Abstract
The characterisation of the simple family household as a source of security, identity and stability not found elsewhere in the early modern world now seems far less certain. The nuclear family was precarious and such families were frequently being disrupted by death, desertion and discontent. Against the idyll of the lengthy marriage and stable family that may, in the seventeenth century, have been prevalent in rural areas of England and France and even in some of the American colonies, must be set a picture of the brief unions, frequent and rapid remarriage, and mixed families that characterised some urban areas, especially London and Manchester, and certain of the colonies, and were not infrequent elsewhere.1 The imminence of untimely death was keenly felt by the young throughout past centuries, its occurrence not taken for granted. A mother in Burwash, Sussex, reported to her rector in 1870 ‘that she had overheard her little children talking in bed, & saying what shd they do if mother went, who would bake the bread for them, father cldn’t …’2 For a young lad in Stoke-on-Trent in the early 1900s, childhood memories were of the small sister upon whose dead form he gazed, the straw thrown on the cobbles outside the door to muffle the sound of the horses and carts during his mother’s final illness, and the sight of his bereft father unable to sit down for dinner with the family without crying, for a long while after his wife’s passing.3 Even when lengthening life expectancy among those who survived the first years of childhood theoretically made a stable and extended family experience probable, the ever present problem of putting bread on the table pulled in the opposite direction.
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Notes
Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (London, 1982) p. 66;
Vivien Brodsky [Elliott], ‘Widows in Late Elizabethan London: Remarriage, Economic Opportunity and Family Orientations’, in Lloyd Bonfield et al. (eds.), The World We Have Gained, Histories of Population and Social Structure (Oxford, 1986), p. 124;
P. Laslett, ‘Parental Deprivation in the Past’, in P. Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge, 1977), p. 169;
Micheline Baulant, ‘The Scattered Family: Another Aspect of Seventeenth-Century Demography’, in Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (eds), Family and Society, Selections from the Annales, ESC (Baltimore and London, 1976), p. 116 et passim;
Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman, ‘“Now-Wives and Sons-in-Law”, Parental Death in a Seventeenth-century Virginia County’, in T. W. Tate and D. L. Ammerman (eds), The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society (Chapel Hill, 1979); and Lorena S. Walsh,‘“Till Death Us Do Part”, Marriage and Family in Seventeenth-century Maryland’, in Tate and Ammerman (eds), The Chesapeake, p. 151.
Roger Wells (ed.), Victorian Village. The Diaries of the Reverend John CokerEgerton ofBurwash 1857–1888 (Stroud, 1992) p. 96.
Lady A. E. Newdigate-Newdegate, Gossip from a Muniment Room (London, 1898, 2nd edition) p. 5.
F. J. Furnivall (ed.), Child Marriages, Divorces and Ratifications… in the Diocese of Chester (Early English Text Society, 108, 1897).
See Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality (Cambridge, 1979) pp. 185–6.
Elizabeth I, c. 4, clause 19, Memorandum on the Statute of Artificers; S. Brigden, ‘Youth and the English Reformation’, Past and Present, 95 (1982) p. 46.
David Hey (ed.), Richard Gough, The History of Myddle, (Harmondsworth, 1981) p. 234.
Richard Parkinson (ed.), The Life of Adam Martindale (Chetham Society, Manchester, 1845) p. 88.
See, for example, E. Claverie and P. Lamaison, LTmpossible marriage, Violente et parente en Gevaudan 17e, 18e et 19e siècles (Paris, 1982) passim.
Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (London, 1976) p. 57.
Martine Segalen, Love and Power in the Peasant Family (Oxford, 1983) p. 5.
This paragraph summarises the work done by Martine Segalen, Love and Power, pp. 78–111; see Ed. du Vieux Meunier Breton, Anna Selle, Thumette Bigoudène (Rennes, 1974) p. 114, cited in Segalen, Love and Power, p. 107; the general point is borne out by Claverie and Lamaison, Llmpossible manage, pp. 78–9.
See W. W. Skeat (ed.), A. [J.] Fitzherbert, The Book of Husbandry, 1534 (English Dialect Society, 13, 1882) pp. 93–8.
Cited in Nancy F. Cott, ‘Eighteen-Century Family and Social Life Revealed in Massachusetts Divorce Records’, Journal of Social History, 10 (1976) p. 33.
Dorothy M. Meads (ed.), The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605 (1930) passim; for these specific references,
see extracts reprinted in David Englander, Diana Norman, Rosemary O’Day and W. R. Owens (eds), Culture and Belief in Europe, 1450–1600 (Oxford, 1990) pp. 212–18.
