influence of each member

3 4 The Family

dependent on the situation. The opinions of older family members generally carried more weight than those of younger, the opinions of first born more than later born, and the opinions of men more than women. These two hierarchies - age and gender - interacted in complex ways dependent on the issue at hand, with older women sometimes having control of younger men on certain matters. In some cultures, older women served as matchmakers, suggesting or arranging marriages.

Wealth was another hierarchy that shaped family lif6 in these areas, as in the rest of the world. In some areas most marriages weremonogamous, and in some polygyny was quite! common, but even in areas where monogamy was the rule, wealthy and powerful men married more than one wife or had several secondary wives or concubines along with a principal wife, a pat- tern often termed "resource polygyny." Rulers of states and villages had the most wives, concubines, slaves, and other types of female dependents as a sign of status. The expansion of Islam in Africa and Southeast Asia sup- ported this pattern. Under Islamic law, the legal status of children followed that of their father, not their mother, so all the children born in the house- hold of a free man would be free, and recognized as his children. Those born to free or slave concubines had a lesser status than those born to wives, but they were free. Later the Atlantic slave trade also reinforced polygyny in Africa, because two-thirds of the millions taken to the New World were men.

Powerful men also used marriage as a way to make or cement alliances, or as a symbol of conquest. The leaders of both the Incas and the Aztecs, for example, married the daughters of rulers of the tribes they had conquered, and in seventeenth-century Virginia, the Algonkian-speaking chief Powhatan reinforced his domination of other groups by marrying women from their villages and then sending them back once they had borne him a child.

Living arrangements varied in polygynous marriages. In much of Africa, families lived in house-compounds in which each wife had her own house; each wife also had her own cattle, fields, and property, for the notion that a wife's property actually belonged to her husband that became standard in Europe was not accepted in most of Africa. In parts of the world in which women were secluded, all wives lived within the same household, often in a special part of the house constructed for them, termed the harim (which means "forbidden area") or zenana. (See chapters 4 and 5 for longer discus- sions of the seclusion of women.)

Many cultures in Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific were matrilineal, in which membership in a kin group is traced through the female line and a man's heirs were his sister's children. This did not necessarily mean that women were economically or legally autonomous, but that they depended on their brothers rather than their husbands. Their brothers also depended on them, however, for many of these cultures also had systems of marriage

in which husband used the money, bridewealth at the marriage was depe also frequently pe, working for his fut of trial marriage. 1' relations among si support if they cat lady true in groups America, in which women lived toget important than the dren often regar< Matrilineal, matril of men from other over their wives' p

Matrilineal inhe tionships ,stronger, resentment. Men c areas where wives : wives who came f their sons could re: sons was exacerba1 to decide whether for a son or anoth erational conflict , young men often I rituals would be al

Some groups in , .: .many peoples livin

reckoned through as land, water, anc fathers. In other l Nigeria, only men their mothers' bw . Some form of di

cultures, and in so filatrilocal groups . divorce simply left ings outside her fa · dren in both case groups divorce wa

ily members generally ms of first born more ii. women. These two ·ays dependent on the ntrol of younger men :ved as matchmakers,

e in these areas, as in re•.monogamous, and as where monogamy than one wife or had ,rincipal wife, a pat- , and villages had the 1ale dependents as a Southeast Asia sup- Of children followed 1 born in the house- , his children. Those ithan those born to 'ade also reinforced s taken to the New

or cement alliances, ; and the Aztecs, for hey had conquered, dng chief Powhatan 1 women from their 'e him a child. ,In much of Africa, tad her own house; :,r the notion that a ,ecame standard in the world in which iusehold, often in a : the harim (which > for longer discus-

; were matrilineal, he female line and essarily mean that ~at they depended :ers also depended stems of marriage

The Family 3 5

-,J;(Jilwhich husband brought a bridewealth to his wife's family. A man often 1rned the money, land, or goods that the family had received as the

..• ·• bridewealth at the marriage of his sister as his own bridewealth, so that his i\Utrdage was dependent on his sister marrying well. A prospective groom

>.tfao frequently performed brideservice for the family of his future wife, . working for his future father-in-law either before the wedding or in a period .·.· or trial marriage. Matrilineal inheritance systems encouraged close lifelong ··. rtilations among siblings, with women relying on their birth families for , iUpport if they came into con/lict with their husbands. This was particu- . {ndy true in groups that were':iiso matrilocal, such as those in eastern North America, in which husbands came to live with their wives' clans and related women lived together. Relations with one's mother's kin were thus more Important than those with one's father's kin or even one's spouse, and chil- dren often regarded their mother's brothers with particular respect.

{Matrilineal, matrilocal systems allowed for the relatively easy in-marriage .f:1ftnen from other groups, because they could not claim immediate control ]:fwer their wives' property. · Matrilineal inheritance systems and bridewealth made some family rela- t.lonships ,stronger, but they also created tensions. Brideservice could lead to i't1Sentment. Men objected to the influence· of their wives' families, and, in jmias where wives moved to their husband's households, intentionally chose \Vives who came from far away, which also lessened the degree to which Jheir sons could rely on their maternal uncles. Conflict between fathers and ~tms was exacerbated by resource polygyny and bridewealth, as families had Jo decide whether their resources would best be spent acquiring a first wife for a son or another wife for the father. Some scholars have seen this gen- ~l'lltional conflict as a source for harsh initiation rituals which unmarried Joung men often had to undergo; only those who had gone through such rfruals would be allowed to marry and join the ranks of fully adult men.

Some groups in Africa and the Americas had bilateral inheritance. Among .many peoples living in the Andean region, for example, lines of descent were l'tckoned through both sexes, with girls inheriting access to resources such ilS land, water, and animals through their mothers, and boys through their fothers. In other groups with bilateral inheritance, such as the Yako of

i Nigeria, only men inherited, but they did so from both their fathers and thdr mothers' brothers.

.. Some form of divorce or marital separation was available in most of these ;. eultures, and in some it was quite easy for either spouse to initiate. Among > mntrilocal groups in North America, for example, a man who wished to · divorce simply left his wife's house, while a woman put her husband's belong- ings outside her family's house, indicating she wished him to leave; the chil- dren in both cases stayed with the mother and her family. Among some urnups divorce was frowned upon after children had been born, however, or

I I I I

36 The Family

because it would involve complicated financial transactions, such as the return of bridewealth.

