Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life

While "Domestic Revolutions" is an interesting book with quality writing, it is much too similar to Mintz's newer book "Huck's Raft: A History of Childhood." I would suggest getting the newer book.

This nearly-twenty-year-old book still has much to commend it: comprehensive scholarship, easy-to-read (though not sparkling or tight) prose style, and no heavy-handed ideological agenda (though the author's values and assumptions aren't hard to discern). On the down side, there's not much by way of interpretive framework, and what's there wavers between incoherence and airy-fairy hand-waving. On the former, for instance, the authors seem both (a) to want to see a significant set of fairly stable "family values" that lasted from the late eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, which are overthrown by late-twentieth century changes, and (b) to show the overwhelming diversity of family life, and the enormous deviations from the alleged stable values, during the same period. But point (b) seems to prove point (a) wrong. On the airy-fairy issue, they have this notion of "the family" as resilient, rising to all sorts of challenges and adapting to all sorts of strains. But it's hard to tell what they mean by "the family" in that context, since they identify no core set of traits, no base-line definition, that pervades the enormous range of "families" they so effectively describe. One could just as easily use the info they present to argue that "the family"--meaning the child-producing, and/or sex-regulating unit of society--is, as conservatives fear, becoming decreasingly important among forms of human affiliation, more peripheral to decision-making and social life. The info-overpowering-the-analysis problem even goes to the paragraph-by-paragraph level. Dozens, if not hundreds, of times, the thesis sentences of paragraphs seem grafted on after the fact, with the collation of facts in the particular paragraph at best losely related to the putative thesis, and the theses contradictory of each other in the space of just a page or two. The book reads as if they, or more likely an editor, realized late in the process of writing that the book lacked, but eeded, something resembling a narrative flow, then tried to impose it on a near-final draft. Whatever really happened to produce this phenomenon, much of the book lacks any integral drive or argument, and what's there often seems oddly imprecise relative to the information presented. Still, the info is great, and well worth thinking about on your own. A couple of things seem a bit off, to me. They date the rise of the companionate family about a century earlier than other scholars I've read. Well, actually, they do and they don't--after they'd said so much about the rise of the companionate family in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I was surprised then to find a whole chapter that agrees with other scholars that the companionate family was a product of the early twentieth century. Huh? Which was it? My guess is that they mistakenly ascribe a more pervasive social presence and influence to the early foreruners of the companionate family than is accurate. And while they aren't heavy

This is probably my favorite book on U.S. social history. While academic, it's written in a very readable style. The authors make the history of American families extremely interesting, and they shatter some of our more romantic cultural myths. I referred to this book when I wrote my master's thesis on the U.S. household economy of the 1930s during the Great Depression. My first ancestors in this country lived in New England in the early to mid 1600s, so I find these accounts fascinating, as I can imagine how all of my ancestors since that time lived their lives in our developing country and culture. I highly recommend this book to students, history researchers, or the curious casual reader.

I expected this book to be pretty dry and academic and was pleasantly suprised . It gives a really balanced veiw of the family and the author doesnt seem to be tied to any of the popular political opinions of the day .I learned a lot I never knew . Its well written and one of those books thats hard to put down .