John R. Gillis

Family life in western societies : a historical sociology of family relationships in Britain and North America

Preface Acknowledgements 1. First principles 2. Family life in the past: continuity and change in four revolutions 3. Maternal care and maternal deprivation 4. Sociological models of western family life in the 1950s 5. Criticisms and critics of the 1950s models 6. Family life and mental illness, especially schizophrenia 7. Exogamy and the avoidance of incest 8. Age-mates and adolescent socialisation 9. Women in employment 10. Careers and couples 11. Social class, social mobility and family life 12. Family life among ethnic minorities 13. Marital adjustment, marital breakdown and divorce 14. Departures and rejections Notes Index.

Traditional Cultures Editorial: Mobility and Innovation in Traditional Coastal Cultures

It may come as a surprise to know that before the modern era, the past weighed much less heavily on the present than it does today. Traditionalism , a mindset that pays obeisance to the past, is in fact more characteristic of our own times than earlier coastal cultures. The kind of nostalgia associated with modernity prevents us from confronting coastal problems with the pragmatism characteristic of our ancestors (Gillis in Nostalgia by the sea, 26:27–31, 2010, [1]). What is striking is just how flexible and innovative they were.

Book Review: Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals

Elizabeth Pleck has written the first comprehensive history of American family rituals, full of fascinating detail that vividly displays all the variations and flavors of this multiethnic, religiously, and regionally diverse country. This book, based on exhaustive research in both secondary and primary sources, goes beyond the existing treatments of Protestant middle-class domestic celebrations to provide us with a much more complete picture of the complicated, often syncretic developments that have produced the ritual renaissance evident in virtually every American community today. Pleck demonstrates not only the diversity of ethnic and religious rituals over time but also their interactions. If the Protestant middle classes can be said to have exerted the greatest influence over family form and family ritual from the mid-nineteenth century onward, they were never wholly hegemonic and, in fact, have been influenced in turn by other ethnic and class groups. The powers of cultural assimilation, which seemed to have reached full strength in the 1940s and 1950s, weakened significantly in the last half of the twentieth century, yielding to a resurgence of ethnic and religious ritualizing, which brought us a whole new set of family rites (Kwanzaa in 1966 and St. Lucia’s Day in 1962), and a elaboration of others, including Chanukah, bar and bat mitzvah, and quinceñera. Yet, while most rituals are now customized to suit individual and group preferences, the overall pattern and function of family occasions remain remarkably constant. The big, white wedding is a case in point, for despite all the critiques launched against it since the 1960s it is even more widespread, still “wasteful, extravagant, patriarchal, heterosexist, and anachronistic,” according to Pleck (p. 231). The more things change, the more they remain the same, and what we are observing today are variations on themes established in the Victorian era. Pleck is right to note the huge change that happened in the mid-nineteenth century. Prior to that time, family cultures had two faces, one carnivalesque, the other puritanical. This ambiguity was resolved by the Victorian Protestant middle classes, who domesticated the carnivalesque and created a national festive calendar (Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving) with a whole new set of life cycle events (birthdays, weddings, and funerals), which Pleck calls the sentimental phase of family celebrations. Other groups, such as immigrant Catholics, Jews, African Americans, and Chinese, initially had their own practices, but by the second quarter of the twentieth century they began adopt certain elements of the dominant culture, urged on by increasingly aggressive commercial forces that, while they had not created the holidays and ceremonies, quickly learned how to profit from them. Something like assimilation seemed to be happening in the 1950s and 1960s, when, quite unexpectedly, ethnic, regional, and religious revitalization movements presented multiple challenges. Ritual itself was confronted by countercultural movements, and by the 1970s, feminism was raising the most basic challenge of all, attacking the patriarchal family system that the rituals celebrated. Pleck calls this the beginning of the post-sentimental. But, if old rituals underwent alteration, few disappeared, and several new rites (home birthing, lesbian and gay coming-out and commitment ceremonies, divorce rituals, and practices associated with the death awareness movement) came into existence. The result was a society even more suffused with rituals covering every phase of life, from the newly created phase of life associated with the unborn child to the dying and dead, who are now the subject of unprecedented cultural attention. Even as the rites of the

For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present@@@Victorian Divorce

This ambitious study presents a comprehensive history of marriage from the seventeenth century to the present day. John Gillis draws on evidence from folk lore and ritual, wedding rites, and the personal accounts of men and women, to illustrate in rich detail the perpetual difference between the ideal of marriage and the actual reality.