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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
There is a popular impression that the contemporary family has lost that position of dominance which it held in the days of our forefathers. Many have come to regard the family as an institution with a great and historic past but with a dark and uncertain future. Meyer F. Nimkoff has assembled some of the evidence in support of this position. “Some students,” he writes, “think they see the eventual demise of the family in the growing restlessness of large numbers of people over the limitations of conventional family life.” He draws attention to the trend towards unconventional sex arrangements as revealed in recent studies of sexual phenomena, to changing public opinion as shown in the changed attitudes towards the family of representative modern novelists, to statements concerning the evolutionary supersession of the family made by scholars such as Müller-Lyer, to increase of childlessness, and to the possibilities of ectogenesis. Though of qualified significance, he might have cited statistics on divorce.
This paper was read at the Round Table on Sociology at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association at Toronto, May 26, 1942. It has been revised in the light of criticisms and suggestions.
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