Dictionary:

family

  (făm'ə-lē, făm'lē)

1. 1. A fundamental social group in society typically consisting of one or two parents and their children.
   2. Two or more people who share goals and values, have long-term commitments to one another, and reside usually in the same dwelling place.
2. All the members of a household under one roof.
3. A group of persons sharing common ancestry. See Usage Note at collective noun.
4. Lineage, especially distinguished lineage.
5. A locally independent organized crime unit, as of the Cosa Nostra.
6. 1. A group of like things; a class.
   2. A group of individuals derived from a common stock: the family of human beings.
7. Biology. A taxonomic category of related organisms ranking below an order and above a genus. A family usually consists of several genera.
8. Linguistics. A group of languages descended from the same parent language, such as the Indo-European language family.
9. Mathematics. A set of functions or surfaces that can be generated by varying the parameters of a general equation.
10. Chemistry. A group of elements with similar chemical properties.
11. Chemistry. A vertical column in the periodic table of elements.

1. Of or having to do with a family: family problems.
2. Being suitable for a family: family movies.

[Middle English familie, from Latin familia, household, servants of a household, from famulus, servant.]

A Household consisting of two or more related people.
Example: Among the 105.5 million households in the United States in 2002, 72 million were families. These consisted of 54 million married-couple families, 13 million female-headed households, and 4 million male-headed households.

noun

1. A group of usually related people living together as a unit: house, household, ménage. See group.
2. A group of people sharing common ancestry: clan, house, kindred, lineage, stock, tribe. Idioms: flesh and blood, kith and kin. See kin.
3. One's relatives collectively: kin, kindred, kinfolk. See kin.
4. One's ancestors or their character or one's ancestral derivation: ancestry, birth, blood, bloodline, descent, extraction, genealogy, line, lineage, origin, parentage, pedigree, seed, stock. See kin, precede/follow.

adjective

Of or relating to the family or household: domestic, familial, home, homely, household. See kin, group.

Definition

A family is a group of two people or more related by marriage, blood relation, or adoption and who live together. The immediate family traditionally consists of parents and their offspring.

Description

No other factor influences children as deeply as their families. As a social unit with genetic, emotional, and legal dimensions, the family can foster the child's growth, development, health, and well-being. The family can provide the child with affection, a sense of belonging, and validation. Every area of a child's life is affected by the family.

Family Functions

The family has basic functions. In order for the family to meet a child's psychological needs, its members must be nurturing, convey mutual respect, provide for intimacy, and engage in bonding and attachment. The family also socializes the child, guiding the child to be members of the society beyond the family. The family conveys religious and cultural beliefs and traditions to the next generation. The family is the child's source of economic resources, which meet the child's various physical needs for food, shelter, and clothing. Then, too, the family sees to it that the child receives health and dental care.

Demographics

Family structure is dynamic. In 1970, traditional nuclear families made up 40 percent of all households, but only 26 percent of all households in 1991. In addition, roles have changed within the nuclear family. The role of provider, once assigned mainly to the father, gradually came in the early 2000s to be shared by both parents, and as of 2004 many fathers are more active in parenting their children than their fathers were in parenting them.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, increasing numbers of families did not fit the nuclear profile. Some families have only one parent; others are combinations based on second marriages; still others are comprised of unmarried couples living with or without children.

The number of single-parent families increased from 12.9 percent of all families in 1970 to 29 percent in 1991 and 28 percent (20 million) in 1997. The increases are mostly the result of the increase in the divorce rate and the increase in births to single mothers. Many women are single parents and heads of households, and many of these live in poverty.

Common Problems

Poverty is the single most powerful risk for families and children and affects families in many ways. Poverty exerts its greatest impact during children's preschool years, the age group in which children are most likely to live in poverty. Poor families are less likely or able to provide educational and cultural experiences for their children.

Parents' economic status (education, occupation, and income) controls the parent's ability provide adequate housing, a safe environment, and responsible child care while the parents work. Availability of and quality of social support influence family life and well-being as individuals cope with raising children in poverty.

Unemployment by either or both parents causes financial hardships and social and emotional strain, which can disrupt family life. The quality of the parent's work and the satisfaction the parent gets from it affects the parents and, in turn, their effectiveness in parenting.

Child abuse and neglect is a destructive force in families and results in children's anxiety, depression, lowered self-esteem, and a decline in school performance. Similarly, children who witness domestic violence suffer some of these same consequences.

Parental Concerns

Parents are troubled by children who are out of control and have problem behaviors such as running away, truancy, school failings or suspensions, and delinquency. Youths who are habitually truant may need school counseling. Truancy specialists provide topic-focused workshops and referrals to family counseling; court intervention is sometimes necessary.

The frequency of divorce and remarriage produces stepfamilies with their own difficulties and challenges. The new stepfamily members may have no shared family history or common lifestyle, and members may have different beliefs. In addition, children may feel torn between the custodial parent, with whom they live, and the noncustodial parent, with whom they visit.

Economic stress affects the whole family. When financial problems occur, the family may be forced to move for employment. Families have lifestyle commitments and ties to their community. When these ties break-up, children, especially adolescents, are likely to experience a loss of hope. Parental career disappointments can cause anxiety and self-doubt in children. Family economic stress may cause parental substance abuse, which can lead to school distraction and declining academic performance in young people.

Finally, children may feel isolated from parents and friends. The most stressful time for a family can be the period preceding a possible foreclosure or business failure. Parents may make desperate attempts to save their source of income. They may also be trying to keep their loss hidden from the rest of the community. Such behaviors can isolate children from parents who are too busy to notice and from neighbors who are not even aware of their trouble.

The long-term effects of continued family stress can cause physical and psychological problems for children. If problems occur often and if several problems appear at the same time, serious attention should be given the child.

When to Call the Doctor

Parents should call their pediatrician if the child shows unhealthy physical or emotional symptoms that may be in response to family problems or transitions. Physical problems may include weight gain or weight loss, or unexplained stomachaches or headaches. Emotional problems may cause a decline in academic performance, breaking curfews, or getting into trouble in school or with the law.

