Reconsidering the Northwest European Family System: Living Arrangements of the Aged in Comparative Historical Perspective.

Between the late nineteenth century and the 1960s, social theorists argued that economic development was inversely associated with complex family forms. The idea originated with Frederic Le Play, one of the earliest scholars to undertake empirical analysis of the family. Le Play idealized stem families, in which one child remained at home to work on the family farm and eventually inherit it, thus continuing the family line. In 1872, Le Play wrote that stem families were disappearing “among the working class populations subject to the new manufacturing system of Western Europe” (Silver 1982: 260). Durkheim (1888) expanded on Le Play’s interpretation, stressing the loss of specialized functions of the family and weakening of kin ties with the growth of social differentiation (Lamanna 2002: 61). Burgess (1916) generalized the theory that the nuclear family emerged as a consequence of industrialization, and by the middle of the twentieth century the idea that simple nuclear families were functionally adapted to industrial society became a fundamental tenet of sociological thought (Ogburn 1933; Parsons 1944). Goode (1963: 6), reflecting this consensus, wrote that “wherever the economic system expands through industrialization … extended kinship ties weaken, lineage patterns dissolve, and a trend toward some form of the conjugal system generally begins to appear. ” Policy analysts discussing changes in the living arrangements of the aged in the first half of the twentieth century similarly emphasized the declining importance of agriculture and the rise of industrial wage labor. The creators of the Social Security system—the landmark US old-age support program, adopted in 1936—routinely justified the need for assistance in terms of the decline of farming and the flight of the younger generation to cities (Eliot 1961; Clague 1961; Brown 1969; Helvering v Davis 301 U.S. 619 [1937]). Mid-twentieth-century literature on aging frequently raised the same points about agriculture and urbanization to explain the increasing tendency for the elderly to reside alone (e.g., Burgess 1960; Cowgill 1974; Nimkoff 1962). A revisionist paradigm emerged in the 1960s. Laslett and Harrison (1963) discovered that only a tenth of households in the village of Clayworth in the seventeenth century included extended kin—a fraction almost identical to that reported by the 1961 census of England and Wales. Laslett and his colleagues soon demonstrated that Clayworth was not an anomaly; there was similar evidence for many other preindustrial English and Northwest European villages (Laslett 1965, 1972). Over the next two decades, Laslett and his followers elaborated a theory that Northwest Europe had, from a very early date, a unique family system characterized by nuclear family structure and neolocal marriage (Hajnal 1982; Laslett 1983; Reher 1998). Almost immediately after Laslett’s first publications on the family, historians asserted that nuclear families had also been standard in England’s North American colonies from the time of earliest settlement (Demos 1965; Greven 1966). American social historians were soon among the most prominent and enthusiastic supporters of the hypothesis that the nuclear family had predominated for centuries in both North America and Northwest Europe (e.g., Hareven 1994, 1996). Proponents of the nuclear family hypothesis argue that that in Northwest Europe and North America—especially England and its colonies—adult children ordinarily left their parental home and established new households when they married. Many scholars maintain that elderly persons resided with their children only in cases of poverty or infirmity, circumstances that could force aged parents to move into their children’s household (Hareven 1994, 1996; Kertzer 1995; Hammel 1995; Smith 1979). Advocates of the hypothesis further maintain that these “weak-family” patterns were unique to Northwest Europe and North America, and that the rest of the world had “strong-family” systems with much higher levels of intergenerational coresidence (Reher 1998; Hartman 2004; Hajnal 1982). This idea of a unique Northwest European family system has been seen by some as an essential stimulus for the early development of capitalism and industrialization (Macfarlane 1978, 1986, 1987; Cain and McNicoll 1988; Hartman 2004). Despite extensive criticism of the methods and measurements used by Laslett and his followers (e.g., Berkner 1972, 1975; Ruggles 1987, 1994, 2003), the hypothesis that Northwest European and North American families were exceptional in their preference for nuclear residence remains the dominant interpretation (Hartman 2004; Thornton 2005). In the literature dealing with the rest of the world, there is some empirical support for the thesis that economic development is associated with a decline in family complexity. There is clear evidence, for example, of diminished intergenerational coresidence in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, which have experienced rapid economic growth and development (Martin 1990; Hirosima 1997; Hermalin, Ofstedal, and Chang 1992; De Vos and Lee 1993; Knodel and Debavalya 1997; Chattopadhyay and Marsh 1999). Bongaarts and Zimmer (2002) found a country-level cross-sectional relationship between schooling and nuclear family structure, suggesting that as educational levels increase, residential family complexity declines. Some comparative survey data also suggest a trend toward independent residence of the aged in developing countries (United Nations 2005). Other recent studies, however, suggest that there have been no clear trends in coresidence in less-developed countries (Logan and Bian 1999; Bongaarts 2001; Palloni 2001; Knodel and Ofstedal 2002; Ruggles and Heggeness 2008). This article evaluates the case for European and North American exceptionalism in nuclear family residence by exploiting a vast collection of newly available historical and contemporary data from 87 censuses of 34 countries around the world between 1850 and 2007. My goal is to begin to systematically assess cross-temporal and cross-national variation in the living arrangements of persons aged 65 or older. The family patterns of the aged are a key indicator for the European exceptionalism hypothesis. All things being equal, one would expect that populations with weak nuclear family systems and neolocal marriage would have comparatively low residence of aged persons with kin or in multigenerational families. By contrast, elderly in strong-family societies in which stem families or joint families predominate would be expected to have relatively high coresidence. Accordingly, I compare living arrangements of the aged in nineteenth-century Northwest Europe and North America to the living arrangements of the aged in both developed and developing countries in the second half of the twentieth century, applying a basic set of controls for agricultural employment and demographic conditions.1 The results suggest that nineteenth-century Northwest Europe and North America did not have exceptionally simple or nuclear family structure. In fact, the family patterns in the historical data from these countries are generally similar to the family patterns found in the recent past in countries that share similar levels of agricultural employment and demographic characteristics.