Relatively easy divorce was an essential part of systems of temporary marriage that developed in some parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. These were cultures in which people were taught to have a strong sense of debt and obligation to their parents and family for having been given life, termed on in Vietnamese and hiya in Tagalog, the language of part of the Philippines. This concept of debt extended beyond the family to the larger political and economic reali:r:~ so that people were often enmeshed in a com- plex system of dependency, sometimes placing themselves or family mem- bers into slavery to another in return for support - what is often termed "debt-slavery" - or otherwise promising loyalty or service. One also gave gifts in order to have others in one's debt; gift-giving was an important way to make alliances, pacify possible enemies, and create links and networks of obligations among strangers. Often these gifts included women, for exchang- ing women was considered the best way to transform strangers into rela- tives. These unions were often accompanied by a marriage ceremony and the expectation of spousal fidelity, but they were also understood to be tem- porary. If the spouses disagreed with one another or the man was from elsewhere and returned to his home country, the marriage ended, just as marriages between local spouses ended if there was conflict or one spouse disappeared for a year or more. Both sides gained from such temporary marriages; the man gained a sexual and domestic partner, and the woman and her family gained prestige through their contact with an outsider and their repayment of a debt. Concepts of debt also structured marriage pat- terns in other ways; prospective grooms frequently carried out brideservice for their future fathers-in-law, understood as paying off their obligations.

Medieval and Early Modern Europe and the Mediterranean (500 CE-1600 CE)

Family life in most of Europe during the period from the Roman Empire to Columbus was shaped to a large degree by the Christian Church. Early Christian thinkers were often hostile to the family, viewing virginity as the preferred form of existence; alternatives to family life, in which men and women lived in single-sex communities dedicated to service to God, devel- oped in most parts of Europe. In some areas, these communities took in widows as well as never-married people, providing a safe and honorable place for women who chose not to marry or not to remarry, or whose fami- lies made this decision for them.

Though there were certainly many people whose families decided when and whom and if they would marry, officially the Christian Church declared

that consent sixteenth cent a valid marri, regarded mar dence of God riage was inc1 of marriage v. and divorce, f was not marr tion. Women which ranged of the high n< for both men than women regarding ma jurisdiction o rate legal sys1 lowed in man courts to grar is a ruling tha to divorce, v. Other church before marri

· Nevertheless, :temained im1 · !)lace within t

·· Christianit• urope, but rthodox Ch

ons, such as the

ns of temporary and the Pacific.

a strong sense of \ been given life, ~e of part of the 1ily to the larger 1eshed in a com- or family mem- is often termed , One also gave · important way nd networks of :n, for exchang- 1gers into rela- ' ceremony and !ood to be tern- nan was from ,ended, just as :or one spouse tch temporary td the woman l outsider and marriage pat- tt brideservice ::ibligations.

td the

mEmpire to lmrch. Early ginity as the . ch men and God, devel- ties took in l honorable IVhose fami-

::ided when ch declared

The Family 3 7

that consent of the spouses was the basis of marriage; indeed, until the ~ixteenth century, consent of the spouses was all that was required to have Ill ;valid marriage, though by the twelfth century many church leaders also regarded marriage as a sacrament, a ceremony that provided visible evi- dence of God's grace, like baptism. Because of its sacramental nature, mar- rhage was increasingly held to be indissoluble, and sexual relations outside of marriage were viewed as illicit. Thus Christian Europe banned polygamy and divorce, and attempted to prohibit any form of sexual relationship that was not marriage, such as concubinage or premarital sex, termed fornica- tion. Women were generally expeq~~d to bring a dowry when they married,

c. which ranged from a few househola goods to a whole province in the case · bf the high nobility. Remarriage after the death of a spouse was acceptable for both men and women and very common, though men remarried faster than women and rural people faster than urban residents. Most issues regarding marriage and many other aspects of family life came under the jurisdiction of church courts and were regulated by an increasingly elabo-

, tate legal system termed canon law. The ideals for marriage were not fol- lowed in many instances: powerful individuals could often persuade church

· courts to grant annulments of marriages they needed to end (an annulment is a ruling that there never was a valid marriage in the first place, in contrast to divorce, which ends an existing marriage); men, including priests and other church leaders, had concubines and mistresses; young people had sex

·· before marriage and were forced into marriages they did not want. Nevertheless, these ideals and the institutions established to enforce them remained important shapers of men's and women's understanding of and place within the family.

Christianity provided the basic skeleton of family structure in medieval Europe, but there were also regional differences. In eastern Europe, the Orthodox Christian churches gradually came to allow divorce for adultery, i\.huse, abandonment, impotence, and barrenness, with both spouses allowed (somewhat grudgingly) to remarry. Consent of the parents as well as the spouses was required for first marriages, especially because age of marriage was often very early-12 to 13 for girls, 16 to 18 for boys. The couple gen- erally lived with the parents of one spouse, usually the husband, and the strongest emotional bonds were often, as in India and China, those between JtJOthers and sons rather than spouses .

After the Ottoman Turks defeated the Byzantine Empire in the fifteenth century, a large part of eastern Europe came under Muslim rule as part of

·• f'11e vast Ottoman Empire, which stretched from North Africa to the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf. Open intermarriage between Christians and Muslims was not permitted, though marriage after one party (usually the wife) con- verted was accepted. Both Muslims and Christians used Muslim courts for tases involving marriage or other family matters, which responded to and

3 8 The Family

shaped social changes occurring around them. Jews in Muslim areas also used Muslim family courts, though in general Jewish family life was regu- lated by Jewish laws and traditions. Jewish marriages in most parts of Europe and the Mediterranean were similar to Christian marriages in eastern Europe, with parents playing an important role and spouses both young. Jewish writ- ers emphasized companionship and affection between spouses, however, and described the ideal marriage as one predestined in heaven. Judaism did allow divorce, which was then sometimes justified on the grounds that the spouses had obviously not been predestined for each other.

Among Christians in western Europe, two rather distinct family patterns developed in the Middle Ages. In the south - as in eastern Europe and much of the rest of the world - ma(riage was between teenagers who lived with one set of parents for a long time, or between a man in his late twenties or thirties and a much younger woman, with households again containing sev- eral generations. (Demographers term this a "complex" household struc- ture.) In northwestern Europe, historians have identified a marriage pattern unique in the world in the premodern period, with couples waiting until their mid or late twenties to marry, long beyond the age of sexual maturity, and then immediately setting up an independent household. (Demographers term this a "nuclear, neolocal" household structure.) Husbands were likely to be only two or three years older than their wives at first marriage, and although households often contained servants, they rarely contained more than one family member who was not a part of the nuclear family.