Resources

Books

Bernstein, Bob. Families of Value: Intimate Profiles of Pioneering Lesbian and Gay Parents. New York: Avalon Publishing Group, 2005.

Cunningham-Burley, Sarah, et al. Families, Relationships, and Boundaries. Livingston, NJ: Policy Press, 2005.

Evans, Tony. Divorce and Remarriage. Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 2003.

Everett, Craig A. The Consequences of Divorce: Economic and Custodial Impact on Children and Adults. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 2003.

Forbes, L. S. A Natural History of Families. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Hansen, Karen V. Not-so-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Jeynes, William. Divorce, Family Structure, and the Academic Success of Children. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 2002.

McKenry, Patrick C., et al. Families and Change: Coping with Stressful Events and Transitions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005.

Organizations

American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. 3615 Wisconsin Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20016–3007. Web site: www.aacap.org/.

[Article by: Aliene S. Linwood, RN, DPA, FACHE]

For more information on family, visit Britannica.com.

In urban planning, one or more persons occupying a single living unit.

Myths, misconceptions, and misleading generalizations distort Americans' understanding of the history of the family. Many Americans mistakenly believe that earlier families were more stable and more uniform than modern ones and that divorce, domestic violence, and single parenthood are modern developments. In fact, American family life always has been diverse and vulnerable to disruption. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had the highest divorce rate in the Western world; one child in ten lived in a single-parent home; and approximately 100,000 children lived in orphanages, in many cases because their mothers and fathers could not support them.

Among the most potent myths is the notion that the traditional family in American history consisted of a breadwinner husband and a fulltime mother. In fact, it was not until the 1920s that a majority of American families consisted of a breadwinner husband, a homemaker wife, and two or more children attending school.

Despite the romanticized images of family life of the past, family well-being has experienced several advances. These include the decline in the frequency with which families are broken by a member's premature death and the fact that smaller families allow parents to devote more attention and resources to each child. A lack of historical perspective nevertheless has interfered with the acceptance of families that diverge from the dominant norms.

Families in Colonial America

Since the early eighteenth century, families have undergone far-reaching changes in their roles and functions, sizes and compositions, and emotional and power dynamics. Whereas twentieth-century families primarily functioned to raise children and to provide emotional support for their members, colonial families were first and foremost productive units. Colonial families performed a wide range of functions that schools, hospitals, insurance companies, and factories subsequently assumed. Colonial families educated children in basic literacy and the rudiments of religion, transmitted occupational skills, and cared for the elderly and the infirm.

The composition of colonial families was elastic and porous, reflecting both a high mortality rate and households' expanding or contracting labor needs. Even in the most healthful regions, during the seventeenth century three children in ten died before reaching adulthood, and most children had lost at least one parent by the time they married. Consequently, a majority of colonial Americans spent some time in a stepfamily. Most children left their parental homes before puberty to work as servants or as apprentices in other households.

Colonial society attached little value to domestic 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 held patriarchal authority. He alone sat in an armchair, his symbolic throne, while other household members sat on benches or stools. He taught children to write, led household prayers, and carried on correspondence with other family members. Domestic conduct manuals were addressed to him, not to his wife. Legally he was the primary parent. He received custody of children after divorce or separation, and in colonial New England he was authorized to correct and punish insubordinate wives, disruptive children, and unruly servants. He also was responsible for placing his children in a calling and for consenting to his children's marriages. His control over inheritance kept grown sons dependent upon him for years, while they waited for the landed property needed to establish an independent household.

In practice, gender boundaries were not as rigid as this patriarchal ideology suggests. Colonial women shouldered many duties later 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 they devoted to child care, and many child-rearing tasks were delegated to servants or older daughters. Ironically, the decline of patriarchal ideology accompanied the emergence of a much more rigid gender division of labor within the home.

Themes and Variations

Profound differences existed among the family patterns in New England, the middle colonies, and the Chesapeake and southernmost colonies. In New England the patriarchal conception of family life began to break down as early as the 1670s. In the Chesapeake area and the Carolinas a more stable patriarchal structure of relationships did not emerge 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 those of the twentieth century. A healthful environment contributed to a high birthrate (more than half of New England children had nine or more siblings) and the first society in history in which grandparents were common. In the Chesapeake region, 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. In seventeenth-century Virginia, half of all marriages were broken within eight years, and most families consisted of an assortment of stepparents, stepchildren, wards, half brothers, and half sisters. Not until the late eighteenth century could a father expect to pass property directly to his sons.

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

The Emergence of the "republican" Family

During the eighteenth century, New England fathers exerted less influence than previously over their children's choices of occupations or marriage partners and over their 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 eighteenth century saw repeated attacks upon patriarchal authority by such popular writers as Samuel Richardson, Oliver Goldsmith, and Henry Fielding, who rejected the idea that a father should dictate a child's career or choice of a marriage partner. Popular literature also asserted 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 eroded paternal authority. Rapid population growth, which divided inherited family land into 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.

By the early nineteenth century a new kind of urban middle-class family emerged as the workplace moved some distance from the household and as unmarried women working in factories assumed many of the productive tasks of married women. A new pattern of marriage based primarily on companionship and affection arose, as did a new division of domestic roles, which assigned the wife to care full time for her children and to maintain her home. At the same time a new conception of childhood emerged that viewed children as special creatures who needed attention, love, and time to mature. Spouses began to display affection more openly, and parents began to keep their children home longer than in the past. By the mid-nineteenth century a new emphasis on family privacy expelled apprentices from the middle-class home, increased the separation of servants from the family, and spawned family vacations and family-oriented celebrations, such as birthday parties and decorating the Christmas tree.

The new urban middle-class family was based on the 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 was beset by latent tensions. Although a father might think of himself as breadwinner and household head and might consider his wife and children his dependents, in fact his connection to his family was becoming essentially economic. He might serve as disciplinarian of last resort, but his wife was now the primary parent. The courts recognized this fact by developing the "tender years" doctrine that young children should stay with their mothers following a divorce or separation.

