Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 15, No 4
Summer 2001

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

Introducing Students to Family History

Linda Gordon

For this reason, I orient the course toward contemporary politicized debates about family practices and “family values.” This orientation is, of course, limited by what makes sense historically: my goal is to reject presentism, so as not to distort history by its practice. At the end of the course, writing assignments ask students to pick a contemporary family-related controversy and show how a historical perspective might improve the level of discourse. In the fall semester 2000, students picked the following topics: divorce, teenage behavior, dating violence, trying children as adults in criminal court, birth control, child abuse, same-sex marriage, theological contention about homosexuality, fathering, abortion, courtship, illegitimacy, and the stigmatization of African American fathers. In some cases these topics arose from personal experience. I know this from discussions with students about their papers and from other assignments the students wrote for me. The first assignment asks students to write five hundred words on their own family and family values. One of the pleasures of teaching first-year students is that they are relatively uninhibited in discussion, not yet worrying too much about sounding sophisticated; perhaps also because their relation to instructors is still modeled on that of high school, they are extremely open with me. I find this productive not because I want to become personally close to students, but because I want them to gain an understanding of the intersection between the personal and large-scale, structural change. I hope to help them see how their own lives offer insights into how individual families are affected by large, world-historical changes.

Consider some of the following excerpts from students’ writings (which I quote with their permission, using pseudonyms):

Rachel Kazemzadeh:

I am a Persian Jewish immigrant female raised in a conservative household in one of the most liberal parts of the United States. All I have to say is: ahhhhhhh! You might wonder how a girl raised and schooled in America deals with parents raised in the back parts of Iran. When you find out let me know. . . . Whether I like it or not, some of my parents’ beliefs have been instilled in me and I do sometimes feel a pang of the shock my parents would feel when I witness or read something that is more “American” than I am used to. Somehow this makes me glad because it reduces some of the guilt I feel about deviating from my parents’ ideals.

Wong Mei:

The separated photographs of my families hang beside each other, as if I am choosing who I like better. But I never wanted to, and I never will.

Mother, mommy, mama, lives with her faucet-importing husband in a beige house in a gated community in a predominantly Asian community. Once in a while, my wonderful stepsisters will visit from New Jersey and we compare accents and play basketball. The live-in nanny watches my half-brother, cradles the newborn. My stepfather is rather bigoted and finds my unconventional interests and my not-entirely-Asian significant other, “unique” to say the least.

Dad, daddy, papa, lives with my stepmother in a 70 year old house, where they are given free rent if they take care of the landlord’s son. In addition to cooking meals, I tutored him in ESL. His father, also extremely racist and conservative, asked me not to participate in AIDSWalk LA because I was helping “gay people” spread the disease. I wondered if he ever knew my Ann. . . .

Desire Mandin:

Being that I am a Haitian girl with a large extended family, my family values are very “traditional” in nature. One of these values, which is considered to be extremely important, is respect for thy elders. As cliched and trite as this may sound, within my family, and the Haitian community, to respect (to be attentive, appreciative, and polite) those who are older than you, whether they may be five years older or fifty years older, is a must. Another family value is . . . self-respect . . . loving thy self so much as to wanting to improve upon your life in a physical, emotional, and spiritual manner. Self-respect entails engaging in activities that will benefit your intellectual level (going to school, studying hard, and limited amount of partying) . . . taking care of your body (no drugs, alcohol) . . . excessive piercing and tattoos are WRONG! . . . Last but not least, self-respect on a spiritual level means preserving your relationships with God. This means going to church, praying at night before you go to bed and when you wake up in the morning, and doing good deeds to help your brothers and sisters in Christ. Loyalty to the family is yet another family value. . . .

Keisha Johnson:

. . . if I were asked who my family was I would clearly state: mother, father, my two sisters, my two brothers and finally my grandmother. . . . Fortunately, though I viewed it as rather unfortunate at the time, I grew up the youngest of five children, with a seven-year gap between the fourth child and myself. All four of whom I affectionately referred to as “them” are aged consecutively, then seven long years passed and a star, I, was born.

