Most families are a source of immense support for their children, particularly at a time of great need. As such, the family unit should be seen as a resource in the management of anxious children.

Chapter 2 recounts how social scientists were already fretting about the family early in the century. The institution, according to sociologists through the late interwar period, was especially vulnerable to the disorganization wrought by modern social change. Concern for the family's fate took on a new, international cast in the early Cold War period, in conjunction with the rise of demography as a cross-disciplinary field. In the contest with the Soviets, the drive to modernize the “new states” had, as its demographic dimension, a concern for large family size. The claim that economic development, and insulation from socialism, hinged on fertility control was advanced by demographers, many but not all housed in sociology. By the mid-1960s, a domestic-facing research landscape was gathering momentum, supported by government and foundation interest in the family's role as transmitter of inequality. The domain of family demography, a resource-intensive specialty clustered in cross-disciplinary centers, spread throughout the remainder of the century—dwarfing other claimants, including Gary Becker's economics of the family.

During the family reunion in Vineland (1990) that resolves the novel’s action, protagonist daughter Prairie Wheeler notes she is “[f]eeling totally familied out” (VL 374). After finishing Pynchon’s novels, especially those after Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), readers, too, could feel totally familied out. The adventures of a variety of families and family-like groups are important in each novel. However, this significance has been overlooked by scholarly readers – understandably, with so much else of academic interest to puzzle out in the books. Pynchon’s “decentered subjectivity,” well described by McHale, has caused readers to attend to unusual, “postmodern” aspects of Pynchon’s fiction at the expense of traditional aspects such as families. Yet the early novels feature children and neglectful parents, and in the novels after Gravity’s Rainbow, families become increasingly central and noticeable. The action from Vineland on often illustrates troubled families remedying their troubles. Families or family-like groups (such as cults) appear in all Pynchon’s main plots, even when family members are conspicuous by various forms of absence. Ongoing thematic concerns of Pynchon’s like alienation, the attraction to death, the perils of science, the power of history, and the limits of knowledge are expressed through parents and children. The following reviews the secondary literature on families in Pynchon, surveys specific instances of families, considers the significance of Pynchon’s families for his vision of American culture, and examines families in relation to pedagogy.

The contemporary status of black families is inseparable from the history of slavery, segregation, and desegregation. Buffeted by white racism over time, they remained markedly uneducated or undereducated and poor. Though the Civil Rights Movement, War on Poverty (WOP), and post–civil rights social programs helped to improve their life chances, persistent racial discrimination especially hurt them.

Enslaved and free blacks laid black familial foundations. When the master agreed, slaves could cohabit or marry. Many masters had bond mistresses, promoted slave breeding, and broke up slaves’ families for sale. Yet, by adopting African customs, such as naming children after days of the week or for kin, the enslaved preserved the memory of those lost at auction or in death. For mutual support, they created an extended family: a father, mother, and children; grandparents, aunts, uncles; free kinfolk; and frequently children of deceased or sold friends. Children on large plantations lived with both parents; on smaller ones, mostly with mothers. The free black minority often had two-parent families. Blacks increasingly converted to Christianity, a source of freedom and togetherness. They urged missionaries to implore Christian masters to keep their families together. Black churches, in the meantime, fostered monogamous marriage, marital fidelity, and solidarity among blacks in the South and the nation.

Families survived. Freedmen and women legitimated slave marriages and children, sustained two-parent households, and took in displaced relatives, while they and their posterity faced sharecropping, Jim Crow, and penury. They undertook rural-to-urban migrations for better livelihoods. Circa 1880–1925 “the typical Afro-American family was lower class in status and headed by two parents” (Gutman, 1976, p. 456). High black male mortality, however, produced a larger percentage of female-headed households for blacks than whites before and during the Great Depression. Still, in 1940 three-fourths of black families with a child younger than eighteen included the husband and wife, a trend to 1960.

Racial and economic reforms in the 1960s underlaid blacks’ mobility into the middle class and safety net for all. The WOP initiated Medicare and Medicaid. It also revitalized Aid to Families with Dependent Children and launched the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (1973), which established the Job Corps, altogether funding food stamps, job training, and jobs for the disadvantaged, and the Head Start Program for early childhood education.

