Abstract
“Eventually,” Gayle Rubin wrote in 1975, “someone will have to write a new version of The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, recognizing the mutual interdependence of sexuality, economics, and politics without underestimating the full significance of each in human society.”2 But historians of the development of the family, if not of its origin, have for the most part passed the last fifteen years without paying much attention to this challenge; and in these days it perhaps sounds somewhat quaint. Is there anything profitable for historians of family life in the Marxist tradition? And if so, how might it best be appropriated?
Just now we must really give priority to problems other than the forms of marriage prevalent among Australia’s aborigines, or marriage between brother and sister in ancient times.
Lenin to Clara Zetkin, 19201
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Notes
See, for example, Peter Laslett, “Age at Menarche in Europe since the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1971–72): 221–36
E. A. Hammel and Peter Laslett, “Comparing Household Structure over Time and between Cultures,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16 (1974): 73–109.
This happened to Centuries of Childhood (see Richard T. Vann, “The Youth of Centuries of Childhood,” History and Theory 21 [1982]: 279–97
David Hunt, Parents and Children in History: The Psychology of Family Life in Early Modern France (New York, 1970); Adrian Wilson, “The Infancy of the History of Childhood: An Appraisal of Philippe Ariès,” History and Theory 19 (1980): 132–53.
Here I follow Martha C. Howell, “Marriage, Property, and Patriarchy: Recent Contributions to a Literature,” Feminist Studies 13 (1987): 204.
Specifically, for being “less concerned with demonstrating the many complexities of historical reality than they are with establishing the correctness of their own particular versions of Marxist truth”: R. B. Outhwaite, “Keeping it in the Family,” Historical Journal 29 (1986): 467.
See Gerald Izenberg, “Psychohistory and Intellectual History,” History and Theory 14 (1975): 139–55.
Pierre Vilar, “Marxist History, a History in the Making: Towards a Dialogue with Althusser,” New Left Review 80 (1973): 101.
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© 1993 Henry Kozicki
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Vann, R.T. (1993). Marxism and Historians of the Family. In: Kozicki, H. (eds) Developments in Modern Historiography. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14970-4_8
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