Another source of tension in the middle-class family involved the expectation that women should sacrifice their individuality for their husband and children's sakes. During their youth, women received an unprecedented degree of freedom. Increasing numbers attended school and worked, at least temporarily, outside a family unit. After marriage they were to subordinate their needs to those of other family members. This abrupt transition led many women to experience a "marriage trauma" as they decided whether or not to marry. Women's subordinate status was partially cloaked by an ideology of separate spheres, which stressed that women were purer than men and were supreme in matters of the home and religion, but the contradiction with the ideal of equality remained.

Meanwhile, children remained home far longer than in the past, often into their late teens and their twenties. The emerging ideal was a protected childhood, in which children were shielded 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 demonstrate their growing maturity. The result was that the transition from childhood and youth to adulthood became increasingly disjunctive and conflict riven.

These contradictions contributed to three striking developments: a sharp fall in the birthrate, a marked rise in the divorce rate, and a heightened cultural awareness of domestic violence. Nineteenth-century women rapidly reduced the birthrate. Instead of giving birth to seven to ten children, middle-class mothers by the century's end gave birth on average to only three. The decline in the birthrate did not depend on new technologies; rather, it involved the concerted use of such older methods as withdrawal and periodic abstinence, supplemented by abortions induced chemically or by trauma to the uterus. No longer were women regarded simply as childbearing chattel or were children regarded as economic assets. The new view was that children required greater parental investments in the form of education and maternal attention.

During the nineteenth century the divorce rate steadily rose, as judicial divorce replaced legislative divorce and many states allowed judges to grant divorce on any grounds they deemed fit. According to a new cultural ideal, marriage rested on mutual affection, and divorce was a safety valve for loveless and abusive marriages. In 1867 the country had 10,000 divorces, and the rate doubled between 1870 and 1900. From 3.1 divorces for every 100 marriages in 1870, the figure climbed to 7.9 in 1900.

The sensitivity toward wife beating and child abuse also grew during the nineteenth century. This sensitivity partly reflected new notions about women's purity and childhood innocence, and it also may have reflected an actual increase in assaults committed against blood relatives. Families became less subject to communal over-sight; traditional assumptions about patriarchal authority were challenged; and an increasingly mobile, market oriented society generated new kinds of stresses. All of these factors turned some families into arenas of tension, conflict, and violence.

Slave Families

No other group faced graver threats to family life than enslaved African Americans. Debt, an owner's death, or the prospects of profit could break up slave families. Between 1790 and 1860 a million slaves were transported from the Upper South to the Lower South, and another 2 million slaves were sold within states. About a third of slave marriages were broken by sale, and half of all slave children were sold away from their parents. Even in the absence of sale, spouses often resided on separate plantations or on separate units of a single plantation. On larger plantations, one husband in three had a different owner than his wife; on smaller plantations and farms the figure was two in three.

Despite the refusal of southern law to legally sanction slave marriages, most slaves married and lived with the same spouse until their deaths. 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 functions of parents. When blood relatives were not present, "fictive" kin cared for and protected children. God parenting, ritual co parenting, and informal adoption of orphans were common on slave plantations. To sustain a sense of family identity over time, slaves named children after grandparents and other kin. Slaves also passed down family names, usually the name of an ancestor's owner rather than the current owner's name.

Working-Class and Immigrant Families

While urban middle-class families emphasized a sole male breadwinner, a rigid division of gender roles, and a protected childhood, working-class and immigrant families, who made up a majority of urban families, stressed a cooperative family economy. All family members were expected to contribute to the family's well-being. Many wives performed work, such as taking in laundry or boarders, inside the home. Children were expected to defer marriage, remain at home, and contribute to the family's income.

Two distinctive types of immigrants arrived in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: migrant workers, many of whom left wives and children in their home countries and who planned to return home; and immigrants who arrived in family units, often members of ethnic and religious minorities who were persecuted in their homelands. In each case, immigrants often moved for family reasons—to earn enough money to marry, acquire a home, purchase a farm, or find their family a new home offering freedom from persecution. Kinship also played an important role in helping immigrants adapt to a new environment. Much of the movement of peoples involved a process called "chain migration," in which clusters of individuals from a common kin group or place of origin moved to a common destination. The earlier migrants provided later migrants with aid and information.

It was not until the 1920s that the cooperative family economy gave way to the family wage economy, in which a male breadwinner was expected to support his family on his wages alone. The establishment of seniority systems and compulsory school attendance laws and increased real wages as a result of World War I made this possible. The New Deal further solidified the male breadwinner family by prohibiting child labor, expanding workmen's compensation, and targeting jobs programs at male workers.

Early-Twentieth-Century Families

During the late nineteenth century a moral panic gripped the country over domestic violence, divorce, infant mortality, and declining middle-class birthrates. Eleven states made desertion and nonsupport of families a felony, and three states instituted the whipping post to punish wife beaters with floggings. To combat the decline in middle-class birthrates, the 1873 Comstock Act restricted the interstate distribution of birth control information and contraceptive devices, while new state laws criminalized abortion. In a failed attempt to reduce the divorce rate, many states restricted the grounds for divorce and extended waiting periods before a divorce.

Mounting public anxiety led to increased government involvement in the family and the emergence of specialists offering expert advice about child rearing, pediatrics, and social policy. To combat exploitation and to improve the well-being of children, reformers pressed for compulsory school attendance laws, child labor restrictions, playgrounds, pure milk laws, and "widows" pensions to permit poor children to remain with their mothers. They also made concerted efforts to eliminate male-only forms of recreation, campaigns that achieved some success when red-light districts were outlawed during the 1910s and saloons became illegal following ratification of the Prohibition Amendment in 1918.

