spheres” encouraged, and in some cases required, married women to avoid work outside the household and make their homes a “haven in the heartless world” of industrialism and business. Oddly, Europeans and Americans criticized the societies they were colonizing for requiring women to be secluded in the home, even though had they created a stronger ideal of domesticity for women in their own societies. The Meiji reformers of Japan similarly stressed the importance of women’s domesticity; “good wife, wise mother” (ryosai kenbo) became a standard government slogan defining women’s proper roles. Middle‐class ideals emphasized the mother–child bond, and also stressed the importance of children in general, in what some historians have dubbed the “discovery of childhood.” In the early twentieth century concerns about children led reformers to call for the abolition of child labor in some places. For the most part, however, the majority of children continued to work in home‐based production or on plantations and farms that produced food and the raw materials for industry, as they continue to do today.
State Intervention in Family Life
Laws regarding marriage and property ownership are just one example of the ways in which the state intervened in family life, which as we have seen began with the earliest river‐valley states of the ancient world. The most dramatic example of this from the ancient world is the Greek city‐state of Sparta, in which all activity was directed toward military ends. Citizen boys left their homes at age seven in Sparta and lived in military camps until they were thirty, eating and training with boys and men their own age; they married at about eighteen to women of roughly the same age, but saw their wives only when they sneaked out of camp. Military discipline was harsh – this is the origin of the word “spartan” – but severity was viewed as necessary to prepare men both to fight external enemies such as Athens and to control the Spartan slave and unfree farmer population, which vastly outnumbered the citizens.
In this militaristic atmosphere, citizen women were remarkably free. As in all classical cultures, there was an emphasis on childbearing, but the Spartan leadership viewed maternal health as important for the bearing of healthy, strong children, and so encouraged women to participate in athletics and to eat well. With men in military service most of their lives, citizen women owned property and ran the household, and were not physically restricted or secluded. Marriage often began with a trial marriage period to make sure the couple could have children, with divorce and remarriage the normal course if they were unsuccessful. Despite the emphasis on procreation, same‐sex relations were widely accepted, with male same‐sex relationships in particular viewed as militarily expedient, leading men to fight more fiercely in defense of their lovers and comrades (Pomeroy, 1997).
In the early modern period, state intervention in family life was clearly evident in colonial areas, where it was tied to the aims of European powers. Europeans brought with them not only their own political, economic, and religious structures, but also their views of family life, gender relations, and the institutions to enforce those ideas.
In the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of the Americas, church courts monitored marriage and sexual relationships, and tried to regulate the status of children born from mixed‐race and/or religious unions. The children of these relationships challenged established norms of identity, resulting in a very complex system of socioracial categories for persons of mixed ancestry. The Catholic Church and the Spanish and Portuguese crowns defined as many as fifteen or twenty different racial categories and combinations that were in theory based on place of birth, family background, assumed race, the status of one’s mother, with a specific name for each one. In practice, race and status were determined by how one looked, though people could “whiten” and legitimize their social status through payments to authorities in order to obtain privileges in society, including the ability to marry or inherit, enter a convent or the priesthood, attend university, or hold political office (Twinam, 1999; Lavrin, 1989).
For members of the white European elite, the concern with bloodlines created a pattern of intermarriage within the extended family, with older women identifying the distant cousins that were favored as spouses. For persons of mixed race, poor people of all types, slaves and indigenous people tied to an owner through debt peonage, family and property considerations did not enter into marital considerations. Despite Christian norms, families in Latin America were extremely diverse: elite men married, but they often had children by slaves or servants who were also part of their household; poor free people did not marry, but might live in stable nuclear households; slave unions could be temporary, and the children stayed with their mothers or became the property of their mother’s owners. Whether officially married or not, members of interracial families sometimes moved back and forth across the Atlantic, creating networks of what Jane Mangan (2016) has called “transatlantic obligations” and Jennifer Palmer (2016) “intimate bonds.”
In the French and British colonies of North America, Africa, and Asia, marriages or other long‐term unions between Europeans and indigenous peoples were rarer than they were in Latin America, and in many places were legally prohibited. Virginia law prohibited “negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women” to prevent the “abominable mixture and spurious issue” resulting from these unions (Brown, 1996). Such laws were passed in all of the southern states and also in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts between 1700 and 1750; they were struck down by the US Supreme Court in 1967, but remained on the books in some states for decades after that. The last of such “miscegenation” laws was rescinded by Alabama voters in a state‐wide referendum in 2000. Government policy toward Native Americans, which removed them from their original homelands and ordered them to live on reservations, disrupted family life along with every other aspect of indigenous society, though extended kin groups retained some voice wherever they could.
The European colonies in Africa and Asia generally developed later than those in the Americas, and in many places European rule did not disrupt existing family patterns to a great extent. European men engaged in sexual relations with indigenous women, but did not regard these as marriage (though they might be viewed by local cultures as temporary marriages). In the nineteenth century, European leaders worried about stability in their empires and what they termed “racial survival,” encouraged more white women to move to the colonies and hardened the laws regulating marriage between groups. In Brazil and Southern Cone countries, European immigration was encouraged, not only to bring in labor for plantations, mines, and factories, but explicitly to “whiten” the population though intermarriage with people already there.
Government intervention in family life became very common in the twentieth century, as biopolitical measures of state surveillance and management of human life were adopted around the world. The most extreme examples were in totalitarian regimes. In Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1930s, birth control was prohibited and large families were rewarded among groups judged to be desirable; those judged undesirable were sterilized or executed. All three of these countries mounted propaganda campaigns setting out their view of the ideal family, which was one in which fathers ruled and wives and children obeyed. In the Soviet Union immediately after World War II, the government encouraged population growth by limiting access to all contraception; even after the desire for more people abated, birth control pills never became widely available, so that abortion became the standard means of birth control for most women, a practice that continued in post‐Soviet Russia.
Democratic governments also shaped family life in the twentieth century. The eugenics movement, which advocated intentional selective breeding of certain types of people and the prevention of breeding among the “unfit,” gained broad acceptance around the world in the first third of the century, with financial support from governments, universities, foundations established by major industrialists such as the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, and civic groups. Laws ordering sterilization of criminals, the “feeble‐minded” or others viewed as genetically undesirable were passed in the United States, Canada, Japan, Brazil, and most of the countries of Europe, and tens of thousands of people were sterilized.
As the world’s population exploded from 2.5
