Domestic Revolutions: A Social History Of American Family Life [Paperback]

Steven Mintz (Author), Susan Kellogg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 1989 | ISBN-10: 002921291X | ISBN-13: 978-0029212912

The American family has undergone a series of transformations from its socially sanctified role as the center of society to today's private, independent unit. The authors explain just how the family has adapted and endured these changes.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

American family structure has changed radically in the 300 years since patriarchal Puritan days, when it was the basic political, religious and educational unit of state and community, maintain Mintz, University of Houston associate professor of history, and Kellogg, his wife, who teaches anthropology, also at Houston. The authors vividly evoke a diversity of family patterns and experiences among racial and ethnic groups, including Afro-American slave kinship networks. They discuss how changes wrought in working-class families by the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the Great Depression and WW II affected family roles and relationships. Emerging from the relative stability of the 1950s and the largely mythical ideal of the nuclear family, today's aging, individual-oriented society, transformed by a sexual revolution, considers the family in whatever formcohabitation, single-parent households, "blended" families from several marriages, among othersas a means of personal fulfillment for both partners, with public institutions taking over many of its traditional roles. Illustrations.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This clear and comprehensive synthesis of recent scholarship shows that the American family, influenced by circumstance, has undergone great transformations and served various social and economic roles over the years from 1620 to the 1980s. The book is exceptionally valuable for its attention to Native American, Afro-American, and ethnic family organization, and childrearing customs and their influence. Extensive footnotes compensate for the lack of a bibliography, reviewing the literature of the field. A useful text for history and sociology courses, this is also valuable as an overview of a relatively new field.Mary Drake McFeely, Univ. of Georgia Libs., Athens
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: The Free Press (April 3, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 002921291X
• ISBN-13: 978-0029212912
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #126,352 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent info, less excellent analysis, October 14, 2006

By 

Bob Fancher (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Domestic Revolutions: A Social History Of American Family Life (Paperback)

This nearly-twenty-year-old book still has much to commend it: comprehensive scholarship, easy-to-read (though not sparkling or tight) prose style, and no heavy-handed ideological agenda (though the author's values and assumptions aren't hard to discern).

On the down side, there's not much by way of interpretive framework, and what's there wavers between incoherence and airy-fairy hand-waving.

On the former, for instance, the authors seem both (a) to want to see a significant set of fairly stable "family values" that lasted from the late eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, which are overthrown by late-twentieth century changes, and (b) to show the overwhelming diversity of family life, and the enormous deviations from the alleged stable values, during the same period. But point (b) seems to prove point (a) wrong.

On the airy-fairy issue, they have this notion of "the family" as resilient, rising to all sorts of challenges and adapting to all sorts of strains. But it's hard to tell what they mean by "the family" in that context, since they identify no core set of traits, no base-line definition, that pervades the enormous range of "families" they so effectively describe. One could just as easily use the info they present to argue that "the family"--meaning the child-producing, and/or sex-regulating unit of society--is, as conservatives fear, becoming decreasingly important among forms of human affiliation, more peripheral to decision-making and social life.

The info-overpowering-the-analysis problem even goes to the paragraph-by-paragraph level. Dozens, if not hundreds, of times, the thesis sentences of paragraphs seem grafted on after the fact, with the collation of facts in the particular paragraph at best losely related to the putative thesis, and the theses contradictory of each other in the space of just a page or two. The book reads as if they, or more likely an editor, realized late in the process of writing that the book lacked, but eeded, something resembling a narrative flow, then tried to impose it on a near-final draft. Whatever really happened to produce this phenomenon, much of the book lacks any integral drive or argument, and what's there often seems oddly imprecise relative to the information presented.

Still, the info is great, and well worth thinking about on your own.

A couple of things seem a bit off, to me. They date the rise of the companionate family about a century earlier than other scholars I've read. Well, actually, they do and they don't--after they'd said so much about the rise of the companionate family in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I was surprised then to find a whole chapter that agrees with other scholars that the companionate family was a product of the early twentieth century. Huh? Which was it? My guess is that they mistakenly ascribe a more pervasive social presence and influence to the early foreruners of the companionate family than is accurate.

And while they aren't heavy-handed with their agenda, they frequently say things like, "The government recognized it's obligation," or "The government failed to accept its duty." That seems to me to reflect naivety about "the government," as if it were some separate, pre-existing entity that has inherent obligations, rather than a tool of society that can and does take different forms under different circumstances; and about the social dynamics that create obligations.

But the book is well worth a read. Especially these days, when so much ill-informed blather about "family values" taints public disourse--from both the right and the left--better knowledge of the enormous diversity and flux that have characterized "the family" would help both sides stop being so self-righteous.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly readable, very informative, May 14, 2006

By 

Barbara Hynes "The Hippie Home Economist" (Ventura, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Domestic Revolutions: A Social History Of American Family Life (Paperback)

This is probably my favorite book on U.S. social history. While academic, it's written in a very readable style. The authors make the history of American families extremely interesting, and they shatter some of our more romantic cultural myths. I referred to this book when I wrote my master's thesis on the U.S. household economy of the 1930s during the Great Depression. My first ancestors in this country lived in New England in the early to mid 1600s, so I find these accounts fascinating, as I can imagine how all of my ancestors since that time lived their lives in our developing country and culture. I highly recommend this book to students, history researchers, or the curious casual reader.

5.0 out of 5 stars Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family LIfe, October 25, 2011

By 

Thomas - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Domestic Revolutions: A Social History Of American Family Life (Paperback)

The book is in great condition. The price was much, much lower than I had expected. Thanks for being so easy to do business with.