Good morning X,
Thank you for your congrats the other day. As a fellow poet, I know you're well aware how important it is to me. I'll fill you in privately when I come back from my week of immersion.
I've got families on the brain today. Here's an interesting piece on the family from today's NYT:
June 30, 2001
Did Cradles Always Rock? Or Did Mom Once
Not Care?
By EMILY EAKIN
hen eight gay couples decided to sue
the Canadian government for the
right to marry last year, they recruited a
historian of the family to file a brief on their
behalf. The Canadian government did the
same. As a result, when Halpern v. Canada is
heard in Ontario Divisional Court this fall, the
judges will be asked to consider conflicting
testimony about the nature of marriages and
families in the past.
On one hand, Edward Shorter, a historian at
the Faculty of Medicine at the University of
Toronto, writing for the government, argues
that bringing up children has been the
motivating force behind Western marriages
throughout history. "Child rearing has always
been the central mission of married life," Mr.
Shorter said in a telephone interview. "The
overwhelming majority of married couples intend to and do have children."
Recognizing homosexual marriages, in which procreation is unlikely, he added,
would be a radical departure from tradition.
On the other hand, Randolph Trumbach, a historian at Baruch College and the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York, writing for the plaintiffs,
argues that marriage and family did not always hinge on producing babies. Just look
at Henry VIII, Charles II and James II, he says, British kings who at one time or
another found themselves married to a woman who was unable to conceive. Failure
to produce an heir carried considerable political and personal risks. Nevertheless,
the monarchs were obliged to stick out their marriages — or in the case of Henry
VIII — find creative ways to weasel out of them. Infertility alone was not a ground
for divorce.
"My brief argues that the family has always been changing," Mr. Trumbach said in a
telephone interview. "But Shorter argues that the one continuous thing is the
producing and caring for of children. In fact, he's just wrong on that issue."
The competing legal briefs are simply the latest installment of a decades-old
scholarly battle over family life in the distant past, where the historical record is
fragmentary at best. Has the family remained a more or less stable institution over
the centuries or has it undergone drastic changes? Is the contemporary family, with
its stress on emotional and sexual bonds, a recent invention? Or have love and
affection always existed between husbands and wives and parents and children?
Such questions have been vigorously debated for 40 years, ever since the French
historian Philippe Ariès published his classic book, "Centuries of Childhood: A
Social History of Family Life," in 1960. Noting that medieval artists depicted
children as adults, only smaller, he argued that early modern parents had little
conception of childhood as a distinct phase of life. It was only with the decline of
infant mortality beginning in the 17th century and a trend toward enrolling children in
local schools (as opposed to sending them away for vocational training), he wrote,
that childhood was discovered and the intimate, loving modern family was born.
His theory was enthusiastically embraced by a generation of historians. In 1975 Mr.
Shorter published "The Making of the Modern Family," in which he made even
more extravagant claims about the relative novelty of the close-knit "Leave It to
Beaver" type of family.
For most of history, he insisted, family life for the vast majority was a grim and
loveless affair. Wives were "baby machines," treated "mechanically and without
affection" by their husbands. Romance was rare. Likewise grief at the death of a
spouse. "The emotional distance separating the couple appears unbridgeable," he
wrote, "and if more than a few escaped the iron cells which their social and sexual
roles had cast for them, our sources do not record it."
As for maternal affection, it simply didn't exist. In Mr. Shorter's characteristically
melodramatic words: "Mothers viewed the development and happiness of infants
younger than 2 with indifference." They had too many responsibilities to waste time
squandering love on an infant that might not survive.
But by 1800, he contended, all that had changed. A "revolution in sentiment" swept
across Western Europe propelled by the rise of marketplace capitalism, which
stressed the individualism of workers and consumers. The family was transformed:
"Affection and inclination, love and sympathy, came to take the place of
`instrumental' considerations in regulating the dealings of family members with one
another. Spouses and children came to be prized for what they were, rather than
what they represented or could do. That is the essence of `sentiment.' "
Not only did mothers now love their babies, but the overflowing of maternal feelings
had a positive effect on marriages as well. "The basic tie holding the couple together
in modern times" probably wasn't romantic attraction, Mr. Shorter speculated, but
rather the "sense of household bliss arising from the mother's concern for her small
infants."
In 1977, two years after "The Making of the Modern Family" appeared, Lawrence
Stone, an influential historian at Princeton University, published "The Family, Sex
and Marriage in England, 1500-1800." He, too, perceived the emergence of a "new
family type" around 1750. "The critical change is that from distance, deference and
patriarchy to what I have chosen to call affective individualism," he wrote. "I believe
this to have been perhaps the most important change in mentalité to have occurred in
the early modern period, indeed possibly in the last thousand years of Western
history."
For years, the sentimentalist view ruled.
Lately, however, it has come under increasing fire. One of the most dogged critics is
Steven Ozment, a historian of the family at Harvard University, who has made
debunking what he calls the "Arièsian myth" his central project for the last two
decades. In that time he has published six books based on German family archives
from the 15th and 16th centuries that seem to contradict many of the claims of Mr.
Ariès's disciples. (One, "The Bürgermeister's Daughter," about a 16th-century
German woman who sued her father, siblings and city council, is being made into a
film.) His new book, "Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe" (Harvard
University Press), is a hand grenade lobbed into the sentimentalist camp.
With short sections devoted to the six historians he considers the worst offenders,
Mr. Ozment pulls no punches. He accuses the sentimentalists of exaggerating the
negative features of the past to make the present look better. "It's a self-serving
argument," he said in a telephone interview. "And it sells the past short."
In contrast to the sentimentalists, Mr. Ozment insists that families of the past were
really no different from families today. He scoffs at Mr. Ariès's notion that medieval
parents treated their offspring like little adults. In fact, he argues, early medieval
writings on childhood bear an uncanny resemblance to the theories of the modern
psychologists Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson. And he cites diaries, letters and
autobiographies preserved in family archives to prove that " `the modern sentimental
family' exists as far back in time and as widely in space as there are proper sources
to document it."
It's an energetic attack, but the sentimentalists aren't ceding any ground. "You could
take his argument and hurl it back into the same place," Mr. Shorter said. "You
could say he has a desire to see the past as golden, to see people in the past as
beneficent and loving as we deem ourselves to be today. That's simply ahistorical
and wrong. There's a massive amount of evidence that speaks for the sentimental
point of view."
So is Mr. Ozment as guilty of idealizing the past as the sentimentalists are of
idealizing the present? It's hard to say. Even Mr. Shorter admits that given the lack
of historical records, "something like this can never be proved one way or another."
Yet, the latest signs suggest the scholarly balance is tipping against the
sentimentalists. In October, Yale University Press is publishing the first volume of a
major new three-part history of the European family. "The bottom line of the project
is to show that while history has molded the family unit across the centuries, there
are many continuities," said Robert Baldock, the Yale University Press editor who is
handling the books. "The modern family is not a radically different construct. Despite
technological changes, lives in the past were very similar to our own in terms of
emotions, relationships and ambitions. We may have a broader horizon, but we are
not necessarily more sophisticated or more spiritually developed than people who
lived 600 years ago." |
