Family is a social institution that consists of two parents and their children in the European tradition, as well as all ancestors who share the same line of descent as the parents and their children. The European Americans continued the same traditions upon settling in America and attempted to enforce their organization of family and gender roles on Native Americans. However, various factors throughout history have shaped families, and the changes in American families illustrate how legal, economic, political, cultural, religious, and social factors can affect the organization and gender roles in the family.
Before the 19th century, marriage was motivated by social and economic reasons. For example, men were motivated for marriage because they needed help managing their farms and businesses or because they would receive a large dowry upon marriage, and women often married for similar reasons (Coontz, 2015, p. 41). The Native American family system was based on extended kinship and community groups, so it was significantly different compared to the European American family system. Christian missionaries, traders, and colonial politicians spent the 19th century trying to eliminate that family system by passing laws that encouraged nuclear families among Native Americans and sending Native American children to boarding schools that aimed to eliminate their cultural traditions (Coontz, 2015, p. 41). These examples illustrate how legal, political, economic, social, and religious factors determine the family system and its changes.
The effects of cultural, political, and economic circumstances on family can also be observed in African American communities. During slavery, African Americans adapted a child-centered system rather than marriage-centered systems because slave trade did not allow them to form stable and lasting monogamous marriages (Coontz, 2015, p. 42). However, the history of captive African Americans determined the family organization in their communities during the 20th century. According to Franklin (2015, p. 74), African American women activists were more likely to be married than European American women activists because the activism of African American women was consistent with the political goals of African American males (i.e., equal rights for African Americans). On the other hand, European American women who fought for women’s rights, such as the suffrage, were in conflict with the political goals of men in a male-dominant society.
Although the economic changes during the 1920s and 1930s had an effect on the family, various organizations, such as the American Institute for Family Relations, were established to provide consultation services (Coontz, 2012, p. 241). However, those consultation services encouraged the maintenance of traditional gender roles and encouraged women to remain dependent on their husbands. This example illustrates how religious and cultural traditions can affect the family system using their influence to maintain the status quo of the family institution despite the evident changes in other parts of society. The attempts to stabilize the family institution through counseling are still ongoing, but successful consultations are more often associated with interventions that are open to diversity and innovation, such as improving parental relationships among divorced or unmarried couples (Coontz, 2012, p. 242).
The evolution of American families and the cultural differences in the organization of families across the world indicate that the concept of a family and its role in society depends on legal, economic, political, religious and social circumstances. Because all of those factors change over time, families are a flexible institution that changes to adapt to new external circumstances when necessary.
References
Coontz, S. (2012). More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss. By Rebecca L. Davis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. 317 pp.). Journal of Social History, 46(1), 240-242.
Coontz, S. (2015). The evolution of American families. In: B. J. Risman & V. Rutter (Eds.), Families as they really are (2nd ed.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Franklin, D. L. (2015). African Americans and the birth of the modern marriage. In: B. J. Risman & V. Rutter (Eds.), Families as they really are (2nd ed.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