So the way I see it, seven people raised me. I always viewed my older siblings as adults that I should listen to and respect until we developed a different type of bond.

My family values are quickly learned. How many times can one person be reprimanded for the same thing?

Fatima Nuad:

My father is from Bangladesh and my mother is from Jamaica . . . divorced . . . remarried. My stepmother is also from Bangladesh while my stepfather is from El Salvador. . . . I am the only “Banglamaican” that I know of.

My parents’ divorce was a complex one. While they were married, my paternal grandparents were arranging another marriage for my father back in Bangladesh. My father, being a man who always desires to please his father, accepted it. The family into which he was marrying resulted to be very powerful and if the contract was broken, they would have my grandparents thrown into jail. One day, my mother happened to stumble upon some paper work which included the details of marriage arrangement. My mother was not very pleased, and so, they got a divorce.

I was taught not to steal, not to drink, drugs are bad, smoking is wrong, and the list goes on. Cussing is wrong and so is sex before marriage. I wasn’t allowed to date until . . . I started college. However, I’m sure my father would rather have me not date. . . .

It was rather odd to hear some of the things my mother had to say before I went off to college . . . about “extra thick” condoms and to watch my drinks. She wondered if I had any boyfriends, which . . . was quite odd since I wasn’t supposed to date. After hearing these things, I came to realize that the things I learned were not “forever.” They were temporary values. . . . It’s as if she never expected me to be obedient.

I selected these excerpts (out of thirty-three such accounts) because they illustrate diversity, how change in family values is accelerated by migration and immigration, and what conflicts may result from these changes. Other members of the seminar have families less remarkable. (And it is probably typical that the women wrote richer, more insightful accounts than the men.) But taken together, most of my students seem well positioned to understand the clash of different familial, personal, communal beliefs. Teaching at New York University (NYU) is an advantage in this regard, since the student body is relatively diverse. Each class combines “out” gay students with religious fundamentalists, students from working-class Catholic families with those from secular professional-class families, sons and daughters of feminist mothers with the offspring of parents terrified of the immorality their children will confront at NYU.

I begin the semester, logically enough, by problematizing what a family is. Although I offer a variety of articles, the students typically already understand the challenge to a single normative family that comes from domestic partnerships, the demands for gay marriage, and “blended” families. I offer my own quirky definition of family: that family is best understood not as a group of people but as a system of regulation—present in every human society—of sexuality, reproduction, child raising, and of interpersonal responsibility both economic and emotional. This definition helps to explain the syllabus, because it explains why matters such as sexuality are, in my view, ipso facto part of the family system.

After the introductory class, I introduce the chronological part of the course by setting up a schema of ideal types of family—traditional, modern, and contemporary. This is admittedly very oversimplified, but it has the advantage of providing a grid against which students can 1) see that families vary and change, 2) appreciate how family change is part of overall social/economic/political change, and 3) think critically about ahistorical notions of what is “traditional.” In a recent class, one student for whom something suddenly “clicked” told me that, while researching a paper, she had come across two articles in which “traditional” was misused.

Offering this three-part categorization means arguing against the grain in relation to conventional usage. In the last years students read two books simultaneously—Ernesto Galarza’s memoir of a Mexican childhood and immigration to the U.S., Barrio Boy, and Elizabeth Ewen’s history, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, about Jewish and Italian women in early-twentieth-century New York. These sources allow them to uncover “traditional family” elements in the context of specific cultures. I relate traditional family structures and practices to a preindustrial mode in which families were the units of production, and I try to get students to recall any personal experience they have had with family enterprises, whether farms, small shops, or handicrafts. But I also have to explain that an American farmer was never quite the same as a peasant, and even though I teach U.S. history, I find it mandatory to see that students understand peasant society—in fact, no matter what course I teach, I seem to start with the question, what is a peasant? I do not begin with the British colonies in North America, because most Americans do not derive their family ideas from that culture. This semester, one question on the take-home final asks students to imagine themselves as time travelers to traditional societies—but one student is writing about contemporary Haiti, her birthplace, as a traditional society.

