Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 15, No 4
Summer 2001

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

Does the American Family Have a History? Family Images and Realities

Steven Mintz

Even as these changes have produced alarm, anxiety, and apprehension for some, they have produced greater freedom and happiness for others. These transformations have inspired family values crusaders to condemn careerist mothers, absent fathers, single parents, and unwed parents as the root cause of many of society’s ills, such as persistent poverty, drug abuse, academic failure, and juvenile crime. This is a situation that begs for historical perspective.

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that diversity and change have been the only constants in the history of the American family. Far from signaling the family’s imminent demise or an erosion of commitment to children, recent changes in family life are only the latest in a series of disjunctive transformations in family roles, functions, and dynamics that have occurred over the past three centuries.

Few subjects are more shrouded in myths, misconceptions, and misleading generalizations than the history of the family. Yet by approaching it critically, students will find this history an eye-opening window on the past. They will discover that:

• It was only in the 1920s that, for the first time, a majority of American families consisted of a breadwinner husband, a homemaker wife, and children attending school.
• The most rapid increase in unwed pregnancies took place between 1940 and 1958, not in the libertine 1960s, and that teenage childbearing was higher in the 1950s than today.
• The defining characteristics of the 1950s family—a rising birth rate, a stable divorce rate, and declining age of marriage—were historical aberrations, out of line with long-term historical trends.
• Throughout American history, most families have needed more than one breadwinner to support themselves.

In recent years, families have gone through many disconcerting and disruptive changes. But if family life today seems unsettled, so, too, was family life in the past. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had the highest divorce rate in the Western world, and one child in ten lived in a single-parent home. Hundreds of thousands of children spent part of their childhood in orphanages, not because their parents were dead, but because their mother and father could not support them. Infant mortality, orphanhood,land early widowhood affected a distressingly high proportion of families. Between 35 and 40 percent of all children lost a parent or a sibling before they reached their twenties.

Americans are prone to romanticizing the past and confusing historical fantasy and reality. This is especially true when Americans ponder our society’s “bedrock” institution, the family. Among the most potent myths that pervade contemporary society are that divorce, domestic violence, and single parenthood are recent phenomena; that throughout American history, most families consisted of a breadwinner husband and a homemaker wife; and that in the past strong, stable families provided effective care for the elderly and other dependents. Only careful historical analysis can correct such myths.

In few areas has susceptibility to myth making been more detrimental than with the family. Highly romanticized images of the past have contributed to unrealistic expectations about family life in the present. Ahistorical thinking has also led Americans to downplay the genuine improvements that have taken place, such as the fact that smaller families enable parents to devote more time and resources to each child. Even worse, a lack of historical perspective has encouraged scapegoating of families that diverge from the dominant norms. It has also blinded Americans to the social, economic, demographic, and ideological pressures that have contributed to familial change—and made transformations in gender roles and family structures irreversible.

Far from being a stable, unchanging institution, the family is as enmeshed in the historical process as any other social institution. The family’s roles and functions, size and composition, and emotional and power dynamics have all changed dramatically over time. In colonial America, as in all other periods of American history, there was no single, uniform family norm. Prior to the Revolution, most distinctions were related to region, religion, and status. It is especially important to distinguish between family lives of the free and the unfree—not only slaves, but servants and apprentices (who were denied the right to legally marry) and redemptioner families (immigrant families that had to place their children in another family’s household in order to repay the cost of their passage across the Atlantic).

In colonial America, free families were, first and foremost, units of production. They also performed a variety of educational, religious, and welfare functions that were later assumed by other private and public institutions. Free families educated children in basic literacy and the rudiments of religion; they transmitted occupational skills; and they cared for the elderly and infirm.

Family composition was far more elastic and porous than in later eras. In even the most healthful regions during the seventeenth century, three children in ten died before reaching adulthood, and children were likely to lose at least one parent by the time they married. As a result, a majority of colonial Americans probably spent some time in a step-family. Family size and composition also varied according to the household’s economic needs. Many children left their parents’ homes before puberty to work as servants or apprentices in other households.

Perhaps the biggest difference between free families in colonial America and families today is that colonial society placed relatively little emphasis on familial privacy. Community authorities and neighbors supervised and intervened in family life. In New England, selectmen oversaw ten or twelve families, removed children from “unfit” parents, and ensured that fathers exercised proper family government.

