ABSTRACT
The first thing to say about the family in post-war Britain is that sociologists in general and the author of this paper in particular know very little about it. There are a number of reasons for this sociological ignorance. The first is that there is no such thing as the British family in the post-war (or any other) period in the empirical, descriptive sense. The population of these islands may be seen to belong to a vast number of overlapping and interconnected family groups, and this collection of families exhibits a bewildering variety of features whether one considers the mentalités of their interiors, the normative and empirical models of family life which the members of each group shared, the modes of articulation of families with the economy, the degree of openness and closure, and so on. Granted these variations are not random, but strongly associated with class, religion, occupation and settlement type. They are also associated with place. However, even if we hold these variables constant and confine ourselves to a consideration of a single family type specified in their terms, we are still confronted with a bewildering empirical variety.