Starting with the traditional allows me to show what was “modern” about families in urban, capitalist, then industrial societies: wage labor which took husbands/fathers out of the homes, fathers’ loss of control over children’s futures, a more individualist value system, a gender system that emphasized gender difference as a means of rationalizing and mystifying male dominance while also making it more vulnerable to challenge. I show the students how “patriarchy” re-entered our language from second-wave feminism but also ask them to grasp its earlier, historical meanings, defining a form of male power over children as well as women, a form that depended on a position in the family. Then I can ask them to consider in what ways patriarchy continues and in what ways it has eroded (or been overthrown). This discussion flows into contemporary America, raising questions about the impact on families of deindustrialization, globalization, the radical movements of the 1950-1970s period, and the conservative and religious revival of the 1980s and 1990s.

After several weeks on this chronological schema, I organize the rest of the course by topic. For each subject I assign both historical and contemporary scholarship, where I can find good materials. My goal is always to get students to put contemporary subjects in historical context.

I begin this part of the course with generational relations, because I find that first-year students still identify primarily as children in family systems (whether they admit it or not). Here the diversity of my classes helps a lot: reflecting, no doubt, their families’ views, for example, some students are shocked by the heavy corporal punishment meted out to kids in certain traditional societies, while others accept it; some believe that children should argue with and stand up against their parents, others condemn such behavior. One student who lives at home rather than in a dorm—part of a class double standard that is simultaneously a racial division—integrated his personal experience into a paper on the history of adolescence, observing that his own adolescence has been extended by his double life, independent by day but returning to dependence each evening. My favorite text for this unit is Viviana Zelizer’s Pricing the Priceless Child.

Then we turn to gender and marriage. First I recapitulate the rise of the Victorian gender system, with its heavy emphasis on gender difference, always calling attention to its class and race specificity and its normative rather than descriptive nature. Then we discuss the transformation of marriage from sacrament to contract, marital separations, and divorce.

Next we turn to courtship, on which Beth Bailey’s From Front Porch to Back Seat is a student favorite. They are asked to put their own “dating” experiences (although dating is now a somewhat outmoded concept) into historical context and to understand themselves ethnographically, i.e., that their high school had a dating system with rules, rituals, sanctions, and stratification. A discussion that continues through every topic—what has been gained and what lost from the erosion of the traditional?—takes place with particular animation here. Many students see the advantages of the formal structures that governed traditional and Victorian courtships, and the escape from individual responsibility that these structures seem to offer (they are even able to see advantages in arranged marriage!), as they also grasp what has been gained in terms of individual freedom, the right to be nonconformist, and greater sex equality from the loosening of that formality.

From courtship we turn to sexuality and birth control. The work I assign on the social construction of gay identity and, as a result, of heterosexuality in its modern meaning is surprising to most students. Equally surprising to many is the fact that societies from time unknown have been trying to limit fertility. We connect the development of highly effective forms of birth control and their increasingly widespread use to what we have learned by now is the basis of modern families—urban living and an economy that demands educated and therefore more expensive children. I ask them what groups stand to gain and what groups to lose from birth control in its various historical stages of development, and whether they think “families” grew stronger or weaker as a result. They know my feminist views, but they also, by now, know how respectfully I treat differing opinions, and there are often spirited debates on abortion as on other controversial questions. I do however insist that they understand that abortion is a method of birth control used very widely in traditional and modern societies, and that traditional sexual morality did not much distinguish between abortion and contraception.

Since birth control has long been a matter of public policy, the students are already considering how states regulate families, but we now take that up directly, first around the matter of family violence, then with respect to welfare. At one point I ask the students to bring in a list of policies that affect families, and my master list grows longer every year including, for example, taxes, the V-chip, truancy, public housing regulations, Social Security, and the age of consent.

The course ends with student debates on hot contemporary family-related controversies, my assignment requiring them to use historical evidence. Since critical thinking is such an important agenda in this course, I offer below not my syllabus but the lists of words and concepts I require students to master.

Linda Gordon teaches at New York University. Her most recent book, to which family history is essential, is The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (1999).