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PREFACE

The three volumes of which this is the first are an attempt to develop an understanding of the forces that have been operative in the evolution of family institutions in the United States. They set forth the nature of the influences that have shaped marriage, controlled fecundity, determined the respective status of father, mother, child, attached relative, and servant, influenced sexual morality, and governed the function of the family as an educational, economic, moral, and spiritual institution as also its relation to state, industry, and society in general in the matter of social control. The work is primarily a contribution to genetic sociology.

Not until such an investigation, as lies back of these volumes, has been undertaken is it possible to realize the absolute dearth of connected and systematic material on the general history of the American family as a social institution in relation to other social institutions and to "the social forces." In this as in so many other vital fields of human interest and action, everything has hitherto been taken for granted. In view, therefore, of the increasing attention given in recent years to the problems of the modern family, such as conditions of marriage, the birth-rate, the waning of home activities, the insurgency of the child, the economic independence of woman, sexual morality, divorce, and general family instability, it seems that the main lines of family evolution in the United States should be made accessible not merely to the professional student of sociology but also

to the thinking public. The present work is in answer to that realized need.

The first volume of the series covers the colonial period and sets forth the germination of the American family as a product of European folkways, of the economic transition to modern capitalism, and of the distinctive environment of a virgin continent. Usages imported from Europe are detailed and their gradual modification or overthrow under the influence of economic progress and the sway of the wilderness is exhibited. Variations between the geographical sections are traced to mesological and population differences but the general similarity of North and South is affirmed as a preliminary to the study of their divergence in the national period. In general, the colonial family is presented as a property institution dominated by middle class standards, and operating as an agency of social control in the midst of a social order governed by the interests of a forceful aristocracy which shaped religion, education, politics, and all else to its own profit. The characteristics of the family in the English colonies receive accentuation from a brief view of the French settlements by the Gulf.

In the second volume, the period from Independence through the Civil War is covered under five main heads: the influence of pioneering and the frontier, the rise of urban industrialism, the growth of luxury and extravagance, the culmination of the régime of slavery, and the consequences of the Civil War. Cleavages between East and West and between North and South are made manifest in this volume and the interaction of their several influences is noted. It is also made evident that all the alarming problems that to-day portend family disintegration or perversion were present in some

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