Gender and Family History

This area studies the history of families, households, and gender relations—how kinship and domestic life were organized and how ideas about women, men, and the sexes shaped past societies.

Definition

The historical study of families, households, kinship, and gender relations, including the changing roles, representations, and experiences associated with women, men, children, and domestic life.

Scope

This area covers the social history of the family and household—their size, structure, and functions—and the history of gender as a category that organizes social relations and meanings. It examines marriage patterns, household formation, the changing roles of women and men, the experience of childhood, and the stages of the life course. Drawing on demographic, social, and cultural history, it treats gender both as lived experience and as a system of representation. The approach is descriptive and interpretive, attentive to how categories of family and gender are historically constructed.

Sub-topics

• History of Childhood and the Life Course
• History of the Family and Household
• Women's History and Gender Relations

Core questions

• How were families and households structured in different periods and places?
• How have ideas about gender shaped social, economic, and political life?
• How did marriage patterns and household formation vary historically?
• How were childhood and the life course understood and organized in the past?

Key theories

Gender as a category of historical analysis

Joan Scott's influential argument that gender—the social organization of difference between the sexes—is a fundamental category for historical analysis and a primary way of signifying relationships of power.

The European marriage pattern

Hajnal's identification of a distinctive northwestern European pattern of relatively late marriage and high proportions never marrying, with important consequences for household formation and fertility.

The history of childhood

Ariès's thesis that childhood as a distinct stage of life with its own sentiments and institutions was historically constructed, emerging more sharply in the early modern period—a claim that opened a wide field of debate.

History

The history of the family was reshaped in the 1960s and 1970s by the household studies of Peter Laslett and the Cambridge Group, which challenged assumptions about large pre-industrial households, and by John Hajnal's work on European marriage patterns. Women's history emerged as a distinct field in the same decades and was transformed in the 1980s by the turn to gender history, articulated by Joan Scott, which analysed gender as a relational and discursive category. Philippe Ariès's work likewise inspired a large literature on the history of childhood.

Debates

Was childhood discovered or always recognized?

Ariès's claim that childhood as a distinct concept emerged historically has been contested by scholars who argue that pre-modern societies did recognize childhood as a special stage, prompting debate over change and continuity in attitudes to children.

Key figures

• Joan Wallach Scott
• Peter Laslett
• Philippe Ariès
• John Hajnal

Seminal works

• scott1986
• laslett1965
• aries1960
• hajnal1965

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between women's history and gender history?

Women's history focuses on recovering the experiences and contributions of women, who were often neglected in traditional histories. Gender history, while building on this, analyses gender as a relational system that shapes the lives of both women and men and structures meanings of power, as set out in Joan Scott's work.

Were pre-industrial households large and extended?

Research by Peter Laslett and the Cambridge Group found that, in much of pre-industrial northwestern Europe, households were typically small and nuclear rather than large and multi-generational, challenging earlier assumptions about a shift from extended to nuclear families with industrialization.