Historians are not exactly sure why northwestern Europe developed such a distinctive marriage pattern, and its consequences are easier to trace than its causes: fewer total pregnancies per woman, although not necessarily fewer total children; a greater level. of economic independence for newly- weds, who had often spent long periods as servants or workers in other households saving money and learning skills; more people who never mar- ried at all. The most unusual features of this pattern were the late age of marriage for women - which meant that they entered marriage as adults and took charge of running a household immediately - and the fact that a sig- nificant number of people never married at all. Demographers estimate that between 10 and 15 percent of the northwestern European population never married in the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, and that in some places this figure may have been as high as 25 percent. Both late marriage for women and the large unmarried population were important checks on population growth, though they also worried contemporary religious and political leaders, who continued to view marital households as the basis of society. Particularly in the sixteenth century, religious reformers urged eve- ryone to marry (Catholic reformers excepted those who lived in religious communities, but advocated marriage for everyone else) and political lead- ers passed laws forbidding unmarried people to live on their own.

In many J 1500 wet European c,conomic institutior vided the polygyny' 11ctivity pi lives of ac lihaped m European: nial forcei tverywhe1 was .thee huge catei focial feat

Notiorn idm1s abo trmceptua l1lood" pr

· 1l,out thei l1ut high-s 1uperior b f,~ ''white- 8lood alsc bii '1Fren

ish l ited as b ·od; an,

n areas also fe was regu- :ts of Europe tern Europe, Jewish writ- towever, and ,mdidallow t the spouses

nily patterns ?eandmuch .o lived with ! twenties or ataining sev- 1ehold struc- riage pattern iVaiting until L1al maturity, !mogra phers s were likely tarriage, and ttained more 1.ily. veloped such to trace than t necessarily e for newly- ::ers in other o never mar- e late age of as adults and ct that a sig- estimate that 1lation never

· that in some ate marriage nt checks on religious and ; the basis of rs urged eve- 1 in religious 1olitical lead- wn.

The Family 3 9

The Colonial World ( 1500-1900)

In many parts of the world, the family forms that had developed before 1500 were radically altered by European exploration and colonization. Europeans brought with them not only their own religious, political, and i·conomic structures, but also their own ideas of proper family life and the institutions designed to enforce those ideas. As in Europe, Christianity pro- vided the official structure for family life in much of the colonial world; polygyny was abolished, divorce made more difficult, premarital sexual activity prohibited, church courts established to ha.ridle family issues. The · lives of actual families and the roles of men and women in them were often Nhaped more by two other factors, however. The first was the germs that Europeans brought with them, which often advanced ahead of actual colo- nial forces. In some cases disease wiped out entire indigenous groups, and r:verywhere it disrupted patterns of marriage and family life. The second was the expansion of existing ways of understanding kinship to include huge categories of people, distinguished from one another by skin tone and focial features in what later came to be understood as "race."

Notions of race were rooted in earlier ideas about difference, particularly Ideas about "blood." In many cultures, "blood" was a common way of ronceptualizing family, clan, and social differences, with those of "noble blood" prohibited from marrying commoners and taught to be concerned t1bout their blood lines. This has been studied most extensively in Europe, but high-status people in other parts of the world were also thought to have

' ijuperior blood; in parts of Indonesia, for example, nobles were referred to "9 "white-blooded" and their marriages limited to others with similar blood. lllood also came to be used to describe national boundaries, with those hav-

•: Ing "French blood" distinguished from those having "German blood," })'Hnglish blood," or "Spanish blood." Religious beliefs were also conceptu- •·-•.·_ 11Hzed as blood, with people regarded as having Jewish, Muslim, or Christian 'blood, and after the Reformation Protestant or Catholic blood. The most

}tframatic expression of this was in early modern Spain, where "purity of .:blood" -having no Jewish or Muslim ancestors - became an obsession, but tfrwas also true elsewhere. European fathers choosing a wetnurse for their ?tthJldren took care to make sure she was of the same denomination, lest, if \h(;l was a Catholic, her Protestant blood turn into Protestant milk and thus ifofect the child with heretical ideas. Children born of religiously mixed mar- itlases were often slightly mistrusted, for one never knew which blood would

nately triumph. In some cases, such as Jews or Jewish converts in Spain the Spanish empire, or Catholic Gaelic Irish in Ireland, religious and

~th:nic differences were linked, with religious traditions being viewed as Jigns of barbarity and inferiority.

40 The Family

Describing differences as blood naturalized them, making them appear as if they were created by God in nature, but people often held contradictory ideas about this. Thus the same religious reformers who warned against choosing the wrong wetnurse also worked for con~ersions, and did not think about whether adopting a new religion would also change a woman's milk. Rulers who supported nobles' privileges because of their distinction from commoners regularly ennobled able commoners who had served as generals and officials. French royal officials with authority over colonies spoke about the superiority of "French bloodb' but also advocated assimila- tion, through which indigenous peoples would "become French." Catholic authorities in colonial areas limited entrance to certain convents to "pure- blooded" white or native women, thus excluding mixed-race people, but were more willing to allow a light-skinned mixed-race person than a "full- blooded" native marry a white person. Such contradictions did not gener- ally lessen people's convictions about racial, social, or religious hierarchies, however.

Religion was also initially a marker of difference in colonial areas outside Europe, where the spread of Christianity was used as a justification for con- quest and enslavement. As indigenous peoples converted, however, religion became less useful as a means of differentiation, and skin color became more important. Virginia laws regarding sexual relations, for example, dis- tinguished between "christian" and "negroe" in 1662, but by 1691 between "white" men and women and those who were "negroe, mulatto, or Indian." In its use of "white" Virginia picked up language first used in a 1661 census in the British West Indies, and later this language spread throughout the British colonies. Other color designations came later, and in the eighteenth century, European natural scientists seeking to develop one single system that would explain human differences settled on the concept of "race" to describe these. They first differentiated "races" by continent of origin - Americanus, Europaeus, Asiaticus, and Africanus - and then by somewhat different geographic areas. (The word "Caucasian" was first used by the German anatomist and naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752- 1840) to describe light-skinned people of Europe and western Asia because he thought that the Caucasus mountains on the border between Russia and Georgia were most likely their original home. He thought that they were the first humans, and the most attractive, a judgment he made through studying a large collection of skulls, not by looking at live people.)

