John Modell

Social Change and Transitions to Adulthood in Historical Perspective.

*John Modell is Associate Professor of History, University of Minnesota, and Research Associate, Philadelphia Social History Project. Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr. is Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania. Theodore Hershberg is Associate Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania, and Director, Philadelphia Social History Project. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, August, 1975. Rules can be found in every society governing the passage to adulthood. In some

Children in time and place : developmental and historical insights

Preface Acknowledgments Part I. A Proposal: 1. Studying children in a changing world Part II. Historical and Life transitions: 2. Americas home front children in World War II 3. Rising above lifes disadvantage: from the Great Depression 4. Child development and human diversity Part III. Life Transitions Across Historical Time: 5. Problem girls: observations on past and present 6. Continuity and change in symptom choice: anorexia 7. Fathers and child rearing Part IV. The Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration: 8. The workshop enterprise 9. The elusive historical child: ways of knowing the child of history and psychology 10. A paradigm in question: commentary 11. Epilogue Bibliography Author index Subject index.

The Timing of Marriage in the Transition to Adulthood: Continuity and Change, 1860-1975

All societies are age graded to a degree and must, therefore, make some provision for marking and sanctioning the orderly passage from one stage of life to the next. The patterning of social transitions provides an unusually good site from which to observe regularities of a social system over time. Clearly, the ways in which such transitions are accomplished are not fixed features of any given society but are subject to renegotiation as social and economic conditions change. In turn, the alteration of social schedules may itself be a source of change, bringing about shifts in other social institutions. Such alterations, though sometimes subtle, are a prime subject for inquiry. Remarkably little attention in the literature on family history has been given to the subject of transitions. Most family scholars, attempting to depict change over time, have fixed their interest on shifts in household size, composition, and headship (Hareven 1976). In this excessive preoccupation with the organization of the household, more dynamic processes have been slighted; it is almost as though it were necessary to make the family stand still in order to appreciate that it has changed. Both on an aggregate and an individual level, it is easy to treat events

The First Conflict Resolution Movement, 1956-1971

From 1956 to 1971 a group of conflict resolution researchers centered at the University of Michigan attempted to develop a comprehensive scientific theory of human conflict and to establish a new profession that would be available to advise national policymakers. The movements pioneers founded the Journal of Conflict Resolution and an interdisciplinary research center and took part in the 1960s expansion of peace studies and activism. The promised theoretical developments failed to materialize, and financial, institutional, and political problems led to the movements dissolution. The present study analyzes the movement as a profession and employs quantitative studies of the movements participants, their published materials, and their citation networks to document its development and dissolution.

Recent social trends in the United States, 1960-1990

Context -- Age groups -- Microsocial -- Women -- Labor market -- Labor and management -- Social stratification -- Social relations -- State and service institutions -- Mobilizing institutions -- Institutionalization of social forces -- Ideologies -- Household resources -- Lifestyle -- Leisure -- Educational attainment -- Integration and marginalization -- Attitudes and values.

Waging War and Marriage: Military Service and Family Formation, 1940-1950

World War II represented a substantial mobilization of American resources, including human resources. Despite the obvious hindrances it posed to marriage, nuptiality on the whole did not slow down during the war. Among the reasons it did not do so was a government policy designed to conserve the already-formed families of soldiers, which also made marriage an economically attractive option to young women. For citizen soldiers, wartime marriage was not simply economically feasible. It was as well an action that connected them with the civilian life that they had reluctantly left. Marriage, moreover, was an action congruent with and promoted by success in the unusual occupational context of the armed services. Even after the war, wartime military service proved to be congruent with marriage, veterans being more prone—after a brief lag—to marry. Often portrayed as a war in defense of the American family, World War II seems to have produced patterns that included surprising degrees of continuity with family formation.

Public Griefs and Personal Problems: An Empirical Inquiry into the Impact of the Great Depression

From Olympus, Samuel Eliot Morison (1965) reminds us that “we owe admiration as well as pity to the simple folk of America who suffered so grievously under the depression.” And no doubt we do. But those who would understand the long-term political and social impacts of the Great Depression must gain a fuller understanding of the ways in which Americans made sense of their Depression experiences. The critical passage through Roosevelt’s Hundred Days largely satisfies most historians’ appetites for understanding the impact of the Great Depression upon Americans’ personal attitudes. The effects of the whole Depression era upon the ways Americans felt are assumed to be congruent with changes in political institutions and ethos. In particular, the durable partisan realignment and its concomitant “New Deal coalition” occurring in the middle of the Depression calls up images of major modifications in attitudes. Thus Clubb, Flanigan, and Zingale (1980) explain the endurance of the New Deal realignment with reference to the “vital and active concern for a suffering citizenry” that FDR and the New Deal came to connote.

