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Marriage and European Views Fertility

Different Family Arrangements

Yet just as the image of the white wedding was at its zenith, in the third quarter of the twentieth century, other forces were at work redefining the culture of marriage. The modern sentimental marriage is, in the early twenty-first century, widely perceived to be in crisis. Since the late-twentieth century, society seems to be in the process of making a different social system in a global world, one whose ripples can be felt in the most personal organization of private experience. In the world past, pluralism was the product of uncontrollable demography abetted by the rigidity of social hierarchies; in the world of the early-twenty-first century, by way of contrast, familial pluralism appears to be the product of centrifugal forces of individualism that castigate the traditional marriage as being both repressive and antisocial.

If, as Jean-Louis Flandrin suggests, the early modern state pivoted on the "government of families," and if, as Jacques Donzelot relates, the modern state practices "government through the family," then it can be argued that in the early twenty-first century the evolution is towards another configuration—government without the married family. The language of the sentimental family, as well as the invented custom of public weddings, has been borrowed indiscriminately by people whose private lives were cloaked in this time-honored disguise. Even though the majority of both males and females regard the nuclear family as the sentimental site for parenting, one in four births takes place out of wedlock. Single-parent households (usually headed by women) have become so prevalent that as many as 50 percent of children may live apart from their fathers at some time in their lives. More marriages are terminated by divorce than by death. A sociological discussion estimated that there are as many as 200 different "family" arrangements recognized by Americans and Europeans. (Bernardes, p. 192–195). In the early twenty-first century, American religious and political leaders are also grappling with demands for same-sex marriage, yet another indication of the transformation of the institution. Indeed the debate itself, which has raised issues of inheritance, parenting, care for the sick and dying, immigration and citizenship, romance, love, and the desire for weddings as rites of passage and public events, reveals the contradictory definitions of marriage and the many purposes that this institution continues to fulfill.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, then, the loss of prescriptive unanimity is thus a matter of fact. Those who mourn that loss cannot forget the sentimental family; yet the cost exacted by modern memory is that socially nostalgic conservatives have mistaken the image of the sentimental family for the continuity and contradictions of past realities.

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David Levine

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Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Macrofauna to MathematicsMarriage and European Views Fertility - Judeo-christian Tradition, Puberty And Marriage, Consensual Unions, Marriage Covenant, Later Marriage