Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival 1900–1950 by Paul Ginsborg (review)

Family Politics examines family life and politics in Bolshevik Russia, the Turkish Republic, Fascist Italy, the Spanish Republic, Francoist Spain, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. Weaving together family theory, legislation, social conditions, gender relations, daily life, and cultural production, Ginsborg cogently demonstrates how each nation-state sought a revolution in family life. At its most compelling, Family Politics recounts the lives of families torn apart during periods of extreme violence and describes the impact of this violence on both the large scale, which resulted in seismic demographic shifts, and at the personal level where individual families struggled amid devastating loss.

Ginsborg recognizes that these "great tyrant regimes" collapsed "the private into the public," restructuring "civil society to serve the state" (68). While acknowledging the invasive nature of dictatorial states, Ginsborg simultaneously challenges totalitarian approaches that downplay private life. As he contends, totalitarian approaches overlook "that layer of social activity which, even in dictatorship, lies between the individual and the state, and which has its lynchpin in the family" (437). By contrast, Ginsborg integrates family narratives into the "social and political life of a nationstate" to show that "families are not simply on the receiving end of political power but are themselves actors in the historical process" (xviii), even under dictatorships.

In the years following World War I, when political experimentation was rife, debates about the family emerged as never before. Ginsborg devotes significant attention to the theoretical underpinnings of each regime's family ideology, from Alexandra Kollontai's reconceptualization of the family within the collective to Turkish nationalist Ziya Gökalp's advocacy of a familial "nest" as the kernel of national organization. Ginsborg also demonstrates how each regime attempted to put its theories into practice to revolutionize daily life.

Comparing five countries through revolution, dictatorship, and war, Ginsborg points out that all of these states advanced family stability as a key ingredient to their "New Orders." His approach produces fascinating bedfellows. For example, both Revolutionary Russia and Kemalist Turkey promulgated family laws that were decidedly secular, undercutting religious authorities. Spain's anarchosyndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) supported eugenic practices that echoed Nazi racial theory. And both the Nazi and Soviet idealization of youth as a national regenerative force incited generational conflict within families, leading to children denouncing their parents.

Despite efforts to instrumentalize families, these regimes did not always realize success in the realm of family policy due to contradictory state policies. For example, while both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany enjoyed tremendous success at enlisting citizens in mass national organizations, these organizations simultaneously undermined family relations, drawing individuals out of the family. Sometimes the policies of these regimes destroyed families altogether. Despite the Francoist government's 1938 law that characterized the family as "the natural nucleus and foundation of society … endowed with inalienable rights" (305), famine ravaged working-class families in the early 1940s due largely to state actions. Similarly, the Bolsheviks contributed to conditions that ruined families during the Civil War, so that by 1922 orphan children totaled at least four million.

For Ginsborg, the regimes' uneven records on family policy highlight the limitations of nation-states to infiltrate private life. Even under dictatorships, families drew boundaries between the public and private. In Fascist Italy, for instance, Mussolini's desire to grow the population was met with resistance by ordinary Italians. Similarly, in Kemalist Turkey peasant families, adhering to traditional religious practices, refused to register marriages with the state.

While there is much to applaud about Family Politics, its analysis largely stops short of examining politics within families. Ginsborg often brings his readers to the cusp of family politics, halting just at the moment when the reader senses that the real drama is about to unfold. For instance, we learn that Kollontai periodically abandoned her family, but her husband is rendered silent, a background character to revolutionary drama. In addition, Ginsborg explains that Joseph Goebbels had a...