During the 1920s, in an effort to strengthen family ties, marriage counselors promoted a new ideal, the companionate family, which held that husbands and wives were to be "friends and lovers" and that parents and children should be "pals." This new ideal stressed the couple relationship and family togetherness as the primary sources of emotional satisfaction and personal happiness. Unlike the nineteenth-century family, which took in boarders, lodgers, or aging and unmarried relatives, the companionate family was envisioned as a more isolated unit.

During the Great Depression, unemployment, lower wages, and the demands of needy relatives tore at the fabric of family life. Many Americans shared living quarters with relatives, delayed marriage, and postponed 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, 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. Wartime stresses 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 all rose.

The postwar era witnessed a sharp reaction to the depression and wartime stress. The average age of marriage for women dropped to twenty, divorce rates stabilized, and the birthrate doubled. Circumstances unlikely to be duplicated, including rapidly rising real incomes; the GI Bill, which allowed many young men to purchase single-family track homes in newly built suburbs; and relatively modest expectations for personal fulfillment bred by the Great Depression contributed to the emphasis on family togetherness.

For many Americans the 1950s family represented a cultural ideal. Yet it is important to recognize that the images of family life that appeared on 1950s television were misleading. Only 60 percent of children born during that decade spent their childhoods in a male-breadwinner, female-homemaker household. The most rapid increase in unwed pregnancies took place between 1940 and 1958, not in the libertine 1960s.

The postwar family contained the seeds of its own transformation. Youthful marriages, especially by women who cut short their educations, contributed to a surge in divorces during 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 middle thirties. Combined with the rising costs of maintaining a middle-class standard of living, this freedom encouraged many married women to enter the workplace. As early as 1960, one-third of married middle-class women worked part or full time. Mean-while, the expansion of schooling combined with growing affluence contributed to the emergence of a youth culture separate and apart from the family.

Late-Twentieth-Century Families

In 1960, 70 percent of American households consisted of a go-to-work dad, a stay-at-home mom, and two or more kids. By the end of the twentieth century less than 10 percent of American households fit that profile. Dual-earner families, in which both husband and wife worked; single-parent families, usually headed by a mother; reconstituted families formed after divorce; and empty nests after children left home became more common. Between 1960 and 1980 the birthrate fell by half; the divorce rate and the proportion of working mothers doubled, as did the number of single-parent homes; and the number of couples cohabitating outside of wedlock quadrupled.

By the end of the century two-thirds of all married women with children worked outside the home, compared to just 16 percent in 1950. Half of all marriages ended in divorce, twice the rate in 1966 and three times the rate in 1950, while three children in ten were born out of wedlock. Over a quarter of all children lived with only one parent, and fewer than half lived with both their biological mothers and fathers.

This "domestic revolution" produced alarm, anxiety, and apprehension. It inspired family values crusaders to condemn careerist mothers, absent fathers, single parents, and unwed parents as the root cause of such social ills as persistent poverty, drug abuse, academic failure, and juvenile crime. Many social conservatives called for enactment of "covenant" marriage laws making it more difficult to obtain divorces.

Historical perspective shows that many fears about the family's future were exaggerated. Despite upheavals in living arrangements, 90 percent of Americans married and had children, and most Americans who divorced eventually married again. In many respects family life became stronger than it was in the past. Fathers became more actively involved in child rearing than ever before; infant and child death rates fell by three-fourths in the last half of the century; and children were more likely to have living grandparents.

Nevertheless, at the beginning of the twenty-first century the family confronted unique stresses. As the proportion of single-parent and dual-earner families increased, working parents found it increasingly difficult to balance the demands of work and family. Because of increasing life spans, many parents cared for their own aging parents as well as for their children. In an attempt to deal with this "crisis of care giving," the U.S. Congress 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. Despite widespread rhetoric about promoting family values, the welfare and immigration reforms of 1996 weakened social supports for families.

Bibliography

Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

———. The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America's Changing Families. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Coontz, Stephanie, Maya Parson, and Gabrielle Raley, eds. American Families: A Multicultural Reader. New York: Rout-ledge, 1998.

Degler, Carl N. At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Demos, John. A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

———. Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Gordon, Linda. Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Greven, Philip J., Jr. Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970.

Grossberg, Michael. Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Hareven, Tamara K. Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship Between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Hawes, Joseph M., and Elizabeth I. Nybakken, eds. American Families: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Mintz, Steven, and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: Free Press, 1988.

Ryan, Mary P. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Schwartz, Marie Jenkins. Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Stevenson, Brenda E. Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

—Steven Mintz

Family is usually defined as a group of persons related by marriage or blood ties, or even by adoption—and also by the family bond.

Psychoanalysis contains an implicit concept of family. It emphasizes the functions of each family member and the prescriptions and prohibitions governing the relationships between them, which influence conflicts, fantasies, and the psychic agencies. The family is a unit that consists of something more than a series of individuals; it is a group to which they belong and that provides support with its rules, which are as obscure and powerful as those of the unconscious and that thus ensure the family's coherence and cohesion. The family has many purposes: providing for its members' material and psychic needs and conceiving and developing the child until his accession as a subject. Each parent transmits a legacy that the child will have to negotiate in connection with its wishes. The family also has a function in terms of play, creating the space and time for leisure and reverie.

Before Freud, doctors took little interest in the family. The patient was studied in the present, without reference to childhood history, to the context in which he had developed, or to his father or mother, except to identify any hereditary predispositions that would reinforce the prevailing hypothesis concerning degeneration in mental patients. Freud raised the family to a preeminent position. However, after he quickly abandoned the seduction theory, the family headed by a seducer changed its status from a real entity to a theoretical fantasy. Freud still addressed the family as a real entity in the form of the primal horde (1912-1913a), with the authoritarian father put to death by his sons who were excluded from sharing the women. Freud subsequently returned to this hypothesis as to the origin of culture. For example, his group psychology (1921c) helped to explain family psychology. It may even be that he envisaged the functioning of the group and the crowd as an archaic family dominated by a leader (father) at whom his subjects direct their (ego) ideal cathexes. This model bears a curious resemblance to the family of ancient Rome, in which the father was the uncontested leader around whom the life of the household revolved. There are some revealing exceptions to this lack of interest in the real family, for instance, the account that the child's father gives to Freud in the analysis of "Little Hans" (1909b). It was not unusual at the time for a single analyst to treat different members of the same family.

