ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the status of the modern family in its conventional middle-class form and ethos. The pluralization of the worlds of social experience describes the social tendency to divide modern social life into two spheres, the private sphere of the family and the public sphere in which the macro-institutions of work and politics dominate. Far-reaching demographic and normative shifts of some standing began to manifest themselves ever more sharply in the ways in which individuals tended to organize their private lives. More remarkably even, in an age where neither tradition nor economic necessity forces people to marry and lead a conventional way of life, most have neither abandoned the modern family nor the conventional lifestyle associated with it. While marriage in the Western past also tended to be based on the free decision of individuals, both sexuality and marriage from medieval times onward had come increasingly under the control of church and state.
