THE REVOLUTION OF LOVE

This lecture is based on the book THE MAKING OF THE MODERN FAMILY by Edward Shorter. Published in 1975

He has a fascinating theory about love and the family.

Basically he thinks that the change in the family during the last two hundred years is that it became PRIVATE, PERSONALIZED AND SENTIMENTALIZED. (p546) He contends that:

a. love became romantic rather than ruled by tradition,

b. that the mother-child relationship became romanticized

c. the family became separated from the rest of the community.

Romantic love = the capacity for spontaneity and empathy in an erotic relationship. This contrasts modern love with the more traditional considerations.

Sex = instrumental sex (for an end) and affective sex.

Sentiment = reordering of priorities.

Domesticity = renunciation of social life for loved ones company

Traditional life = people put demands of the community before their own personal ambitions and desires.

Applies to the three centuries between Reformation and French Revolution.

1. Authority versus individual freedom - patriarchal rule: parents over children, husband over wife, community elders over youth.

2. Prefer custom to spontaneity and creativity.

3. Suspicious of sexuality (it is dynamite).

Modern = the wish to be free outweighs obedience and conformity.

A. Household and Community in Traditional Society

1. THE FAMILY SIZE IS NOT THAT MUCH DIFFERENT FROM TODAY - slightly larger.

Families on the different economic levels had different families. Generally the higher the income the larger the family. On the whole households in traditional society were larger than today. (Single family dwellings for upper class came later.)

Day laborers had 1 or 2 children at home, the rich 3 or 4.

Many children were born, but half died (half reached age 21). They went to work at age 7 or 8.

So while they may have had many children, the number of children at home was not high.

2. THE EXTENDED FAMILIES WERE FOUND MOSTLY IN YUGOSLAVIA AND EASTERN EUROPE. Even these included no more than 3 0r 4 generations because the grandsons moved away.

Kinless domestic units (nuclear family) more common in US and UK.

Grandparents are included in many farm families.

3. THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRIVACY WAS IMPORTANT TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF ROMANTIC LOVE.

In Germany and France the lower class families slept together in one room.

Among upper class the privacy was not that much greater.

Curtains or thin walls separated sleeping quarters.

In the US and UK there was more privacy, primarily because of heating and glass windows which led to separate bedrooms.

"BY THE TIME OF THE REVOLUTION, COLONIAL MEN AND WOMEN COULD, TO A FAR GREATER EXTENT THAN WAS POSSIBLE ELSEWHERE IN THE WEST, LEAD SEXUAL AND EMOTIONAL LIVES THAT WOULD NOT BE MONITORED BY OUTSIDERS."

4. COURTSHIP WAS ORGANIZED UNDER COMMUNITY SUPERVISION.

Communities had the right to refuse immigrant craftsmen. It had legal authority to enforce morality. The guilds exerted a moral pressure - if someone's reputation was tainted they wouldn't be supported, or would be prevented from establishing residence.

They could prevent marriages of poor people - their children would become needy.

B. Men and Women in Traditional Society

1. MARRIAGES WERE HELD TOGETHER BY PROPERTY AND LINEAGE CONSIDERATIONS, NOT LOVE.

He concludes that peasants had neither intimacy or romantic love.

Men did not get the doctor for their wives when they were sick - they just let them die and then married someone else.

2. MOST MARRIAGES WERE UNHAPPY.

Most husbands and wives lived according to prescribed roles. If one or the other didn't perform their roles, there was not enough affection for communication and compromise to take place.

3. Puritans were an exception. Family life in the colonies in 18th century included romantic love.

4. WOMEN WERE POWERFUL IN THEIR OWN REALMS - in the house and home. But they had a diminished social role. The wife was therefore subservient and inferior.

Self-renunciation was expected of everyone - especially women.

C. Two Sexual Revolutions

The incidence of premarital sex prior to 1800 is slight.

1550-1650 = brief peak of pre-marital sex

1750-1850 - rise around the time of French Revolution

1850-1940 - Decline in out of wedlock children

1955-1970 - increase

HE CONCLUDES AN EVER INCREASING MODERNIZATION OF MORALS.