The impact of notions about blood and race, and of the spread of germs, can be seen very clearly in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of the New World. Historians estimate that the indigenous population decreased dra- matically - by about 90 percent in the sixteenth century in Central America, for example - at the same time that there was large-scale immigration from Europe and the importation of huge numbers of slaves from Africa. Originally

t:he Spa but the. there w, duced c Spaniar, i:omple:,. About o try by rt. much h:i

The C 1nany a~ i\Ssumed ijpecific 1 them w.c painting: ~uchpar Chamiza chis bool names, c ensta sys d®scenda tainted, I Lncin An lrnd lowt pure. Ne· a similar ~nc's anc

Deterrr tlHY ass< Wffire atte1 fion of re lttr;e ext<

·. 1m:estry J siblings. 1 ip~d in cc

later coloi

. · t'iys ck ··~that or · Jiyskal j1 · (IUit~ easil ",ti'fhe pre tit!tm:minit

n appear as ntradictory 1ed against nd did not a woman's distinction i served as er colonies ,d assimila - " Catholic , to "pure- >eople, but .an a "full- not gener- 1ierarchies,

:as outside m for con- ~r, religion )f became .mple, dis- 1 between ;r Indian." ;61 census ghout the !ighteenth ;le system "race" to f origin - ;omewhat ed by the h (1752- a because ussia and ·were the . studying

of germs, the New :tsed dra- America, :ion from )riginally

The Family 41

Spanish and Portuguese Crowns hoped to keep all these groups apart, the shortage of European and African women made this impossible, and

were sexual relationships across many lines. As sexual relations pro- Ct.foced children that did not fit into the existing categories of Indian and ipaniard, the response of colonial authorities was to create an ever more t:omplex system of categories, called castas, for persons of mixed ancestry. About one-quarter of the population of Latin America was of mixed ances- try by the end of the eighteenth century, and in urban areas, the number was . Jnuch higher.

··• The Catholic Church and Spanish and Portuguese officials defined as many as 40 different castas that were in theory based on place of birth, /ilssumed geographic origin, and status of one's father and mother, with a

\3f)ecific name for each one. The various castas and the relationships among Jhem were clearly delineated in treatises an_d by the eighteenth century in

intings that showed scenes of parents of different castas and the children , nteh parents produced: India + Spaniard = Mestizo; India + Negro = Lobo; _ C:liamiza + Cambuza = Chino, and so on. (The illustration on the cover of Jhis book is one of these casta paintings.) Some of these castas had fanciful tt11mes, or ones derived from animals, such as coyote or Lobo (wolf). The ,1nsta system built on earlier Iberian notions of "purity of blood," in which tfoscendants of Muslim and Jewish converts to Christianity were viewed as tidnted, because their religious allegiance was carried in their blood. In the Latin American colonies, people of indigenous and African ancestry both Jmd lower rank than did Europeans, with blood that was viewed as less Jliire. New laws passed after 1763 in the French Caribbean colonies set out ii similar system, with various categories based on the supposed origin of

· 1me's ancestors. Determining the proper casta in which to place actual people was not as

· cosy as setting these out in theory, however, for the treatises and paintings Were attempts to impose order on a confused and fluid system, not a descrip- lion of reality. In practice, the category in which one was placed was to a h1i'ge extent determined by how one looked, with lighter-skinned mixed-

. Hncestry persons often accorded a higher rank than darker, even if they were r.lblings. Many historians have thus termed the social structure that devel- tlped in colonial Spanish and Portuguese America, including the Caribbean (und later in the French Caribbean), a "pigmentocracy" based largely on tikln color, but also on facial features and hair texture. Contemporaries tllways claimed that color was linked to honor, virtue, and family, however, ~o that one's social status - termed calidad - involved a moral as well as physical judgment, but in reality, as intermarriage increased, people passed quite easily from one casta to another.

The precarious balance of moral, physical, and class judgments used in determining status also frequently shifted over time. Since one's ability to

i

I

I l I I

42 The Family

marry or inherit, enter a convent or the priesthood, or attend university relied on official determination of ancestral purity, individuals not only passed as members of a higher group, but also sought to officially "whiten" their social status in order to obtain privileges in society. In many areas families of property and status bought licenses to be considered descendants of Europeans, regardless of their particular ethnic appearance and ancestry. In frontier areas of Spanish America, or during times of political and social transitions, family members classified their chilqren as "Spanish" or "Castellano (Castilian)" on baptismal records, often in open defiance of the presiding priest's observations about the actual appearance of the child. In addition, individuals might define themselves, or be defined, as belonging to different categories at different points in their life, in what scholars have called a "racial drift" toward whiteness. Thus the hierarchy became increas- ingly confused and arbitrary over generations.

The granting of honorary whiteness and the difficulty of assigning peo- ple to castas points out just how subjective .this entire system was, but it was the essential determinant of family life and gender norms in Latin America. For members of the white European elite, the concern about bloodlines and color created a pattern of intermarriage within the extended family, with older women identifying the distant cousins that were favored as spouses. Following the southern European pattern, these marriages were often between an older man and younger woman, which limited the number of potential spouses for women, and many never married; in the Portuguese colony of Bahia, for example, only 14 percent of the daughters of leading families married in the seventeenth century. Rural native people also married most often within their own group, with the extended family exerting control over choice of spouses just as it did for elite whites. For slaves, many persons of mixed race, and poor people of all types, family and property considerations did not enter into marital considerations, and in most cases people simply did not get married at all, though in many cases they did establish long-term unions regarded by their neighbors and friends as stable.

The number of births out of wedlock in Latin America remained star- tlingly high by comparison with most of Europe (although Spain did have the highest rate of out-of-wedlock births in Europe). During the period from 1640 to 1700 in Central Mexico, one-third of the births to white women were out of wedlock, along with two-thirds of those of mixed-race individu- als. Both Spanish and Portuguese law made distinctions among varieties of illegitimacy, according children of parents who could have been married but were not more inheritance rights than those of parents who could not have married, such as priests' children or those born in adulterous relationships. Thus, despite Christian norms, families in Latin America were extremely diverse: elite men married, but they often had children by slaves or servants

whow might and th, mothe1

This hierarc family Americ Europe Americ forbadt a "negr ally ger preamb marryir blemix1 states a: they we the boo] tion" la .2000. Ir 11ies and which o

Whet!

1111ong n depende1 tace chit,

. British l\ ·. womant

tied indi! while me

.. bccamep 4\tmtury; <

, ienship c @Uy fort tlleularly Jrotestan

'Whiteness ,,uch as b

md university uals not only ally "whiten" 1 many areas I descendants and ancestry. :al and social Spanish" or :fiance of the the child. In belonging to :holars have 1me increas-

:igning peo- was, but it ns in Latin cern about te extended ~re favored '.'iages were imited the 'ied; in the daughters ive people led family -bites. For es, family :ions, and m many

tbors and

ned star- did have fodfrom ! women ndividu- cieties of :ried but 10thave :mships. :tremely ;ervants

The Family 43

o were also part of the]r household; poor free people did not marry, but t live in stable nuclear households; slave unions were often temporary,

. the children stayed with their mothers or became the property of their ther's owners.

