Conclusions

Across these three centuries the family has been a constant in women’s lives, providing a material and a discursive framework for women’s experiences. But it should be clear from the preceding discussion that the meaning and the material reality of family changed markedly over the period indicating that far from constituting something natural and thus unchanging, the family is an historically contingent institution and concept. Accordingly then, there is nothing natural about women’s relationship with the family in the past. Women’s role within the family is determined by specific economic and cultural conditions. The ‘common-sense’ notion of the family is now beginning to disappear as historians utilise the findings of demographers, scholars of kinship and of gender, which demonstrate the variety of family forms in past times as well as the mutability of categories and definitions. More recently, the shift towards understanding the family in terms of rituals and everyday practices instead of structures has opened up a new way of thinking about the family and women’s place within it.

This chapter has imposed some rather artificial frameworks on the history of the family in order to simplify and hopefully clarify our understanding of the relationship between women and family life. One of the aims of this chapter was to break the link between the family, the private sphere and women’s role by demonstrating how the family has always been part of the social, embedded in the local economy and its cultural patterns. The early modern flexible family with its permeable walls and its sense of inclusivity appears to have offered women a range of roles; women were not uniquely associated with the family merely on account of their role in reproduction and their tendency to attend to the domestic sphere. While it is undoubtedly the case that the family as an economic unit offered women the greatest security, the web of familial relationships within and between households may have acted as a conduit for women to engage legitimately in a range of productive and affective relationships.

A second objective of this overview was to address the problem constituted by the nineteenth-century middle-class family model. Historians of the modern period have been guilty in the past of assigning a normative function to the private, domestic, conjugal family, in part because it is this model that endured from the early nineteenth century until the 1960s and that still has considerable purchase today at the start of the twenty-first century. The ubiquity of this image of family has constrained the ways in

Which historians of women have interpreted women’s role in this period. The dominant belief that the family was the crucible of woman’s natural role, a space where she might reveal and revel in her femininity, informed interpretations of the family that regarded it as a constraint on her opportunities. And of course there is a deal of evidence to support this view. However, one should be beware of transposing an ideal model onto material reality, and it is clear that nineteenth-century families - even amongst the middle classes - were a good deal more permeable than the ideal would suggest. The self-conscious family could only be such if it was on display.

The domestic conjugal family may have been long lived but, viewed over the longue duree, it appears transient and temporary. The late twentieth-century multiplication of family forms has forced a re-evaluation of the apparently normative conjugal unit although it has been pointed out that the range of differently organised families in evidence today is still defined as ‘other’ in relation to the conjugal ‘norm’, and continued debates about women’s familial roles indicate that women are still primarily identified by their relation to the family, notwithstanding their productive roles. It seems there will be no return to the early modern household model, such is the cultural power of the nuclear family in modern times.

The family has always meant different things and performed different functions for women at different stages of their lives. It has provided protection and nurture, economic security and emotional support and sometimes constraints and abuse. For many women though, family has provided a space within which they could perform roles and take on responsibilities valued by women themselves.