In theory, the seventeenth-century family was a hierarchical unit in which the father was invested with patriarchal authority. He alone sat in an armed chair, his symbolic throne, while other household members sat on benches or stools. He taught children to write, led household prayers, and carried on the bulk of correspondence with family members. Domestic conduct manuals were addressed to him, not to his wife. Legally, the father was the primary parent. Fathers, not mothers, received custody of children after divorce or separation. In colonial New England, a father was authorized to correct and punish an insubordinate wife, disruptive children, and unruly servants. He was also responsible for placing his children in a lawful calling and for consenting to his children’s marriages. His control over inheritance kept his grown sons dependent upon him for years while they waited for the landed property they needed to establish an independent household.

In actuality, the ideology of patriarchy coexisted with a blurring of gender boundaries. Colonial women shouldered many duties that would later be monopolized by men. The colonial goodwife engaged in trade and home manufacturing, supervised planting, and sometimes administered estates. Women’s productive responsibilities limited the amount of time that they could devote to childcare. Many child rearing tasks were delegated to servants or older daughters. Ironically, the decline of patriarchal ideology was accompanied by the emergence of a much more rigid domestic division of labor.

There were profound differences in family patterns in New England, the middle colonies, and the Chesapeake and southernmost colonies. In New England, a patriarchal conception of family life began to break down as early as the 1670s. In the Chesapeake and the Carolinas, a more stable patriarchal structure did not truly emerge among white families until the mid eighteenth century.

Demography partly explains these regional differences. After an initial period of high mortality, life expectancy in New England rose to levels comparable to our own. A healthful environment contributed to a very high birthrate (over half of New England children had nine or more siblings) and the first society in history in which grandparents were common. In the Chesapeake, in contrast, a high death rate and an unbalanced sex ratio made it impossible to establish the kind of stable, patriarchal families found in New England. During the seventeenth century, half of all marriages were broken within eight years, and most families consisted of a complicated assortment of step-parents, step-children, wards, and half-brothers and half-sisters. Not until the late eighteenth century could a free father be confident of his ability to pass property directly to his sons.

Religious differences also contributed to divergent family patterns. Not nearly as anxious as the Puritans about infant depravity, Quaker families in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey placed a far greater stress on maternal nurture than did Puritan families. Quakers also emphasized early autonomy for children. They provided daughters with an early dowry and sons with sufficient land to provide a basis for early independence.

During the eighteenth century, New England fathers found themselves less able to influence their sons’ choices of occupation, when or whom their children would marry, and their offsprings’ sexual behavior. By mid century, sons were moving further away from the parental home, fewer daughters were marrying in birth order, and rates of illegitimacy and pregnancy prior to marriage were rising markedly.

One force for change was ideological. The mid and late eighteenth century saw repeated attacks upon patriarchal authority not only by such popular male writers as Samuel Richardson, Oliver Goldsmith, and Henry Fielding, but also among early women’s rights activists such as Susannah Rowson (author of one of the earliest American novels, Charlotte Temple) and Judith Sargent Stevens Murray (whose 1790 essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” was published in Massachusetts Magazine two years before Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman). These writers rejected the idea that a father should dictate a child’s career or choice of marriage partner and argued that love and affection were superior to physical force in rearing children and that women were more effective than men in inducing children’s obedience.

Economic shifts further contributed to an erosion of paternal authority. Rapid population growth, which resulted in plots too small to be farmed viably, weakened paternal control over inheritance. New opportunities for nonagricultural work allowed many children to marry earlier than in the past.

Two new patterns of family life—those of the urban working class and of the middle class—emerged during the early nineteenth century. Far more numerous than urban middle-class families were working-class families. The quickening pace of commerce during the early nineteenth century not only increased the demand for middle-class clerks and shopkeepers, but for unskilled and skilled manual workers, such as carters, coal heavers, day laborers, delivery people, dockworkers, packers, and porters. Manual workers earned extremely low incomes and in many of these families, wives and children were forced to work to maintain even a low standard of living. In 1851 Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, estimated that the essential expenditures for rent, food, fuel, and clothing for a family of five was $10.37 a week. In that year, a shoemaker or printer earned just $4.00 to $6.00 a week, a male textile operative about $6.50 a week, and an unskilled laborer just $1.00 a week. The only manual laborers able to earn Greeley’s minimum were blacksmiths and machinists.