Suburbanization and change in the American family

Suburbanization and Change in the American Family Episodic accounts of social processes have proven generally unsatisfying to recent historians. One reason that Warners Streetcar Suburbs so quickly attained the status of a classic in urban history is that it makes processual sense out of a range of phenomena formerly of interest mainly to a variety of antiquarians. Warners inquiry into the growth of residential Boston in the late nineteenth century taught urban historians that suburbanization has been, for a century, a critical process of American urbanization, and not just a characteristic alarum of the 1950s. The most suggestive element of Warners account has been its indication that even in the era of the streetcar, American cities did not simply expand: cities differentiated as they grew, redistributing individuals and activities in non-random ways, serving different categories of individuals differently. Warners work conveyed the powerful message that the restructuring of social space within cities has affected lives in systematic ways which call for close scholarly attention.1 Although systematic social historians are in Warners debt for his processual account, Streetcar Suburbs is nevertheless a case study, and, like much of Warners work, proceeds intuitively rather than by spelling out implications. Among the most important of these implications is the notion that the family not only affected but was systematically affected by urban form. The present paper pursues this line of analysis.

Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925: Demographic Perspectives

Throughout his distinguished career, Herbert Gutman has displayed a rare genius for dredging up the most gloriously obscure historical evidence and deriving from it new perspectives on the largest themes. The Black Family is another triumph of this kind: my awe of Professor Gutman’s energy and insight is enhanced by this volume. At the same time, Gutman makes clear that the volume is not demographic in its intent. Since my commentary is to be from a demographic perspective, I will take particular pains to direct this perspective to the purposes Gutman sets forth in The Black Family. These are identified by the author as discerning “what sustained common slave beliefs and behavior,” rather than merely documenting “regularities in behavior,” the latter being Gutman’s characterization of the results of the application of quantitative methods (1976). My task, then, is to examine the links that Gutman establishes between demographic argument and explanation, in his sense, and to assess their adequacy. No demographer, I suspect, would have undertaken the kind of investigation Gutman assays; but demographic skills would have served Gutman’s intentions. I will here try to be severe with this imposing volume, recognizing the importance and aptness of its central thesis, and the audacity of its author’s empirical reach, but questioning the adequacy of his demography to his own ends.

Book ReviewsWelcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions). Edited by Richard A. Shweder. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xvii+302.

“Not everything real is something from no point of view” (p. xi) argues Richard Shweder in his introduction to this fine set of interdisciplinary essays about one such situatedly “real” “something”: middle age. The book draws together specially prepared essays on mainstream and nonmainstream “middle age” (or its absence, or its closest approximation) in five radically different societies (including the contemporary United States), with an eye to examining “the emergence and diffusion of a cosmopolitan midlife discourse” (p. vii). That, at any rate, is the editor’s thesis. The essays’ diversity—and the volume’s internal controversy—is greatly heightened by a cultural-historical account by Margaret Morganroth Gullette of “middle-ageism” in the United States: the insistence that one ought to be anxious—perhaps preemptive—about incipient aging. (The text slightly preceded Viagra’s entry upon the scene, but the drug and its uptake fit her argument perfectly.) “Belief in midlife decline is a pandemic peculiar to our era, a set of effects with a discernible twentiethcentury history and extremely vigorous and insidious maintenance strategies” (p. 17). The “pandemic” as described is composed of “effects,” but with no causes in sight; but these effects are said to have “maintenance strategies” but no one to formulate them is mentioned. Gullette rages against the diffidence of scholars, perhaps her fellow contributors, who launch “counterdiscourses . . . from . . . certain restricted ‘fields’ of academe (life course development, sociology, gerontology, midlife studies)” (p. 7). We are enjoined instead to construct better midlife narratives, for ourselves and as scholars, that “locate the decline elements in one’s middle life more accurately” (p. 31), proximately in the producers of conventional decline narratives, more remotely in those who so arrange the labor market that early superannuation is in employers’ interests. Perhaps in reaction, Thomas S. Wiesner and Lucinda P. Bernheimer offer a spirited assertion of the meaningfulness of the notion of midlife in the contemporary United States, somewhat distantly justified by their fascinating empirical typology of life course deflections and reflections of a sample of American “countercultural” parents, studied longitudinally now for a quarter of a century. They also offer an empirically grounded assertion that seems to draw together the observations and arguments of several of the essays in the volume: “Midlife . . . is a joint, yoked transition of adolescent children and parents. Parents experience, define, and respond to midlife in part because of the teenage transition of their children” (p. 215). Superb essays on Japan, India, and Samoa present sharp contrasts to