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supports his thesis. She calls his approach "anecdotal" and unscien–
tific. This accusation could be levelled at any historian who relies on
his good judgment to form a picture of a culture. What she offers in
place of Aries's reliance on judgment is pure positivism. Pollock does
everything she can to avoid the bias which she thinks historians often
bring to an interpretation of their materials . Thus she prefers to
adopt a method as mechanical as possible. The no-history thesis of
Pollock's book, for all of its charts and counting up of passages, re–
mains unconvincing, however, precisely because her steadfast re–
fusal to rely on her judgment as a historian prevents her from form–
ing a Gestalt of the public world of symbols in which parents and
children must live .
Actually, the method which Aries uses is not at all arbitrary ,
though it does depend upon good sense and imagination and is, of
course, vulnerable to individual bias . The method depends on being
well-informed about the details of the past and on intuition about
how these particular details fall into place. The evidence that Aries
provides is not meant to be geometric proof of the truth of his thesis .
To practice history in this way, imagination is required - not in
order to create a fiction but to get closer to reality.
I have saved the most vigorous defense of patriarchy against its
modern critics for last: Steven Ozment's
When Fathers Ruled: Family
Life in Reformation Europe
(Harvard University Press, 1983). Ozment
thinks that the sixteenth and seventeenth-century family was, both
in norm and in general practice, a humane institution and,
moreover, that it taught humanity to its members. Its private life
had a public purpose. "The habits and character developed within
the family became the virtues that shaped entire lands." The first
and best place to learn to be part of a community (which requires
that one must sometimes give up the pursuit of one's own individual
wants) was the family itself. A father must not only provide for the
present and future needs of his own immediate family, but provide
the "fatherland" with the moral adults it needs . The family was an
institution for the creation of conscience . Unlike the modern family
which Ozment thinks promotes self-centered individualism, home in
this earlier time was "no introspective, private sphere, unmindful of
society." Ozment thinks that because it is infected by the very indivi–
dualism that affiicts the modern family, modern historical writing
has grossly undervalued the patriarchal world.
Ozment's moral justification of the patriarchal family is sus–
tained by his belief that the self-sacrifice required of its members in