While the urban middle-class family emphasized a sole male breadwinner, a rigid division of sexual roles, and a protected childhood, urban working-class families emphasized a cooperative family economy. Typically, a male laborer earned just two-thirds of his family’s income. The other third was earned by his wife and children. Many married women performed work in the home, such as embroidery, tailoring, or laundry. The wages of children were critical for a working-class family’s standard of living. Children under the age of fifteen contributed about 20 percent of their family’s income.

Older children were expected to defer marriage, remain at home, and contribute to the family’s income. It was not until the 1920s that the cooperative family economy gave way to the family-wage economy, which allowed a male breadwinner to support his family on his wages alone. Contributing to this new family formation were the establishment of the first seniority systems, compulsory school attendance laws, and increased real wages as a result of World War I. The New Deal further solidified the male breadwinner family by prohibiting child labor, expanding worker’s compensation, and targeting job programs at male workers.

During the early nineteenth century, a new kind of urban middle-class family also began to emerge as the workplace moved some distance from the household and as many of married women’s productive tasks were assumed by unmarried women working in factories. Among the urban middle class, a new pattern of marriage developed, based primarily on companionship and affection; a new division of domestic roles appeared, which assigned the wife to care full-time for her children and to maintain the home; and a new conception of childhood arose that looked at children not as little adults, but as special creatures who needed attention, love, and time to mature. Spouses began to display affection more openly, calling each other “honey” or “dear.” Parents began to keep their children home longer than in the past. By the mid nineteenth century, a new emphasis on family privacy could be seen in the expulsion of apprentices from the middle-class home and the increasing separation of servants from the family.

The new urban middle class defined itself by a strict segregation of sexual spheres, intense mother-child bonds, and the idea that children needed to be protected from the corruptions of the outside world. Even at its inception, however, this new family form, which some extol as an ideal, was beset by certain latent tensions. One source of tension involved the role of the father, who was becoming more psychologically separate from his family. Although fathers thought of themselves as breadwinners and household heads, and their wives and children as their dependents, in fact men’s connection to their family was becoming essentially economic. They might serve as disciplinarians of last resort, but mothers replaced fathers as the primary parent.

Another contradiction involved women’s domestic roles. In their youth, women received an unprecedented degree of freedom; increasing numbers attended school and worked, at least temporarily, outside of a family unit. After marriage, however, women were expected to sacrifice their individuality for their family’s sake. In a society that attached increasing value to individualism and equality, the expectation that women should subordinate themselves to their husbands and children was a source of latent tension. Women’s subordinate status might be cloaked with an ideology of separate spheres and true womanhood, but the contradiction with the ideal of equality remained.

A third challenge involved the status of children, who remained home far longer than in the past, often into their late teens and twenties. The emerging ideal required a protected childhood, shielding children from knowledge of death, sex, and violence. While in theory families were training children for independence, in reality, children received fewer opportunities than in the past to express their growing maturity. The result was that the transition from childhood and youth to adulthood became more disjunctive and riven with conflict.

These underlying contradictions were apparent in three striking developments: a sharp fall in the birth rate, a marked and steady rise in the divorce rate, and a heightened cultural awareness of domestic violence. The early nineteenth century saw the beginnings of a sharp fall in the birth rate. Instead of giving birth to seven to ten children, middle-class mothers by the end of the century gave birth to only three. The reduction in birthrates did not depend on new technologies; rather, it reflected the view that women were not childbearing chattel and that children were no longer economic assets. An emerging ideology deemed children to be priceless, but the fact remained that the young now required greater parental investments in the form of education and other inputs.

During the early and mid nineteenth century, the divorce rate also began to rise, as judicial divorce replaced legislative divorce and many states adopted permissive divorce statutes. If marriages were to rest on mutual affection, then divorce had to serve as a safety valve for loveless and abusive marriages. In 1867 the country had ten thousand divorces, and the rate rose steadily: from 3.1 per hundred marriages in 1870, to 4.5 per hundred in 1880, to 5.9 per hundred in 1890.

A growing awareness of wife beating and child abuse also occurred in the early nineteenth century, which may have reflected an actual increase in assaults and murders committed against blood relatives. As families became less subject to communal oversight, as traditional assumptions about patriarchal authority were challenged, and as an expanding market economy produced new kinds of stress, the family could become an arena of explosive tension, conflict, and violence. Such reform movements as temperance, abolition, and women’s rights helped to identify family violence as a social problem.

