The “Traditional Family”: Reflections on Social History

James Davison Hunter 1987 Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation
This chapter co-authored with Helen V. L. Stehlin.

One of the most important functions of the family in the twentieth century is the satisfaction of the emotional needs of its members.³⁵ “Feelings” play a prominent role at all points of the family life cycle: in uniting couples, in rearing children, in binding families together. Yet the emotional factor has not always figured so prominently. It was nearly foreign to family dynamics in centuries past. In all social strata from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century (though by this point, only in the lower classes) in a culture that was overtly “Christian” in name if not in practice, family life was conducted with little if any emotionalism and sentimentality. The most important function of the family was survival from day to day. Connected, of course, was the concern with transmitting property and lineage from one generation to the next. In this light, success of the family could be defined only in terms of having adequate food, shelter, and protection and not in terms of the degree to which husbands and wives and parents and children were “relating” well. Above all, family was defined as a common economic enterprise (Shorter 1975; Aries 1962).

From day to day, life was lived in public with the home being little more than an open dwelling shared by servants, friends, clients, guests, and the like. Privacy was virtually nonexistent. Accordingly, marriages were open to public scrutiny. Typically arranged by parents, they tended to lack much romantic affection, especially among the peasants, who were preoccupied with the austere demands of everyday life.

A strong form of patriarchal rule also typified the preindustrial family type, requiring total submission from children and wife. Children in the Middle Ages viewed their father with such fear and respect and were taught to behave with such formality and awe that the familiarity often experienced in the twentieth century would have been unimaginable (Queen and Habenstein 1967, 238; Aries 1962, pt. 3). Accordingly roles and tasks for family members were sharply distinguished.

Childhood was not considered a distinct and separate period of life. Adolescents of the Middle Ages were viewed as little adults. As Philippe Aries noted, “as soon as the child could live without the constant solicitude of his mother, his nanny, or his cradle-rocker, he belonged to adult society” (1962, 128). No distinction was made between the young and old in work or in play, aptly symbolized by the fact that children and adults wore similar dress. Infants were distinct from adults, of course, yet they were typically regarded with a measure of indifference. This was so for three reasons. In part it was due to the fact that mothers were forced by material circumstances and community attitudes to subordinate infant welfare to the economic demands of daily existence. There was simply very little time for playful tenderness. More importantly, it was a function of a high rate of infant mortality. For rich as for poor a large proportion of infants (estimates of one in three) died in the first three years of life. Still more (approximately one in two) did not live to maturity (Banks 1981, chap. 9). It simply was too much to expect parents to allow maternal and paternal affections to grow and to invest energy in the child’s future given the likelihood that the child would not live to see that future. Still a third reason was that infants, for all practical purposes, did not really warrant human status. Though perhaps overstating his point, social historian Edward Shorter speaks to this: “Barely possessing souls of their own, they came at the will of God, departed at His behest, and in their brief mortal sojourn deserved little adult sympathy or compassion” (1977, 169). Thus, it was not uncommon for children who died in infancy to be buried in the garden or next to the house in the same way that people of later centuries buried domestic dogs or cats (Aries 1962, 39). Naturally mothers rarely thought to concern themselves with the development and happiness of their young children.

Life was a struggle for all family members. Children were brutalized as much by the daily routines of life as by outbursts of parental rage— beatings, sexual abuse, and abandonment were not at all uncommon. This was so even as late as the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for the popular classes. In rural France, for example, there was virtually a universal practice of leaving infants alone for long periods of time “stewing in their own excrement,” sometimes “attacked and eaten by the barnyard hogs” (Shorter 1977, 170-71). It appears that maternal indifference was not only characteristic of the rural families where women worked in the fields; the lower-class workers in the early industrial period treated their young children in a similar manner. Yet economic necessity by itself did not account for this maternal indifference, for mothers who stayed with their children during the day tended to display a similar attitude. Children who survived infancy during this period did not remain long with their parents. It was common practice among privileged and unprivileged alike to have their children apprenticed at an early age (Queen and Habenstein 1967, 239). All in all, family life was tremendously austere, providing little space for emotional expression.