Sarah Heller Mendelson, ‘Stuart Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs’, in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society, 1500–1800 (London, 1985) p. 190; The range of activities practised was close to those listed in, for example, William Whately, A Bride-Bush p. 24.
J. E. Cashin, A Family Venture. Men and Women of the Southern Frontier (Oxford, 1991) pp. 67–9, shows how settler women in the nineteenth-century South had to relearn hard manual labour common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 37. Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680, p. 94;
M. St Clare Byrne (ed.), The Lisle Letters: An Abridgement (Chicago, 1983) p. 17.
Cited in E. S. Morgan, The Puritan Family (revised edition, New York, 1966), p. 43.
See R. Middleton, Colonial America, A History 1667–1760 (Oxford, 1992) p. 237.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (Chapel Hill and London, 1988) pp. 22–4.
L. Pollock, With Faith and Physic, The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552–1600 (London, 1993) pp. 97–143.
See Wendy Gibson, Women in Seventeenth-Century France (London, 1989) p. 87.
G. Davies (ed.), The Autobiography of Thomas Raymond and the Memoirs of the Family of Guise of Elmore, Ghucs (Camden Society XXVII, 1917) p. 109.
Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘City Women and Religious Change’, in N. Z. Davis (ed.), Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975) p. 94;
Merry Weisner, ‘Women’s Defense of their Public Role’, in Mary Beth Rose (ed.), Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Syracuse, 1986) pp. 1–28;
Mary Prior, ‘Women and the Urban Economy: Oxford 1500–1800’, in M. Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London, 1985) pp. 93–117.
James B. Collins, ‘The Economic Role of Women in Seventeenth-Century France’, French Historical Studies, 16 (1989), pp. 436–70.
William Chester Jordan, Women and Credit in Pre-industrial and Developing Societies (Philadelphia, 1993) pp. 23–82.
A. Bideau, ‘La Mortalité des enfants dans le Chatellenie de Thoissey-en-Dombes’, Démographie Urbaine XVe-XIXe siècles (Lyons, 1977) pp. 111–41;
Fiona Newall, ‘Wet Nursing and Child Care in Aldenham, Hertfordshire, 1595–1726’, in Valerie Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers in Preindustrial England (London, 1990) pp. 122–38.
Miranda Chaytor, ‘Household and Kinship: Ryton in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth centuries’, History Workshop Journal, 10 (1980) p. 25.
Hughes Lapaire, Le Berry vu par un Berrichon (Paris, 1928) pp. 38–9, cited in Segalen, Love and Power, p. 16.
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Marriage Strategies as Strategies of Social Reproduction’ Annates, ESC 27 (1972) pp. 1105–25,
in Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (eds), Family and Society, Selections from the Annates, ESC (Baltimore and London, 1976) pp. 117–44.
See Ralph Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450–1700 (London, 1984) p. 72. Miranda Chaytor has observed that marriage formed part of family strategy among urban dwellers late in die sixteenth century.
Daniel Scott Smith, ‘Parental Control and Marriage Patterns: An Analysis of Historical Trends in Higham, Massachusetts’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 35 (1973) pp. 423–4;
Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (Oxford and New York, 1980) p. 10.
V. B. Elliott, ‘Single Women in the London Marriage Market: Age, Status and Nobility, 1598–1619’, in R. B. Outhwaite (ed.), Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage (London, 1981) p. 90.
See Michael Mitterauer and Reinhard Sieder, The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford, 1982) pp. 64–6, where the authors appear to argue the contrary.
Alan Macfarlane (ed.), Diary of Ralph Josselin (London, 1976), 12.5.1645.
Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, A Seventeenth-Century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge, 1970), p. 107.
I am struck by the number of references, at various social levels and in two of these societies, to the practice of women reading aloud to their menfolk. See, for example, R. Chartier, A History of Private Life, vol. III (Cambridge, Mass., 1989) p. 120;
Thomas Turner, The Diary of a Georgian Shopkeeper (Oxford, 1979) p. 2;
S. Hardy, The Diary of a Suffolk Farmer’s Wife, 1854–69 (London, 1992) p. 27.
R. Latham and W. Matthews (eds), The Diary of Samuel Pepys (London, 1970) vol. I, pp. 75, 79, 85, 165.
Mary Beth Norton, ‘Gender and Defamation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 44 (1987) p. 23.
