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The American Family: Past, Present--and Future?
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14975 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1988 |
4,710 Words |
| Author
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John Braeman
John Braeman is professor of history at the University of
Nebraska at Lincoln. |
DOMESTIC REVOLUTIONS
A Social History of American Family Life
Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg
New York: Free Press, 1988
400 pp. $22.50
Family history has become one of the major academic growth areas in the last quarter century. The now-formidable body of work on the American experiences has inspired the husband-and-wife team of Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg to try for a new synthesis in their Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life.
Unfortunately, however, the work reflects rather than resolves the disarray afflicting the field of family history. The first problem that strikes the reader is the skewed attention given different aspects of the American family experience. Colonial New England receives fuller treatment than colonies south of the Mason-Dixon line, while the so-called middle colonies appear lost in the shuffle. For the nineteenth century, the longest chapter (twenty-three pages) deals with the rise of the middle-class or Victorian family--which the authors, following Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, call the "democratic family." Seventeen-plus pages examine the shaping of the Afro-American family. White working-class family life receives approximately the same amount of space, but only slightly more than one page deals with the varying family patterns among different ethnic groups. Although constituting a majority of the population until the beginning of the twentieth century, rural families are allotted only seven pages (most of which deals with the Great Plains)--roughly the same as for coal
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