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Family History, Family Violence: A Review Essay

Review products

MintzSteven and KelloggSusan, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: The Free Press, 1988).
PleckElizabeth, Domestic Tyranny; The Making of American Social Policy against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
GordonLinda, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (Viking: New York, 1988).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

E. Wayne Carp
E. Wayne Carp
Affiliation:
Pacific Lutheran University
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Abstract

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Type
Review Article
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , April 1991 , pp. 203 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1991

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References

Notes

1. Sweet, James A. and Bumpass, Larry L., American Families and Households (The Population of the United States in the 1980s: A Census Monograph Series) (New York, 1987), chaps. 6, 7; New York Times, 15 July 1990, 11.Google Scholar

2. Rix, Sara E., The American Woman Today: A Status Report (New York, 1990), 380.Google Scholar A breakdown by children's ages reveals that 51.5 percent of mothers with children under age 6 and 61.4 percent of mothers with children between ages 6 and 17 are employed; ibid.

3. Thornton, Arland, “Changing Attitudes toward Family Issues in the United States,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 51 (1989): 873–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Quotation in Straus, Murray, Gelles, Richard J., and Steinmetz, Suzanne K., Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family (Garden City, N.Y., 1980), 4Google Scholar; Gelles, Richard J. and Cornell, Claire Pedrick, Intimate Violence in Families (Family Studies Text Series 2) (Beverly Hills, 1985), 12Google Scholar; Straus, Murray A. and Gelles, Richard, “How Violent Are American Families? Estimates from the National Family Violence Resurvey and Other Studies,” in Hotaling, Gerald T. et al. , eds., Family Abuse and Its Consequences: New Directions in Research (Beverly Hills, 1988), 30–31.Google Scholar Researchers estimate that there are between 701,000 and 1,093,560 abused elders. See Pillemer, Karl and Finkelhor, David, “The Prevalence of Elder Abuse: A Random Sample Survey,” The Gerontologist 28 (1988): 52.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

5. Tilly, Louise A. and Cohen, Miriam, “Does the Family Have a History? A Review of Theory and Practice in Family History,” Social Science History 6 (1982): 131–32Google Scholar; Hareven, Tamara K., “Historical Analysis of the Family,” in Sussman, Marvin B. and Steinmetz, Suzanne K., eds., Handbook of Marriage and the Family (New York, 1988), 38.Google Scholar

6. Cartwright, William H. and Watson, Richard L. Jr, eds., The Reinterpretation of American History and Culture (Washington, D.C., 1973), 15.Google Scholar

7. Tilly and Cohen, “Does the Family Have a History?” 131–32; Stone, Lawrence, “Family History in the 1980s,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (1981): 52.Google Scholar

8. Unless otherwise indicated, this and the next two paragraphs rely heavily upon Michael Anderson, Approaches to the History of the Western Family, 1500–1914 (London, 1980)Google Scholar; and Hareven, “Historical Analysis of the Family,” in Sussman and Steinmetz, eds., Handbook of Marriage and the Family, 39. For an incisive critique of the various methodological approaches to family history, see Tilly and Cohen, “Does the Family Have a History?” 131–79.

9. Hareven, Tamara K., “Introduction: The Historical Study of the Life Course,” in Hareven, , ed., Transitions: The Family and the Life Course in Historical Perspective (New York, 1978), 5.Google Scholar In chapter 1 of Transitions, Glen H. Elder, Jr., formulates the conceptual framework of life-course analysis and its application to historical research.

10. For a discussion of these methodological approaches, see Ruggles, Steven, “Family Demography and Family History: Problems and Prospects,” Historical Methods 23 (1990): 22–30 (quotations on 23)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miriam King, “All in the Family?” ibid., 32–40.

11. Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York, 1962)Google Scholar; Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London, 1977)Google Scholar; Shorter, Edward, The Making of the Modern Family (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; Degler, Carl N., At Odds: Women and the Family in America, 1776 to the Present (New York, 1980).Google Scholar

12. Modell, John, “Patterns of Consumption, Acculturation and Family Income Strategies in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” in Hareven, Tamara K. and Vinovskis, Maris A., eds., Family and Population in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, N.J., 1978), 206–40Google Scholar; Hareven, Tamara K. and Modell, John, “Urbanization and the Malleable Household: An Examination of Boarding and Lodging in American Families,” in Hareven, , ed., Family and Kin in Urban Communities, 1700–1930 (New York, 1977), 164–86Google Scholar; Goldin, Claudia, “Family Strategies and the Family Economy in the Late Nineteenth-Century: The Role of Secondary Workers,” in Theodore Hershberg, ed., Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981), 277–310.Google Scholar

13. Mintz and Kellogg might not agree with this statement. It is puzzling that, contrary to the text, which often cites the crucial importance of intellectual or cultural factors in the transformation of the family, the authors prefer to downplay intellectual forces and instead emphasize underlying economic and demographic factors when summarizing the book's thesis. See Mintz and Kellog, Domestic Revolutions, xvii–xx, and Kellogg, Susan, “Exploring Diversity in Middle-Class Families: The Symbolism of American Ethnic Identity,” Social Science History 14 (Spring 1990): 31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. For the sake of emphasizing broad developments in family history, I have concentrated on the New England family. Mintz and Kellogg admirably stress the diversity of colonial families and devote a chapter to Chesapeake and Black families, which diverged from the New England model. But they also note that after 1750 sectional patterns of family life disappeared and American families began to resemble each other. Even in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, however, state intervention into family life was common. For Virginia, see Bremner, Robert H. et al. , eds., Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 65–66.Google Scholar For Maryland's innovative orphan courts, see Carr, Lois Green and Walsh, Lorena S., “The Planter's Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 34 (1977): 559–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 47.

