• ▶ family introduction The family has long been the ugly stepchild of history.. However, all of the problems of family history have not been resolved.. The very definition of a family a
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▶ family
introduction
The family has long been the ugly stepchild of history
Tra-ditional history focuses on politics, wars, and revolutions
but not the ordinary happenings of everyday life The private
world, one dominated by women, simply seemed too
com-mon to be of any scholarly interest In the 1970s this situation
began to change gradually as historians examined social and
cultural history However, all of the problems of family history
have not been resolved Emotional history and sexual history
remain fields with major gaps of knowledge at the start of the
21st century The very definition of a family also differs from
region to region, thereby complicating studies of the family
While the medieval Europeans established nuclear families,
Africans lived in clans, with family relationships extending
far beyond the nuclear family A father or mother to a
me-dieval African was not the same as a father or mother to a
medieval European or Asian
Scholars of the family have been burdened with a lack
of sources For many regions, including the Americas, most
evidence about family life must be drawn from
archaeologi-cal sources Attempts to do justice to women of the
medi-eval period have encountered special difficulties owing to
the character of the documentary sources that are typically
used The writings of church leaders and theologians have
been repeatedly cited, with little consideration of the
accu-racy of their descriptions of conditions or of their audience
By a similar method of investigation, a modern scholar might conclude that modern Catholics never practice birth control Law books and manuals have also been misleading William Blackstone’s 18th-century pronouncement that European women lacked any legal rights in the medieval era enjoyed wide acceptance until the 1970s
Childbearing is at the heart of the family It is also one of the few aspects of medieval life that was not shaped by class standing or wealth Rich or poor, women suffered and were injured in labor Often, they died during birth, along with the child Contraception by mechanical, medicinal, and magical means found limited use in all cultures, though it had little effectiveness Abortion and infanticide apparently had been practiced since ancient times in all regions of the world and continued in the medieval era Females were the targets of infanticide much more than males because the cost of rais-ing a daughter and providrais-ing a dowry were more costly than the labor that she could provide to a family However, females
in the Americas and Africa seem to have been much more highly regarded than females in Europe, Asia, and the Islamic world American and African women were valued for their childbearing and ability to link clans This valuation probably reduced female infanticide rates in this region
The gender roles of men and women influenced all aspects
of the family Males and females in Europe, Asia, and the Islamic world had different ages of consent, and a double standard gave sexual freedom to the man but not the woman While the Is-lamic world emphasized polygamy (where either spouse could
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