Changes did take place, however, though they were not universal in scope. Initially they found expression in the aristocratic classes of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. There was a change in the way the nobility and upper-class families viewed their children. Infants and children came to be distinguished from adults and came to assume a greater moral worth. As Aries comments, “a new concept of childhood had appeared, in which the child, on account of his sweetness, simplicity and drollery, became a source of amusement and relaxation for the adult” (1962, 129). This attitude (expressed by mothers as well as nannies) was a significant departure from that of the medieval family. As such it did not go unchallenged. Wrote Montaigne in the seventeenth century: “I cannot abide that passion for caressing new-born children, which have neither mental activities nor recognizable bodily shape by which to make themselves lovable, and I have never willingly suffered them to be fed in my presence” (quoted in Aries 1962, 130). While maternal indifference was giving way to affection and sentimentality in the upper classes, by the end of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, “coddling” was beginning to be practiced in the lower classes as well.

Accompanying the sentimentalization of childhood and adolescence was the view that children were not just “charming toys” but “fragile creatures of God who needed to be both safeguarded and reformed.” Other moralists of the period were then concerned with the behavior of the child and ways to understand and correct it. (Thus by the seventeenth century, texts on the subject of child psychology emerged.) This had implications for the education of children. Previously a matter of apprenticeship, education increasingly became institutionalized in the school. Aside from a desire on the part of pedagogues to isolate children from the “negative influences of the adult world,” the schools served the parents’ relatively new interest in “watch [ing] more closely over their children, stay [ing] nearer to them, and avoid [ing] abandoning them even temporarily to the care of another family” (Aries 1962, 369). Thus the family as well as the school isolated the child from adult society.

Clearly a new significance was being placed on the upper-class child. Unlike his medieval predecessor, he became increasingly regarded as an indispensable element of everyday life, and his parents worried about his education, his career, his future. The seventeenth-century child of privilege, though still not the center of the family, had gained a significance not previously known.

Another important trend just beginning to take hold among the upper classes of Europe had to do with household space. There was a direct correlation between privacy and social position. Rooms were becoming larger and more partitioned, allowing men and women of privilege to lead sexual and emotional lives that would not be monitored by outsiders. But once again, the emergence of “privacy” was class-based. The lower classes in Europe during this same time period continued to conduct family life very much in public (Aries 1962,405; Shorter 1977, 39-40).

In America at this time, there was no real equivalent to the landed aristocracy in Europe. American culture was, in fact, fairly well insulated from many of the cultural changes taking place across the Atlantic. The predominant cultural form taking shape in the new colonies was that of Puritan New England, which evinced its own orientation toward family life.

Like middle-class, lower-class, and peasant families in Europe, the Puritan family experienced little privacy in day-to-day living. Rooms in households served multiple purposes and were not set aside for specific functions. Families also continued to be open to the obtrusive world of servants, friends, clients, boarders, and other people’s children. The presence of strangers was a normal part of family life. In spite of this public and seemingly cacophonous quality of family life, a clear structure of authority prevailed. Husbands were superior to their wives, and parents were superior to their children. The place of women in this arrangement was distinct. Women, it was maintained, were made “ultimately for God, but immediately for man” (Morgan 1966, 20). In seventeenth-century New England it was unquestionably held that a woman’s place was in the home. She was expected to “keep at home, educate the children, and keep and improve what is got by the industry of the man.”³⁶ Her place was to “guid[e] the house” and not “guid[e] the husband.” As Edmund Morgan notes: “The proper conduct of a wife was submission to her husband’s instructions and commands. He was her superior and she owed him an obedience founded on reverence. He stood before her in the place of God; he exercised the authority of God over her and he furnished her with the fruits of the earth that God had provided” (1966, 44–45).

In terms of a basis for family order, sentiment and affection were still fairly sparse features of Puritan life, though more evident than in the past. The Puritans believed that God commanded husbands and wives to be kind and loving toward each other. Yet this spousal love was not without limits, for to value anything too greatly was to upset the order of creation and descend to idolatry. Accordingly, Puritan marriage typically resulted neither from falling in love nor from parental arrangement (though parental influence was formidable) but from a rational decision to enter a married state. This was followed by the calculated choice of a suitable spouse.

