Megan Doolittle

The family story : blood, contract and intimacy, 1830-1960

Part I Family paradoxes: the family and the historian conceptualizing the family. Part II Families 1830-1914: social and cultural change fathers and fatherhood - family authority domestic service and lodging - doing family work. Part III Families 1914-1960: changes in family life - the 20th century family shadows - unmarried women family silences - untold stories.

Understanding family meanings: a reflective text

Family Studies is a key area of policy, professional and personal debate. Perhaps precisely because of this, teaching texts have struggled with how to approach this area, which is both ‘familiar’ and also contentious and value laden. This innovative and reflective book deals with such dilemmas head-on, through its focus on family meanings in diverse contexts in order to enhance our understanding of everyday social lives and professional practices. Drawing on extracts and research by leading authors in the field of family studies, Understanding Family Meanings provides the reader with an overview of the basic concepts and theories related to families using readings with questions and analysis to encourage reflection and learning. The book centralises the question what is ‘family’ and focuses on family meanings as the key underpinnings for academic study and professional training. It explores the shifting and subtle ways in which individuals, researchers, policy-makers and professionals make sense of the idea of ‘family’ and in doing so considers issues of power, inequality and values which are integral to any understanding of family meanings. Audio discussions with leading authorities in the field are also available online to enhance the content and key concepts of the book. It therefore provides an excellent foundation for any module in family studies, as well as all professional training modules that include attention to families and close relationships, and for further learning in the area of families and relationships.

Fatherhood and Family Shame: Masculinity, Welfare and the Workhouse in Late Nineteenth-Century England

This story was told by George Hewins, a building labourer from Stratford on Avon, about looking after his four young children circa 1910, during a period when he was unemployed and his wife was out working. The children were often hungry, so this was a good opportunity for a snack of broad beans, which he had filched from a bag outside a shop selling them for pig food. In their very small home, things easily got out of hand but he was never the strict disciplinarian, using his storytelling gifts to keep them in order: I’d tell them anything to keep them quiet. We had a houseful! They got a bit out of hand sometimes, but not one of the knowed the weight o’mine. I never tapped them. The missus did that — with the slipper. She let them know who was boss.3

Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914

Finally, two contributions seem initially to fall outside the remit of this collection but make a strong impression when considered alongside the whole. Jay Winter’s contribution on silence begins with a plea that it is our ‘business as historians’ to read ‘between the spoken lines of history’ and hear the silences. Winter argues persuasively for the inclusion of an analysis of silence by scholars of remembrance. He makes a striking point about the recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder, both publically and medically, giving some veterans and civilians a new licence to speak. Aaron William Moore’s examination of peace and war museums in Japan is the only contribution not focused on Europe. Moore argues the Japanese experience is illuminating as a contrast to Western war memory and that it has to be examined on a local level because it does not fit a European model. He then discusses the current provision and the bias behind existing museums, while acknowledging where gaps exist. The conclusion by the editors reiterates that the aim of the volume was to provide a ‘range of different perspectives’ by scholars from an array of disciplines. The collection intended to take a very broad approach to ‘modern warfare and its aftermath’. This is certainly achieved and the variety of topics and viewpoints is a real strength when considering the volume as a whole. Many of the contributions leave the reader wanting to know more and to trace the aftermath further. The length of the chapters prohibits this but the footnotes and bibliography provide excellent further reading for those to whom the subjects are new. As such, many of the contributions – particularly those attempting to consider almost the whole twentieth century – are excellent individual gateways to studying a particular nation, its people, and learning more about the impact of conflicts on a local level. The editors urge historians of war and its aftermath to ‘think more comparatively, to look for similarities, differences and common explanations’. This book allows the reader to begin such a process.

The Duty to Provide: Fathers, Families and the Workhouse in England, 1880–1914

This chapter explores the ways that the poor laws in England were designed around the norms and ideals of the provider role in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and how in practice the result- ing structures rarely matched the more fluid realities of the lives of the poor. In the decades around 1900, Poor Law provision in England was under intense scrutiny as meanings of poverty and of welfare more generally were being challenged. Growing critiques of the excluding side-effects of the Poor Law accompanied debates about how to bring the male working class into the nation state by reconceptualizing citi- zenship around long-standing social-moral norms of obligation to pro- vide for women, children and the elderly within families. The provider role was thus highly gendered, with husbands and fathers normally required to support their dependents, but the relationship between providing and masculinity was a complex one, particularly amongst the very poorest who availed themselves of Poor Law relief. Those who failed to provide found themselves increasingly vulnerable to pauper- ism, at the same time as its stigma powerfully reinforced the ‘deviant’ position of those claiming relief. However, relationships between wel- fare institutions and families were not totally determined by the state and philanthropic agencies, but were actively used and contested at the individual level by those seeking relief and by collective working-class struggles. The voice of the very poor is notoriously difficult to access, but some fragmentary autobiographical accounts of encounters with pauperism provide opportunities to explore these dynamic relation- ships between the Poor Law and its subjects through the perceptions and reactions of the poor themselves.