No group faced graver threats to family life than enslaved African Americans. An owner’s debt, death, or hope of profit could break up slave families. Between 1790 and 1860, a million slaves were sold from the upper to the lower South, and another two million were sold within states. As a result, about a third of all slave marriages were broken by sale and half of all slave children were sold from their parents. Even in the absence of sale, slave spouses often resided on separate plantations or on separate units of a single plantation. On larger plantations, one father in three had a different owner than his wife; on smaller plantations and farms, the figure was two in three. Compared to free families, slave families appear to have been far less patriarchal. Enslaved wives and mothers were much more likely than their free counterparts to “head” their household or to share familial responsibilities with their husbands.

Despite the refusal of southern law to provide legal protection to slave marriages, most slaves married and lived with the same spouse until death. Ties to the immediate family stretched outward to an involved network of extended kin. Whenever children were sold to neighboring plantations, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins took on the function of parents. When blood relatives were not present, “fictive” kin cared for and protected children. Godparenting, ritual coparenting, and informal adoption of orphans were common. To sustain a sense of family identity over time, slaves named children after grandparents and other kin; they also passed down family surnames, usually the name of an ancestor’s owner rather than of the current owner.

Over the past three centuries, Americans have gone through recurrent waves of moral panic over the family. During the late nineteenth century, panic gripped the country over family violence and child neglect, declining middle-class birth rates, divorce, and infant mortality. Among the factors that contributed to a sense of panic were wrenching economic shifts as well as a rapid increase in immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, Asia, and Mexico. Eleven states made desertion and nonsupport of families a felony, and three states instituted the whipping post where wife beaters were punished with floggings. To combat the decline in middle-class birth rates, the Comstock Act restricted the interstate distribution of birth control information and contraceptive devices, while state laws criminalized abortion. In a failed attempt to reduce the divorce rate, many states reduced the grounds for divorce and extended waiting periods.

Mounting public anxiety led to increased government involvement in the family and the emergence of distinct groups— including doctors, juvenile court judges, psychologists, and social workers—offering expert advice about child rearing, parenting, and social policy. To combat the exploitation and improve the well-being of children, reformers pressed for compulsory school attendance laws, child labor restrictions, playgrounds, pure milk laws, and “widow’s” pensions to permit poor children to remain with their mothers. There were also concerted efforts to eliminate male-only forms of recreation, campaigns that achieved success with the destruction of red-light districts during the 1910s and of saloons following adoption of Prohibition in 1918.

To strengthen and stabilize families, marriage counselors promoted a new ideal: the companionate family. It held that husbands and wives were to be “friends and lovers” and that parents and children should be “pals.” This new ideal stressed a couple’s relationship and family togetherness as the primary source of emotional satisfaction and personal happiness. Privacy was a hallmark of the new family ideal. Unlike the nineteenth-century family, which took in boarders, lodgers, and aging or unmarried relatives, the companionate family was envisioned as a more isolated and more important unit, the primary focus of emotional life.

During the Great Depression, unemployment, lower wages, and the demands of needy relatives tore at the fabric of family life. Many Americans were forced to share living quarters with relatives, delay marriage, and postpone having children. The divorce rate fell, since fewer people could afford one, but desertions soared. By 1940, 1.5 million married couples were living apart. Many families coped by returning to a cooperative family economy. Many children took part-time jobs, and many wives supplemented the family income by taking in sewing or laundry, setting up parlor groceries, or housing lodgers.

World War II also subjected families to severe strain. During the war, families faced a severe shortage of housing, a lack of schools and child-care facilities, and prolonged separation from loved ones. Five million “war widows” ran their homes and cared for children alone, while millions of older, married women went to work in war industries. The stresses of wartime contributed to an upsurge in the divorce rate. Tens of thousands of young people became latchkey children, and rates of juvenile delinquency, unwed pregnancy, and truancy rose.

The late 1940s and 1950s witnessed a sharp reaction to the stresses of the depression and war. If any decade has come to symbolize the traditional family, it is the 1950s. The average age of marriage for women dropped to twenty; divorce rates stabilized; and the birthrate doubled. Yet the images of family life that appeared on television were misleading; only 60 percent of children spent their childhoods in male breadwinner, female homemaker households. The democratization of the family ideal reflected social and economic circumstances that are unlikely to be duplicated: a reaction against the hardships of the depression and the upheavals of World War II; the affordability of single-family track homes in the booming suburbs; and rapidly rising real incomes.

