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Families against the city;: Middle class homes of industrial Chicago, 1872-1890
Book by Sennett, Richard
258 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2013
38 people want to read
About the author
Richard Sennett
72 books550 followersRichard Sennett has explored how individuals and groups make social and cultural sense of material facts -- about the cities in which they live and about the labour they do. He focuses on how people can become competent interpreters of their own experience, despite the obstacles society may put in their way. His research entails ethnography, history, and social theory. As a social analyst, Mr. Sennett continues the pragmatist tradition begun by William James and John Dewey.
His first book, The Uses of Disorder, [1970] looked at how personal identity takes form in the modern city. He then studied how working-class identities are shaped in modern society, in The Hidden Injuries of Class, written with Jonathan Cobb. [1972] A study of the public realm of cities, The Fall of Public Man, appeared in 1977; at the end of this decade of writing, Mr. Sennett sought to account the philosophic implications of this work in Authority [1980].
At this point he took a break from sociology, composing three novels: The Frog who Dared to Croak [1982], An Evening of Brahms [1984] and Palais Royal [1987]. He then returned to urban studies with two books, The Conscience of the Eye, [1990], a work focusing on urban design, and Flesh and Stone [1992], a general historical study of how bodily experience has been shaped by the evolution of cities.
In the mid 1990s, as the work-world of modern capitalism began to alter quickly and radically, Mr. Sennett began a project charting its personal consequences for workers, a project which has carried him up to the present day. The first of these studies, The Corrosion of Character, [1998] is an ethnographic account of how middle-level employees make sense of the “new economy.” The second in the series, Respect in a World of Inequality, [2002} charts the effects of new ways of working on the welfare state; a third, The Culture of the New Capitalism, [2006] provides an over-view of change. Most recently, Mr. Sennett has explored more positive aspects of labor in The Craftsman [2008], and in Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation [2012].
His first book, The Uses of Disorder, [1970] looked at how personal identity takes form in the modern city. He then studied how working-class identities are shaped in modern society, in The Hidden Injuries of Class, written with Jonathan Cobb. [1972] A study of the public realm of cities, The Fall of Public Man, appeared in 1977; at the end of this decade of writing, Mr. Sennett sought to account the philosophic implications of this work in Authority [1980].
At this point he took a break from sociology, composing three novels: The Frog who Dared to Croak [1982], An Evening of Brahms [1984] and Palais Royal [1987]. He then returned to urban studies with two books, The Conscience of the Eye, [1990], a work focusing on urban design, and Flesh and Stone [1992], a general historical study of how bodily experience has been shaped by the evolution of cities.
In the mid 1990s, as the work-world of modern capitalism began to alter quickly and radically, Mr. Sennett began a project charting its personal consequences for workers, a project which has carried him up to the present day. The first of these studies, The Corrosion of Character, [1998] is an ethnographic account of how middle-level employees make sense of the “new economy.” The second in the series, Respect in a World of Inequality, [2002} charts the effects of new ways of working on the welfare state; a third, The Culture of the New Capitalism, [2006] provides an over-view of change. Most recently, Mr. Sennett has explored more positive aspects of labor in The Craftsman [2008], and in Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation [2012].
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November 4, 2016pg 10 ...the area seems to have sheltered from its inception a band of fashionable families that had extensive face-to-face relations with each other as a community. To use a more sociological term, a diverse network of "primary-group" bonds and affiliations marked this area; small social clubs, philanthropic committees, established lines of party-giving and other entertaining, sprang up. The result was that the family unit was only one arena, although an extremely important one, in which the original inhabitants of the community had face-to-face social contact with each other In the middle class era that followed, this diversity of primary-group networks in Union Park disappeared, and the family group became the center of social activity. In the process of this shift in communal focus, the family group changed its character radically. Studying the nature of the upper class homes provides comparative tools to measure the family life of the middle class people who subsequently came to dominate Union Park.