Ibid., p. 9. See Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives, Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1987) p. 92, for the suggestion that making meals was frequently the occasion for an ‘obedience struggle’.
J. A. Sharpe, Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England (Borthwick Institute, University of York, Paper 58, 1980) pp. 1–10, 15–17;
Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987) p. 165.
K. V. Thomas, ‘The Double-Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959) pp. 195–216.
Sarah Hanley, ‘Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France’, French Historical Studies, 16 (1989) pp. 16–21.
Egerton MS 2545, f. 327; printed in Arthur Searle (ed.), Barrington Family Letters 1628–1632 (Camden Fourth Series, 28, 1983).
H.J. Morehouse (ed.), A Dyurnall … [Adam Eyre], Surtees Society, Yorkshire Diaries, lxv (1875, published 1877) pp. 10,12–13,15, 19, 67–8,116, 49, 39, 42, 49, 54, 84.
Wendy Gibson, Women in Seventeenth-Century France, p. 87; for a recent study of divorce and separation, see Lawrence Stone, The Road to Divorce, England 1530–1987 (Oxford, 1990).
John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970) pp. 92–7.
For example, LJ.R.O. B/C/3/7, 17 April 1600. See also, R. O’Day and J. Berlatsky (eds), The Letter Book of Thomas Bentham… (Camden Miscellany, XXVII 1979) p. 125, for sympathetic approach to women in marriage in 1561.
L. Pollock, With Faith and Physic, p. 10; see Craig R.Thompson (ed.), The Colloquies of Erasmus (Chicago, 1965) pp. 115–27, reprinted, with an introduction, in David Englander et al. (eds), Culture and Belief in Europe, pp. 58–66.
Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children, Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge, 1983) passim.
D. H. J. Clifford, The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford (Stroud, 1990) pp. 31–2, 35, 38, 42–3, 47–51, 53, 54–5.
Thomas Heywood (ed.), The Diary of Rev. Henry Newcome (Chetham Society, 18, 1849) pp. 15, 59 (19 February 1661/2), 60 (22 February 1661/2).
Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London 1660–1730 (1989) pp. 232–4;
see G. Davies (ed.) The Autobiography of Thomas Raymond and Memoirs of the Family of Guise of Elmore, Gloucs (Camden Society, XXVIII, 1917), pp. 111–123.
Henri Misson, Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England, (translation, London, 1719) p. 33.
See R. O’Day, Education and Society in Britain, 1500–1800 (London, 1982) passim.
Philip Greven Jr, Four Generations: Population, Land and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, 1970) pp. 238–40, 249–50; Richard S. Dunn, ‘Servants and Slaves: the Recruitment and Employment of Labour’,
in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (eds), Colonial British America (Baltimore, 1984) pp. 186–8.
P. Crawford, ‘Construction and Experience of Maternity’, pp. 23–7; see D.J. H. Clifford (ed.), The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford (Stroud, 1990) p. 123.
Journal of Elizabeth Turner, 5 May 1672, Kent Archive Office; M. Holden, The Woman’s Almanack for the year… 1688 (1688) p. 9.
See Laurel Ulrich Thatcher, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York, 1982);
Catherine M. Scholten, Childbearing in American Society, 1650 to 1850 (New York, 1985);
Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, Mass., 1980).
Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality (Cambridge, 1979) p. 74; see also, Claverie and Lamaison, L’Impossible manage, passim.
Lutz K. Berkner and John W. Shaffer, ‘The Joint Family in the Nivernais’, Journal of Family History, 3 (1978) p. 152.
See also, A. Pardailhe-Galabrun, The Birth of Intimacy: Privacy and Domestic Life in Early Modern Paris (Oxford, 1991) p. 69.
G. Davies (ed.), The Autobiography of Thomas Raymond and Memoirs of the Family of Guise of Elmore, Gloucs (Camden Society, XXVIII, 1917) pp. 111ff.
James A. Henretta, ‘Wealth and Social Structure’, in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (eds), Colonial British America (Baltimore and London, 1991 reprint) p. 283. See also, J. E. Gashen, A Family Venture, pp. 10–20.
David Levine, Reproducing Families (Cambridge, 1987) p. 160.
For example, the residential governess of Grace Sherrington (Mildmay) was Mistress Hamblyn, yet she was Grace’s cousin. L. Pollock, With Faith and Physic, p. 6; Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (London, 1979) p. 85; Chaytor, ‘Household and Kinship’, p. 29; Ralph Houlbrooke, The English Family, p. 46.