1. THERE IS AN INCREASE IN OUT OF WEDLOCK CHILDREN WHICH CHANGED SOCIETY. He rejects the theories of some that women were healthier, or there were fewer abortions, or there was improved registration, or a decline in still births.

"IN POINT OF FACT, THE YEARS 1750-1850 WITNESSED A CRESCENDO OF COMPLAINTS ABOUT IMMORAL SEXUAL ACTIVITY AMONG THE YOUNG. THIS AMOUNT OF LAMENTATION WAS UNPRECEDENTED SINCE THE REFORMATION - ...AND IT WAS NOT AGAIN TO BE ATTAINED UNTIL THE 1920s."

It concerned young women, men and women who worked together, and was lamented by some of the most respected persons of the age.

Some think masterbation increased during this time too.

Doctors and educators often discussed the subject.

2. From 1900 -1950 there was little change in children conceived prior to marriage. But the number of illegitimate children increased prior to 1965. With the advent of the pill, illegitimacy dropped.

In the 1950s and 1960s adolescents stripped away the "SENTIMENTAL LAYERS FROM THE ROMANTIC EXPERIENCE TO GET AT ITS HARD SEXUAL CORE. EROTICISM BECAME THE MOST PRECIOUS ASPECT OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS."

In both revolutions, it was the lower class which started the revolution. In 18th century France it was domestic servants, laundresses, seamstresses, spinners and proletarians who had children.

The significance of the sexual revolutions is that sex changed from a marginal activity to a central aspect of marriage and dating.

a. Premarital sex

b. Sex during engagement

c. Sex on a date/with feeling

d. Sex without feeling

D. Romance

Courtship became transformed from instrumental to expressive.

1. Personal happiness and self-development became more important than responsibility and loyalty to lineage.

2. Privatization of courtship

There are three major forms of community courtship of the past:

a. Bundling - groups of young boys proceed from house to house to court the girls.

b. The veillee (Vay-yay) or community gathering - to spin, knit, sew, dance. This took place in most of Europe. The boys went from barn to barn to look at the girls.

c. Village Festivals - costumes, partying, drinking, dancing, eating. In France,for instance, there was Carnival, May Day, St. John's Day (Midsummer), Parish Holiday.

Illegitimate pregnancy was higher in urban settings.

In the community the happiness of the couple was subordinate to larger familial considerations - but marriages were not arranged.

Shorter insists that although feeling was involved, it is not what we call love or romance today.

Because if parents objected, the couple gave up.

Spontaneity is minimal. (Sentiment = empathy and spontaneity).

Shorter measures intensity of emotion by the willingness to sacrifice. Thus when the couple is more willing to sacrifice communal harmony for their love, their love is more intense than when they are not willing to.

Ostracism, disinheritance, etc.

Romantic Revolution had two aspects:

a new relationship between man and woman in the couple,

a new relationship of the couple to surrounding social order.

ENDOGAMY = marrying within one's own social bracket or village.

It is less outside of tradition.

Occupations - today less important

Village - today unlikely to be from the same place.

Age (age disparity has declined. In Europe it was not uncommon for a man to marry someone 5 years older.)

Changes in seasonal births - indicates commonality of romance.

(In traditional society late spring and early summer was favored season for sex. August to December was second. Today babies are born all year round.)

The first revolution was primacy of affection.

The second revolution was rejecting external pressures that sex meant monogamy.

"THE FIRST SEXUAL REVOLUTION OF THE LATE 18TH CENTURY SHIFTED SUPERVISION OF COURTSHIP FROM THE COMMUNITY AS A WHOLE TO THE PEER GROUPS OF YOUTH ITSELF...THE SECOND SEXUAL REVOLUTION OF THE 60S SEEMS TO HAVE REMOVED EVEN THIS FEEBLE PEER-GROUP CONTROL OVER ADOLESCENT MATING AND DATING. THE WISH TO BE FREE HAS FRAYED ALL THE CABLES THAT USED TO TIE THE COUPLE TO SURROUNDING SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS. SELF-REALIZATION - ACCOMPLISHED THROUGH SEXUAL GRATIFICATION - HAS TAKEN COMMAND OF COURTSHIP."