Introduction

Perhaps one of the areas of Hegel's political philosophy that has received the least attention is his theory of the family. This lack of attention is certainly not the result of agreement with his readers. In fact, Hegel's views have attracted much criticism. This criticism concerns Hegel's defence of the traditional family: a husband and wife raising children in a monogamous relationship where only the husband engages in activities outside the home, such as employment or full political participation. Such views have brought the ire of feminists, in particular, leading one feminist critic to argue that we should all ‘spit on Hegel’(!). Others are equally dismissive, but on different grounds. For example, Peter Steinberger argues that the ‘Hegelian account [of] marriage seems to speak to a simpler time, a time long past’. Thus, it is not so much that Hegel is wrong by our standards, but that he is simply defending the prejudiced view of the family of his day.

In this chapter, I will adopt the following approach to interpreting Hegel's views:

I share the view with most, if not all, contemporary philosophers that the ideal family is not a heterosexual, monogamous married couple with children where the wife's roles are limited to homemaker and mother; I do not believe there is such a thing as ‘an ideal family’.

The family is central to our understanding of the interaction between the laity and religious. Monks, nuns and priests all had blood relations as well as their new religious family within the cloisters and churches of Normandy. Families were also the first point of contact between the religious and secular spheres and were thus both of benefit and disadvantage to the religious life. Relatives – parents, siblings and children – founded monastic institutions, contributed to their endowment and provided their professed members. But the family could also be a burden on already stretched financial resources and make demands on the monks' and nuns' time.

In Normandy, the families of monks and nuns blurred spatial boundaries in a number of ways, both in terms of the physical barriers of the monastic precincts and the abstract barriers induced by enclosure. Kinfolk were found in the cloister making demands on hospitality. They caused professed religious to leave the cloister for a variety of reasons. Some families developed a network of vocations within specific houses, establishing a religious branch of the family interest dedicated to the maintenance of its spiritual wellbeing. Other families used their monastic foundations as private mausolea, displaying their wealth and patronage through tombs in churches, cloisters and chapter houses. Gender is crucial in this discussion. Although an individual's biological sex remained the same after taking vows, their gendered identity changed. This is particularly true of those individuals who were married prior to committing themselves to a life of celibacy. By considering the family and use of space through the interaction between the Norman laity and religious, this book's other themes of display, reception and intrusion, and enclosure, come together.

This chapter discusses the extent to which these merchants defined themselves via their membership in their lineage, but then turns to the extensive evidence they provided about their marriages and their children, in effect their role as patriarchs of the nuclear households they founded. The men appear to have taken their familial responsibilities seriously and, even as they demonstrated their power over wives and children, they did not present themselves as harsh or unfeeling husbands and fathers.

Dwight Eisenhower's childhood was typical of the early twentieth- century Midwest. Or, at least, that is how he depicted it. Yet in one or two ways it was not. Although large families were common—Eisenhower was the third of six brothers—they were not typical, at least in one sense. The American archetype was, and still is, the lone individual, even in childhood. The typical American child, thanks to Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain and many other writers, was the pathfinder, the free- thinking, occasionally rebellious, self- reliant, self- made young person. And although the young Eisenhower was all these things, he was almost never alone. He was surrounded by his family. He ate, slept and lived much of his childhood in the intimate company of others. He learned to heed them, to work with them, to feel part of them and to stand with, and for, them. As anyone with siblings knows, these relationships incur benefits and costs, and challenge us to assume responsibility in society, especially when growing up. At school, as a younger sibling, one's first identification is as the brother or sister of so- and- so; in town, in church, in the neighborhood, one is a daughter or a son or even a grandchild, before one is oneself.