?his diversity was also found elsewhere in the.colonial world, with racial rarchies and notions of gender intersecting in complex ways to shape ily life. In some areas, such as the French and British colonies of North erica, Africa, and Asia, marriages or other lo\19,-term unions between

rropeans and indigenous peoples were much rarer than they were in Latin irterica, and in many places legally prohibited;cthe 1691 law in Virginia ' ade marriage between an "English or other white man or woman" and

·i '1negroe, mulatto, or Indian man or woman." Though such laws were usu- , ly gender-neutral, what lawmakers were most worried about was, as the

•amble to the Virginia law states: "negroes, mulattoes, and Indians inter- rrying with English, or other white women" and the resultant "abomina-

e mixture and spurious issue." Such law:s were passed in all of the southern ates and also Pennsylvania and Massachusetts between 1700 and 1750; ey were struck down by the US Supreme Courtin 1967, but remained on

1e books in some states for decades after that. The last of such "miscegena- on" laws was rescinded by Alabama voters in a statewide referendum in- 000. In contrast to a hierarchy of castas, the British North American colo-

_Jes and later the United States developed a dichotomous racial system, in which one drop of "black blood" made one black.

Whether hierarchical or dichotomous, racial systems were not simply a itnatter of ideas or discourse. Unmarried white women who bore mixed-race ~hildren were more harshly treated than those who bore white children, \vhile pregnancy out of wedlock was often ignored or even encouraged . umong nonwhite women, particularly if they were slaves or other types of dtipendents whose children would become workers; men's fathering mixed-

J'HCe children with nonwhite women was tolerated or even expected. In the Uritish North American colonies and later the United States, rape of a white woman by a black man could lead to castration. European women who mar-

ried indigenous men lost their legal status as "European" in many colonies, while men who married indigenous women did not. (A similar disparity became part of the citizenship laws of many countries well into the twentieth

-century; even today in some countries a woman automatically loses her citi- icnship on marrying a foreign national, while a man does not.) It may be easy for us to see the socially constructed nature of certain categories, par- ticularly those that are readily changeable - Does one's blood become Protestant if one converts? Or one's skin tone change if one gets a license of whiteness? - and most scholars who study the human species as a whole, such as biologists and anthropologists, view "race" as completely socially constructed as well. They avoid using it, as it has no scientific meaning.

44 The Family

People in the colonial world, however, regarded racial, national, and to some degree class and religious boundaries as real despite their malleability, and as undergirded by even more fundamental boundaries, such as those between "godly" and "ungodly" or between "natural" and "unnatural."

Until the middle of the nineteenth century; of course, most people of African descent in North America were slaves, and only in New England were marriages between slaves legally recognized. In contrast to Islamic law, laws in the North American colonies declared that the children of slave women would be slaves, reversing the nor)Jlal English practice, in which legal status followed the father. White men's fathering of mixed-race chil- dren was not recognized legally and rarely spoken about publicly in polite society, though men occasionally made private arrangements for their chil- dren by slave women, just as men occasionally did in European households when they fathered children by servants or slaves. More often they did not, though sexual relations between masters and and slaves were so common over generations that by the nineteenth century a large part of the North American slave population was mixed-r~ce.

As in Latin America, the family str'uctures that developed in North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were thus class- and race-related. White families, especially in the north, tended to follow the northwestern European model, with late marriage and a high proportion of people who never married, while black families were more fluid, and often matrifocal. Government policy toward Native Americans, which removed them from their original homelands and ordered them to live on reserva- tions, disrupted family life along with every other aspect of indigenous soci- ety, though extended kin groups retained some voice wherever they could.

The European colonies in Africa and Asia generally developed later than those in the Americas, and in many places European rule did not disrupt existing family patterns to a great extent, and they continued to be shaped by religious ideals and existing traditions. European men engaged in sexual relations with indigenous women, but did not regard these as marriage (though they might be viewed by local cultures as temporary marriages). Once more white women moved to the colonies, long-term interracial rela- tionships became less common as the European communities worried about mixed-race children and what they termed "racial survival."

The growth in mining and commercial agriculture for export in colonial areas during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led many men to leave their families for years at a time in search of wage labor, with women at home in the villages engaged in subsistence agriculture and caring for children and the elderly. Thus, like slavery, wage labor in areas that pro- duced raw materials led to matrifocal family patterns, with closer relation- ships between mothers and children than between spouses. In some areas, such as parts of Africa, migratory wage labor occurred in areas in which

;1

\,

s

;)

l

::>some and as :tween

ple of 1gland iclaw, : slave which e chil- polite r chil- :holds f not, 1.mon ~orth

forth , and v the :mof ::>ften oved ~rva- soci- 1ld. than rupt tped ,mal iage ;es). ·ela- 1out

nial l to nen for 1ro- on- :as, ich

The Family 4 5

itance patterns had been matrilineal or bilateral, but European colonial orities did not understand these systems. They imposed their own pat- .al system when deciding about rights to property, and the fact that men 1 away made European expropriation of land easier, as did conflicts een matrilineal and patrilineal inheritance systems. This often led to a , : contradiction between theory and practice regarding family structure

· •power relationships, with men the official and legal heads of families , women actually responsible for the family's day-to-day well-being. men thus experienced what some scholars have termed a "dual patriar- ," .of colonial officials and the men of their families, and some resisted.

y women in colonial Gusiiland in Kenya, for example, left their rural . esfor the city or defended traditional marriage patterns, with bridewealth

hd,matrilineal inheritance, in local courts.

The Industrial and Post ind us trial World (1800-20 I 0)

.contradiction between theory and practice in terms of the family was und not only in the colonies during the nineteenth century, but in the Ionizing countries - often termed the "metro pole" - and in other European d European-background countries as well. As we will discuss in greater ail in chapter 3, the growth of industrialism brought new forms of work anization that had a significant effect on family life. Young women were

.en the first to be hired as factories opened, for they were viewed as more mpliant, willing to take lower wages, and better able to carry out the

epetitive tasks of tending machines. Factory work removed young women l'Om their parental households, however, and could lead to a lessening of aternal authority once the women had their own wages. Politicians and

social commentators debated the merits of this, anp. suggested that factory owners establish dormitories for their·workers and act as substitute fathers, J<cstricting women's leisure-time activities and socializing habits. They fur- jher recommended that, whenever possible, women work in sex-segregated workshops or at home, so that their (and their family's) honor was not threatened by contact with men who were not their relatives, and that wom- en's wages stay low, so that they did not become too independent. Young women were encouraged to give most or all of their wages to their families,

, 1ind married women encouraged to avoid work outside the household and to make their homes a "haven in the heartless world" of industrialism and business. (This advice was bolstered by the fact that until the mid-nineteenth \;cntury, the wages of married women in European countries belonged legally 10 their husbands.)

