Family Life In Nineteenth Century North America

Describes the family within the context of nineteenth-century America and shows how it worked within the educational, social and economic expectations of that century. Assesses the role of the father as successful breadwinner and leader of the family; the mother as homemaker and caretaker of the children; and family members as learners and workers who make the family operate efficiently. Slaves and servants are presented for their role in the family network.

Colonial America comes alive in this depiction of the daily lives of families—mothers, fathers, children, and grandparents. The Volo's examine the role of the family in society and typical family life in 17th- and 18th-century America. Through narrative chapters, aspects of family life are discussed in depth such as maintaining the household, work, entertainment, death and dying, ceremonies and holidays, customs and rites of passage, parenting, education, and widowhood. Readers will gain an in-depth understanding of the world in which these families lived and how that world affected their lives. Also included are sources for further information and a timeline of historic events. Volumes in the Family Life through History series focus on the day-to-day lives and roles of families throughout history. The roles of all family members are defined and information on daily family life, the role of the family in society, and the ever-changing definition of family are discussed. Discussion of the nuclear family, single parent homes, foster and adoptive families, stepfamilies, and gay and lesbian families are included where appropriate. Topics such as meal planning, homes, entertainment and celebrations are discussed along with larger social issues that originate in the home, such as domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and divorce. Ideal for students and general readers alike, books in this series bring the history of everyday people to life.

An examination of how the concept of “family” has been transformed over the last three centuries in the U.S., from its function as primary social unit to today’s still-evolving model. Based on a wide reading of letters, diaries and other contemporary documents, Mintz, an historian, and Kellogg, an anthropologist, examine the changing definition of “family” in the United States over the course of the last three centuries, beginning with the modified European model of the earliest settlers. From there they survey the changes in the families of whites (working class, immigrants, and middle class) and blacks (slave and free) since the Colonial years, and identify four deep changes in family structure and ideology: the democratic family, the companionate family, the family of the 1950s, and lastly, the family of the '80s, vulnerable to societal changes but still holding together.

Colonial America comes alive in this depiction of the daily lives of families—mothers, fathers, children, and grandparents. The Volo's examine the role of the family in society and typical family life in 17th- and 18th-century America. Through narrative chapters, aspects of family life are discussed in depth such as maintaining the household, work, entertainment, death and dying, ceremonies and holidays, customs and rites of passage, parenting, education, and widowhood. Readers will gain an in-depth understanding of the world in which these families lived and how that world affected their lives. Also included are sources for further information and a timeline of historic events. Volumes in the Family Life through History series focus on the day-to-day lives and roles of families throughout history. The roles of all family members are defined and information on daily family life, the role of the family in society, and the ever-changing definition of family are discussed. Discussion of the nuclear family, single parent homes, foster and adoptive families, stepfamilies, and gay and lesbian families are included where appropriate. Topics such as meal planning, homes, entertainment and celebrations are discussed along with larger social issues that originate in the home, such as domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and divorce. Ideal for students and general readers alike, books in this series bring the history of everyday people to life.

Who was the Victorian patriarch, and what kind of father was he? In this richly documented study, Stephen M. Frank presents the first account of nineteenth-century family life to focus on the role of fathers. Drawing on letters, diaries, memoirs, and other primary sources, Frank explores what fathers thought about their family responsibilities and how men behaved as parents. His findings are often surprising. Beneath the stereotype of the starched Victorian patriarch, he discovers fathers who were playful, demanding, uncertain of their authority, and deeply anxious about their children's prospects in a rapidly changing society—men with strikingly modern attitudes toward parenthood. Focusing on Northern, middle-class families, he also uncovers the social origins of the "family man" ideal and explores how this standard of middle-class propriety found its way into practice. Life with Father looks beyond the well-known nineteenth-century fascination with motherhood to discover a social order that valued a "father's care" no less than a "mother's love" as a basis for stable family relationships. This compelling social history engages readers with the story of how families in the past struggled with economic and social changes that required fathers to reassess themselves as parents and as men.

