Interpreting the Eighteenth-Century English Family

In this exhaustive exploration of several genres of fiction, Ruth Perry argues that a seismic change in the basis of kinship occurred in eighteenth-century England, from a primary kin group rooted in “consanguineal” ties to one rooted in “conjugal” ties. In other words: “the biologically given family into which one was born was gradually becoming secondary to the chosen family constructed by marriage” (p. 2). In Perry’s view this was not merely representative, but actual. In order to support this claim, she cites two main economic causes which influenced traditional norms of marriage and reproduction. First, the commercialization of the agricultural sector in which the disappearance of small holdings and consolidation of large estates led to the rise of a waged economy and a drop in marriage age which rooted people in the conjugal rather than the consanguineal family. Second, she suggests that an emphasis on capital accumulation and resulting competition for resources for exchange rather than use undermined the pre-industrial reliance on kindred. This divided family loyalties and was felt in all classes, but had the most impact upon women because it gave men more independence and domestic power as husbands and fathers. Women also lost social and material power as wealthwas increasingly concentrated in the male line. By the later eighteenth century, women were constructed “as private sexual partners rather than as coproducers of lineage” (p. 36). Each chapter presents another layer of “proof” for this thesis, by examining in detail the role of property in the family, the father-daughter, sister-brother, and husband-wife relationships, the significance of aunts (or “substitute mothers”), and the “incestuous family.”