Sentimentality was also a sparse feature of Puritan childrearing practices. Puritan children were often raised within other families even when there was no educational purpose behind it. It was believed that by bringing children up in other people’s homes, children would learn better manners. However, while their own children were in their care, Puritan parents saw discipline and instruction as among their chief responsibilities. Underlying this orientation was the Calvinistic conviction that children were vessels of sin. Therefore, they required continual correction and chastisement (including sound beatings) in order to make them human beings— indeed, in order to save their souls. As Cotton Mather quipped, “ Better whipt, than Damn’d.” Indeed, these themes were so prominent that some modern-day commentators have described Puritan family government as “ authoritarian” and “rigorously repressive” (Greven 1977, 32). Puritan parents held complete control and power within the family, and thus, the subjugation “o f the child’s will by the exertion of systematic efforts on the part of the parents was justified by the conviction that parental power and authority were beyond question within the confines of the household” (Greven 1977, 99). Children were expected to look toward God and their parents with love and fear; obedience and submission were the only acceptable responses for children.

The many different economic and political changes associated with the emergence of industrial capitalism (such as urbanization, the separation of work from the home [of public from private], and the development of surplus wealth for individuals and nations) are complex to be sure. It is clear that they had profound effects on family life—in particular, in accelerating and intensifying themes of privacy, individual autonomy, and even sentimentality. The tendencies in family life emerging among the upper classes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had begun to filter downward in the social structure in the eighteenth century such that by the nineteenth century, they had become diffused and firmly institutionalized in what is known as the bourgeois (middle and upper middle class, industrial) family (Aries 1962, 404; Lasch 1977, 4). This was true both in Europe and in America.

For one, the bourgeois family became separated in many ways from the larger community in which it was embedded. This meant, on the one hand, that the community exercised less control over courtship, marriage, and family relations and had fewer sanctioning capabilities in the face of the violation of social and familial norms. Accordingly, the family became increasingly isolated from the bustle of public activity, segregated from strangers, outsiders, and basically all nonfamily members. This privatization process had important consequences for the inner dynamics of family life as well. This period and this social stratum witnessed an emotional revolution (after a fashion). For example, romantic love and intimacy played an increasing (and increasingly legitimate) role in the courtship process and in the sustenance of marriage. No longer instrumental and largely affectionless as in previous centuries, husbands and wives came to value the relationship for the companionship it provided. Yet romantic love was not equalitarian either. It was interpreted in terms of the authority structure of the family. For men, it therefore meant protectiveness; for women, it meant service and chaste submission.

Children came to hold a central place and therefore a new status in the family. As fewer youths were needed to help with agricultural work, factory work, or infant care, middle-class children gradually became viewed not as objects of utility but as beings of sentimental worth (Hareven 1977, 67). A child soon became irreplaceable; his death an irreparable loss. Never before had children been treated with such considerateness and solicitude. Emerging, then, was a new conviction that childhood was a time of innocence and purity, a period of life not yet contaminated by the vulgarities of the modern industrialized world. Even so, Calvinistic notions continued to inspire parents to drive their children on to moral excellence. The nurturing of children became a parental and societal priority. The ethic of improvement predominated. Parents were to do the best they could for their children (with a proper education and good job prospects for their sons and careful grooming of daughters as desirable candidates for marriage), and children were then to improve upon their parents in terms of status and material comfort. The net effect of these cultural changes was a prolongation of the period considered proper to childhood and adolescence.

Perhaps the single most important cultural development surrounding the family had to do with its legitimating ideology, its place in society. In the face of a competitive world of commerce and industry and the loneliness and alienating circumstances of the modern city, the family and the home came to be viewed as a place of peace, a refuge, and a “haven in a heartless world” (Jeffrey 1972; Laslett 1973; Lasch 1977). Here the tension and stress of work would be abolished, the vulgarity of the public realm would be excluded, and true standards of taste would be preserved. As one Victorian commentator put it, “when the father returns home [from work] . . . it ought to be a scene of order, harmony and comfort.”³⁷ The utopian qualities of the notion of family and home as Edenic retreat cannot be overemphasized. The perfection of society was attainable largely through the perfection of the home. This in large part was the impulse behind the domestic science movement and other reform movements of the late nineteenth century (Calder 1977; Pivar 1973).