E. Mothers and Infants

Good mothering is a modern invention.

In the upper classes parents began to see children empathetically around the 16h and 17th centuries.

In the lower classes in the late 18th century.

Babies were shaken to silence them.

They were left for long periods of time

There was little sorrow when a baby died.

Children were left in orphanages.

There were wet nurses - mainly in France.

Wealthy. Shop keepers boarded their children out so they could help with the shop.

The mortality rate was 38-90%

in Paris in Napoleonic period 5,000-6,000 infants were nursed out per year. By 1830 only 1,000.

In mid-1800s mothers were less liable to abandon their children.

There was swaddling until then.

Same time there was a decline in infant mortality - which he associates with an improvement of mothering.

F. The Rise of the Nuclear Family

Shorter calls the nuclear family a STATE OF MIND that separates the domestic unit from the surrounding community.

In the traditional family, family members spent more time away with peers than at home.

Also the boundary between home and society is less clear.

There was community intervention in the family life.

With romantic love the couple was detached from communal sexual supervision.

With maternal love a sentimental nest was created for the family.

The family began to feel more in common with each other than with their peer groups - it began to be domesticated.

As the family became more attractive, fathers spent more time at home.

The song Home Sweet Home was popular in 1870s.

DOMESTICITY = THE FAMILY'S AWARENESS OF ITSELF AS AN EMOTIONAL UNIT WHOSE PRIVACY MUST BE PROTECTED.

Maternal love and domesticity began among the bourgeoisie.

Romantic love began among the lower classes.

Domesticity has evolved in the modern couple:

a) Complete withdrawal from routine community life.

b) Strengthened ties to parents and close relatives

(He has a very dim view of family relationships of the past.)

In traditional family kin provided material support, not emotional support. Feuding, in-law troubles, etc.

Today there are no community networks which interfere with the family. In the past kin were instrumental. Today they are affectionate.

He contends that the nuclear family of the modern world is physically and spiritually isolated. (1975)

In the US the family was born modern. Family ties were cut by immigration.

Working class stuck to tradition longer.

Sex became romanticized so that finally the couple comes to expect to be affectionate and sexual to the end. This was apparently not the case in the traditional family.

A result of romanticization of sex and love is:

a) abandonment of a meaningful emotional life outside marriage.

b) Unstable marriages.

c) we have lost the sense of lineage.

G. The Reason Why

Capitalism

Materialism (industrialization)

Change from cottage industries to industrial proletariat

"IN THE TRADITIONAL SOCIETY, THE BALANCE WAS VERY HEAVILY TILTED TOWARD THE COMMUNITY, ...CAPITALISM TILTED THIS BALANCE THE OTHER WAY. AND ONCE THE RULES OF MARKETPLACE INDIVIDUALISM HAD BEEN LEARNED, THEY EASILY TOOK CONTROL OF THE WHOLE ARENA OF CONSCIOUS ATTITUDES."

It affected women more than men.

It started in the lower classes

Today women HAVE to work and neglect children to do so?

H. Toward the PostModern Family -

Generation gap has disappeared.

Families have taken over the community's role in raising children.

Peer group is socializing youth - parent's morals are unimportant

"TO GO BY THE DATA THAT DO EXIST FOR THE POST-1965 PERIOD, ADOLESCENTS ARE ESCAPING WITH INCREASING FREQUENCY INTO A SUBCULTURE THAT IS NOT SO MUCH IN OPPOSITION TO THE DOMINANT CULTURE AS INDEPENDENT OF IT. AND THE TYPICAL POSTURE OF YOUNG PEOPLE IN GENERATIONAL RELATIONS IS NOT SO MUCH REJECTION AS INDIFFERENCE."

Parents are becoming friends (affective relationship) rather than advisors, educators.

PEOPLE MARRY EARLIER TODAY (BUT IN THE PAST THEY DIED YOUGN), SO THEY ARE NOT NECESSARILY IN FAMILIES FOR SHORTER PERIODS OF TIME.

He predicts that the nest is breaking apart.