I

I

46 The Family

Social reformers and the labor organizations that developed in the nine- teenth century had a different goal for men's wages, but one that was also related to family life; they increasingly advocated a "family wage," that is, wages high enough to allow married male workers to support their families so that their wives could concentrate on domestic tasks. Both middle- and working-class male leaders emphasized the propriety of a distinction between the "private" world of home and family and th~_ "public" world of work and politics. Europeans and Americans often triticized the societies they w:ere colonizing for requiring women to be secluded in the home, but at the same time they created a stronger ideal of domesticity for women at home. This ideal included an intense emphasis on the importance of children and the mother-child bond, another faniily trait often found in the very cultures Europeans regarded as backward and barbaric. (We will look more closely at such ideals in chapter 4.)

The economic realities of industrialism created further ironies. At the same time that European and European-background societies were putting greater empl,.asis on children (some historians have dubbed this the "discov- ery of childhood"), white children were hired in factories and mines in increasing numbers at very young ages, and black children in areas with plantation slavery worked in the fields or household as soon as they were able. Men's wages were rarely enough to support a family, but women's wages were so low in the jobs available to them that the labor of children was needed to allow working-class families to survive.

Children were also a burden on those families, however, requiring food long before they could work, and the demand for contraception grew. The same leaders who described the family as a private haven viewed birth con- trol as a highly public issue, however, passing laws such as the Comstock Laws in the United States that prohibited the distribution of birth control devices, and arresting those, such as Marie Stopes in England and Margaret Sanger in the United States, who disseminated birth control information, especially when this was to working- or lower-class women. Religious authorities also made pronouncements on this issue; Pope Pius IX, for exam- ple, declared in 1869 that the fetus acquires a soul at conception rather than at quickening, which had been the standard opinion before that point. ( Quickening is the point when a mother feels movement, usually about the third or fourth month; the word "quick" is an old word for alive, as in the phrase "the quick and the dead.") Any postconception methods of contra- ception would thus be considered abortion, whereas until this point they had been viewed as contraception, a lesser sin.

Governments intervened in family life in the twentieth century far more than they had earlier, with the most extreme examples in totalitarian regimes. In Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1930s, birth control was prohibited and large families were rewarded among groups judged to be desirable; those

11 I,

i\ ii \V

II(

of

leni1w, fas also ~hat iN 1 iimilicn le- and ~tween

f

' work s they at tlw

borne. n and ltures · ,Iosely

were roen's

(en

food · !The ~on- ~ock ~trol jaret ~on, I tous ~m- ~an

· tra•

~ey i l

~re ies. 6d !

rse

The Family 4 7

undesirable were sterilized or executed. (Sterilization of "undesira- so occurred in the United States from the 1930s to at least the 1970s.)

of these countries mounted propaganda campaigns setting out w of the ideal family, which was one in which fathers ruled and d children obeyed. In the Soviet Union right after World War II, the ent encouraged population growth by limiting access to all contra-

; even after the desire for more people abated, birth control pills .ecame widely available, so that abortion became the standard means,, h control for most women, a practice that has continued in post:'. · .Russia. t governments in the twentieth century sought to limit population 1.rather than encourage it, in response to explosive population growth gan in the late nineteenth century. (World population in 1850 was

tt, 1.2 billion, and in 2008 6. 7 billion.) This growth was largely the It of medical advances such as vaccinations that lowered the death rate \tg children dramatically; in the Arab world, for example, only one out ur children survived to age 50 in 1900, but by 2000 three out of four ved. In India, Puerto Rico, and el~ewhere the government encouraged rtdoned widespread sterilization, while in China families who had more

n one child were penalized by fines and the loss of access to opportuni- ' Though governments which introduced strict population policies tried ninimize gender differences in their effects, the value put on male chil- l was still higher than that on female, which led in some countries to

cctive female infanticide, abortion of female fetuses, and better care and Jrition for infant boys. Government campaigns at the end of the twentieth tury in China tried to end such practices, and observers noted that girls y become more desirable in the future because selective abortion has de them scarcer than boys.

By the early twenty-first century, the one-child policy had been so effective China that officials, worried about the graying of the population, granted :mptions in some areas to rural people, ethnic minorities, and parents () had no siblings. Because of the one-child policy, the latter group is now tc large, but the expenses of a second child and continued official support

. l' the one-child policy mean that few couples choose to have a second. Other than in China, government campaigns to curtail family size in the

.vcntieth century were uneven in their effects. Cultural and political changes ·ere more important. Birth control became culturally acceptable, more reli- hk, and more widely available in Europe, North America, Japan, and

Australia by the 1960s, and families grew smaller. By the 1980s disputes jtlwut reproductive control in these areas revolved largely around moral fo,ues relating to abortion and medically assisted reproductive techniques uch as in-vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, and genetic testing, not

fibout birth control itself. The expansion of government systems of social

48 The Family

support also led to smaller families because people did not have to rely on their children for support in old age.

Coercive government measures provoked strong resistance in many parts of the developing world from both religious and women's organizations, and toward the end of the century aid agencies recognized that a more effec- tive means of decreasing the birth rate was to increase the level of basic and technical education for girls and women, while providing small loans for sewing machines, farm flocks, or even cellular phones so that women could gain economic independence. Both lower birth rates and education for girls were opposed in some parts of the world for much of the twentieth century by traditional and colonial authorities, for they regarded women's proper role as tied to the household. By the the end of the century, however, world- wide fertility had been lowered, from 4.97 births per woman in 1950 to 2.80 in 2000, with sterilization the most common form of birth control.

Fertility rates have continued to decline in the early twenty-first century. In 2008, the worldwide fertility rate was 2.61, with Singapore having the lowest birth rate (1.08) and Mali the,highest (7.4). Most countries in west- ern and eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and many other coun- tries now have fertility rates below replacement levels, although only in a few of these has the population actually begun to decline. (Immigration and population momentum - the fact that a large share of the population is in childbearing years - balance out fertility decline in most countries.) France and some other countries have adopted policies to encourage couples to have more children, such as payments for working parents and better child- care provisions. There are some signs that these are having a small effect, but the increased cost of living, especially in cities where most of the world's population now lives, women's participation in the paid labor force, and the social acceptability of small families mean that low fertility rates will no doubt continue.