Nineteenth century families had to deal with enormous changes in almost all of life's categories. The first generation of nineteenth century Americans was generally anxious to remove the Anglo from their Anglo-Americanism. The generation that grew up in Jacksonian America matured during a period of nationalism, egalitarianism, and widespread reformism. Finally, the generation of the pre-war decades was innately diverse in terms of their ethnic backgrounds, employment, social class, education, language, customs, and religion. Americans were acutely aware of the need to create a stable and cohesive society firmly founded on the family and traditional family values. Yet the people of America were among the most mobile and diverse on earth. Geographically, socially, and economically, Americans (and those immigrants who wished to be Americans) were dedicated to change, movement, and progress. This dichotomy between tradition and change may have been the most durable and common of American traits, and it was a difficult quality to circumvent when trying to form a unified national persona. Volumes in the Family Life in America series focus on the day-to-day lives and roles of families throughout history. The roles of all family members are defined and information on daily family life, the role of the family in society, and the ever-changing definition of family are discussed. Discussion of the nuclear family, single parent homes, foster and adoptive families, stepfamilies, and gay and lesbian families are included where appropriate. Topics such as meal planning, homes, entertainment and celebrations, are discussed along with larger social issues that originate in the home like domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and divorce. Ideal for students and general readers alike, books in this series bring the history of everyday people to life.

A highly original account of the evolution of the family unit Current debates about the future of the family are often based on serious misconceptions about its past. Arguing that there is no biologically mandated or universally functional family form, Stephanie Coontz traces the complexity and variety of family arrangements in American history, from Native American kin groups to the emergence of the dominant middle-class family ideal in the 1890s. Surveying and synthesizing a vast range of previous scholarship, as well as engaging more particular studies of family life from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Coontz offers a highly original account of the shifting structure and function of American families. Her account challenges standard interpretations of the early hegemony of middle-class privacy and “affective individualism,” pointing to the rich tradition of alternative family behaviors among various ethnic and socioeconomic groups in America, and arguing that even middle-class families went through several transformations in the course of the nineteenth centure. The present dominant family form, grounded in close interpersonal relations and premised on domestic consumption of mass-produced household goods has arisen, Coontz argues, from a long and complex series of changing political and economic conjunctures, as well as from the destruction or incorporation of several alternative family systems. A clear conception of American capitalism’s combined and uneven development is therefore essential if we are to understand the history of the family as a key social and economic unit. Lucid and detailed, The Social Origins of Private Life is likely to become the standard history of its subject.

Sweet Chariot is a pathbreaking analysis of slave families and household composition in the nineteenth-century South. Ann Malone presents a carefully drawn picture of the ways in which slaves were constituted into families and households within a community and shows how and why that organization changed through the years. Her book, based on massive research, is both a statistical study over time of 155 slave communities in twenty-six Louisiana parishes and a descriptive study of three plantations: Oakland, Petite Anse, and Tiger Island. Malone first provides a regional analysis of family, household, and community organization. Then, drawing on qualitative sources, she discusses patterns in slave family household organization, identifying the most significant ones as well as those that consistantly acted as indicators of change. Malone shows that slave community organization strongly reflected where each community was in its own developmental cycle, which in turn was influenced by myriad factors, ranging from impersonal economic conditions to the arbitrary decisions of individual owners. She also projects a statistical model that can be used for comparisons with other populations. The two persistent themes that Malone uncovers are the mutability and yet the constancy of Louisiana slave household organization. She shows that the slave family and its extensions, the slave household and community, were far more diverse and adaptable than previously believed. The real strength of the slave comunity was its multiplicity of forms, its tolerance for a variety of domestic units and its adaptability. She finds, for example, that the preferred family form consisted of two parents and children but that all types of families and households were accepted as functioning and contributing members of the slave community. "Louisiana slaves had a well-defined and collective vision of the structure that would serve them best and an iron determination to attain it, " Malone observes. "But along with this constancy in vision and perseverance was flexibility. Slave domestic forms in Louisiana bent like willows in the wind to keep from shattering. The suppleness of their forms prevented domestic chaos and enabled most slave communities to recover from even serious crises."

This book focuses on the impact of economic systems and social class on the organization of family life. Since the most vital function of the family is the survival of its members, the author give primacy to the economic system in structuring the broad parameters of family life. She explains how the economy shapes the prospects families have for earning a decent living by determining the location, nature, and pay associated with work.