Making time for family: The invention of family time(s) and the reinvention of family history

Journal of Family History

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 4-21

  Gillis, John ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0029703978     PISSN: 03631990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/036319909602100102     Document Type: Article

References (91)

1. John Bender and David Wellbery, eds., Chronotypes: The Construction of Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 4.
2. 2. New York Times, December 5,1990; concern about family time had been noted earlier in "The Struggle to Keep Family Time Quality Time," New York Times, May 12, 1988.
3. New York Times, December 5,1990; concern about family time had been noted earlier in "The Struggle to Keep Family Time Quality Time," New York Times, May 12, 1988.
4. "Family Rituals May Promote Better Emotional Adjustment," New York Times, March 11, 1992.
5. 4. Quoted in Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 162; when James Bossard and Eleanor Boll surveyed family ritual in the late 1940s, they too thought the family meal was under siege. See their Ritual in Family Living (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950), 100ff.
6. Quoted in Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 162; when James Bossard and Eleanor Boll surveyed family ritual in the late 1940s, they too thought the family meal was under siege. See their Ritual in Family Living (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950), 100ff.
7. Sarah Ellis, Women of England, Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (London: Rischer, 1838), 55-6.
8. Mark Mellman, Edward Lazarus, and Allen Rivlin, "Family Time, Family Values," in Rebuilding the Nest: A New Commitment to the American Family, ed. David Blankenhorn, Steven Bayme, and Jean Bethke Elshtain (Milwaukee, WI: Family Service America, 1990), 88-9.
9. On French concern with time famine, see Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Mankind (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 352.
10. Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 30.
11. Witold Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend (New York: Viking, 1991).
12. Schor, Overworked American, 11-3, 21, chap. 4.
13. Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life: The Other Dimensions of Time (New York: Anchor Books, 1983).
14. Barbara Adam, "Perceptions of Time," in Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology (London: Routledge, 1994), 508, 513.
15. Michael Young, The Metronomic Society: Natural Rhythms and Human Timetables (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
16. Jeremy Rifkin, Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History (New York: Henry Holt, 1987), 1.
17. 15. Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981); The Seven Day Cycle: The History and Meaning of the Week (New York: Free Press, 1985); and The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (New York: Free Press, 1991).
18. Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981); The Seven Day Cycle: The History and Meaning of the Week (New York: Free Press, 1985); and The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (New York: Free Press, 1991).
19. Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981); The Seven Day Cycle: The History and Meaning of the Week (New York: Free Press, 1985); and The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (New York: Free Press, 1991).
20. John W. Murphy, Postmodern Social Analysis and Criticism (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989), 111-2.
21. 17. Tamara Hareven, "Family Time and Historical Time," in The Family, ed. Alice Rossi, Jerome Kagan, and T. Hareven (New York: Norton, 1978); also Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); John Modell, Into One's Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States, 1920-1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
22. Tamara Hareven, "Family Time and Historical Time," in The Family, ed. Alice Rossi, Jerome Kagan, and T. Hareven (New York: Norton, 1978); also Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); John Modell, Into One's Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States, 1920-1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
23. Tamara Hareven, "Family Time and Historical Time," in The Family, ed. Alice Rossi, Jerome Kagan, and T. Hareven (New York: Norton, 1978); also Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); John Modell, Into One's Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States, 1920-1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
24. Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, introduction to The Myths We Live By, ed. Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (London: Routledge, 1990), 1.
25. Hareven, "Family Time and Historical Time," 67.
26. 20. Martin Kohli, "The World We Forgot: A Historical Review of the Life Course," in Later Life: The Social Psychology of Aging, ed. Victor W. Marshall (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1986). For some of the problems with Kohli's notion, see John Gillis, "The Case against Chronologization: Changings in the Anglo-American Life Course, 1600 to the Present," Ethnologia Europaea 17, no. 2 (1988): 97-106.
27. Martin Kohli, "The World We Forgot: A Historical Review of the Life Course," in Later Life: The Social Psychology of Aging, ed. Victor W. Marshall (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1986). For some of the problems with Kohli's notion, see John Gillis, "The Case against Chronologization: Changings in the Anglo-American Life Course, 1600 to the Present," Ethnologia Europaea 17, no. 2 (1988): 97-106.
28. Marlis Buchmann, The Script of Life in Modern Society: Entry into Adulthood in a Changing World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), xiii.
29. Ibid., chaps. 2, 8. Gail Sheehy summarizes similar findings in her New Passages: Mapping Your Life across Time (New York: Random House, 1995).
30. Harvey Graff, Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
31. Illana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).
32. Thomas Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
33. Young, Metronomic Society, 14.
34. 27. For Germany, see Ingeborg Weber-Kellerman, Saure Wochen, Frohe Feste: Fest und Alltag in der Sprache der Brauche (Munich: Bucher, 1985); on Swedish developments, Orvar Löfgren and Jonas Frykman, Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle Class Life (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), chaps. 1, 3.