Families in many parts of the world not only saw first more and then fewer births in the twentieth century than they had earlier, but they also changed shape and became more varied. In many parts of the world, such as Africa and the Caribbean, male mobility and the lack of good jobs for either women or men meant that many people did not marry until quite late in life or never married at all. The pattern of matrifocal households that had devel- oped during the nineteenth century continued, a pattern that could also be found among many African-American households in the United States. A similar living pattern, though under much different economic circum- stances, developed in post-World War II Japan, tied in some ways to earlier Japanese traditions. Japanese companies favored male workers, expecting them to work very long hours and socialize together after work, sometimes in the company of geishas; women were expected to work only until they had children and then devote themselves to their children. Thus, like many men

l.ilolonial m ad little

tb~ll.1 'COntinu ~ulture and VI

•··• ,Marital pat .· ~lf the worn, :t)r.ban marria h@cause of cu

~i.1h11nge. Incre, \v1th older mt f fhe.y did earli 'c)Jrhoice of sp01 \women of all , :,~ort them ecc ':1tfrly during ti rtml ~ethnic w:

iiltidsions abot .· In Japan, C I,1Mtinued to <world, the tw both western :not marry; in • Without marr .• increased sigr divorce rate i With one out<

c common else\ · marriage endc

The social; world meant t tdationships, remarriage ha households in lesbian, and tr by unmarried of the world, became incre, definitions of forms was (an only becomin!

As we have se bl)en diverse,

:tve to rely on

in many parts >rganizations, a more effec• l of basic and Qall loans fol' women could 1tion for girls ttieth century men's proper 111ever, world. t1 in 1950 to h control.

,-_;' first century, ·e having the tries in west• ' other coun• gh only in a tigration and 1ulation is in ries.) France e couples to better child• small effect, f the world's >rce, and the ates will no

re and then at they also >rid, such as bs for either 'elate in life t had <level- mld also be ited States. nic circum- vs to earlier :, expecting sometimes

til they had many men

The Family 49

f;fH~l)fonial mining or agricultural areas, men in Japan rarely saw their wives ;Jllltl J1ad little role in the upbringing of their children, though almost all of )11~m,continued to marry, for marriage remained a central part of Japanese

1[ture and was expected by Japanese companies. Marital patterns in many parts of Africa remained polygynous, with over.- · jfthe women in western Africa in the 1980s having at least one co-spou~:

Urban• marriages were increasingly likely to be monogamous, however, both {fotntuse of cultural influences such as Christianity and because of economic ' 1tmge. Increased mobility brought a weakening of kinship and lineage ties,

if;h older men having less power over both younger men and women than did earlier. This allowed for greater independence in such matters as

iilmlce of spouse or job, but also left individuals, especially older people and \V<m1en of all ages, more vulnerable because they did not have a lineage to sup- Wrt them economically or emotionally. Such vulnerability emerged particu- . rly during times of drought and other environmental crises, and during civil !HI ethnic wars, all of which contributed to frequent famines and difficult tltiisions about how to allocate scarce resources among family members. ln Japan, China, and the Arab world, more than 95 percent of people mtinued to marry at some point in their lives, but in other parts of the odd, the twentieth century saw a dramatic decline in marriage rates. In ilh western Europe and the United States couples lived together but did r marry; in 1995 there were 10 times as many couples living together thout marrying in Germany than there had been in 1972. Divorce rates (:teased significantly in developed countries - in the United States the vnrce rate in the 2000s was three times what it had been in the 1920s, h'h one out of every two marriages ending in divorce - and were also more Hl1mon elsewhere, such as the Arabic world, where one out of every four htrriage ended in divorce in the 2000s. The social acceptability of remarriage after divorce in many parts of the

rodd meant that many families included the children from several different •lationships, thus returning to an earlier pattern when spousal death and marriage had created such "blended" families. To this variety were added ouseholds in which children were raised by their grandparents, by gay, i,bian, and transsexual couples, by adoptive parents, by single parents, and y unmarried individuals who had no intention of marrying. In some parts

)ii the world, marriage between individuals of different races and religions '.,lwcame increasingly common, challenging centuries-old boundaries and 1i;lcfinitions of who was family and who was kin. This diversity of family forms was (and is) perceived by some observers as a social problem, but it is .foily becoming more extensive in the early twenty-first century.

s we have seen in this chapter, family structure and function have always ken diverse, but, given greater immigration and better communications,

50 The Family

that diversity is more widely and more intimately known and experienced now than• in the past. Family and kinship are not simply matters of genetic connections, but are culturally determined and given meaning by individu- als and groups. It is clear from this chapter that gender differences have been a key part of family life throughout history, which has made them rµore resistant to change than gender differences in other realms of life, suih as the workplace or the voting booth. Thus they often survived, and continue to survive, dramatic economic or political upheavals. In Russia, for exam- ple, women did almost all the domestic work before, during, and after Communism; in much of Africa, kin structures were the primary shapers of marriage during the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial eras. Gender patterns involving the family are not as unchanging as they sometimes seem to be, but we all learned these at a very early age, and they are very difficult to shake.

f URTHEi ~ADING

The family is a topic of great interest in sociology, anthropology, and psy- chology as well as history, so that there are countless studies of all aspects of contemporary family life, many of which pay specific attention to gender issues. An excellent place to begin for historical studies of the family is the two-volume collection, Andre Burguiere et al., eds., A History of the Family, vol. 1: Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds and A History of the Family, vol. 2: The Impact of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). For overviews with a historical focus, see James Casey, The History of the Family (London: Blackwell, 1989); Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); G. Robina Quale, Families in Context: A World History of Population (New York: Greenwood, 1992) and A History of Marriage Systems (New York: Greenwood, 1988); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); Miriam Koktvedgaard Zeitzen, Polygamy: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (New York: Berg, 2008); Robert Jii.tte, Contraception: A History, trans. Vicky Russell (Malden, MA: Polity, 2008). The newest research may always be found in the the Journal of Family History, which began publica- tion in 1976.

There are many collections that bring together issues of family life from a number of different cultures and time periods, including Mary Jo Maynes et al., eds., Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History (New York: Routledge, 1996); special issue of the Journal of Family History, 24:3 (1999) on the history of fatherhood; special issue of Women's History Review, 8:2 (1999) on "Revisiting Motherhood: New

Historiei Josef m (Newark

For an Birth, D Hopkins Hellenis; 1997). B the most Space (C

TheE scholars essay co Laslett, Universi Relatiori 1983); l Patriarc Universi and Lif Medick of Fami Wally S( in Nort1 l-7cunily, 1995); J lEssay ((

· and Jor · Develot

studies \Y/omen.