Eisenhower's paternal family came from Pennsylvania, his mother's from Virginia. With them, as he stated in his well- known Guildhall address, he came “from the very heart of America.” His father, David, descended from a family of pious, thrifty stock, was “strict and domineering.” It may be true that “the source for Eisenhower of what proved to be an extremely successful approach to life” was his father, for he “controlled the household.” To Eisenhower, “Dad believed more […] in sheer training and discipline,” whereas his mother, Ida, “was the one who talked more of standards, aspirations and opportunities.” She was the real teacher and role model, the most likely source of his own special power of political control through the nurture of connections without overtly taking sides. Eisenhower remained devoted to her for the rest of her life. “Her household problems,” he later wrote, “were […] monumental”:

Rawls included the family, understood as the primary venue for the rearing and educating of future citizens, as an essential part of society’s basic structure. Ideally, the family serves as what John Stuart Mill called the first school of social justice by raising children through affection, example, and guidance to develop the cooperative virtues and sentiments upon which the just society depends (TJ §70). These include the desires to interact with their fellow citizens on fair terms, and also to participate as fully cooperating members of society. Children’s education should further include practical measures to prepare them to become self-supporting, and knowledge of their equal constitutional and civic rights (PL 199), although these sorts of education may be provided outside the home by schools. It is the family’s role in the formation of future citizens that justiies its inclusion among the institutions of the basic structure. In Rawls’s words in “Public Reason Revisited,” “the family is part of the basic structure, since one of its main roles is to be the basis of orderly production and reproduction of society and its culture from one generation to the next” (CP 595).

Rawls speciies a society’s basic structure as the system of interaction among the main political, economic, and social institutions – how they operate together to form the background conditions against which associational and personal ends are pursued. Rawls’s principles of justice apply directly to this system, but only indirectly to the basic structure’s component institutions. So although the basic structure must satisfy the difference principle, requiring that inequalities work to the greatest advantage of the least well off, it is neither required nor appropriate for judges to apply the difference principle in deciding cases between litigants.

Marriage

While some indicators are volatile and jump around from year to year, many demographic and social variables tend to be stable, with the pace of change seemingly glacial. Nevertheless, over a period of decades or a generation, changes can be substantial, even revolutionary. It is not an exaggeration to say that family life in the selected countries has been undergoing revolutionary changes in practices, attitudes and expectations, and to some extent these changes are captured in the data in these and the following tables.

Table 14.1 shows that young people are increasingly delaying marriage. In the almost quarter-century between 1980 and 2004, the mean age at first marriage rose by around four years. In every single country, and among both sexes, the mean age at the time of first marriage rose. The Nordic countries and the Netherlands are marrying the latest among the selected countries, while the English-speaking countries show considerable diversity. While marrying relatively younger is still the norm in the United States, and somewhat less so in Canada and the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand have moved more towards later marriage.

In Australia, the age at first marriage edged steadily downward over the decades until reaching its youngest point in 1971 (23.8 years for men and 21.4 years for women), but has been climbing since then. Moreover, compared with the previous generations' gradual movement towards ever-younger marriage, the trend towards older marriage has been very rapid.

The formulas not only tell us about how people in the formulas’ world understood family relationships, but also sometimes reveal hints of how they felt about them. The formulas focus above all on the nuclear family. A good number of them deal with inheritance, in a variety of permutations that reveal tension as well as concord within families. Others deal with different kinds of property arrangements among members of families, including people who had been adopted into families. Still others highlight the needs and emotions that could drive family behavior. A number of formulas deal with those who had lost their families, namely orphans. The formulas dealing with family matters have a great deal to say about the lives of lay women in this world. Women appear not simply as passive objects in the arrangements reached by their male relatives and husbands, but as active agents who participated fully in the documentary culture around them. Some of the formulas that involve them also reveal that while the dominant norms disadvantaged women in the inheritance of property, those norms could be and frequently were breached in practice, even when they were framed in terms of law.

Often relegated to a parallel narrative in Frederick Douglass’s biography, family life played an integral role in his political life. He and his first wife, Anna Murray, formed a partnership defying their upbringing as a slave and as a free woman surrounded by slavery. They implicitly claimed citizenship by demanding the integrity and privacy of their free family, contradicting depictions of African Americans in popular culture and contemporary race science. By doing so, they politicized their household as much as when they provided a haven for militants, the self-emancipated, or extended kin in need. Anna and their daughter, Rosetta, navigated roles of domesticity and activism by serving the movement through support of Douglass, but Rosetta especially endured the conflicts between the patriarchal family and women’s rights ideology endorsed by her father. In his widowhood, Douglass further challenged racial definitions of family by marrying a white woman, Helen Pitts.

