ABSTRACT
Histories of “the family” have generally agreed that the small, private, secular, nuclear family based on affective personal relationships has developed historically and can be associated with modern, industrial, urban society.1 A great deal of women’s history has in recent years begun to scrutinize in depth the historical changes in the family from a woman-centred perspective. Childbearing and childrearing have generally been a crucial determinant of women’s life course, though once we begin to appreciate the family as being both socially-constructed and historically-located, it becomes apparent that there is nothing inevitable or unchanging about the ways that women have experienced family life. Furthermore, the history of women cannot be accounted for by the history of the family, not only because significant amounts of women’s experience were located in the public sphere, but also because the ideologies that constructed the family as private were created publicly.