As the real family receded from the picture, the representations of the parents gained ground, particularly through the increased interest in object relations. The shifting importance of the family relates to developments in the theory of trauma. However, the real problem is discovering not whether the original theory of trauma was definitively abandoned by Freud but whether it was given anything other than a factual status. It would then not simply be the presence of the object or the primary maternal care that contributed to introjections but the parent's subjectivity, desires, fantasies, and affects—in other words, the force of his unconscious desire, which orients the child's ideals by proposing an ideal that reinforces his self-esteem when he experiences it as an important part of himself and which awakens the life of the drives by seducing him.

The analytic theory of the family is based on this model. It addresses the way in which the reciprocal cathexes between its members are managed and mobilized. Donald Winnicott explained this unconscious functioning as a productive network of interrelated fantasies giving rise to a generative illusion on the part of the mother and her child, whose attuned psyches are connected by primary narcissistic identifications. This generates the concept of the bond: An object relationship would be inconceivable without its counterpart, in other words, without the cathexis that the external object creates of the former and applies to him (Eiguer, 1987).

Furthermore, the concept of the bond is complicated by the dual nature of filiation. The family romance (Freud, 1909c [1908]) is a fantasy in which the child gives himself another origin by imagining himself to be adopted or illegitimate. While assuaging his oedipal anxieties, he seeks, by inventing better or prestigious parents for himself, to preserve the previous idealization of his own parents. However, in giving himself other parents (or one other) than his own, he acknowledges an essential dimension of filiation: The parental roles are not equivalent to the procreative functions—they can even be independent of these. In matrilineal cultures in particular, the father's role of strict educator reverts to an uncle who is related to the mother. Although Freud's discovery relates to a set of fantasies, this nevertheless accords with the idea of an underlying imago-based structure. The transgenerational figure of the ancestor ultimately evokes this spiritual fatherhood in the other of the father, the fourth family member.

Bibliography

Eiguer, Alberto. (1987). La Parenté fantasmatique. Paris: Dunod.

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Laforgue, René. (1936). La névrose familiale (IXe Conférence des psychanalystes de langue française). Revue française c de psychanalyse, 9 (4), 327-359.

Winnicott, Donald W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment. London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

—ALBERTO EIGUER

There is no natural form of family, just as there has never been historical agreement about the meaning of the word itself. Throughout most of the early modern period "family" usually referred to all the members of one's household, including nonrelatives, such as servants and lodgers. At the same time some authors of the time clearly conceived of "family" in the sense of an extended kinship network. By the beginning of the nineteenth century both of these meanings had been largely supplanted by the modern sense of a cohabiting nuclear group of parents and children, although neither of the older meanings died out completely. Just as importantly there was no common family and household living arrangement during the early modern era and accordingly no clear transition from "traditional" to "modern" families but rather a plurality of household forms that continued to occur well into the nineteenth century.

Kinship and the Household Before the Early Modern Era

The early modern household represented the basic unit of residence, production, and reproduction in the city and country alike. Its common interchangeability with "family" throughout the period had deep and ancient roots. Almost all modern European languages trace their words for "family" back to the Latin famulus, 'slave', thus signifying the dependence of relatives and servants on the paterfamilias or head of the household. Government officials from antiquity through the early modern period shared this patriarchal view of all authority and accordingly considered the hearth, or household, the key unit in census and tax calculations. Thus for practical as well as ideological reasons, the premodern household was the family.

This residential sense of family, however, coexisted with a broader definition as an extended group of kin or all of the people related by blood. Ancient Greeks and Romans tended to stress the unilineal agnatic kinship group (Latin gens, plural gentes), tracing blood relations only through the father's ancestry, but still recognized the importance of relations through the mother's side (known as cognates). Latin, for instance, had one word for a paternal uncle (patruus) and another for a maternal uncle (avunculus). During the early and High Middle Ages the Germanic understanding of kinship as bilateral, involving blood relations from both parents' families, dominated. The marriage of two individuals from different clans (German Sippe; French race; Spanish raza; Italian razione) thus had repercussions far beyond the couple itself. Now each had new parents, siblings, and cousins who were to be treated as blood relations, even after the death of one of the spouses, at least according to canon or church law. Until at least the twelfth century this type of broadly defined family by extended kinship constituted the strongest social, economic, and political bond throughout Europe.

About this time many aristocrats, knights, and wealthy merchants returned to the ancient practice of a patrilineal definition of kinship, inventing permanent family surnames and coats of arms that were passed down from fathers to sons. By the end of the Middle Ages the patrilineal movement had spread throughout Europe. Admittedly some members of the lower orders did not adopt the practice of a first and a last name until governments compelled them to do so at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but these were rare exceptions to the rule. In most cases the family surname was inherited from the father though some islands of bilateral lineage survived, such as Castile, where men often took their aristocratic wives' surnames. Sometimes, as in parts of France, a surname went with an estate and thus could potentially come from a nonrelative.

The success of the patrilineal form of genealogy, however, did not eliminate the importance of all maternal as well as paternal relatives in matters of inheritance, guardianship, and of course affection. Canon law also made no distinctions between the two branches of family in its restriction of marriage to those individuals outside the fourth degree of kinship. Thus family in both its broadest definition of kinship and the narrower sense of household survived into the early modern era.