David R. Ransome, ‘Wives for Virginia 1621’, William and Mary Quarterly, XLVIII (1991) pp. 14–15.
Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, Servants and their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore and London, 1984) p. 61.
Flandrin, Families in Former Times, p. 140; Macfarlane, Diary of Ralph Josselin, 5. 8. 1644; Parkinson (ed.) Life of Adam Martindale, p. 30; M. St Clare Byrne (ed.), The Lisle Letters: An Abridgement (Chicago, 1981) vol. V, pp. 448–9, 453, 730.
G. Rouger (ed.), Rétif De la Bretonne, De la vie de mon pére (Paris, 1970) p. 130.
James Horn, ‘Servant Emigration to the Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century’, in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century, Essays in Anglo-American Society (Chapel Hill, 1979) p. 95; Russell Minard, ‘British Migration to the Chesapeake Colonies’, in Lois Green et al. (eds), Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill, 1988) pp. 44–132.
See Middleton, Colonial America, p. 199; Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1689–1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986) passim.
W. E. Burghardt DuBois, The Negro American Family (Atlanta, 1908) pp. 21–2;
E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago, 1939) p. 134;
Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (New York, 1956) pp. 345–6;
Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959) p. 53.
John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community (New York, 1972) pp. 87–8; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974) pp. 451–2;
Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1976) pp. 45–184;
James Trussell and Richard Steckel, ‘The Age of Slaves at Menarche and Their First Birth’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 8 (1978) pp. 477–505;
Richard H. Steckel, ‘Slave Marriage and the Family’, Journal of Family History, 5 (1980) pp. 407–20.
Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engermann, Time on the Cross, vol. I (1974) p. 83; Richard Sutch, The Breeding of Slaves for Sale and the Westward Expansion of Slavery, 1850–1860’, in Engermann and Genovese (eds), Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere (Princeton, 1975) p. 195.
See, for example, Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life, A History of American Families, 1600–1900 (London and New York, 1988).
Henretta, ‘Wealth and Social Structure’, in Greene and Pole (eds), Colonial British America (Baltimore, 1984) p. 281; Hermann Wellenreuther, ‘A View of Socio-Economic Structures in England and the British Colonies on the Eve of the American Revolution’, in Eric Angermann et al. (eds), New Wine in Old Skins: A Comparative View of Socio-Political Structures and Values Affecting the American Revolution (Stuttgart, 1976) pp. 15–21.
See Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family (1987 edn) pp. 74–5, for comment on the contrast in the nineteenth century.
B. A. Holderness, Pre-Industrial England (London, 1976) p. 154;
Hans Medick, ‘The Proto-Industrial Family Economy: the Structural Function of Household and Family during the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism’, Social History, 3 (1976) pp. 291–316;
Joan Thirsk, ‘Industries in the Countryside’, in F.J. Fisher (ed.), Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1961) pp. 70–88.
For a highly readable account, see John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry (London, 1981).
For example, Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 2 vols (London, 1962).
An interesting but only partially successful attempt to penetrate behind the theoretically rigid distinction between the supposed ‘separate spheres’ of public and domestic life, to obtain an understanding of life-experience, is Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987).
Michael Katz, Michael Doucet and Mark Stern, The Social Organization of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1982) pp. 14–63.
Many of the features identified by L. Davidoff as characteristic of the eighteenth century family — the fact that the family network itself supported commercial enterprises; the training of the young in the families of relatives; the cementing of business partnerships by sibling and cousin marriage; the late age at marriage, which encouraged youthful intimacy and independence; the proximity and interchangeability of home and work; and the strengthening of family bonds through letter writing, visiting, feasts and celebrations of rites of passage — were all extensions of an earlier world. Leonore Davidoff, ‘The Family in Britain’, in M. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 1990) pp. 78–80.
Shirley Nicholson, A Victorian Household, Based on the Diaries of Marion Sambourne (London, 1988) p. 39.
H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (London, 1934) vol. I, pp. 45–6.
Sheila Hardy, The Diary of a Suffolk Farmer’s Wife, 1854–1869 (London, 1992) p. 34.
For further elaboration of this point, see Daniel E. Sutherland, Americans and their Servants: Domestic Service in the United States from 1880 to 1920 (Baton Rouge, 1981) especially pp. 7–18.
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© 1994 Rosemary O’Day
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O’Day, R. (1994). The Descriptive Family — 2: Co-Resident Relations. In: The Family and Family Relationships, 1500–1900. Themes in Comparative History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23654-1_4
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