Mary Jo Maynes, Class Cultures and Image of Proper Family Life

In this chapter, Maynes provides much information and evidence for the changes within European families in the 19^th century. She argues that clashes resulted between post-Enlightenment ideals and images of “proper” family life held by the bourgeois and conflicting evidence of what actually happened in families. She uses cultural evidence regarding parent-child relations, age and gender roles, and sexual behavior.

Maynes states that mother-child relations and close supervision of children were important to the new family model, but that in actuality, few European women could be essentially stay-at-home moms. Mother and children’s labor was needed for most families to survive.

Another increasing ideal was that of two spheres, public and private. Maynes writes that gender roles became more polarized as a result. Urban growth contributed to class and gender segregation. Market and residential areas as well as class-segregated neighborhoods arose. In practice, most of the migrants coming to crowded urban areas had no option of moving to the suburbs. The new ideal family life was mainly indoors, but every-day realities required lower-class families to be in public, on the streets. Poor women were never able to remain inside their homes, even if new ideals of domesticity expected it.

The increased ideal separation of private and public matters can be seen in courtship as well. New ideas about family life supported marrying for love and not money. However, in reality arranged marriages based on economic needs and expectations continued.

This reading could belong under categories of gender or family relationships/family economics, but I think categories of difference would fit best. This reading covers many different elements of families, but focuses on the changes of family life – real and ideal, rural and urban, in different regions of Europe. This reading is significant in our study of European families because it shows how although family-life ideals changed extensively in the 19^th Century, evidence of actual family life reveals a different story.