THE HISTORY OF THE FAMILY

The family cannot be said to be neglected as a subject of study. More effort in fact is probably going towards the examination and analysis of this fundamental institution than in any other field of enquiry into human behaviour. The only comprehensive bibliography, a large volume of computer printout as it has to be, lists over 12,000 titles published in this century up to 1964, though over half appeared within the ten preceding years, and less than a twentieth before 1929. Perhaps the number of studies devoted to the family will have doubled again before the present book appears, but it is not to be expected that many will have been added to the 250 or so which in 1964 the compilers assigned to the heading of history.

This lack of recent interest in the past condition and development of the human family seems to be due to a number of circumstances. The obvious, if perhaps not the effective cause, is scarcity of evidence and the difficulties of dealing with that which is known to exist. Prominent among these difficulties are the intricacies of defining the subject, and of deciding what are in fact the varying senses in which ‘family’ can be said to have had a history, or a series of histories.