The Household Viewed from the Outside: Formation and Composition

The great diversity of marriage and inheritance practices in early modern Europe make generalizations about the formation and composition of the household extremely difficult if not impossible. There are, however, some notable characteristics, a few of them quite distinctive in history. In 1965 the historical demographer John Hajnal famously identified what he called "the European marriage pattern" of the early modern era. This apparently unique phenomenon, which he later revised to "the northwestern European pattern," originally described marriage practices in all the lands west of an imaginary line drawn between Saint Petersburg and Trieste. The two most striking aspects of this model were relatively late marriage (late twenties for men, early to midtwenties for women) and a high percentage (10 to 25 percent) of never married or widowed individuals. Hajnal theorized that various economic factors—such as extended journeyman status in a craft and a population surplus of marriageable girls and women—as well as religious factors (notably the Catholic celibate ideal) contributed to this pattern, which showed no signs of change before the nineteenth century.

The implications for household formation were significant. First, there was the size of the household itself. Late marriage tended to reduce the number of pregnancies and live births, the latter to about five to seven per woman by the age of forty. Given the high infant and child mortality rates, this meant a nuclear family under five per household most of the time—considerably smaller than was commonly assumed. At the same time the common practice of sending boys and girls by age twelve to apprentice-ships or domestic service meant that many youths would be considered part of a household other than their parents' for at least five and as much as fifteen years, depending on their securing permanent employment, property, or in the case of young women, a suitable dowry. Finally, the large number of single young people and widowed old people resulted in an unusually high proportion (by premodern standards) of lodgers or single households, especially in cities.

During the last forty years of the twentieth century, Hajnal's thesis underwent testing and considerable refinement. Reconstituting families by examining marriage contracts, wills, baptismal registers, tax records, and other legal documents, many historians have confirmed the frequency of late marriage and single households during the era, but they have also made clear that there was no one marriage pattern or household type among the diverse peoples of early modern Europe, east or west. Rather, certain ideal models tend to appear more in certain places and times, but even so there is a risk of distorting the variability of these household forms and their larger social implications in practice.

It is widely accepted that the most common type of household was the nuclear family, with evidence pointing well back to the Middle Ages, at least in England. Composed only of a married couple with or without children and possibly a servant, the nuclear family appears everywhere and at all times during the early modern era. If a son remained at home with his parents into adulthood and postponed setting up his own household, the nuclear unit became what is known as a stem family, also an apparently frequent model throughout Europe. When three generations of a family lived together or when any relatives other than the nuclear unit cohabited, the household became an extended family. This type of household, typically including one elderly grandparent, was most common in southern France and parts of German-speaking Europe, especially in the countryside. Households without a conjugal unit at the center, known as nonfamily households, were more common in cities. Households composed of several conjugal units—known to demographers as joint, multiple, or complex households and to early modern contemporaries as fraternas (Italian) or frérèches (French)—were most common in southern and eastern Europe. Again though, these geographical generalizations are merely crude approximations that are particularly difficult to support in the so-called transition zones of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, western Poland, and Estonia.

The erroneous presumption that most early modern families were large appears to have originated in the nineteenth century primarily as a reaction against the perceived dangers to the family (by then meaning the nuclear family) from industrialization and other modern developments. Numerous subsequent studies have instead confirmed Hajnal's conjecture that large or multiple households predominated only in eastern Europe, while small households remained the norm in the west. In Russia, for instance, three-quarters of all serf households through the eighteenth century were multiple, while in Scandinavia, England, and northern Germany the majority of households were nuclear, with only 2 percent of English households containing more than twelve people. In fact except for serfs or sharecroppers, whose landlords structurally encouraged large households, the poorer the family, the smaller the household.

The painstaking work of David Herlihy and Christine Klapisch-Zuber on a fifteenth-century Florentine tax census found that only one out of ten households had more than ten people and that most averaged four to five persons. Significantly those few large households in Florence, England, and elsewhere tended to be proportionate to personal wealth. Royal courts, for example, could encompass hundreds of retainers, and even the household of a seventeenth-century English lord might contain forty or more people (and many aristocrats maintained more than one residence). An ordinary English gentleman, by comparison, might have eight people in his "family," while the average household in the kingdom contained four to five individuals. Even among those households with more than three children, the relatively long span between births in many families combined with the early age of leaving for work often meant than no more than three children might be resident at a given time.

In addition to the various types of blood relatives included in different household models, three types of nonkin might also be in residence and therefore considered members of the family. The most common were domestic servants. In cities these tended to be girls from the country, sometimes relatives but usually strangers contracted for three or more years. The objective for the girls, typically starting work at age twelve or thirteen, was to earn enough money for a decent dowry with which they hoped to secure a good marriage. Salaries were one-half to one-third of what the maids could make in the fields, so there was great mobility during harvest time despite the obligations of their contracts and laws threatening punishment. The one exception to the preference for female domestics was the wealthy household, where many male retainers reflected on the social status and virility of the paterfamilias. Domestic servitude as a life phase was extremely common in early modern Europe, so at least one-third of households at any given time included servants. This also held for apprentices, under contract for up to seven years in the hope of learning a craft. In practice apprentices, who were usually teenage boys, ended up doing many odd jobs and other work not related to a craft and were in that sense on the same level as servants.

The third type of nonrelative who might be considered part of the household was lodgers. These individuals tended to be single young men, often journeymen, who stayed for as little as a few weeks or as long as several years. Unable to set up their own households yet, they were forced to rent and often travel, staying mostly in cities and providing a welcome source of income for many families. Often they worked on the family farm or in some kind of cottage industry.

The Household Viewed from the Inside: Affections and Material Interests

Another modern myth about the premodern family has its origins in the work of the sociologist Philippe Ariès more than forty years ago. Though later scholars have somewhat caricaturized his argument, their criticism has nonetheless thoroughly demolished Ariès's most controversial assertion regarding the family, namely that the sentimental affections seen as normal between parents and their children were alien to Europeans before the eighteenth century. During the 1970s some historians, such as Lawrence Stone and Jean-Louis Flandrin, attempted to modify the thesis with their own theories of an early modern transition, but by the late 1980s the scholarly consensus had clearly swung in favor of greater continuity on the question of familial and parental love and affection. Obviously such matters are highly subjective and thus impervious to quantification. The sources available for an overwhelmingly illiterate society are extremely limited as well. Still one need go no further than the sensationalist press's accounts of infanticide and parricide or the plays of Shakespeare, Molière, or Richard Sheridan to grasp the extreme sensitivity of early modern Europeans to the unnatural treatment of blood relations, particularly acts of betrayal and murder among parents, children, siblings, and other close relatives. There was clearly something special about the relationship between parents and children that went beyond mutual duties and obligations, something that occasionally led to great extremes of passions and above all something that deeply affected one's own sense of identity.

