Abstract
Family structures and family law have been moving in the same direction all over the world over the past two centuries. Although general agreement exists that these changes have something to do with industrialization and with the ensuing transformation of the material basis of individual subsistence, it is nearly impossible to disentangle cause and effect in this process of the simultaneous revolution of economic and family structures. The transition from a society in which status and the family constitute the basis of social security to a society in which survival and success are based on merit has led to a disintegration of the family. But a society cannot go on functioning well unless it protects its inept, and hence the disintegration of the family is a threat to social cohesion itself.
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References
1.
Harry Willekens has managed to frame this set of changes by focusing more specifically on the legal changes; I think that focus might well be a stimulus for creative analysis that focuses on the ways that the law, in addition to being determined by economic or social forces, constrains its own development. See esp. his "Explaining Two Hundred Years of Family Law in Western Europe," in Het gezinsrecht in de sociale wetenschappen, ed. Harry Willekens (Den Haag: VUGA, 1997), 59-93. See also Barbara Willenbacher's article in this volume on the immanent shaping of the law, "Individualism and Traditionalism in Inheritance Law in Germany, France, England, and the United States," Journal of Family History 28 (2003): 208-225.
2.
At the extreme microlevel, we give up the search for causes because the processes seem to be random.
3.
Almost all such events or processes seem to be "caused" by countless individual human actions, not by huge biological or geological events (major epidemics, volcanic catastrophes, meteors, etc.); thus, their causal processes seem aggregative.
4.
I believe his first statement was in "On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions: Applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (1888): 245-72.
5.
As he stated it in Lewis Henry Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. For a later view of his impact on family theory, see Thomas R. Trautman, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
6.
The likeness between Eskimo and "Yankee" kinship was formally stated by George P. Murdock, Social Structure (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 226-27. Not all Eskimo groups fall into the same kinship group, and Willekens has reminded me that in any event, Murdoch was referring specifically to kinship terms and not making a comparison between the activity patterns of the two systems. Robert F. Winch (with Linton C. Freeman) was the first to prove by scalogram analysis that neither religion nor the family would "fit" into a scale of societal complexity. See their "Social Complexity: An Empirical Test of a Typology of Societies," American Journal of Sociology 62 (1957): 461-66.
7.
Although I have stated the thesis more narrowly, its classic presentation is in Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937), and most succinctly in chaps. 2 and 12.
8.
My statement is to be found in World Changes in Divorce Patterns (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 335-36.
9.
Under Savonarola's whiplash, the Genevans did try for a while, and several utopias in the United States were created during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, including some successful ones. Indeed, the first (mainly British) European settlers in Massachusetts believed they were re-creating a virtuous society. Note, however, that they were not transforming their own societies but creating a new one, a very different task.
10.
Martha Minow offers an extensive analysis of what legal historians do and ought to do, focusing especially on the position of women, and including much of the nineteenth century in her critique. See her " `Forming Underneath Everything That Grows': Toward a History of Family Law," Wisconsin Law Review (1985): 819.
11.
As long ago as 1941, E. Adamson Hoebel and Karl N. Llewellyn presented the logic for determining which customs could be considered law. See their book The Cheyenne Way (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973) (originally published in 1941).
12.
Thomas Kuehn makes this point only about the Annales group, but I believe that it applies to sociologists generally. See Kuehn's Law, Family, and Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4-7.
13.
I believe this relationship was first analyzed in the United States by Max Rheinstein in Marriage Stability, Divorce, and the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). For the recent period of rapid change, see Le Divorce en Europe Occidentale: La Loi et le Nombre (Paris: Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques, 1981), 168-80 (by Patrick Festy) and 183 ff.ff. (by P. Guibentif).
14.
This general statement has many ramifications, some of which are presented in my "The Protection of the Inept," American Sociological Review 32 (1967): 5-19.
15.
We are all somewhat protected, of course, by the sheer inability of others to measure our excellence (or lack of it) precisely enough.
16.
I consider the Japanese to be one of several "Stable High-Divorce Rate Systems," with a range of interesting social patterns. See my World Changes in Divorce Patterns, chap. 8.
17.
See especially Michael M. Sheehan, "The Formation and Stability of Marriage in Fourteenth-Century England: Evidence of an Ely Register," in Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies, ed. Michael Sheehan (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1996), 38-76.
18.
Theresa McBride, "Public Authority and Private Lives: Divorce after the French Revolution," French Historical Studies (1991-1992): 747-68, gives an excellent analysis of the backgrounds of the Naquet law.
19.
Gregory J. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919-1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), esp. chaps. 7 and 8, gives an extended analysis of this and usefully contrasts it with the Chinese example. See also Gregory Massell, "Family Law and Social Mobilization in Soviet Central Asia: Some Comparisons with Communist China," Canadian Slavonic Papers 17 (1975): 375-403.
20.
For some of the complexities of this process, see Goode, World Changes in Divorce Patterns, chap. 8, and Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York: Free Press, 1963), chap. 7. The 1946 constitution was simply the Meiji Constitution, as amended; the revision was extensive, but the procedure for legal adoption followed the original version. See Sylvia Brown Hamano, "Incomplete Revolutions and Not So Alien Transplants: The Japanese Constitution and Human Rights," University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 1 (1999): 415-90.
21.
Ataturk, of course, intended to drag Muslim Turkey into the twentieth century and successfully bet on the future, despite considerable resistance. June Starr asserts that by mid-century, even the rural women in Anatolia's provinces had begun to assert their rights. See her article, "The Role of Turkish Secular Law in Changing the Lives of Rural Muslim Women, 1950-1970," Law and Society Review 23 (1989): 497-523.
22.
For a commentary just after Taliban took control, see Helena Malikyar, "Development of Family Law in Afghanistan: The Roles of the Hanafi Madhhab, Customary Practices and Power Politics," Central Asian Survey 16 (1997): 389-99. As many scholars have noted, fundamentalist leaders typically have their own version of "Koranic" rules since there are many interpretations of that basic theological document. For a wise analysis of how some of the earlier reforms arose during the previous century, see J. N. D. Anderson, "The Role of Personal Statutes in Social Development in Islamic Countries," Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (1971): 16-31.
23.
The development of world community pressures on governmental systems and especially codes has been explored by John Meyer and his colleagues. See Nitza Berkovitch, From Motherhood to Citizenship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 11 and chap. 5; Francisco O. Ramirez and John W. Meyer, "Dynamics of Citizenship Development and the Political Incorporation of Women: A Global Institutionalization Research Agenda," in Public Rights, Public Rules, ed. Connie McNeely (New York: Garland, 1998), 59-80; Francisco O. Ramirez, "Global Changes, World Myths, and the Demise of Cultural Gender: Implications for the United States," in America's Changing Role in the World-System, eds. Terry Boswell and Albert Bergesen (New York: Praeger, 1987), 257-90.
24.
Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women, chap. 9.