There was no distinction between family and society: Family life wassocial life.
Families performed a whole range of functions later performed by social institutions.
The family was not only a site of economic production and consumption. It was:
■A school. Any reading and writing you learned was at your parents’ knee.
■A church. The head of the household led the family prayers; you might see the
inside of a “real” church or temple once or twice a year.
■A hospital. Family members knew as much as there was to know about setting
broken bones and healing diseases
■A day care center. There were no businesses to take care of children, so someone
in the family had to do it.
■A police station. There were no police to call when someone wronged you, so
you called on your family to take care of the situation.
■A retirement home. If you had no family to take care of you in your old age, you
would end up in debtor’s prison or begging on the streets.Obviously, all these functions cannot be met by the nuclear family model. (That
model includes the biological parents and their children, although it can also include
their children from other marriages.) The most common model in the premodern era
was the extended family,in which two or three generations lived under the same roof
or at least in the same compound. No one left the household except to marry into
another family, until the group got too big for the space available and had to split up.
And even then, they would build a new house nearby, until eventually everyone in
the village was related to everyone else.The Origins of the Nuclear Family
Just as families are no longer concerned exclusively with socializing children, marriage
developed far more functions than simple sexual regulation, ensuring that parents and
children know who each other is. Marriage could also validate a gentleman’s claim to
nobility and establish that a boy had become a man. It could form a social tie between
two families or bring peace to warring tribes. In the Middle Ages, European monarchs
often required their children to marry the child of a monarch next door, on the the-
ory that you are unlikely to go to war with the country that your son or daughter has
married into (it didn’t work—by the seventeenth century, all of the European mon-
archs were second or third cousins, and they were always invading each other).
Marriage has also come to represent a distinctive emotional bond between two
people. In fact, the idea that people should select their own marriage partner is actu-
ally a very recent phenomenon. For thousands of years, par-
ents selected partners to fulfill their own economic and
political needs or those of the broader kinship group.
Arranged marriages are still the norm in a number of coun-
tries. People still fall in love—romantic love is practically
universal across human societies—but not necessarily with
the people they intended to marry. The tradition of courtly
love, praised by the troubadours of medieval France, was
expressly about adultery, falling in love with someone else’s
spouse (De Rougemont, 1983).
Only about 200 years ago did men and women in West-
ern countries begin to look at marriage as an individual
affair, to be decided by the people involved rather than
parents, church, and state.386 CHAPTER 12THE FAMILYRomantic love is virtually
universal, found in all
cultures. Hindu couple in
South Asia. n