Introduction

This chapter takes a critically informed look at the role of families, and children's position within families, in understanding child poverty and disadvantage. The chapter begins by demonstrating that family life under conditions of disadvantage tends to be pathologised and denigrated: parents who are ‘poor’ are frequently situated as ‘poor parents’. Low-income families are particularly vulnerable to categorisation as ‘troubled’ or troublesome families (Ribbens McCarthy et al, 2013). It goes on to look at the myths and realities of family life at the bottom of the income structure and considers how wealthier families, who are held up as the benchmark of the ideal family, reinforce and perpetuate the disadvantage of poor children and families by employing their superior resources to confer advantage onto their own children.

The chapter closes by asking what it all means for children: how do children understand, negotiate and mediate poverty in family life and their experiences and agency within the family. It addresses some of the challenges children face living in a low-income family, such as stigma and bullying, and explores how children succeed in masking or hiding their poverty from their peers. It shows the difficulties children and young people living in poverty face trying to make transitions from adolescence to young adulthood. The chapter concludes by asking how we could flip our thinking on families facing disadvantage.

What is family?

Everyone has their own idea of what a family is and most people, for better or worse, are a member of one. There are many books on what makes a family and there is no agreed definition of ‘the family’ (Edwards et al, 2012). This book does not seek to explore the conceptual discourses on the family; instead, here, a family is taken to mean any lone, couple or group of people, of any gender, who come together to ‘do’ family. As this is a book about children, it will consider those families who are together with the intention of bringing up children.

Already before 1571, when the designing and procuring of building materials for her mosque complex began, Nurbanu had planned to establish a vakıf, a perpetual charitable endowment to support the construction and maintenance of the buildings. Such endowments had tied (and held) together economic, religious, social and cultural life in the Ottoman Empire since its inception, following Byzantine, Arab and Seljuk models. The sultan who conquered Constantinople, Mehmed II (r. 1444–1446, 1451–1481), very well understood the utility of endowments for urban development, establishing two of the largest evkaf in the entire empire, one in his own name, the other in that of the Hagia Sophia. At the same time, he urged officials and dignitaries of his court to do the same and to construct buildings with commercial, social and religious purposes. That the resulting mosque complexes provided durable focal points for urban development is still evident in those neighbourhoods that carry the mosque founder's name – such as Davutpaşa or Mahmutpaşa. The building complexes provided an urban infrastructure in the form of water supply, roads and canalisation; employment opportunities through their hiring of personnel; business opportunities through the creation of market space, baths and inns; and social and cultural facilities in the form of schools, convents, public kitchens and hospitals. Although the foundation's income was not subject to taxes and therefore promised no profit for the state's coffers, endowed complexes had other advantages for governing Ottoman subjects.

Marriage

Family life, and especially marriage, is undergoing rapid and profound changes, which are partly reflected in Tables 14.1 and 14.2.

Table 14.1 shows that young people are increasingly delaying marriage. Even in the years between 1980 and 1999, the mean age at first marriage rose by around four years. In every single country, and among both sexes, the mean age at the time of first marriage rose. In Australia, the age at first marriage edged steadily downward over the decades until reaching its youngest point in 1971 (23.8 years for men and 21.4 years for women), but has been climbing since then. Moreover, compared with the previous generations' glacial movement towards ever younger marriage, the trend towards older marriage has been very rapid.

It has not been possible to obtain good longitudinal comparative data on one reason for the increasing tendency to delay marriage: the growing trend towards cohabitation. In Australia, the proportion of all heterosexual couples who were cohabiting rose from 1% in 1971 to 6% in 1986 and 10% in 1996. Moreover, cohabiting before marriage has now become the norm. Of people getting married in 1975, only 16% had cohabited, while in 2000 71% said they had.

The other major change in the selected countries has been towards the more frequent dissolution of marriages. Divorce rates rose by more than 2.5 times in the last three decades of the 20th century.