Nov 19, 2008
Historians began paying significant attention to families, especially those of ordinary people, only within the last several decades. Beatrice Gottlieb offers a distillation of that recent scholarship in addition to her own insights in this popularly written volume. Much of her work consists of debunking commonly held beliefs about families of this time period. Most of her discussion generalizes to all of Western Europe, but she frequently cites examples from specific areas and explains when customs, such as that of partible versus impartible inheritance, differed across regions.
Large households were not the norm during these centuries, as is commonly supposed. Wealthy and politically powerful households tended to be larger, particularly so if servants are counted as household members, as Gottlieb suggests. She illustrates how servants were treated much the same way as were children — in fact, many families, even among the wealthy, took in children as servants or apprentices while at the same time sending their own children, as a means of educating them, to serve in other households. Gottlieb makes it clear that servants often held high status within their communities, tied to the status of the households in which they worked.
Gottlieb also presents evidence on the debate concerning care for children. Although children were likely to die young, prompting parents to avoid emotional attachment, Gottlieb offers examples of strong bonds. Even the use of wet nurses, long argued to be indicative of parental indifference to children, might be seen as protective of them, since their mothers might themselves be too busy to care for the children properly.
Households and families fulfilled numerous functions during this time period. Most urban homes served dual duty as stores or shops in addition to housing family members and, often, livestock. Thus the household was the focus of business as well as family life. Historians have always recognized lineage and heredity as important in the lives of the politically powerful, but Gottlieb illustrates that heredity also influenced the status of everyday people. Marriage often was used as a way of improving inherited status or as a means of financial improvement; this reiterates the concept of the family’s many contractual and businesslike dealings with the world. Marriages during this time, contrary to common belief, were no more permanent than are modern marriages, since early death often intervened even though divorce was rare.
The Industrial Revolution altered the roles of families by taking many of these functions out of the household. In a concluding chapter, Gottlieb explains how families have changed in the past two hundred years.
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