Family: The Making of an Idea, an Institution, and a Controversy in American Culture (review)

Family: The Making of an Idea, an Institution, and a Controversy in American Culture. By Betty G. Farrell (Boulder, Westview Press, 1999) 199 pp. $59.00 cloth $20.00 paper

The history of the family has been interdisciplinary from its beginnings. Initially it owed most to sociology and demography, with lesser debts to psychology and economics. Of late, it has grown closer to anthropology and cultural studies, as the focus of research has shifted from measurable behavioral data to the languages, rituals, and images that constitute the mental worlds of families. Farrell's book reflects this latest transition. It is a well-informed, smoothly written synthesis of recent work about the history and sociology of American families, one that acknowledges the behavioral as well as symbolic dimensions of families. "A family is defined not so much by a particular set of poeple as by the quality of the relationships that bind them together," she writes (3). Family is more than a set of structures and functions; it also embodies many, often conflicted, meanings for individuals and the society at large.

Farrell pays close attention to four dimensions of family: childhood, adolescent sexuality, marriage, and aging. She traces each from colonial times to the present, noting major shifts at both the ideological and behavioral levels. What emerges in each case is a growing disjunction between the ideal and the real, showing the ambivalence that characterizes American family life today. We regard children as innocent; yet we treat them as vulnerable, even dangerous. We insist that adolescents gain autonomy; yet we demand that they conform. We idealize marriage; yet we remain incredulous that it actually works. As a group, the aged have never had greater public support, but the fear of aging has never been greater.

Why should there be so much ambivalence? Farrell makes it clear that expectations for family have never been higher. Furthermore, the symbolic weight families carry is much greater now than in the past. However fragile families may be institutionally, they have never been more powerful culturally. When families and family members do not live up to the ideal, we find it difficult to deal with them objectively. Unfortunately, Farrell's book stops short of exposing the sources of this condition. It does not examine the larger cultural context for clues to why so much significance has come to be attached to family. The history and sociology of American religions is not examined; no comparative anthropological perspectives are deployed.

What would an adequate cultural history of family entail? It would be more than a history of ideas, and more than a history of families as such. It would consist of the many ways in which family rituals, narratives, and images give meaning and direction, and how, as symbol and metaphor, family expresses, and at the same time attempts to resolve, the contradictions that other institutions--like the church, the community, and nation--can no longer mediate.

Although this would be a different book, nonetheless, Farrell has provided a concise, balanced, and readable treatment of a subject that, because of its cultural significance, can never be free of controversy.

John R. Gillis
Rutgers University

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