16. Ibid., 205.

17. Ibid., 62.

18. Ibid., xx.

19. Demos, John, Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History (New York, 1986), 75.Google Scholar

20. Pleck has published a series of articles that contain information not included in Domestic Tyranny. See, for example, “Wife Beating in Nineteenth-Century America,” Victimohgy: An International Journal 4 (1979): 60–74Google Scholar; “Feminist Responses to ‘Crimes Against Women,’ 1868–1896,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8 (1983): 451–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 9.

22. Quoted in ibid., 22. In her most recent work, Pleck notes that in 1639 the colony of New Haven enacted the first American law against family violence. It punished incest with death by hanging. See Pleck, , “Criminal Approaches to Family Violence, 1640–1980,” in Lloyd Ohlin and Michael Tonry, eds., Family Violence (Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, vol. 11) (Chicago, 1990), 19–116.Google Scholar

23. Mintz, Steven, “Regulating the American Family,” Journal of Family History 14 (1989): 91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 48.

25. Ibid., 95.

26. Ibid., 107.

27. Ibid., 129.

28. Ibid., 163.

29. Gordon, Heroes, 295.

30. Breines, Wini and Gordon, Linda, “The New Scholarship on Family Violence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8 (1983): 506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. Loizos, Peter, “Violence and the Family: Some Mediterranean Examples,” in Martin, J. P., ed., Violence and the Family (New York, 1978), 190–94.Google Scholar A popular piece of Italian doggerel said of the wife that:

Like a good weapon she should be cared for properly
Like a hat she should be kept straight
Like a mule, she should be given plenty of work and occasional beatings
Above all, she should be kept in her place as a subordinate.

Quoted in Coppa, Frank J., “Those Who Followed Columbus: The Italian Migration to the United States,” in Coppa, Frank J. and Curran, Thomas J., The Immigrant Experience in America (Boston, 1976), 126–27.Google Scholar

32. Discussing the assimilation of middle-class Italian Americans, Micaela di Leonardo points out that “power relations based on age and gender seem to have declined in importance. Specifically, parents assert less control over their children's lives, and women in domestic groups, especially daughters, have increased parity with men.” Micaela di Leonardo, The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender among California Italian-Americans (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), 115.Google Scholar Young Italian-American husbands reacted angrily at their wives’ “insubordination.” In the late 1930s, one Italian-American contacted a social agency seeking a divorce from his wife of less than a year. Her “offense”: refusing to hold a towel for him to dry his hands. Instead she remained seated at the dinner table reading a newspaper. Significantly, she had been raised in America, he in Italy. Williams, Phyllis H., South Italian Folkways in Europe and America: A Handbook for Social Workers, Visiting Nurses, School Teachers, and Physicians (New Haven, 1938), 92.Google Scholar Rather than arguing for assimilation, Sherri Broder suggests that differing notions of respectability among the working class explain their use of social agencies, but only as a last resort. See “Informing the ‘Cruelty’: The Monitoring of Respectability in Philadelphia's Working-Class Neighborhoods in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Radical America 21 (1989): 34–47.Google Scholar

33. Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971), chap. 5Google Scholar; quotation on 156. For a contrary, though unconvincing, interpretation of the Italian family, see Gabaccia, Donna R., From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930 (Albany, N.Y., 1984).Google Scholar

34. Gordon, Heroes, 24.

35. As a researcher who has been refused access to adoption case records by numerous East Coast adoption agencies on the grounds of confidentiality, I am perhaps especially sensitive to obstacles preventing legitimate research. But Gordon goes beyond the normal preservation of client confidentiality and in the process has inadvertently made it extremely difficult to replicate her study. In addition to using only fictional names, which is standard procedure when using confidential case records, Gordon has taken the unprecedented step of not citing the file number of the agency case record; instead she cites “a code system developed for this research.” Gordon assures her readers that “any researcher who has permission of the relevant agency to see the records can get the actual case numbers by writing to me” (303). That should be cold comfort to a younger scholar wanting to investigate Gordon's findings further.

36. Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 195. For extensive overviews of social scientists’ theories purporting to explain family violence, see Gelles, Richard J. and Straus, Murray A., “Determinants of Violence in the Family: Toward a Theoretical Integration,” in Wesley R. Burr et al., eds., Contemporary Theories About the Family, vol. 1: Research-Based Theories (New York, 1979), 549–81Google Scholar; and Susanne K. Steinmetz, “Family Violence: Past, Present, and Future,” in Sussman and Steinmetz, eds., Marriage and the Family, 725–66. For a recent feminist perspective, see Yllo, Kersti A. and Straus, Murray A., “Patriarchy and Violence against Wives: The Impact of Structural and Normative Factors,” in Straus, Murray A. and Gelles, Richard J., eds., Physical Violence in American Families (New Brunswick, N.J., 1990), 383–99.Google Scholar For an overview on the development of the field of family violence, see Gelles, Richard J., “Violence in the Family: A Review of Research,” in Gelles, , Family Violence, 2d ed. (Newbury Park, Calif., 1987), 26–46.Google Scholar

37. Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 179.

38. A fascinating discussion of the collaboration between historians and social policymakers can be found in the introduction to David J. Rothman and Stan ton Wheeler, eds., Social History and Social Policy (New York, 1981), 1–18. The editors “remain convinced of the viability of uniting history and social policy, but we recognize how complicated and even discomforting it is to accomplish this task” (ibid., 3). For other accounts of researchers and policymakers, see John Demos, “History and the Formation of Social Policy Toward Children: A Case Study,” in Demos, Past, Present, and Personal, 186–212; Richard J. Gelles, “Applying Research on Family Violence to Clinical Practice,” in Gelles, Family Violence, 213–33.

39. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 243.

40. Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 203.

41. Ibid.