Introduction

How do we imagine the family in the past? And how do we think about women’s relationship with this primary social institution? Women (and children) are so frequently associated with the family - contained within it, isolated without it, defined by it - that it has become common to talk about family in terms of the functions and roles closely associated with femininity. Hence, the family of the historical imagination is a domestic, nurturing and intimate unit, governed by women’s concerns: reproduction, nurture, socialisation and the provision of sustenance. The existence of a family in the past is dependent upon the presence and work of women; a family without an adult female was not deemed worthy of the name. Certainly, by the nineteenth century, family had become intimately associated with the idea of ‘home’ and a woman was an essential component of home-making so that the sentiment ‘A man can no more make a home than a drone can make a hive’ was widely held.2

And yet, despite the intimate association of women’s roles and functions with family, it is often implicit in discussions of women’s experience rather than made explicit: ‘Family is everywhere and family is nowhere to be seen’.3 Family - as a concrete collection of individuals as well as a symbol - underpins so much of personal experience in the past from childhood to old age, but its meaning is rarely explored. The family is a set of social relationships connected by blood, property, dependency and intimacy. It is a material reality as well as an ideology and a cultural practice. As a means of basic social organisation it frames domestic and work lives, and as a symbol it influences social policy. This chapter will define family as a cultural practice, a series of interconnected rituals based upon co-residence or kin relations. It will examine how women experienced the relationships and functions implicit in family and how constructions of family - as a conduit for property inheritance for example, or as a guarantor of social stability - came to impact upon women’s choices and opportunities in western Europe from 1700. This reimagining of the family as a set of relationships and rituals,

Which are determined by prevailing economic conditions and cultural and religious beliefs, may offer a more positive interpretation of women’s association with family than has hitherto been considered.

The concept of family is so ubiquitous in modern life and in modern historiography that it is hard to imagine a time when it was not. And yet, as Sarti explains, ‘family’ only began to be used in western Europe to refer to a kin group living under the same roof as late as the eighteenth century. Before then, the term ‘family’ did not necessarily identify blood or kin relationships but relationships of dependency on the head of the household. By the eighteenth century, it seems that the French concept famille, referring to a married couple and their children, began to be used elsewhere, but it was not until the nineteenth century that family came to denote ‘a hierarchically structured domestic community, made up of a father, a mother, children and servants [representing] a fundamental building block in society’.4 Indeed, for comparative purposes the term ‘household’ is more useful as a catch-all concept that allows one to sidestep the difficulties embedded in different meanings of family over time and space. It is the rather narrow and time-specific concept of the family, analogous with the co-resident nuclear family, with which historians of the modern period in Europe are most comfortable, perhaps because it equates most closely to the concept and reality of family with which we are most familiar (although not necessarily as part of our personal experience). It is this model of family that informs the massive popularity of genealogy research in modern society, and yet we know from our own family histories that the family we live by is so rarely the family we live with. That is to say, the myths of family that inform our understandings of what family should be and how it should be experienced are often unhinged from the material reality of family life.5 As Gillis states in his analysis of the relationship between family myth and family reality, the families we live with are ‘often fragmented and impermanent [and] are much less reliable than the imagined families we live by’.6 It is a sentiment echoed in a recent feminist study of the family in which the authors acknowledge that present debates about the family exhibit a yearning for a ‘golden age of stable, loving and supportive families’ which privileges the nuclear family, and yet this very narrative of family in the past ‘denies the complexities of familial relationships’.7

An example from the author’s own family history serves this point well. My great great grandfather Samuel Jay was born in rural north Essex in 1797 into a family of agricultural labourers. In 1830, Samuel married his first wife Sarah Sallows. The couple had five children together before she died in 1838. In 1839 he married for a second time to Sarah Butcher, daughter of a labourer in the same village as Samuel. Sarah appears to have died upon or after the birth of a son. In 1848 a third marriage to Amelia Howe was also short-lived for, in 1851, Samuel Jay was living with Elizabeth Butcher (sister of his second wife Sarah) listed variously as his lover and his lodger in the census, with whom he stayed for at least thirty years. The couple may have had an illegitimate daughter together, Ellen, who is recorded in the census as Samuel’s daughter-in-law. Samuel Jay had at least seven children with his wives and partners. Each time a wife died he remarried to create a new family grafted onto the old, until the death of Amelia after which he seems to have rejected marriage while still forming a household with Elizabeth and the younger children from his previous marriages.8 Samuel’s family, which was continuously resident in the same village (although at different addresses) for more than eighty years, was both enduring and discontinuous. At some points it might have been described as nuclear and at other times extended. This story tells us a lot about the nature of the rural labouring family, but from the scant information available to construct this complex series of family forms we know little of the women in Samuel’s life apart from the fact that they had children and died young. Indeed, they are defined solely as wives and mothers.

Women’s relationship to the family is so often framed by their relationships to others: fathers, husbands, children. This approach does highlight important ways in which women’s lives are defined in some way by their familial ties but also limits our understanding of women’s identities and experiences over the life course. The history of the family is not the same as the history of women. As the Jay family story illustrates, families in the past no less than today were continually changing shape. The relationships within the co-residential group and beyond to kin outside the residential core were in constant flux. For women at all times and in all places this meant frequent adaptation to different sets of economic and cultural circumstances.