Chapter Three Structures and Meanings in a Gendered Family History

       Merry E. Wiesner‐Hanks

      What is a family? Anyone familiar with current political and social debates in many parts of the world knows that this is an extremely controversial question, as issues such as marriage equality, surrogate motherhood, grandparents’ rights, trans parenthood, access to contraception, and others related to defining and regulating families highlight deep differences of opinion. Such controversies also make plain that the answer to this question is based in culture, and thus in history. Despite this, just as traditional history paid little attention to women, it also paid little attention to families, other than ruling dynasties, until the early 1970s. Initially, traditional historians regarded women’s and family history as the same thing, presuming that only women had families, and only within the family context were women’s roles important enough to warrant attention. For example, few biographies of the French thinker Jean‐Jacques Rousseau mentioned that he had several children out of wedlock with a servant and sent them all to foundling hospitals; until the last several decades, no studies questioned how his domestic arrangements might have shaped his ideas. By contrast, the fact that they were unmarried and childless was never left out of discussions of Queen Elizabeth I or Susan B. Anthony.

The assertion of a distinction between women’s and family history is made difficult not only by the millennia‐long tradition in which neither was part of “history,” but also by the fact that for most cultures in most periods, women’s experience has been linked to family life more than men’s. There are exceptions, but especially in written records, women’s familial relationships are expressed in law codes, religious prescriptions, taboos, political conceptualizations, and social norms. Those relationships were not necessarily private, as we would understand that term, and the women themselves may have weighted aspects of their identity differently, yet even in cultures in which men were also viewed as part of a family group, a woman’s relation to birth, marriage, and family defined her place in that culture more than did a man’s. In addition, factors relating to the family that shaped male experience, such as inheritance of a name or property, were seen as markers of class status, not family relationships.

      Women’s history and family history are now more than forty years old, so perhaps the assertion of difference can be made less forcefully, particularly given the ways each intersects with the younger field of gender history. Actually, as with so much in both women’s and family history, it is self‐evident that both men and women of the past had families (however they were defined), and that their experiences as members of families shaped other aspects of their lives, although quite differently for boys and girls, men and women. Because the family or kinship group was the earliest form of social organization, gender prescriptions within the family have been the most enduring and difficult to change. Moreover, the consequences of breaking with prescribed patterns of family life might include disinheritance, social ostracism, outlawry, imprisonment, or even death. This chapter will touch on many of these topics, including the sources of family history, the structure and function of the family, relations within the family, and the family’s relationship to the state.

Sources for a Gendered Family History

      Family history initially flourished at a time when historians were beginning to use computers to handle large amounts of quantitative data, quantifiable sources, and quantitative methods. Typical of this early work was that produced by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, which explored demographic issues and population trends. This type of family history is portrayed in charts and graphs of quantitative measures such as average age at marriage, average number and frequency of children, rates of divorce and remarriage, birth and death rates, population growth and decline, fertility rates, life expectancy, and so on.

      Among premodern societies, the Andean peoples of South America were unique in their attention to keeping a careful census, recorded on a stringed device called a quipu. The masses provided work and goods, called mita, to the Inca emperor, the nobility, clergy, the gods, and state enterprises, always in rotation. The quipu keeper required a careful census in order to equally distribute the labor tithe, the military, and public welfare throughout the vast empire. Unfortunately, the knowledge of how to read quipus was lost after the Spanish conquest, but scholars today are beginning to decipher the information they contain, and may be able to use them as sources in the future. Otherwise, for the premodern period quantitative sources are generally available only in very specific cases, such as cities that took population counts during wartime, or the genealogies of noble houses. Rudimentary records of births, marriages, and deaths began in the fifteenth century in some parts of Europe. In the eighteenth century governments began expanding the recording of demographic statistics, part of what the French philosopher Michel Foucault has termed “bio‐power” or “bio‐politics.” The state’s exercise of such biopolitical measures has increased broadly from the eighteenth century to today.

Quantitative family history statistically differentiates between men and women, engendering a clear demarcation in the rhythms and patterns of family life. Age at first marriage varied for men and women, as did life expectancy, rate of remarriage after widowhood or divorce, and amount of inheritance. In general, polygamy more likely involved men with multiple wives than women with multiple husbands; kin networks pertaining to the father’s family (agnatic kin) were more important than those involving the mother’s (morganatic kin); inheritance may have been divided among children, but prioritized a son and in some cultures, such as the Bedouin of the Middle East, only the birth of a son created a true family that was counted separately. In various parts of the world, girls were not counted as regularly as boys because daughters would not inherit family property and were not considered a significant part of the family.

      Definitions of various population groups – those who were “working” and those “not working,” for example – were based on the male experience, so that a married woman who raised chickens, did laundry, and took in boarders was defined as “not working” in census records. Who was “married” and who was “not married” was dependent on the judgment of those keeping the records. Thus consensual unions not officially recorded as “marriage” may well have been regarded as such by the people involved and their neighbors. For example, since the Catholic Church charged for marriage ceremonies, as for other sacraments (baptism, first communion, funerals, etc.), poorer people in the Catholic lands of Latin America often cohabited for years and only married when the need arose to legitimize offspring.

      Some of the earliest quantitative records have been used with other types of sources to examine large‐scale family patterns. For example, historians have identified a marriage pattern that emerged in northwestern Europe (England, the Netherlands, parts of France, Germany, and Scandinavia) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in which couples waited until their mid‐ or late twenties to marry, long beyond the age of sexual maturity, and then immediately set up an independent household. Husbands were likely to be only two or three years older than their wives at first marriage, and a significant number of people never married at all, in some places perhaps as high as 25 percent (Seccombe, 1992). This contrasted with the standard premodern marriage pattern in other parts of the world where marriage was nearly universal, generally between teenagers who lived with one set of parents for a long time, or between a man in his late twenties or thirties and a much younger woman, with households again containing several generations.

      Exactly why the distinctive northwestern European marriage pattern developed is not clear, but at its core was the idea that couples should be economically independent before they married, with some money and skills developed during long periods as servants or workers in other households. Religious and political leaders who valued male‐headed marital households passed laws forbidding unmarried people to live on their own, sometimes limiting these to women, but sometimes including men