Edmund Leites
THE FAMILY AS HISTORY
One of the signal features of modern culture, from the
Edwardians to the present day, has been its powerful challenge to the
traditional patriarchal family. From the perspective of modernity,
patriarchal culture victimizes wives and children, assigning roles to
them which do not fully acknowledge their humanity . But there are
many recent historians whose work implicitly denies that modern
forms of marriage, child rearing, and family life represent any kind
of moral advance over previous centuries. Their effort to draw a dif–
ferent picture is based to some extent on a different reading of the
past, but it is also rooted in their antagonism towards later, "per–
missive" attitudes towards marriage and the family. Their viewpoint
reflects the rejection in the 1970s and 1980s of the liberation philoso–
phies of the late sixties and early seventies, which supported emo–
tional openness and antihierarchical institutions. But instead of
praising the forties and fifties, as some neoconservatives do, the revi–
sionist social historians have turned to the fifteenth and sixteenth or
to the nineteenth century to take what is essentially a stand against
the culture of the late sixties. Reading their books with this perspec–
tive in mind, we can see them as striking documents of contemporary
sensibility and moral attitude.
The revisionists show very little awareness of their own ideolog–
ical position. As they see it, their quarrel is not with modernity but
with certain standard works on the history of the family and on sex–
uality. These include the late Philippe Aries's
Centuries of Childhood,
which described the development of the idea of childhood from the
late medieval period to the modern period in the West; Lawrence
Stone's
Family, Sex and Marriage in England,
which covered the subject
from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries ; and Steven Marcus's
The
Other Victorians,
an exploration of nineteenth-century English sexual–
ity. Each of these books had its own unique message . Stone and
Aries did not, for example, agree upon just how harshly children
were treated in the late medieval and early modern period (Aries
thinks they were much better treated than does Stone). But to their
opponents, all of the books do carry a common message: that hu–
mane, warm, caring and affectionate relations between husband and
wife and between parents and children is, as a general phenomenon
