Family Systems In Europe Research Paper

1. A European Family System

The debate over the existence of a European family system has revolved around two related elements—a marriage system and a household system— emphasizing the demographic aspects of each. The former focuses on the age at which men and women marry, as well as the proportions who never marry. The latter concerns the principles by which coresidential units form and dissolve. The two are linked via the principles governing postmarital residence, that is, where newlyweds live following marriage.

These are only two aspects of what could be seen as the larger matrix of a family system. The anthropologist Goody (1983) has called attention to a variety of features that together historically differentiated European family dynamics from those found elsewhere in the world—including a prohibition on polygamy and child adoption, and various restrictions on marriage to kin—differences which he attributes in good part to the influence of the Church. An understanding of family systems more generally would also include consideration of kin ties beyond the household; however, relatively little empirical attention has been focused on such issues historically.

1.1 From Le Play To Laslett

Most prominent among the nineteenth-century progenitors of the social scientific study of European family systems was the Frenchman, Le Play (1895), who combined a series of empirical studies of families across much of Europe with pronouncements about the evolution of family life in the west, warning of an alarming erosion in traditional family forms that was eating at the moral fabric of European society. He contrasted what he took to be the traditional family, consisting of a large, patrilaterally extended group of kin under the senior male’s autocratic control, with the unstable family that was rapidly spreading throughout the industrializing population of a rapidly changing Europe.

Between the two extremes was the household form that Le Play thought best, the stem family, which mixed a high degree of respect for authority and concern for other kin with an element of independence and room for innovation. The farmstead lay at the center of stem family life, and was passed on, intact, from generation to generation, to a single child, preventing land fragmentation.

Le Play believed that the large patriarchal family had already receded in Europe, remaining primarily among Eastern nomads, Russian peasants, and the Slavs of Central Europe. The epic struggle that gripped nineteenth-century Europe, in Le Play’s view, pitted the stem family against the unstable family.

Such evolutionary perspectives as Le Play’s were taken up by American sociologists in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Many assumed that large, complex family households had characterized the European past, and were being ineluctibly replaced by small, nuclear family households as a result of modernization, however defined (Goode 1963). Challenging these assumptions, Laslett (1965), using British historical evidence, argued that the view of the large, complex household as typical of the European past was a ‘myth.’ According to Laslett, western Europe was long characterized by neolocality (i.e., couples established their own independent households at marriage) and it was rare for people in the past to live in large, complex family households. The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, which Laslett and Wrigley cofounded at this time, became an influential center for historical household studies, and the 1972 volume edited by Laslett and Wall, Household and Family in Past Time, set the terms of the debate for years to come and spawned hundreds of local-level studies throughout Europe.

1.2 The European Marriage Pattern

Just as Laslett was attacking the myth of the European extended family, Hajnal (1965) advanced the claim that a unique marriage system had characterized the whole of Europe except for the east and southeast for at least two centuries preceding 1940. It had two key features: a high age of marriage and high proportions of people who never married. A line could be drawn, he argued, stretching from St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) southwest to Trieste. To its east the system was not found.

Two decades later, Hajnal (1983) partially retreated from his by then famous ‘line,’ portraying the European marriage pattern as characterizing northwestern Europe and excluding not only eastern Europe, but the south as well. In this reformulation, he emphasized a third characteristic of the European family system, in addition to high marriage age (men 26, women 23) and high proportions (10 per cent or more) never marrying: young people in large numbers left their parental home and spent the years before marriage circulating between houses of nonkin in the capacity of servants. It was this circulation of servants that gave flexibility to the nuclear family system, facilitating the redistribution of a household-based rural labor force in response to each household’s labor needs.

1.3 Geographic Diversity

As Hajnal’s retreat from his own ‘line’ suggests, the proponents of a traditional European family system soon found themselves under heavy criticism from scholars who determined that some form of a more complex household system had indeed been typical of the areas they were studying. Both Hajnal and Laslett attempted to salvage their model of the European family system by restricting its territorial reach. It is revealing that French family historians never participated in these efforts to find a single European family system, for they were all too aware of the fact that even within a single country—in this case, their own—more than one family system had existed. In northern France a system much like that described by Laslett and Hajnal appeared, but in the central and southern regions larger, complex family households were common in past centuries. Similarly, work on Spain (Reher 1997), Portugal (Kertzer and Brettell 1987), and Italy (Barbagli 1984) found clear internal divisions: in each country nuclear family systems predominated in the south but more complex household systems were found in parts of the north. Nuclear family systems and neolocality were linked to systems of partible inheritance or contexts in which there was little of productive value to inherit (as in the case of the proletariat).

Laslett (1983) responded to this new evidence by proposing a new division of traditional Europe into four areas—the West, Middle, Mediterranean, and East—each having a distinctive family system. It turned out that the ‘myth’ that Laslett had punctured, if it was a myth at all, pertained only to one of the four areas of Europe, the West. In this new model, not only did Eastern Europe have low female marriage age and high proportions of joint-family households, but so did Mediterranean Europe.

Laslett continued to hold to Hajnal’s notion of a family system in which neolocality, high female age at marriage, and the prevalence of service as a life stage go together. Yet the Italian case, among others, shows that this is not necessarily true: in Italy in past centuries, it was the central and northern areas having high proportions of joint family households that had high proportions of servants, while in the south, where nuclear family residence prevailed, life-cycle service was rare (Da Molin 1990). Moreover, age of female marriage was typically higher in the center and north than in the south, again going against the Hajnal Laslett model.

