ABSTRACT
This article consists of three separate pieces jointly presented as a workshop at an international conference in women’s history entitled “Women and Power: Dimensions of Women’s Historical Experience” held at the University of Maryland in November, 1977. The workshop had the title, “Family History: A Critique.” What we want to offer here is not a criticism of family history which would abolish it or lead to its replacement, but rather a critical examination of its underlying assumptions which should lead to its more fruitful expansion. We, like many others, have found the theory and data of the last decade of family history enormously valuable. What we want to argue, however, is that much of the field is complicated by the conceptual problem of relating the family to the larger world. Each of our three pieces examines the theories which historians have used to situate families in their social environments; and each piece suggests some of the pitfalls involved in the use of those theories. Rayna Rapp argues that the notion of family has been overly objectified and should be seen instead as a cultural device, an ideology, for a larger social purpose: recruitment into household and class. Ellen Ross peels the history of women out of family history in which it has too often been hidden. To do so, she challenges the assumptions of role theory, of consensus within families, and of the emotional isolation of families. Renate Bridenthal suggests a broader synthesis, “the mode of social reproduction,” which shows the family to be only one agent among many, continuously transformed by the dialectical processes of capitalism itself.
