Volume 22, Number 19 · November 27, 1975
The Emotions of Family Life
By Christopher Lasch
The Wish to Be Free: Society, Psyche, and Value Change
by Fred Weinstein, by Gerald M. Platt
University of California Press, 330 pp., $3.85 (paper)
In the first of these articles (NYR, Nov. 13, 1975), I reviewed a number of studies that attempt to establish the size of the average household at various periods in history and to trace changes in household size and family structure. The controversy about the emergence of the nuclear family, which has inspired most of these researches, remains inconclusive in spite of them. Even if we accept the finding that the nuclear family prevailed in many areas of Western Europe, long before the industrial revolution, it is still not clear what we should make of this information. It is not even clear that the information is of any importance. If the structure of the family persisted essentially unchanged, through centuries of economic and political upheaval, changes in family structure can no longer be regarded as an accurate reflection of other social changes. The more we learn about the size and composition of the household of the past, the more the significance of these statistical studies recedes.
Review, 4609 words
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