. Chicagc l~amily,

"Reorde1 Cambri, .Comme Univers

}i,xchan, ·oountri

hua nder

,perienced of genetic individu· ~ave been Lem more :, such as continue or exam- md after 1apers of

Gender 11es seem difficult

nd psy- aspects ·gender y is the "amity, vol. 2: . Press, listory 'utting bridge World )ry of .dford eacon ltural story, tmay Jlica-

oma ynes

The Family 51

ries of the Public and Private"; Richard Wall, Tamara K. Hareven, and Ehmer, eds. Family History Revisited: Comparative Perspectives

ark: University of Delaware Press, 2001). ' analyses of family and gender in ancient Greece, see Nancy Demand, , Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece (Baltimore, MD: Johns 'ns University Press, 1994); Sarah Pomeroy, Families in Classical afid istic Greece: Representations and Realities ( Oxford: Clarendon Press,

,). Beryl Rawson has edited three books about families in ancient Rome, :most recent of which is The Roman Family in Italy: Status, Sentiment, ce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

e European family has received far more attention in English-language larship than those in other parts of the world. These include general

collections and surveys, such as Richard Wall, Jean Robin, and Peter ett, eds., Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge ersity Press, 1983); Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child tions from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

83); Michael Mitterauer and Reinhold -Sieder, The European Family: triarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present (Chicago: 1iversity of Chicago Press, 1983); Richard M. Smith, ed., Land, Kinship, d Life-Cycle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Hans :dick and David Sabean, eds., Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study Family and Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ·1984);

ally Seccombe, A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism Northwestern Europe (London: Verso, 1992); David Herlihy, Women, mily and Society in Medieval Europe (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 95); Jack Goody, The European Family: An Historico-Anthropological ay (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher,

1d Jon Mathieu, eds., Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term evelopment (1300-1900) (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007). Important udies that focus on one country include Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, omen, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of

'iicago Press, 1985); Sherrin Marshall, The Dutch Gentry, 1500-1650: amity, Faith and Fortune (New York: Greenwood, 1987); Joel Harrington, 'eordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany ( Cambridge: :ambridge University Press, 1995); Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort:

Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Martha C. Howell, The Marriage .l!;xchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in the Cities of the Low Countries, 1300-1500 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University f•ress, 2000); Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster, eds., The Family in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Two of

.-J

j

I I ! I ~ ~ I

I

5 2 The Family

the few studies that focus on eastern Europe are Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989) and Christine Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). ,))

Two solid introductions to changing ideas about race are Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Brian Niro, Race (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Studies that look at the ways in which race was con- structed in European colonies include Magnus Marner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995); Elise Lemire, "Miscegenation": Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth- Century North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Marfa Elena Martfnez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico· (St~nford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

Studies of families in Latin America and the Caribbean include Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574-1821 (Stanford, CA: Stanford U~iversity Press, 1988); Asuncion Lavrin, ed., Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Christine Barrow, Family in the Caribbean: Themes and Perspectives (New York: Markus Weiner, 2000); Ondina E. Gonzalez and Bianca Premo, eds., Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007).

For marriage and family life in China, see Kay Ann Johnson, Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Lloyd Eastman, Family, Fields, and Ancestors: Constancy and Change in China's Social and Economic History, 1550-1949 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993 ). For other parts of Asia and the Pacific, see Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre, Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Gloria Goodwin Raheja and Ann Grodzins Gold, Listen to the Heron's Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994 ); Laurel Kendall, Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity (Berkeley:

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The Family 5 3

University of California Press, 1996); Harald Fuess, Divorce in Japan: )' 11amily, Gender, and the State, 1600-2000 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Jh:ess, 2004). · For Africa, see Sarah Le Vine, Mothers and Wives: Gusii Women of East \Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Caroline Bledsoe, •· \'((omen and Marriage in Kpelle Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univers'ity )itess, 1980); Kristin Mann, Marrying Well: Marriage, Status and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos ( Cambridge: Cambridge lJniversity Press, 1995); Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: {1'ender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed Books, 1987); Barbara M .. Cooper, Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900-1989 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997); Jean Davison, fhmder, Lineage, and Ethnicity in Southern Africa (Boulder, CO: Westview . jiress, 1997); Lisa Cliggett, Grains from Grass: Aging, Gender, and Famine ·ill Rural Africa (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Brett Lindsay Shadle, "Girl Cases": Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890-1970 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemal).n, 2006).

For the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire, see Elizabeth Warneck ]fornea, ed., Women and the Family in the Middle East: New Voices of Cbange (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); Alan Duben and Cem J\char, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family, and Fertility, 1880-1940 '{Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Margaret Meriwether, The !<in Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo (Austiri: University of Texas Press, 1999); Margaret Meriwether and Judith Tucker, eds., A Social History of Women and the Family in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999); Beshara Doumani, ed., Family History in the Middle /!:i1St: Household, Property, and Gender (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Iris Agmon, Family and Court: Legal Culture and Modernity in Late Ottoman Palestine (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006).

The history of the family in the United States has been very well studied, And there is an extensive bibliography in Joseph M. Hawes and Elizabeth I. Nybakken, eds., American Families: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook (New York: Greenwood, 1991). Just a few of the many recent works include Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988); C,1role Shammas, A History of Household Government in America · (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Joseph M. Hawes and Jilizabeth I. Nybakken, eds., Family and Society in American History ;(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

For studies that focus on twentieth and twenty-first century issues around the world, see Rae Lesser Blumberg, ed., Gender, Family and Economy: The 'li'i/J/e Overlap (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991); Esther Chow and Catherine

,J

54 The Family

Berheide, Women, the Family and Policy: A Global Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Jennifer Cole and Deborah Lynn Durham, eds., Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). Daniet Bertaux and Paul Thompson, Between Generations: Family-N1.odels, Myths, and Memories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) and John R. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual and the Quest for Family Values (New York: Basic Books, 1996) make excellent use of inter- views and oral history along with other sources to explore contemporary notions (often mythological) about family history. Studies that specifically examine reprbduction and contraception in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries include Janet Smith, Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1991); Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, eds., Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Gita Sen, Adrienne Germain, and Lincoln Chan, eds., Population Policies Reconsidered: Health, Empowerment and Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Gabe T. Wang, China's Population: Problems, Thoughts and Policies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Matthew James Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population ( Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008).

There is a much longer list of suggested readings, along .vith links to orig- inal sources, on the website associated with this book: www.wiley.com/go/ wiesnerhanks.

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