The European Family (review)

Jack Goody’s The European Family appears as part of a multi-volume series on the Making of Europe. It represents a restatement, if not a full synthesis, of the author’s writings on comparative family history that appeared in several books published in the 1980s and 1990s. In this volume, Goody presents his views in a set of chronologically- and topically-based chapters beginning with the Classical World and ending with the contemporary family.

In his work on comparative family history in recent years, Goody has sought to slay several analytical dragons. He reserves his greatest disapproval for those who, following Max Weber, emphasize the “uniqueness” of the West by emphasizing the singularity of what John Hajnal called the “European Marriage Pattern,” or by arguing that the modern western family invented affection for children. Goody uses the work of David Sabean on the village of Neckarhausen to attack the body of research inspired by the Cambridge School for the History of Population and Social Structure for over-emphasizing the uniqueness of nuclear family forms to the West (Goody believes that this form prevails in all societies). He also decries scholars’ exaggeration of the “isolation” of residents of nuclear household dwellers from their extended kin.

Instead, Goody advocates seeing Eurasia as a single cultural and economic zone that can be fruitfully contrasted with Africa. Since the Bronze Age, Eurasian societies developed two important practices that shaped family relations: the “endowment of women,” and “women’s property complex.” Under these broad cultural practices, women became part of systems of inter-generational property devolution. In both Europe and Asia, couples had some control over a “conjugal fund” (16). Though in many instances receiving less property than siblings, women in these societies, as seen by Goody, were key parts of “strategies of heirship.” Complex systems of social stratification evolved from these strategies and later came to reinforce them.

Curiously enough, despite Goody’s desire to minimize differences between East and West, this volume emphasizes the impact of Christianity on western family life as a main factor that distinguished European from Asian family history. In his previous work, and again in this volume, Goody shows how rules that the church gradually imposed on the European population limited “strategies of heirship” that they could practice to preserve property within kin groups. The church erected severe restrictions upon the range of persons whom one could marry. It insinuated itself into the lives and consciousness of wealthy Europeans, often convincing them to convey property to the church in their own lifetimes or through written wills and testaments. It convinced wealthy widows to remain unmarried, further diminishing the likelihood of heirs with which it would have to compete for property. It gradually imposed its prohibition of divorce (though loopholes existed for wealthy men and for the very poor simply through abandonment). It prohibited a system of adoption of male heirs that men in the ancient world had used to maintain patrilines. By gradually becoming a “great organization,” the church became a worthy adversary of secular authorities in the battle for the hearts and minds of medieval and early modern Europeans. More than any other single factor it shaped the “family values” of Europeans.

With his long-standing interest in patterns of property devolution across generations, Goody devotes attention to the economic features of his story. He revisits the process of Europe’s proto-industrial and then its full industrial development. But in this part of the analysis, it is not always clear what the main point is. Did the proto-industrial or industrialization process radically affect family relations?

Goody is at his best in analyses that expose these important structural features of western society. His text loses power and becomes more equivocal when he narrates events such as the Reformation or the processes of proto-industrialization or industrialization. These parts of the book are relatively uncontroversial, but it is often difficult to understand whether the author believes that these figured more as sources of continuity or change in western...