Historiography

In 1987 Louise A. Tilly asked whether the relationship between women’s history and family history was characterised by ‘fruitful collaboration or missed connection?’9 Her quest was informed by a sense that these two vibrant fields of historical research had more to say to each other than had hitherto been the case for a combination of methodological and ideological reasons. Family history, until quite recently, tended to be dominated by demographic and structural approaches. The study of population movement and change is of course central to understandings of family forms and relationships, but until the 1970s debates about fertility changes, for instance, were carried out with little or no reference to gendered power relationships. As Alison Mackinnon has argued, demographers see fertility as ‘a characteristic of populations rather than persons’.10 Structural approaches, dominated by the spectre of late nineteenth-century ethnologist Frederic Le Play, who almost single-handedly invented a language and a series of ideal family models (for example, the stem family, the complex household, the nuclear household), have similarly downplayed the role of women and of men as social actors informed by ideas about gender roles. The families alluded to by the historical demographers and the stucturalists are disembodied and impersonal. Women and their roles as childbearers and nurturers are implicit rather than explicit in these analyses and the tendency to treat the family as a single social and economic unit in its relationship to the rest of society resulted in the silencing of ‘internal’ relationships within the family as well as the disregarding of non-kin relations outwith this institution.

Arising from the structural and demographic approach to family was the theory that modernisation fundamentally altered family structures and relationships, notably that the family became more nuclear in character as opposed to kinship oriented and more centred upon affective relations as opposed to instrumental or economic relationships. The debate between those who argued for changes of this kind and those who emphasised continuity did address issues of gender, often in a controversial way. The proposition of Shorter and Stone that, before the rise of the nuclear affective family, parental and more especially maternal relations with children were characterised by instrumentalism and lack of affection or sentiment certainly placed women’s role in the family in the spotlight, but the debate in general perpetuated the tendency to downplay or ignore what family meant to those who experienced it.11 And in any case, the focus on parent-child relations was regarded by these historians as a means of advancing a more general position rather than of gaining deeper insight into the material realities of familial relations.

Women’s historians, on the other hand, traditionally had little time for the family. First-wave feminists of the late nineteenth century and second-wave feminists of the 1970s both regarded the public sphere - education, paid work and citizenship - as the key to women’s emancipation. Nineteenth-century feminists focused their energies on reforming women’s subordinate legal position in the family in respect of property and child-custody rights. By the late twentieth century, marriage was regarded by many second-wave feminists as the keystone of women’s oppression. The family as a legal and an ideological construct was regarded by historians of women as a hindrance to women’s claims to participation in the economy and the polity. And the discursive construction of woman since the Enlightenment as wife and mother, domestic angel and homemaker has long been considered a constraint upon women’s opportunities beyond the family and the home. The resilience of the ideology of separate spheres, of the notion of a gendered public and private, within historical writing on gender has tended to perpetuate the subordination of family to lesser importance in the disciplinary hierarchy. Notwithstanding vigorous debates amongst historians of women and gender about the value and the persistence and chronology of separate spheres as a discursive power or organising principle in social, cultural, economic and political life, the continued association of the private sphere with the domestic and the personal presents challenges for the historian of women if he or she wishes to privilege this sphere as a site of female consciousness and power.

Since the 1980s, women’s historians have embraced the family in a more positive fashion, as a legitimate site of women’s experience and identity. Arising from a recognition that most women’s lives were structured by the ideology and the material reality of family - its demands, its structures and its relationships - historians of the labouring classes placed family centre stage and repositioned it as a complement to work. The family in these studies is imagined as a strategic unit, incorporating variable roles and relationships interacting with the outside world.12 The family was contingent upon its position within the wider economy, and relations within the family unit as well as beyond it were influenced by ideas about appropriate gender roles, by cultural assumptions and by material circumstances. In this literature then, the family is conceived as neither necessarily oppressive nor emancipatory for women, but rather a social unit that provides the context for women’s reproductive and productive experiences. Thus, for example, in the proto-industrial economy in France, the declining income to be gained from home-based handloom-weaving undertaken by men forced women into waged work to ensure the family’s survival. The family economy, in these circumstances, was adaptable to the needs of the market.13 In the industrial economy, however, familial ideology, which categorised the husband as breadwinner and wife as homemaker, impacted upon women’s experiences in the workplace as they were treated as secondary or subsidiary workers, a development discussed in more detail by Deborah Simonton in Chapter 5.