The existence of a primary-group association in Union Park from its beginnings was due to the economic geography of the city in the 1830s and 1840s.
pg 17 In Union Park, the conduct of the family group was the way this union between virtue and status was expressed.
p 63 A wide range of kin lived closely intermixed, so that the sense of the privacy and separateness of the conjugal group was not felt; Aries links the spatial organization of the house itself to this diversification, for the rooms of the medieval houses were not specialized in function; the same room could serve as dining hall, sitting room, and bedroom.
pg 66 Where Aries sees the specialization of the family as a limitation on human capacities to grow, Parsons sees this specialization as both a necessary consequence of the increasing specialization of the whole society, and as a means of leading the child step by step into a position where he could act alone as an adult in a complex industrial world.
pg 67 Parsons' brilliant perception of this process of learning as a form of ego development brings together the psychoanalytic description of child development with the structural analysis of sociology, for it is the essence of ego formation to learn the proper limits and spheres of ego formation to learn the proper limits and spheres of action.
pg 73 If private and intense families were the product, as Aries and Parsons both believe, of a nuclear form of family structure, here certainly would be a statistical base for their arguments, for the kinship system was overwhelmingly nuclear in Union Park.
135 extended families were more work-oriented than nuclear families, not in the degree to which the heads of the respective families worked, but the degree to which other members worked... The extent to which the work load was shared among family members was thus greater in the extended families of Union Park than in the nuclear ones.
138 In Union Park in 1880 the foreign-born person living alone had a more inferior occupational position compared to his native-born counterpart than did the foreign individual in a nuclear family compared to his native-born counterpart. In the single-member families, the gap between native and foreigner widener; in the nuclear, it narrowed somewhat. Single-member families, as a whole, had a less favored occupational distribution than nuclear or extended families. Thus disabilities in Union Park tended to compound themselves: given one disability, foreign birth, its stratification pattern within another unfavored social form, the single-member family, intensified the disability.
But the category of extended families contained foreigners who were not at a disadvantage in work.. there was some correlation between the extended family form of organization, ethnicity, and the ability to own property-based business; a correlation also between this family form and the ability of the foreigner to reduce his numbers among the manually skilled.
144 The extended family forms sheltered more of those who had overcome the occupational disadvantages of foreign birth than did the dominant order of nuclear families.
145 One quality unified four seemingly unrelated social conditions in this community. The first of these was that the stages of family life past childhood, but before middle age in the forties, were unstructured in the manner in which breaks from the parental home were accomplished. Secondly, there was a greater tendency for work stability among the youngest people who had married than among the same age group who had not married. This stability may have meant that the burdens of early marriage were such that young married men could not afford to take chances by changing jobs as often as young men who were still unattached. Third, an unequal rate of employment of women in the upper and lower classes was related to the fact that the wives of working men tended to have better jobs than their husbands, and so, to permit the husband to remain the leader in the family, the wives were prohibited pr prohibited themselves from working. Fourth, the pattern of life stages made plausible Aries description of the nuclear family as an isolating unit in the society, an institution whose purpose and scope was to create a shelter for certain of its members from the larger society.
The emotional element that bound these four social conditions together was fear.
147 Economics were sacrificed for a sense of secure marital identity in which a husband was able to show a clear power in the work world a power that placed him and justified him in the family circle.
A well-articulated secondary literature now exists about the fear, in general, that people of the time had of cities; surely the family played a specific role in the expression of this fear. The upbringing of children in such a society would not focus on their participation in the city. Nor would the husband and wife turn to the community for social activity. Rather, the family would become the instrument of defense against the increasing complexity and uncertainty of the city environs. The family would thus become a retreat from perceived disorder.
154 The tracking down of these thousand Union Park people revealed, for the majority of families, that the family became a refuge for fathers who were in fact stagnant in their work, even though the economic structure of Chicago was rapidly expanding. In this stagnation, this lack of vigor, whose surface character was noted in Union Park at the time, lay the origins of a condition that has, on many accounts, persisted into the present: a special weakness of middle-class fathers in relation to their sons, and a consequent sense of family in which the mother is taken as the strong force; in Union Park occurred, in other words, a failure of middle class fatherhood, where the father was unable, due to his own work experience, to prepare his children to cope with the urban society in which they would live.
163 This distributional approach is one statistical expression of Emile Durkheim's argument for social characteristics having a uniqueness of their own, apart from the lives of the separate individuals who compose the social group. The difference between the measures of linked and distributional change was not then simply in the size of the usable statistical sample, but in the kind of phenomenon described. In analyzing the trace sample measures on the direct level and on the Durkheimian distributional level have been compared to each other and used in conjunction in order to present as complex a portrait as possible of the process of historical change for individuals and social groups in Union Park.
