Pop Social History

...It was most likely the replacement of this traditional 'moral' economy with a modern marketplace economy that changed so thoroughly values and behavior...

...A new tenderness was displayed toward the child, and improved standards of care resulted in fewer deaths...

...Shorter's authorities on women are male folklorists who regale us with tales of the philandering farmer's shrewish wife and bourgeois medical men who blamed a rampant mortality they could not understand on the vile habits of midwives and mothers...

...He can provide no answer to Goode's question other than to say that sexuality eased the transition...

...With demographic and conventional historiographical tools, Shorter sets out to chronicle changes in human sentiment...

...What was new in the 18th century was the willingness of women to climb into the sack with them...

...It was generally thought at the time that industrialization had undermined the traditional kinship structures of the West, but this had never been verified empirically...

...Shorter also documents a sharp decline in infant mortality during the same period...

...For example, Shorter depicts women as forming the vanguard of the 18th-century wave of feeling...

...Goode wondered if it might not have happened the other way around...

...He assumes peasant women were debased and perceived themselves as such, and over-emphasizes the harshness of their lot to serve the needs of his own thesis...

...His quantitative data are paltry...

...nuclear, extended or otherwise...

...Additional opportunties for sexual liaison could have resulted in additional pregnancies without any change in values at all...

...Few married women participated in the labor force, and it was generally the case that the move of productivity from the household to the factory left women to a life of relative ease as "parasites" of their wage-earning husbands...

...and his literary sources too biased in their assumptions about the popular life to have anything beyond a marginal documentary value...

...Because he insists on linking the decline of the traditional family to the liberation of women, Shorter determinedly refuses to consider an alternative hypothesis advanced by historians Joan Scott and Louise Tilly (though he dutifully lists their work in his bibliography...

...Market capitalism, Shorter says abruptly, was indeed at the root of it: "At the same time that mentalities were undergoing the historic shift toward individualism and affection, the economic substructure of the world in which village people lived was in upheaval as well...

...Could the individuation and isolation of households have come first, unleashing the newly independent young to transform the old agrarian world...

...It's fun, but those seeking intellectual rigor will have to look elsewhere...

...Despite his rhetoric, however, he is not certain whether social or economic change (sexual revolution or capitalism) came first...

...Marriages tend to be aflectionless, and are arranged with "functional" or "material" considerations taking precedence over "feelings...

...Scott and Tilly have argued that temporary employment for wages was only a logical progression for the single women who had held productive roles in the nonindustrial domestic economy...

...He deduces that "traditional" restraints on emotion began to give way in the 18th century to a "surge of sentiment" that swept across rural Europe...

...We are moving toward a "postmodern" family where eroticism is intensified and sexuality stripped bare of the entrapments of romance, family and sentiment...

...This liberation of feeling found its initial expression in sexual license and, given the absence of effective contraception, resulted in all the pregnancies...

...Furthermore, Shorter judges the social ritual of peasant life by 20th-century middle-class American standards...

...The class and sex bias of these sources is nowhere accounted for...

...the observations of provincial bureaucrats and country dootors, as well as of antiquarian scholars and folklorists...

...Shorter's tale unfolds in a setting far removed from the romanticized preindustrial past of Western nostalgia...

...And just what caused the profound transformation of values that occurred in the 18th century...

...others have found that in certain urban settings extended kinship ties persist well into the 20th century...

...Rural cottages are crude and undivided spaces, packed with people...

...The dense community intrudes upon the family, enforcing a stringent code of conduct and providing little opportunity for privacy, intimacy or individual expression...

...Young girls in the 18th century began to go out and work but, more likely than not, they simply handed their wages over to the male head of household...

...We can probably assume that men have always been avid for intercourse, that a male desire to get women into bed is probably a historical constant," he writes, in an unfortunate turn of phrase...

...What is more important, on close examination Shorter's sexual revolution hypothesis, the heart of his work, just doesn't hold up...

...Historians have holed up in the provinces, burrowed through parish archives and searched out households that left behind little written record...

...The men care more for their livestock than for their wives, Shorter tells us, because, unlike cattle, wives can easily be replaced...

...The nuclear family is crumbling," he concludes with a dramatic flourish, "to be replaced, I think, by the free-floating couple, a marital dyad subject to dramatic fissions and fusions " And, once again, the "master variable" at work on the family is women's liberation...

...An intriguing view, to be sure, but can it be demonstrated...

...Oppressed, unloved and overworked, the young single woman rebelled when she got the chance to venture forth on her own for wage-earning work...

...Historians of the family, he says, have been preoccupied with physical circumstances when they should have been concentrating on how people felt about each other...

...Shorter's association of illegitimacy and the rise of the modern emotive family requires something of a leap of faith...

...The fruits of a decade's labor in microscopic social reconstruction now fill academic journals and monographs...

...Shorter lets us modern-day feminists know, lest we have illusions of originality, that we are the direot descendents of our European foremothers who kicked up their heels 200 years ago...

...He begins this delicate task at the parish registers, looking at birth, marriage and death records of anonymous peasant families...

...Here he argues that today we are living through a second revolution in behavior, equal in proportions to the 18th-century transformation of values...

...I think not...

...This is social history turned pop...

...his deduction often spurious...

...From these he discerns a pattern of behavior, which he then corroborates with testimony...

...More significant than medical advances, we are told, was the fact that the liberated passions of youth quickly settled down to a placid domesticity...

...The statistics establish soaring trends of illegitimacy, and of premarital conception resulting in "shotgun" weddings...

...Little cultural upheaval took place...

...Reviewed by Ellen Chesler More than 10 years ago William Goode, the Columbia sociologist, challenged historians to study the family and provide a perspective social science theory lacked...

...Some have traced the nuclear family back centuries before industrialism...

...Shorter's final chapter is his give-away...

...The rise in illegitimate births that Shorter makes so much of, according to Scott and Tilly, may simply have been due to the increased mobility of the population as the autonomy and inclusivity of village life began to break down...

...The previously presumed "ideal fit" between industrialization and the modern family has been called into question, but no alternative theory has been offered???at least not until the appearance of Edward Shorter's new book...

...A young historian well-versed in quantitative technique, Shorter believes that analysis of household size and composition does not tell us what we need to know...

...Life is a ghastly affair...

...In a typically tired metaphor, Shorter describes the family as a "ship" that drifted "onto the high seas" and was buffeted about not only by the forces of capitalism and urbanism but by the "great tides of rationality and secularism over which it had no control...

...In the central argument of The Making of the Modern Family, Shorter compares the dates of marriage with birth dates of first-born children for a smattering of peasants in France, Scandinavia and Bavaria between 1750-1850...

...It then carried over to marriage, where it fostered an expressiveness and cohesion that is still the distinctive feature of family life...