Practice Exam 1 ❮ 183151015202530354045Most historians warn readers that to grasp “family” history, you must first abandon
the idea that you already know what “family” means. “Family” seems to be a word
invented by Humpty Dumpty, who told Alice that “a word means what I say it means,
what I say it should mean, neither more nor less; the question is, which is to be master,
that is all.” Historians always remind us of the word’s etymology. Our “family” is
related to its root in the Roman “familia” just about as closely as a Chevy Suburban is
related to an elephant and a camel-drawn caravan. Sure, both of them move, but who’s
inside and what are they doing there?
Inside the Roman familia was everyone in the household: legitimate children,
adopted adults, secretaries, and other dependents, slaves of various ages. “The Romans
rarely used it to mean family in the sense of kin,” writes Roman family historian
Suzanne Dixon.^1 What counted, rather, was ownership. The words for children, slaves,
and servants were so often interchanged that historians can’t always tell how many of
which lived under one roof. And for good reason. The patriarch’s rule was complete:
he could educate, beat, sell, give, indenture, marry off, endow, or kill any one of them,
almost at will.^2
He could, of course, care for his familia as well. Romans lived with their slaves and
servants so closely that it “in some ways resembled kinship, even if the slaves were
always in the position of poor relations,” explains Dixon.^3 [She] also cites one hard-
fought custody battle between a freed slave and her former owners over who would keep
the ex-slave’s daughter, Patronia Iusta, a custody battle as vicious as that over Baby M.^4
Romans didn’t consider birth the only way to acquire offspring. Just as they felt free
to expose (in other words, kill) any child they didn’t need, they also felt free to adopt—
adults, that is. Adoption’s goal was not to nurture a child, but to install an heir to carry
on the house, a goal better served by adults—and so nearly all adoptions were of grown
men (yes, men). Adoptees were usually nephews or grandsons or cousins, sometimes
adopted through a will. As one historian explains, “A citizen of Rome did not ‘have’ a
child . . . The Romans made no fetish of natural kinship.^5 Choice, not biology, made a
familia.”... the Roman’s idea that “family” meant everyone under one roof, biologically
related or not, lasted until the eighteenth century’s end.^6
Historians and anthropologists frankly throw up their hands and admit that they
can’t define “family” in a way that works universally. “Before the eighteenth century,
no European language had a term for the mother-father-children group,”^7 one pair
of historians writes, mainly because that grouping—although widespread—wasn’t
important enough to need its own word. A 1287 Bologna statute defined “family” to
include a father, mother, brothers, sisters, daughters-in-law (sons brought home their
wives), but Italy was an exception. For Northern and Western Europe, the extended
family is a myth. New-marrieds almost always launched their own households—if their
parents signed over the farm, the contract often included a clause insisting that the
old folks must be built their own separate dwelling—socialized as much or more with
neighbors and work partners, as well as with kin. Rather, the European family, like
the Roman, included people we’d consider legal strangers: they were grouped together
in that word “family,” not by blood, but by whether they lived under one roof. “Most
households included non-kin inmates, sojourners, boarders, or lodgers occupying rooms
vacated by children or kin, as well as indentured apprentices and resident servants,
Questions 21-32 are based on the passage taken from an article by E. J. Graff titled “What Makes a Family?”
that appears in What is Marriage For? published by Beacon Press, Boston, in 1999.