165 Both fathers and sons in large families were upwardly mobile to a greater degree than the same generations in small families.
178 The families in less intensive family situations, by contrast were more upwardly mobile over the course of time, and became a solidly white collar group. Sons from intensive families, that is families of small size and nuclear form, had a markedly less favorable work experience than sons from less intensive families; in addition, for all working members of the two kinds of families, those in the intensive families appeared to have a weaker grasp on the upper-status jobs they managed to have in 1880 over the course of the next decade.
It appears, from this data, that large or extended families were better able to adapt to the emerging bureaucratic order of work in the city than the families constituting a majority in Union Park, of a more intense and isolated nature.
in the intensive families the fathers did not exhibit to the sons a pattern or a model of successful adaption to work in the way that was present in other homes. The sons seemed in turn to have suffered for it, the evidence suggests, since in the intensive families these young people had difficulty in keeping themselves in the white collar sphere, or successful within it, in a way sons from less intensive families did not.
182 Measures of family size revealed the same phenomenon: the process of an inter-generational territorial break was much stronger in the less intense families than in the intensive families.
186 The United States in these early Republic years was an inchoate but energetic society, the people "restless unto death" in Tocqueville's words;
202 Thus the nuclear-family father could have exercised a clear and unchallenged role as the mediator between the home and the city, could have singly interpreted the happenings of their society to those in the family shelter.
213 Indeed, the greater rootedness of the dominant family sons to the places of their youth may be a sign of that disengagement from society, that anomie, that Durkheim found to be the hidden pathology of the industrial culture of this time.
221 to withdraw children from school and to put them to work at the age of ten or twelve was another... the sons of exceptionally prosperous laborers did not enjoy generally superior career opportunities; the sacrifice of their education and the constriction of their occupational opportunities, in fact, was often a prime cause of the family's property mobility.
The existence of a primary-group association in Union Park from its beginnings was due to the economic geography of the city in the 1830s and 1840s.
pg 17 In Union Park, the conduct of the family group was the way this union between virtue and status was expressed.
p 63 A wide range of kin lived closely intermixed, so that the sense of the privacy and separateness of the conjugal group was not felt; Aries links the spatial organization of the house itself to this diversification, for the rooms of the medieval houses were not specialized in function; the same room could serve as dining hall, sitting room, and bedroom.
pg 66 Where Aries sees the specialization of the family as a limitation on human capacities to grow, Parsons sees this specialization as both a necessary consequence of the increasing specialization of the whole society, and as a means of leading the child step by step into a position where he could act alone as an adult in a complex industrial world.
pg 67 Parsons' brilliant perception of this process of learning as a form of ego development brings together the psychoanalytic description of child development with the structural analysis of sociology, for it is the essence of ego formation to learn the proper limits and spheres of ego formation to learn the proper limits and spheres of action.
pg 73 If private and intense families were the product, as Aries and Parsons both believe, of a nuclear form of family structure, here certainly would be a statistical base for their arguments, for the kinship system was overwhelmingly nuclear in Union Park.
135 extended families were more work-oriented than nuclear families, not in the degree to which the heads of the respective families worked, but the degree to which other members worked... The extent to which the work load was shared among family members was thus greater in the extended families of Union Park than in the nuclear ones.
138 In Union Park in 1880 the foreign-born person living alone had a more inferior occupational position compared to his native-born counterpart than did the foreign individual in a nuclear family compared to his native-born counterpart. In the single-member families, the gap between native and foreigner widener; in the nuclear, it narrowed somewhat. Single-member families, as a whole, had a less favored occupational distribution than nuclear or extended families. Thus disabilities in Union Park tended to compound themselves: given one disability, foreign birth, its stratification pattern within another unfavored social form, the single-member family, intensified the disability.
But the category of extended families contained foreigners who were not at a disadvantage in work.. there was some correlation between the extended family form of organization, ethnicity, and the ability to own property-based business; a correlation also between this family form and the ability of the foreigner to reduce his numbers among the manually skilled.
144 The extended family forms sheltered more of those who had overcome the occupational disadvantages of foreign birth than did the dominant order of nuclear families.