2. Rethinking European Family Systems

Laslett’s later work on European family systems rejected crude generalizations about ‘the’ European family. A more fully satisfactory approach should build on these insights, recognizing the role played by political economic, demographic, and cultural forces in local contexts. It should also abandon the notion that northwestern Europe is the kernel of Europe and the lingering attempts to rescue a quintessential European family system.

2.1 Political Economy

Family historians frequently have pointed to two major, related economic pressures shaping family systems: the household as production unit, and inheritance norms. The traditional model of rural life in preindustrial times depicts a peasant society in which the household was the unit of production. Where this is the case, the composition of the household, and the timing of marriages, are shaped by labor needs and relations between peasants and the land they farm (or ownership of other productive resources, such as livestock). A dramatic case comes from central Italy, where sharecroppers typically lived in large joint family households. Landowners sought to maximize the number of adult laborers on each plot of land, to maximize their income (classically one-half of the produce). In the Alpine area in the north of Italy, likewise, Viazzo (1989) describes a system in which complex family households prevailed, allowing peasants to diversify their holdings and their risks, combining herding with farming scattered plots of land at different altitudes.

Political forces entered into these dynamics both indirectly, via political support for various landholding systems, and directly, as when systems of household taxation or military conscription influenced peasants to live in more extended or more nuclear households. In the case of serf systems of Eastern Europe, controls on movement out of estates had a similar influence (Czap 1982).

Inheritance systems are tied closely to family systems. In Spain, France, and elsewhere, areas practicing impartible inheritance tended to have stem family systems. On the other hand, where peasants did not own their own land, the link did not operate in this way. Italian sharecropping households practiced partible inheritance, but the pressures to have large numbers of coresiding adults resulted in joint family households.

2.2 Demographic Constraints

A continuing theme in debates about European family systems concerns the constraints placed on family dynamics by the brute facts of demography. In 1965, Levy argued that the great majority of people in the past lived in relatively small nuclear family households regardless of family formation norms, because high mortality rates interfered with the formation of extended family households. In critiquing Laslett’s original thesis of the prevalence of the nuclear household system in Europe, Berkner (1972) took up this idea, arguing that census data showing that the great majority of households at any one time are nuclear does not in itself provide evidence of a nuclear family system. Rather, he argued, under preindustrial demographic conditions, people following extended family norms would spend most of their lives living in nuclear households.

Given the workings of such demographic constraints, inheritance was typically a much more messy process than a focus on norms would suggest. A study of a nineteenth-century Austrian community, in which impartible inheritance was the rule, for example, found that large numbers of households heads died before they had a son old enough to take over. When their widows remarried, tensions between stepfather and sons resulted (Sieder and Mitterauer 1983). Yet work in sharecropping Italy and on the Russian serf estates shows that such demographic constraints were much less evident in joint family systems: where all sons are supposed to bring their brides into the household at marriage a nuclear phase is much less common, as many other combinations of coresiding kin are possible (Kertzer 1989, 1991, Czap 1982). Indeed, there is evidence that in the nineteenth century the proportion of people living in large, complex family households was growing in several areas as a result of a combination of demographic and economic factors (Ruggles 1987). In central Italy, with a largely fixed number of sharecropper farms available, a growing rural population, and the primary alternative—agricultural wage labor—providing a much poorer living, there was increasing pressure on the children of sharecropper families not to strike off on their own at marriage, and in this area the nineteenth century saw the historical zenith in the proportion of people living in joint family households (Barbagli 1984).

3. Culture

Understanding European family systems requires not only attention to historically changing political economic and demographic forces, but to cultural norms regarding proper family life as well. For example, each society has norms about the proper timing for a woman’s marriage. While in some settings marriage age was affected by changing economic conditions (i.e., marriage being postponed during hard economic times) (Wrigley and Schofield 1981), there is also much evidence of the resistance of cultural norms to economic pressures. One manifestation of this is the number of studies showing a very similar female marriage age across different economic segments of local stratified populations (Knodel 1988, pp. 130–6).

The great bulk of the work on European household systems—following Laslett and Hajnal—focuses on the cultural norm of postmarital residence as the key (identifying neolocality with nuclear family household systems). However, it is becoming clear that another cultural norm must be entered into the model: the fate of older people as they become frail or widowed (Kertzer 1995). Even where newlyweds routinely establish their own household, a pure nuclear family system does not necessarily result. Recent studies show that in the very heartland of Hajnal and Laslett’s northwestern European family system, large numbers of older people did live in extended family households. Wall (1995), for example, in a sample of English communities for 1599–1796, found that half of the men aged over 65 and over a third of the women lived with at least one child. While some of these adult children were not married, many of them were.

Finally, while most work on European family systems has focused on household units and on marriage, any satisfactory understanding of the role of family must consider relations that extend beyond single households. Reher (1997, p. 114), for example, found that in the Spanish community of Cuenca in the middle of the nineteenth century, while neolocality prevailed about three-quarters of the newlyweds set up their households in the same immediate vicinity of one of their parental households.

In short, no single family system—in the sense intended by Hajnal or Laslett—characterized ‘traditional’ Europe, nor even western Europe. While broad general differences among family systems in different parts of Europe can be distinguished, attempts to divide the continent into distinct family zones are misguided. In those areas where complex family households were commonly found, significant sections of the population lived in simpler households, while even in the heart of northwestern Europe, the epicenter of the presumed nuclear family system, more complex household dynamics were often at work.

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