This does not mean that early modern families were immune to material interests or the tensions that property often caused. The common source of such conflicts was of course the question of inheritance, and here early modern Europe possessed as bewildering a set of local variations as can be imagined. Some historians have attempted to tie type of inheritance practice to household type, yet while there is some rough correlation between impartibility and multiple households or between partibility and nuclear households, there are far too many regional exceptions to support any such generalization. Broadly speaking the two most basic distinctions were those between partible and impartible inheritance. In partible inheritance the patrimony, or total estate, was evenly divided among children, usually the sons. Occasionally daughters would inherit (especially if there were no sons), but their property would be administered by their husbands or male relatives. Though intended to minimize conflicts among siblings over inheritance, partibility often had the opposite effect, since the heirs had to inventory anything they received at any time. Dividing up the patrimony every generation could also lead to impoverishment, hence a gradual move toward impartibility developed by the beginning of the early modern era.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries partibility began to be replaced in some parts of central and southern Europe by impartibility, which had already established a foothold in much of southern France and Spain. In most versions of impartibility, one heir (usually the oldest son, a practice known as primogeniture) inherited the entire patrimony, thus acting as a steward to the family property and preserving its integrity. The new practice was especially popular among royal dynasties, large landowners, and other wealthy families. In most places noninheriting brothers and sisters were to receive a "portion," that is, a cash settlement, and in many cases went on to work for the older brother. Among nobles on the Continent, the designated heir was often expected to provide an annual stipend for each of his brothers and a dowry to each of his unmarried sisters. English aristocrats, by contrast, were rarely required to make any such concession and only did so voluntarily.

Despite such counterbalances, many early modern people, especially among the Protestant clergy, considered impartibility inherently unfair and even unchristian. Moreover the multitude of diverse customs throughout Europe could make the rights and prerogatives bestowed upon the head of the household appear quite arbitrary. Within the kingdom of France, for instance, a father in Provence had absolute power over the choice of his heir, an exclusionary tactic that led to the designation of the fortunate beneficiary as l'enfant, 'child' (implying that his excluded siblings were not even children in a real sense). Meanwhile a father in Brittany had no power whatsoever to discriminate among his children. Occasionally a father might attempt to circumvent the local legal tradition and put an entailment in his will (known as a substitution in France; mayorazgo in Spain; majorat in Denmark; fideicommissum in Italy, Germany, Sweden, and Poland; and strict settlement in Britain) that prohibited sale, gift, or division of the land for several generations, but this was not always possible.

The question of inheritance could play a key role in relations within the family, including degrees of affection. Even small amounts of property could trigger bitter rivalries among designated heirs and their brothers and sisters, particularly in the case of children from two different marriages, where each individual or group of siblings attempted to exclude the other from inheritance. Many fathers clearly agonized over their attempts to preserve the patrimony and also provide for all of their children. The results could vary considerably. Impartibility tended to encourage emigration, early marriage, and nuclear households among noninheriting children, especially as travel to the New World became cheaper and more frequent, but many also remained near home. It also usually resulted in an extended family household for the adult heir and parent(s), though this too could vary, depending on the nature of the inheritance, local custom, and preferences of the father. Partibility carried its own set of conflicts and survived in many areas (for example, much of central and western Germany) well into the nineteenth century.

The head of the household's control over the family's patrimony obviously gave him a great deal of authority over his children's lives, particularly over the choice of spouses and the timing of marriages. As a rule the more property involved, the greater the involvement of fathers or male guardians in such matters, although forced marriages remained unusual and in most places illegal. Instead, fathers and children often sought a convergence of economic interests and personal attraction, apparently succeeding a good deal of the time. The prerogatives of inheritance also usually ensured that fathers or mothers would be provided for in old age, either in an extended household or with guaranteed income after passing the family property on. Heads of poor households, on the other hand, especially landless laborers, exercised no such economic authority over their grown children and thus enjoyed much less financial security in old age. Well into the twentieth century small households of single or married people over sixty were the poorest anywhere in Europe or North America, surpassed in that distinction possibly only by female-headed households with children.

The nonrelatives of an early modern household usually had no stake in inheritance strategies but played essential roles in family dynamics nevertheless. Writers of the era were fond of portraying servants and apprentices as scheming enemies of the master and the mistress of the house: lying, stealing, lecherous, and above all lazy. Indeed by the eighteenth century words such as "varlet" and "knave" had taken on almost exclusively derogatory meanings in the English language. Legal and other records convey a more nuanced and complicated tangle of relationships between servants and the relatives of the house. Some servants were treated like surrogate children, while others were clearly neglected or abused, receiving worse or less food, mean accommodations, and no affection. Even that common source of illegitimate babies, the illicit affair between the paterfamilias and a young maid, defies easy generalization. Every case had its own mixture of coercion (even rape) and willingness, of naïveté and cynical manipulation, of secrecy and flagrancy. The authority of the paterfamilias over servants and apprentices moreover was never absolute, though it did generally enjoy the legal benefit of the doubt. Religious authorities held the paterfamilias responsible for the spiritual instruction of the entire household, and immoral acts by children and servants alike reflected directly on his reputation. Protestant consistories and other church bodies frequently censored a father or widow for "bad housekeeping," though secular authorities rarely followed up with any punishments of their own.

