A Different Nuclear Family
This article is the first in a series of responses to Episode 2.4 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast.
Narratives of the family in our current cultural discourse draw heavily on interpretations of the past and “modernity talk.” Episode 2.4 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast, “The Jamestown Colony and the Myth of the Sovereign Family,” does an impressive job of exposing such narratives. Producer Caro Pirri warns that myths of the independent family can draw on historical models that were, in fact, political arguments for absolutist, patriarchal power. The warning is well researched, beautifully articulated, and topical.
I appreciate the episode’s critiques of the myth of the historical sovereign family and am moved and enthusiastic about the idea of forging various family forms in the present. However, I am also troubled by the largely negative treatment of American enthusiasm for the nuclear family and parental rights concerns. While championing an open-minded approach to the kinds of families we can imagine, which the episode beautifully promotes, I will urge a more nuanced treatment of those who see themselves as embracing a “traditional” family model. I will argue for the ongoing usefulness of the insular family, suggest an alternative to the Jamestown historical model, and even venture to ask whether parents’ rights advocates are fairly represented by the patriarchal model we encountered in the podcast.
In the podcast, we hear of David Brooks’s depiction of the nuclear family as “a cult of togetherness,” an archaic, post-war notion of the two-parent family that is not representative of most American households today. This assessment, however, is historically shortsighted, as there is an older model of the nuclear family that, I would argue, has a great deal more purchase in our current setting. In the interests of the stated goal of this podcast episode to discover “new possibilities for family and community relationships” and discover “old models of what social life could be,” I offer Lawrence Stone’s classic narrative of the nuclear family in eighteenth-century England as more relevant to our current context.
Thomas Gainsborough, The Byam Family (c.1762–1766)
Stone’s The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1979) describes the rise of the nuclear family from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In this model, this period in English history saw an increase in affectionate marriages. Stone suggests that older economic marital ties or convenient alliances increasingly gave way to personal romantic marriages. Along with this, emotional language expressing tenderness between parents and children became more frequent. Such trends facilitated the rise of affectionate individualism within the nuclear family, where emotional ties were focused inward toward a circumscribed family unit: the nuclear, insular family. This model indeed looks like the “cult of togetherness” that Brooks describes. However, such a characterization would ignore the significant context in which Stone’s nuclear family arose.
The eighteenth-century nuclear family arose in an age most notable for its expansiveness. Commercial networks took on newly global dimensions as did the experience of distance due to improved travel technologies and increased imperial activity. Even within the circumscribed space of the British Isles, the new problem of creating community was complicated by innovations such as expanded bureaucracies, extended government reach, and institutionalized post offices, which collapsed distances without creating community. The period also witnessed an explosive growth in printing that fed polarized discussions, undermining community on yet another level.
On all of these counts, Britain in the eighteenth century experienced a sense of destabilizing expansion that threatened to render meaningless any sense of community or shared interest. Arising precisely in this setting, Stone’s inward-looking, nuclear family, with its emphasis on affectionate individualism, appears not as an attack on community, but as a bulwark protecting community in the face of globalizing and polarizing trends. Such trends would only increase as eighteenth-century expansion gave way to nineteenth-century empire and even greater industrial impersonalization.
The affectionate, individualized family in the context of expansion and polarization may have more purchase for twenty-first-century Americans than the Jamestown or 1950s models. The eighteenth-century nuclear family’s inward-looking affection can be understood as an attempt to promote ties on a personal level. If many parents today are asserting their parental rights, it might not be because they are intentionally or unknowingly attempting to assert absolute authority over their children. Indeed, the impulse might share more in common with this episode’s beautiful depiction of Powhatan communities and their desire for personalized community. This depiction of Indigenous community life is moving and desirable, but it is not to scale for modern American audiences, with our global social and commercial networks and divisive national politics. Whether or not the motivations of the eighteenth-century, inward-looking, expansion-wary nuclear family mirror those of today’s parents’ rights advocates, the comparison certainly allows us a more generous and nuanced understanding of their potential fears, concerns, and hopes.
I would like to close by questioning whether the popular fascination with the Duggar family actually represents an American hunger for an isolated patriarchal world, as its inclusion in this episode seems to imply. This interpretation ignores the strong likelihood that the Duggars are in part fascinating because of their Otherness. It may be much more helpful to look at another, more recent cultural phenomenon: Barabra Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead. The book is a bestseller, the darling of book clubs over the past year, and the winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. It is arguably a better measure of current discourse than the fifteen-year-old and sensationalist Duggar trend.
What does this book and its popularity suggest about the idea of the family in twenty-first-century America? Set in contemporary Appalachia, the story follows Demon Copperhead, a child orphaned by a drug overdose, as he navigates an indifferent world in search of connection. Much of the narrative depicts his attempts to find his kin and to replace his dead family. Importantly, Demon’s search for family does not replicate the 1950s, two-parent family. Instead, it shows a search for a variously defined, close-knit group of people who value, love, and protect Demon from a world that is too big and rich and busy for his orphaned interests to matter. It is a moving and deeply nuanced narrative that reminds us that individualism is not just about competition, market forces, and greed; it is also about human rights advocacy, child labor laws, and the concern for vulnerable humans who have fallen between the cracks.
It is fitting that Kingsolver uses Charles Dickens as her model, translating his nineteenth-century social concerns into our own twenty-first-century problems: Demon is tossed from abusive foster family to indifferent foster family, abandoned by a well-meaning social worker whose own interests and family are elsewhere, subjected to cruelty, drugs, unsafe work conditions, and chronic hunger. He is a twenty-first-century descendant of not only David Copperfield, but the host of orphans who populate Dickens’s novels. As with Stone’s eighteenth-century nuclear family, the image of the orphan resonates today because of a genealogical likeness between Dickens’s industrially, commercially expansive day and our own partisan, globalized world. As Demon moves through this world uncared for, it is important to take note of the object of his search: a family who can support him. We would do well to appreciate the wide appeal of these sentiments to current audiences. Such appreciation might provide a more nuanced, sympathetic diagnosis of what motivates sentiments about parents’ rights, as well as a feasible, flexible model for the individualized, nuclear family.
Kaitlin Pontzer is a historian of emotions and partisan politics in early modern Britain. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Cornell University and an instructor with Cornell’s Prison Education Program.