Kevin Schürer & Simon Szreter

Today the small nuclear family dominates across much of the world. Following World War II this prevailing family form was associated with modernity – the product of a post-industrial society. But just how modern is the modern nuclear family?  

George Cruikshank, Taking the Census (1851), plate 3 from The Comic Almanack for 1851, published by David Bogue, London. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Whilst the scene of George Cruikshank’s cartoon “Taking the Census” (1851) is exaggerated for comic effect, the underlying message is still clear. Taking the census in mid-19th-century England was wrought with difficulties, not only because of the potential size of the families being enumerated, but also their complexity.  

The family depicted here is not only multigenerational, but also extended by the presence of co-residing aunts, uncles and cousins. The family is far removed from ‘modern’ nuclear families consisting of just parents and unmarried children which have dominated most of Europe and North America since the mid-20th century. 

The nuclear family was once believed to be a product of the post-industrial age, and this is an assumption still held by many people. However, one of the earliest and most significant revolutionary findings of Campop was the discovery that the nuclear family household existed as the predominant pattern throughout English society for many centuries in the past long before the modern, post-industrial era. 

Why was this so significant? Put simply, because it completely over-turned a central assumption of ‘modernisation theory’.  

Modernisation theory

During the immediate post-war decades of the Cold War era, modernisation theory provided a crucial conceptual underpinning which justified the US-led west in believing it had a self-appointed mission to bring liberal democracy and its capitalist version of development to the world’s new postcolonial nations.           

Modernisation theory envisaged a tight relationship between family forms and economic change. American sociologist Talcott Parsons saw the family as the crucial mechanism forming and transmitting cultural values from one generation to the next. According to Parsons, small nuclear families were the quintessential ‘modern’ form which inculcated the liberal, capitalist, democratic and economically dynamic values of individualism, independence, aspiration and social mobility.  

These ‘modern’ families resided in households containing just the one or two adults, their own pre-adult children, and no other kin. The contrast was with extended family households in the ‘traditional’ (non-modern) past, and apparently still visible in the mid-20th century in various forms around the ‘undeveloped’ world. These were typically vertically or horizontally extended in kinship terms: three-or even four-generational households; with wider lateral kin (brothers and sisters and their partners and children) co-resident together or in adjacent housing.

These households were thought to transmit the anti-individualist values of respect for the authority of elders and for tradition, collective solidarity, mutual support and social stasis.  

Parsons saw his theory as ‘structural functionalist’, combining Emile Durkheim’s insistence that societies were like organisms composed of interacting parts, with Max Weber’s idea that there could nevertheless be a source of structural change in this self-sustaining system. For Weber, the prime mover of this change was the rise of Protestantism, from which individualist values emerged, and consequently the legitimacy and spread of the capitalist system.

A demographic transition from the traditional to the modern family?  

Parsonian modernisation theory quickly came to be understood by influential policymakers in the Cold War era as a justification for the anti-communist development economics project of the post-war liberal west. It demonstrated that all the postcolonial ‘undeveloped’ peasant societies around the world needed to be transformed from their traditional extended family households into modernized nuclear family households.  

Leading US demographers Frank Notestein, Kingsley Davis and A.J. Coale all came fully on board with this project through their adaptation of the theory of demographic transition, a general historical and policy-relevant model of demographic change in line with modernisation theory.     

L. S. Lowry, Family Group, 1958. Image credit: Colleges in the University of Cambridge. CC BY-NC-ND.

Due to the relative absence of much serious scholarly attention in the Anglophone world to investigating what actually were the family household forms found in the pre-industrial past, it was not difficult for this representation of the ‘traditional’ west – as being essentially similar to the contemporary ‘traditional’ east and south – to be accepted as fact. 

The nuclear family household in the English past 

However, these ideas were about to change. Prior to the foundation of Campop in 1964, Peter Laslett, one of the Group’s co-founders, was already an acknowledged authority on the history of 17th-century political philosophy and political thought. His interest in patriarchal systems led him to consult the late-17th-century Rector’s Book for the Nottinghamshire village of Clayworth. The book contains two census-type listings of the 400 or so inhabitants of the village, for 1676 and 1688, compiled by the parish priest. The impact of these two short listings on Laslett’s thinking and subsequent writing was phenomenal. It was a genuine eureka moment.  

The Rector’s Book Clayworth, Notts., 1672-1701.

As he scanned the pages Laslett was puzzled that he could see no evidence for the sorts of large multigenerational patriarchal families that he expected to be present in 17th-century England. In his own words, it was an ‘intellectual shock’ that he could see no sign whatever of the extended co-resident domestic group.  

Rather than being large and extended, the households of Clayworth were small, simple and predominantly nuclear. Could this be right? Could the so-called ‘modern’ nuclear family have been present in such large numbers in pre-industrial England?  With these questions in mind, Laslett immediately felt the need to search out similar sources in order to discover if the picture sketched by the Clayworth documents were representative or atypical.

Illustration from the 1563 Whole Book of Psalms published by John Day. Source: Wikimedia

Laslett therefore devised a project to collect as much evidence as possible – no small feat given that in the 1960s such materials tended to be available only from county record offices. 

Aided by a new recruit to Campop, Richard Wall, Laslett established that the English evidence showed a consistent pattern of nuclear household formation, both spatially and temporally. In Laslett’s words: ‘the present state of evidence forces us to assume that its [the family’s] organisation was always and invariably nuclear unless the contrary can be proven’.

This null hypothesis was to become one of the most commented-on features of the book Household and Family in Past Time, and one which was often subsequently misinterpreted and taken to mean that the nuclear family was the only form of residential unit across all societies, something which was never intended.  

A. Devis, Family Group, 1756. Image credit: The Courtauld. CC BY-NC-ND.

Despite this, or maybe even in part because of it, Household and Family in Past Time became a landmark publication for the study of historical social structures. It became, in a sense, a manifesto.  

Due to the pioneering work on household structures led by Laslett and Wall, the previously held notion that the nuclear family was the product of forces shaped only in the post-industrial age has been consigned, as it were, to history. 

Further reading

P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost (Routledge Classics edition, London and New York, 2021) – especially chapter 4.

W. Coster, Family and Kinship in England, 1450-1800 (Longman, Harlow, 2001).

M. Abbott, Family Ties: English families 1540-1920 (Routledge, London and New York, 1993).

K. Schürer, E. M. Garrett, H. Jaadla, and A. Reid, ‘Household and family structure in England and Wales (1851–1911): continuities and change’, in Continuity and Change vol. 33 no. 3 (2018), pp. 365-411. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0268416018000243

S. Szreter, ‘The idea of demographic transition and the study of fertility change: A critical intellectual history’, in Population and Development Review, vol. 19, no. 4 (Dec. 1993), pp. 659-701.