35. For Germany, see Ingeborg Weber-Kellerman, Saure Wochen, Frohe Feste: Fest und Alltag in der Sprache der Brauche (Munich: Bucher, 1985); on Swedish developments, Orvar Löfgren and Jonas Frykman, Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle Class Life (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), chaps. 1, 3.
36. Anne Martin-Fugier, "Bourgeois Rituals," in A History of Private Life, ed. Michelle Perrot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 4:262-336.
37. There is no space here to develop the connection with Protestantism fully. The religious as well as the social and economic conditions will be explored more fully in my forthcoming book on the subject, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values, to be published by Basic Books.
38. Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend, chap. 6 passim.
39. John Gillis, "Ritualization of Middle Class Life in Nineteenth Century Britain," International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 3, no. 2 (1989): 213-36.
40. John Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), chaps. 1-3.
41. 33. Ellen Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 77; also Gillis, For Better, For Worse, chap. 5.
42. Ellen Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 77; also Gillis, For Better, For Worse, chap. 5.
43. Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 83, 101-2, 167.
44. 35. John F. Walzer, "A Period of Ambivalence: Eighteenth Century American Childhood," in The History of Childhood, ed. L. de Mause (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974), 358; John Gillis, "The Cultural Production of Family Identities in the Nineteenth Century" (paper presented at Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, September 1989).
45. John F. Walzer, "A Period of Ambivalence: Eighteenth Century American Childhood," in The History of Childhood, ed. L. de Mause (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974), 358; John Gillis, "The Cultural Production of Family Identities in the Nineteenth Century" (paper presented at Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, September 1989).
46. William Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. 1, ed. M.R.D. Foot (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1968), 218.
47. Natalie Zemon Davis, "Ghosts, Kin and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France," in The Family, ed. A. Rossi, J. Kagan, and T. Hareven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 87-114.
48. Cole, Journey of Life, pt. 1.
49. Gillis, For Better, For Worse, pts. 1, 2.
50. Karel Kosik quoted in Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country (London: Verso, 1985), 6.
51. William Greg quoted in Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 7.
52. I want to thank Erika Rappaport for this insight.
53. The advice was that of a Dr. Kitchener, a New Yorker writing in 1830. Lynn Mahoney, "'Order and Method': Visions of Housework in American Cookery Books, 1800-1860" (unpublished seminar paper, Rutgers University, May, 1990).
54. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 240.
55. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 19.
56. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 260-1.
57. Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend, 75-80, 105-7.
58. Cole, Journey of Life, 136-8, 146.
59. Vivianne Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
60. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Delta Books, 1972), 9.
61. On the pilgrimages and family reunions, see Gwen Neville, Kinship and Pilgrimage: Rituals of Reunion in American Protestant Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), chaps. 1, 4.
62. Philippe Ariés, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Vintage, 1981), 510-43.
63. Alywn Rees, Life in a Welsh Countryside (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975), 46.
64. David Cheal, The Gift Economy (London: Routledge, 1988).
65. Gavin Weightman and Steve Humphries, Christmas Past (London: Sidswick & Jackson, 1987), 88.
66. Clement A. Miles, Christmas in Ritual and Tradition: Christian and Pagan (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), 18.
67. On the changing meaning of the word "family," see Raymond Williams, Keywords, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
68. Joan Busfield and Michael Paddon, Thinking about Children: Sociology and Fertility in Post-War Britain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 134-40.
69. Micaela di Leonardo, "The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families and the Work of Kinship," Signs 11 (1987): 440-53.
70. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1971), 111.
71. 61. Gillis, "Ritualization of Middle Class Life," 226; and Ann Dally, Inventing Motherhood: The Consequences of an Ideal (London: Burnett, 1982).
72. Gillis, "Ritualization of Middle Class Life," 226; and Ann Dally, Inventing Motherhood: The Consequences of an Ideal (London: Burnett, 1982).
73. Schor, Overworked American, chap. 4.
74. For an interesting discussion of other places, see Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (New York: Paragon House, 1991).
75. These contrasts are discussed in Pierre Bourdieu, Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
76. For the functions of "home" in modern space, see Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), chap. 10.
77. Quoted in Jenni Calder, The Victorian Home (London: Batsford, 1977), 145.
78. Evan Imber-Black and Joanne Roberts, Rituals for Our Times: Celebrating, Healing, and Changing Our Lives and Our Relationships (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), chap. 4.
79. Barbara Myerhoff, "Rites and Signs of Ripening: The Intertwining of Ritual, Time, and Growing Older," in Age and Anthropological Theory, ed. David Kertzer and Jennie Keith (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 305.
80. Ibid., 306.
81. David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 6.
82. di Leonardo, Female World, 441-3.
83. For calculations of the amount of money spent on ceremonial, see Macfarlane, Family Life, 198.
84. di Leonardo, Female World, 451.
85. On the nature of symbols, see Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, 11.
86. "Family Rituals May Promote Better Emotional Adjustment," New York Times, March 11, 1992.
87. Nils Arvid Bringeus, "Bitte, keine Feier oder Das Fest als Trauma," Hessische Blatter für Volks-und Kulturforschung 7/8 (1978): 39.
88. I am indebted to Sonya Rose for her formulation of this way of looking at rituals.
89. Imber-Black and Roberts, Rituals for Our Times, 65.
90. Ibid., 127-9.
91. Jane Collier, Michelle Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako, "Is There a Family? New Anthropological Views," in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barrie Thorne with Marilyn Yalom (New York: Longman, 1982), 33.