Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on contributors
- Anthony Fletcher
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Marriage, separation and the common law in England, 1540–1660
- 3 Republican reformation: Family, community and the state in Interregnum Middlesex, 1649–60
- 4 Keeping it in the family: Crime and the early modern household
- 5 Faces in the crowd: Gender and age in the early modern English crowd
- 6 ‘Without the cry of any neighbours’: A Cumbrian family and the poor law authorities, c.1690–1730
- 7 Childless men in early modern England
- 8 Aristocratic women and ideas of family in the early eighteenth century
- 9 Reassessing parenting in eighteenth-century England
- Select bibliography
- Index
8 - Aristocratic women and ideas of family in the early eighteenth century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on contributors
- Anthony Fletcher
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Marriage, separation and the common law in England, 1540–1660
- 3 Republican reformation: Family, community and the state in Interregnum Middlesex, 1649–60
- 4 Keeping it in the family: Crime and the early modern household
- 5 Faces in the crowd: Gender and age in the early modern English crowd
- 6 ‘Without the cry of any neighbours’: A Cumbrian family and the poor law authorities, c.1690–1730
- 7 Childless men in early modern England
- 8 Aristocratic women and ideas of family in the early eighteenth century
- 9 Reassessing parenting in eighteenth-century England
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
One of Lawrence Stone's primary arguments in The Family, Sex and Marriage is that the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the decline of patriarchy and its replacement by affective individualism in the nuclear family. This thesis has been the subject of considerable debate over the years, as historians have questioned whether there was any such change, and if so, how great that change was and how it affected men and women. As Naomi Tadmor has recently pointed out, these debates appear to have reached something of a stalemate, with arguments in favour of the continuity of the English family apparently winning out; but it also seems that the discussion has simply been exhausted. Stone's argument may now be so familiar that it hardly seems to merit attention. Yet it is worth re-examining his work to consider what exactly he meant by patriarchy and the implications of its decline.
The eighteenth-century aristocratic family is a particularly fruitful focus of discussion in this context because scholarship on the period encapsulates some of the central debates over Stone's tale of the demise of patriarchy. It is within the aristocracy, for instance, that some historians with views similar to Stone's have seen the rise of the affective nuclear family, with close emotional ties growing more important and broad kinship relations decreasing in significance.
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- The Family in Early Modern England , pp. 184 - 208Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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