Davidoff and Hall’s Family Fortunes, a study of the English middle classes, placed the family at the heart of middle-class life and identity formation in the crucial period 1780-1850. They regarded the family as a dynamic institution within which women and men formed social bonds, exhibited gendered roles and found ways of meeting their needs. The family in this analysis does not sit apart from business; it is not synonymous with the private or the personal; rather it is implicated in the middle-class economy and the idea of family as a flexible and adaptive kinship system ‘framed middle-class provincial life’.14 The work of Ellen Ross on women in poor working-class London families, and of Bonnie Smith on the women of the French industrial bourgeoisie, epitomises this approach.15 For these historians, the family is the very substance and texture of women’s daily lives, more so than paid work. The women in question - whether poor and struggling in London’s East End, or wealthy and privileged in northern France - lived lives shaped by the material demands and the discursive construction of family. Family here incorporates a multitude of activities and experiences: marriage, childbirth, death, ritual, religion, relationships and work which, in their doing, facilitated a sense of female collective identity or at least a sense of where their common interests lay. Ultimately, some have argued that woman’s familial relationships and experiences shaped her feminist consciousness in the nineteenth century, resulting in middle-class philanthropic engagement and working-class protest informed by the material conditions of everyday life.16

Historians of family and of women, particularly in Britain, have been less interested in the nitty-gritty day-to-day monotony of family life with which many women were accustomed. Ethnography has always been more integrated into the historical discipline outside the British Isles and, moreover, the shift to theories of gender have sidelined aspects of the past which do not appear conducive to theoretical approaches. For instance, the work of servicing the family has mostly been discussed within the context of domestic service, yet in most families this work was done by whoever was not undertaking paid work, that is, women, children and the elderly. The focus on the everyday by European historians has reoriented attention on the family as the fulcrum of private experience and as a place where individuals find meaning and assume an identity. Sarti, in her study of family and material culture in early modern Europe, demonstrates how descriptions of ‘banal objects and commonplace events’ may ‘penetrate the experience of men and women of the past’.17 French historian Martine Segalen has taken this further, recognising the possibilities of material culture for penetrating family relationships. For instance, Segalen points to the significance of the introduction of communal water fountains and washhouses in southern France, which resulted in changes in patterns of female sociability as women used to carrying out their laundry alone now ‘found a time and a place to express their identity and sometimes their solidarity’.18 Studies of everyday family practices in particular religious and ethnic cultures also highlight how delineated gender roles have been essential to the practice of family in the past. Within migrant Jewish communities, for instance, the task of providing the kosher eve of Sabbath meal with all its attendant ritual was invariably female.

Doing the laundry, cooking, eating and cleaning up, as well as decorating one’s home, visiting kin and so on, are all part of ‘doing family’ as much as property inheritance, marriage, procreation and choice of living arrangements. And family life was part of everyday life, argues Gillis. Referring to European Protestants, he argues that their family life was ‘transparent, unreflexive, unmediated by any representations of itself, lived on a day-to-day basis, without reference to custom or tradition’.19 By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, family had become something that one consciously created. In Gillis’s words, ‘family had put itself on display’.20 This emphasis on family practices rather than social structure is a fruitful way forwards for both historians of family and of women and gender.21 It is an approach that potentially transcends the divisive separate-spheres dichotomy, thus positioning the family as an institution and an idea that informs all cultural experience, and it might help us to stretch ourselves across longer timespans. Family history and women’s history are primarily concerned with relationships in the past - between husbands and wives, parents and children, kin and non-kin, family and community - expressed as a series of relational practices which may include care of and responsibility for others and the protection and control of family members within a complex web of kin and non-kin relations.22 Such an approach allows one to move beyond the supposedly ‘natural’ association of woman with family in her role as mother, wife, care-giver, homemaker, and so on (an approach that tended to hide or silence women’s role) and forces a rethinking of women’s familial relationships and responsibilities over the life course and over historical time and space.

For women’s historians then, the family occupies an ambiguous place in our construction of the past. For a long time, historians of women saw the family and those concepts so intimately associated with it - the home, the household, the private sphere, moral discipline - as a source of historical oppression, a place where women were confined both physically and ideologically. But more recent studies of family relationships have situated family and women’s roles within it in a wider spatial and theoretical context. The family is no longer conceptualised in a rigid structural or ideological way, but rather historians are beginning to see how a focus on the practices of family might offer a way of thinking about women in the past that allows for women’s own representation of their familial roles and identity.