The Intense but Fragile of Family Ties
Since the nineteenth century, when the effects of industrialism and urbanization began really to be felt, scholars have debated the impact of industrialization on the family. Many scholars and laymen were convinced that the family had outlived its usefulness. For the first time in history, men and women could find work and satisfy basic needs outside the bonds of blood or marriage. They felt, therefore, that the family would disintegrate.
The functional sociologists of the postwar era scoffed at predictions of family disintegration. They judged it to be more important than ever. The family nurtured and raised children and provided refuge for adults from the impersonality and competition of public and industrial life. It now appears that both views were right and wrong. Those who thought that life in a mass society would undermine family life were correct. But they were wrong in assuming that most people would want to spend their lives as isolated individuals. Those who argued that the conditions of urban-industrial society create exceptional needs for nurturant, intimate relationships were also correct. But they never understood that those same conditions would make it hard for the family to fulfill such needs. Family ties have become more intense than they were in the past, and yet at the same time they have become more fragile.
Although most Western Europeans never lived in large extended-family households, kinship ties exerted much stronger constraints over the individual before the modern era. Work and marriage were not matters of individual choice. A person’s economic and marital destiny was determined by hereditary status, tradition, and economic necessity. Continuity of marriages and conformity to prescribed behavior, both within the family and outside it, were enforced by severe economic, familial, and community sanctions.
Hi,
Thanks for the visit. Interesting subject you have here, heavy reading, but interesting.
Comment by john — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:07:41 +0100 @ 11:07 am
Hi, Thanks for the visit.
Comment by john — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:09:43 +0100 @ 11:09 am