145 One quality unified four seemingly unrelated social conditions in this community. The first of these was that the stages of family life past childhood, but before middle age in the forties, were unstructured in the manner in which breaks from the parental home were accomplished. Secondly, there was a greater tendency for work stability among the youngest people who had married than among the same age group who had not married. This stability may have meant that the burdens of early marriage were such that young married men could not afford to take chances by changing jobs as often as young men who were still unattached. Third, an unequal rate of employment of women in the upper and lower classes was related to the fact that the wives of working men tended to have better jobs than their husbands, and so, to permit the husband to remain the leader in the family, the wives were prohibited pr prohibited themselves from working. Fourth, the pattern of life stages made plausible Aries description of the nuclear family as an isolating unit in the society, an institution whose purpose and scope was to create a shelter for certain of its members from the larger society.
The emotional element that bound these four social conditions together was fear.
147 Economics were sacrificed for a sense of secure marital identity in which a husband was able to show a clear power in the work world a power that placed him and justified him in the family circle.
A well-articulated secondary literature now exists about the fear, in general, that people of the time had of cities; surely the family played a specific role in the expression of this fear. The upbringing of children in such a society would not focus on their participation in the city. Nor would the husband and wife turn to the community for social activity. Rather, the family would become the instrument of defense against the increasing complexity and uncertainty of the city environs. The family would thus become a retreat from perceived disorder.
154 The tracking down of these thousand Union Park people revealed, for the majority of families, that the family became a refuge for fathers who were in fact stagnant in their work, even though the economic structure of Chicago was rapidly expanding. In this stagnation, this lack of vigor, whose surface character was noted in Union Park at the time, lay the origins of a condition that has, on many accounts, persisted into the present: a special weakness of middle-class fathers in relation to their sons, and a consequent sense of family in which the mother is taken as the strong force; in Union Park occurred, in other words, a failure of middle class fatherhood, where the father was unable, due to his own work experience, to prepare his children to cope with the urban society in which they would live.
163 This distributional approach is one statistical expression of Emile Durkheim's argument for social characteristics having a uniqueness of their own, apart from the lives of the separate individuals who compose the social group. The difference between the measures of linked and distributional change was not then simply in the size of the usable statistical sample, but in the kind of phenomenon described. In analyzing the trace sample measures on the direct level and on the Durkheimian distributional level have been compared to each other and used in conjunction in order to present as complex a portrait as possible of the process of historical change for individuals and social groups in Union Park.
165 Both fathers and sons in large families were upwardly mobile to a greater degree than the same generations in small families.
178 The families in less intensive family situations, by contrast were more upwardly mobile over the course of time, and became a solidly white collar group. Sons from intensive families, that is families of small size and nuclear form, had a markedly less favorable work experience than sons from less intensive families; in addition, for all working members of the two kinds of families, those in the intensive families appeared to have a weaker grasp on the upper-status jobs they managed to have in 1880 over the course of the next decade.
It appears, from this data, that large or extended families were better able to adapt to the emerging bureaucratic order of work in the city than the families constituting a majority in Union Park, of a more intense and isolated nature.
in the intensive families the fathers did not exhibit to the sons a pattern or a model of successful adaption to work in the way that was present in other homes. The sons seemed in turn to have suffered for it, the evidence suggests, since in the intensive families these young people had difficulty in keeping themselves in the white collar sphere, or successful within it, in a way sons from less intensive families did not.
182 Measures of family size revealed the same phenomenon: the process of an inter-generational territorial break was much stronger in the less intense families than in the intensive families.
186 The United States in these early Republic years was an inchoate but energetic society, the people "restless unto death" in Tocqueville's words;
202 Thus the nuclear-family father could have exercised a clear and unchallenged role as the mediator between the home and the city, could have singly interpreted the happenings of their society to those in the family shelter.
213 Indeed, the greater rootedness of the dominant family sons to the places of their youth may be a sign of that disengagement from society, that anomie, that Durkheim found to be the hidden pathology of the industrial culture of this time.
221 to withdraw children from school and to put them to work at the age of ten or twelve was another... the sons of exceptionally prosperous laborers did not enjoy generally superior career opportunities; the sacrifice of their education and the constriction of their occupational opportunities, in fact, was often a prime cause of the family's property mobility.
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