Naturally, husbands and wives continued to have distinct roles and operate in distinct spheres of authority. The man’s first duty continued to be to provide a good living for his wife and children. The husband’s role in this new model altered little from his role in the past. By virtue of having to leave home in order to work, he was necessarily removed from the routines of everyday life. Thus, his authority became more abstract and symbolic. Still, his influence in the affairs of the family remained virtually uncontestable. Family hierarchy remained resolutely patriarchal though not always or necessarily tyrannical. For example, it appears that he became more sentimentally attached to his children (especially now to his daughters) than in the past. Overall, however, the image of the bourgeois father and husband continued to be one of autocratic dominance, paternal severity, and moral and religious rigidity.

The woman’s authority remained under that of her husband and her sphere of responsibility became the details of domestic life. But within this sphere, the meaning of her role changed dramatically. It was now understood that the burden of familial perfectibility fell upon her shoulders. She would be the architect of the Edenic retreat. Women as “angels of consolation” were to minister to their husbands, exhausted by the demands of the public sphere, to repair the spiritual damage inflicted by the market, and to shelter their children from the corrupting influence of the modern city (Lasch 1977, 168). It was the last which took on special prominence. As the household ceased to be the center of production, the wife was able to devote enormous amounts of time and energy to raising her children, who were no longer viewed as little adults but rather persons of vulnerability and impressionability who required a warm, protected, and prolonged period of nurture. Increasingly, violence was replaced with persuasion as a means of familial control. The home in this scheme would be an orderly, secure place where children could be indoctrinated with the proper values before being sent forth to make their way in a rapidly changing world (Lasch 1977, 5-6). By the middle of the nineteenth century, motherhood had emerged as a full-time vocation and it was exalted in the culture accordingly (Hareven 1977, 69). “Good mothering,” an invention of the period, had become the moral standard for all women of standing, the significance of which was the reform and perfection of the entire social order.

The cultural history of the family since the nineteenth century has evolved in predictable fashion. The main features of the bourgeois pattern of family life spread to all classes of Western society. Lower-class but upwardly mobile women, in fact, came to regard the attainment of this family arrangement as the height of liberation and fulfillment. But in the post-World War II era, the family underwent what can only be described as a further intensification and radicalization of the tendencies predominant in the bourgeois family model. Hyperindividuation and hypersentimentalization became particularly prominent (Berger and Berger 1983, chap. 5).

The former entails an increasing emphasis on the individual over against every collective entity. Ironically it was the bourgeois family that had provided the context out of which modern individuation could occur. But up to this point individuation meant placing individual needs and interests over those of the state and, more practically, over those of the local community. Hyperindividuation takes this process one step further such that the concerns and interests of the individual have priority even over the family itself. The rise of contemporary feminism takes on meaning in this regard. The individual woman (her rights, her needs, her occupational and political interests) is now emphasized over against every social context in which she finds herself. In the context of the family, her identity and rights are redefined independently of her spouse’s authority (previously absolute); her identity and rights are defined independently of the culturally defined needs of her children (previously all-encompassing). This can even extend to a priority of her independence over that of a fetus/unborn child—in this case, a right to control her own body.

Hypersentimentalization entails a propensity to reorder family priorities such that emotional considerations are elevated to a level equal to or above other immediate considerations—community concerns, the honor and integrity of the family name, and even the material well-being of the family. This clearly constitutes an extension of the propensities already evident in the nineteenth century. In childrearing, it is seen in the tendency to impute high moral value to the emotional stability, psychological development, and happiness of the child. (The inclination to define all corporal punishment as child abuse is important in this regard as is the concern of parents and professionals with the mental health and emotional development of children.) In courtship and marriage, it is seen in the singular role of romantic love and intimacy in the selection of a mate and in the foundation of a long-term commitment. But hypersentimentalization is especially noticeable in the redefinition of patriarchal authority—the role of men in the household. For women sentimentality had already achieved a high level of expression in the nineteenth-century definitions of motherhood and homemaker. Not so in the nineteenth-century definitions of husbanding and fatherhood. A strong patriarchal form of authority prevailed at this time (and for centuries before). As father and as husband, his authority was, for all practical purposes, an unquestioned reality. This was so in Evangelical homes and non-Evangelical homes alike. Yet, it is this paternalistic dominance which has been qualified if not completely redefined. (83–91)