**A Look At The Historic Evolution Of The Bourgeois Nuclear Family- “When Fathers Ruled”-A Book Review

Book Review

When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe, Steven Ozment, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Ma., 1983

Those bourgeois ideologues and others who have defended the notion of  the immutable nature of the family have always shrieked to the heavens about the irrationality of the goals of  the international socialist movement, especially its communist wing, in it efforts to replace the bourgeois nuclear family structure prevalent in most of Western society since the 1500s. At least since the Paris Commune in the 19^th century, hell, since the Anabaptist Commune at Munster in the 16^th century they have claimed, and put such claims in graphic and lurid terms, that communists and socialists have programmatically wished to “nationalize women” and place all children in state run orphanages. What they have not understood, and sometimes not they alone, is that the goal is to replace the outdated bourgeois nuclear family structure with more socially sensible norms of interaction between generations. I will gladly discuss that question at some other time but today in reviewing this book, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe by Steven Ozment, I would to look at the roots, as he does, of the bourgeois nuclear family as it evolved up to the 1500s in Western Europe in order to negate the notion that the bourgeois nuclear family is immutable and unchangeable.         

A critical concept in the arsenal of the defenders of the bourgeois nuclear family is that this structure is somehow the most satisfactory basis to build society on, and by extension, that it is somehow the only form that evolved through history that makes sense. We know, or should know now, with the tremendous increases in academic research that all kinds of family forms from the polygamous to extended kin to nuclear have formed the basic unit of society in the over 10,000 year history of human social organization that we know enough about to judge. That is what makes Ozment’s book so refreshing. He investigates the changes that occurred in the way families faced the world as the bourgeois ethos came to dominate continental Europe at the time of the Protestant Reformation and knocks down that theory flat. .

Although, admittedly, the data available from that period is in some respects scanty nevertheless through chapbooks, self-help books and sermons from the pulpit Ozment has made some reasonable generalizations about the newly emerging burgher class that started to take family life and family culture seriously. Along the way he looks at the changes in the formalities of the marriage contract from it previous essentially common law customary origins to a more formal public pronouncement; the liberation of important segments of women from cloistered life as a result of breakdown of religious institutions (nunneries and the like) in the wake of the Protestant Reformation; and the breakdown of the old religious concept of celibacy as having some inherent virtue over marriage. He also looks at the “new” way that husbands treated their wives; she still subordinate to he but with recognized duties and, more importantly, recognized rights by law and by the emerging ethos; and, given the more formal nature of the marriage vow the more formal nature of divorce (and the greater obstacles to being granted it). Finally, Ozment, although recognizing that fathers “ruled” also traces changes in the way fathers related to their offspring in such matters as seeing to their health, their education and their discipline. There was then, as now, a brisk trade in self-help (and just plain help, please, help) books by authors from Erasmus to Martin Luther down to the local church pastor.  

Special note: There has been a trend in modern academic research, and an important trend a couple of decades ago when this book was written, centered on the notion that since life, was, as Thomas Hobbes put it in the 17^th century, nasty, short and brutish, that the so-called modern notion of child-centeredness was absent and that somehow because of high rates of mortality and other adverse factors that loving and caring for children did not drive parental concerns. Of course nature was a darker force in those days, and there was plenty to tremble about in the harshness of life so that one could speculate that child love would be in short supply but that assumption, as Professor Ozment notes, will not stand closer scrutiny. And so we come full circle, at least for my purposes. Why? Well go back to the start of this review where I noted that the socialist movement has been accused of essentially the same thing as those early bourgeois fathers and families - not loving children. By exposing children to alternative social, healthy, and caring forms under socialism and making the whole of society responsible collectively however we will put paid to that notion.  

***Tales From The 1950s Crypt- “Revolutionary Road”- This Ain’t “Ozzie And Harriet”

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of the trailer for the movie, "Revolutionary Road".

DVD Review

Revolutionary Road, based on the book by Richard Yates, starring Kate Winslett and Leonardo DiCaprio, DreamWorks Productions, 2008

Over the past period I have seemingly endlessly retailed the experiences of my young adulthood during the 1960s, the time of the “generation of ‘68”. That makes me, obviously, a child of the 1950s, the time period of this very interesting movie, “Revolutionary Road”, based on a book by the darkly sardonic writer, Richard Yates. I have also seemingly endlessly pointed out my experiences and the effects they had as a result of growing up among the marginally working poor in that ‘golden age’. I am fond of saying that I didn’t know there was any other condition than being poor for a long time. Well, I did find out there were other conditions although in my youth I would still have had a hard time relating to the story line of this film. The ‘trials and tribulations’, then, of an upwardly mobile, prosperous young couple, the Wheelers, Frank and April, with the mandatory two charming children (although amazingly well hidden throughout the film) and a nice leafy suburban house in some nice town in Connecticut would have gone over my head. Now though I can a little more readily appreciate the seamy psychologically paralyzing side of that existence.

As graphically portrayed in the film, that seamy side that also provided some of the most powerful scenes in the movie, and best acting moments by both Winslett and DiCaprio (last seen together in "Titanic") the central driving force of the story is the emptiness of middle class existence in the 1950s. Cookie-cutter is the word that came to mind as Frank and April try to break the golden bonds that keep them tied to their old life. One of the nice moments cinematically is the sequence involving Frank’s routine workday morning ritual catching the train to New York City (along with all the other felt-hatted men, the symbol of success in that period). Another sober moment is when April takes out the rubbish in their deathless suburban tract and realizes that this life is not for her.

But how to break those golden chains? The issues presented here about consumerism, meaningless and vacuous work, the isolated role of women in the nuclear family (and the question of women's reproductive rights that drives the final section of the film), the eternal struggle for security in an individualistically-driven society are all issues that got a fuller workout and wider airing in the 1960s (and since). In a sense the ‘whimsical’ Wheelers were too early. They were before their time. However, although times have changed, I will bet serious money that if you go to some Connecticut train station headed to New York City on any Monday morning you will see, two generations removed and without the hats, men and women making that same meaningless trip that old Frank made. Yates was definitely onto something about the nature of modern capitalist social organization. But I will confess something, although I know better now the stresses of that fate, I would not have minded, minded at all, growing up in that little ‘cottage’ the Wheelers called home. That, however, is a story for another day. In the meantime note this. I am glad, glad as hell, that I followed my version of 'revolutionary road', not theirs.