The Household As an Economic Unit

Before the wide-scale industrialization of the nineteenth century, the household was the key unit of production in European economies. Urban workshops and rural farms alike relied on the labor of household members, including parents, children, servants, apprentices, and sometimes wage-earning lodgers. The degree to which this "whole house" (das ganze Haus) economic model successfully functioned remains a matter of some dispute among family historians. The key for the early modern paterfamilias lay in meeting his family's immediate and future needs while minimizing the number of mouths he had to feed. In this respect rural households west of the Hajnal line showed much greater flexibility, largely because of the high availability of servants and lodgers to balance the size of the household with the size of the holding. The size of eastern European households, usually complex in structure, was less flexible and therefore fixed the amount of labor available, regardless of the size of the property to be worked. Over all, many factors—type and quantity of product, local agrarian system, interregional and international markets, kin and other social networks, property laws, demographics, and so forth—helped determine which labor strategy a head of household adopted.

The division of labor in the early modern household had not always been gender and age specific. During the Middle Ages wives apparently often shared in their husbands' craftwork, even into widowhood. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, this type of labor was increasingly restricted for women, who nevertheless often continued to bring in income through sewing or spinning work (which came to be defined as part of "housekeeping" and thus not really "work"). The division of labor along gender lines was long familiar in rural settings, where men were assigned to tasks requiring greater physical strength, such as plowing and planting, while women (and children) worked on food preparation, cleaning and mending of clothing, housecleaning, water carrying, and so forth. During harvest all members of the household played various parts in getting crops from field to market.

Two major economic events during the early modern era had especially significant consequences for the household economy. The first was the rise of wage labor following the late fifteenth century. At the very time when new impartible inheritance laws were sweeping across Europe, an increasing number of wage-earning jobs in the West provided noninheriting children with an alternative basis for setting up their own households. This loss of labor forced some farmers to hire their own help, further increasing the number of wage earners in the economy and nonrelatives in the household.

The second development began in the mid–seventeenth century and likewise fed the growth of a wage economy in many parts of western Europe. Proto-industrialization, particularly in the textile industry, had the greatest impact on small landholders, whose members (women, children, and sometimes men) increasingly turned to some phase of cloth production for their households' incomes. Unlike the traditional guild system, in which all phases of production were under the direct supervision of a master in the craft, the "putting-out system" (German Verlagssystem) assigned an intermediate task to an outsider, who was paid at an agreed-upon piece rate. The growth of these so-called cottage industries was gradual and came as a consequence of changes in agrarian markets as well as higher demands and therefore increased production. Before the mechanization and factories of the industrial revolution, for instance, it took four to ten spinners to produce the amount of yarn woven by a single weaver in one day. Like large landowners who had increasingly enclosed and converted their farmland to sheep-grazing fields, these cottagers found income from the cloth industry both more profitable and more reliable than farming.

The immediate impact of increased wage labor and proto-industrialization on household forms was not always clear-cut. Clearly wage labor tended to encourage earlier marriage and more nuclear households. No longer forced to wait for inheritance, noninheriting children had little reason to remain part of an extended or complex household rather than start their own. Yet many such individuals, for reasons of security or family solidarity, did stay on well into adulthood despite the conditions. Similarly proto-industrialization sometimes encouraged more nuclear households and other times had the opposite effect. The formation of new households depended on many factors, including the skills required for production (an important limitation in such industries as arms manufacture in Belgium), the initial outlay of capital required for equipment (for example, expensive looms), and the size of the household.

Ideas About the Household and Family

Since antiquity family and household have served as powerful metaphors as well as social realities. Aristotle considered the household (Greek oikos) the chief building block of society as well as the model for a successful state. "It was out of the association formed by men with . . . women and slaves," he wrote in his Politics, "that the household was formed. . . . The next step is the village. . . . The final association, formed of several villages, is the city or state." Aristotle considered both the household and the state "naturally" hierarchical and patriarchal, with the head of the household and head of state each possessing certain duties as well as prerogatives. Their paternal authority demanded filial obedience but also obliged household heads to display loving concern. Later the Roman paterfamilias and emperor enjoyed expanded rights, often to a shockingly autocratic degree by modern standards. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries European writers revived the classical tradition of the household as metaphor for the state, arguing for a strengthening of the patriarchal leader of each. In Germany a number of popular Protestant pamphlets, the so-called Hausvaterliteratur, lamented that the authority of the head of household, or Hausvater, was under assault from an unholy alliance of shrewish wives, wild children, papist agitators, and a variety of devils bent on destruction of the family. A father should be as a king in his own household, they argued, providing biblical, classical, and anecdotal evidence in support. Publications elsewhere in Europe similarly invoked the sovereignty of the paterfamilias, whom Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) likened to the head of a small monarchy.

The other side of the patriarchal metaphor consisted of a paternalization of political authority. This imagery too was ancient and continued to inspire many medieval paeans to fatherly kings, such as Saint Louis (Louis IX; ruled 1226–1270) of France. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, proponents of a stronger "absolutist" monarchy, such as Jean Bodin (1530–1596), applied paternal claims of sovereignty to argue for greater political authority for their kings. Only a father's strong hand, Bodin maintained in his Six Books of a Commonwealth (1576), could prevent the anarchy that had overtaken France during its religious wars.

The comparison of a kingdom to a household probably reached its zenith with the writings of the Englishman Robert Filmer (c. 1588–1653). Beginning in the 1630s Filmer published several tracts that made an argument similar to Bodin's but with even more extensive use of patriarchal imagery. Unlike the proposed absolute monarch of Thomas Hobbes, Filmer's ruler—like a true father—ruled more by moral suasion and education than by force. His ultimate authority, however, was beyond dispute, dating back to Adam and later the dispersion of Babel: "The Nations were distinct Families, which had Fathers for Rulers over them; . . . God was careful to preserve the Fatherly Authority, by distributing the Diversity of Languages, according to the Diversity of Families." After the English Civil War and Commonwealth, Filmer's writings received new attention, culminating in the printing of his previously unpublished masterwork, Patriarcha (The natural power of kings) in 1680. By then patriarchal political imagery and language were so pervasive that even Joh