The postwar family was envisioned not simply as a haven in a heartless world, like the Victorian family, but as an alternative world of satisfaction and intimacy. But this family, like its Victorian counterpart, had its own contradictions and latent tensions. Youthful marriages, especially among women who cut short their education, contributed to a rising divorce rate in the 1960s. The compression of childbearing into the first years of marriage meant that many wives were free of the most intense child rearing responsibilities by their early or mid thirties. Combined with the ever rising costs of maintaining a middle-class standard of living, this encouraged a growing number of married women to enter the workplace; as early as 1960 a third of married middle-class women were working part- or full-time. The expansion of schooling, combined with growing affluence, contributed to the emergence of youth culture, separate and apart from the family. Thus, the seeds of radical familial changes were planted in the 1950s.

Since the 1960s, families have grown smaller and more diverse. At the same time, more adults live outside a family, as single young adults, divorced singles, or older people who have lost a spouse. As recently as 1960, 70 percent of the households in the United States consisted of a breadwinner father, a homemaker mother, and two or more kids. Today, the male breadwinner, female homemaker family makes up only a small proportion of American households. More common are two-earner families, where both the husband and wife work; single-parent families, usually headed by a mother; reconstituted families, formed after divorce; and empty-nest families, created after children have left home. Declining birth and marriage rates, the rapid entry of married women into the workforce, a rising divorce rate, and an aging population all contributed to this domestic revolution.

During the 1970s and 1980s, a political crusade emerged among many Americans who feared that climbing rates of divorce, working mothers, and single parents represented a breakdown of traditional family values. These people built a powerful political coalition consisting of religious conservatives, traditional political conservatives, and single-issue groups concerned about legalized abortion, ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, feminism, sex education, gay and lesbian rights, school busing for racial integration, and expanding welfare rolls. Among other things, this movement sought to restore prayer in schools, screen textbooks, limit teenagers’ access to contraception, and reverse the Supreme Court’s decisions on abortion.

Today, the angry controversy that surrounded child care and family issues in the 1980s and early 1990s has quieted as both political parties have pledged support for the American family. Yet beneath the surface calm, serious differences of opinion remain. The electorate remains deeply divided over such specific issues as abortion, provision of family planning materials to adolescents, tax treatment of working mothers, and federal funding and standards for day care. These policy disagreements, in turn, reflect divergent moral judgments on such issues as women’s rights, the prerogatives of parents, the authority of husbands, adolescent sexuality, the rights of children, and mother-centered versus public approaches to child care.

Despite the changes that have taken place in private life, the family is not a dying institution. About 90 percent of Americans marry and bear children, and most Americans who divorce eventually remarry. In many respects, family life is actually stronger today than it was in the past. While divorce rates are higher, fewer families suffer from the death of a parent or a child. Infants were four times more likely to die in the 1950s than today, and older children were three times more likely. Because of declining death rates, couples are more likely to grow into old age together than in the past, and children are more likely to have living grandparents. Meanwhile, parents are making a greater emotional and economic investment in their children. Lower birth rates mean that parents can devote more attention and greater financial resources to each child. Fathers have become more actively involved in child rearing.

Nevertheless, the profound changes&emdash;such as the integration of married women into the paid labor force&emdash;that have taken place in the late twentieth century resulted in a “crisis of caregiving.” As the proportion of single-parent and two-worker families has increased, many parents have found it increasingly difficult to balance the demands of work and family life. Working parents not only care for their young children, but, because of increasing life spans, for aging parents as well. In an attempt to deal with these needs, the United States adopted the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, entitling eligible employees to take up to twelve weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave in a twelve-month period for specified family and medical reasons. But because leaves are unpaid, few can afford to take advantage of this law, and those who can were often given leaves before the law was enacted. Yet despite widespread rhetoric about promoting family values, many “reforms,” such as the repeal of Aid to Families with Dependent Children under the Clinton administration, had the effect of weakening social supports for families. Whether the early twenty-first century will witness a wave of family-related reforms comparable to the Progressive Era remains to be seen. •

Steven Mintz is the senior associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History at the University of Houston. His books include Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (1988), coauthored with Susan Kellogg.