Search results
As with marriage, the woman’s relationship to her husband and children has to be seen within the framework of canon and common law, the Church being concerned with the marriage itself, and the royal courts with property. Throughout the period, the family and its continuity were regarded as of prime importance, and the birth of the heir, preferably a son, was considered
Family Rhythms is a comprehensive, user-friendly text that opens a new window on family change in Ireland. The authors draw on major new qualitative longitudinal datasets to develop a rich account of continuity and change in the textures, meanings and rhythms of family life in Ireland since the early years of the state. Consistent with the recent turn to more inductive approaches in family studies, the book focuses on changing everyday practices in different family life stages: childhood, early adulthood, the middle years and grandparenthood. Readers acquire insights on the diverse experiences of family life from different historical and generational points of view and on the associated challenges for social policy. Throughout, qualitative findings are placed in the context of societal shifts in demography, value systems, household economies, and patterns of kinship, community and public life. For each life stage, the Irish experience is also placed in a comparative European context. The book includes a state-of-the-art introduction to contemporary sociological perspectives on family life and introduces readers to the wealth of historical and contemporary research on family life in Ireland. Highlighted panels invite readers to look in more detail at selected landmark Irish studies and to explore extracts from the qualitative data for themselves.
9 Family history: history’s poor relation? Alison Light Family history is everywhere, not only on television shows like the BBC’s extremely popular Who Do You Think You Are? or in the newspapers, which frequently carry family stories and old photographs, but in the form of software, maps, books, magazines and vast events such as family history fairs, where gatherings of thousands of people share knowledge and buy things. It is a booming business across Europe, North America and Australia in particular, and has had a huge impact on information science and the
Most films concerned with working-class life offer some image of the family. In Holiday Camp (d. Ken Annakin, 1947), it is the stable, coherent social unit of the Huggetts. In It Always Rains on Sunday (d. Robert Hamer, 1947), the family generates conflict and divided loyalties, though the film holds out the hope of something better. In Good Time Girl (d. David Macdonald, 1948), the family is
When a descendant shares their personal archive with an oral historian or brings it along to a heritage event, they respond to the historical culture around them. But it is not just their own: they also respond to a history within the family, memories of ancestors and the feelings associated with them and the backstory of how they came to hold the family heritage
might be said to follow the generic format of ‘family albums’. Although the makers and audiences of these collections were not always kin, there are certain analytical benefits to retaining the concept for my purposes here. ‘Family photography’ invokes a vernacular genre characterised by certain social practices as much as visual conventions, following photographic historians Geoffrey Batchen and Gillian Rose. 2 Amateur photographs of royal celebrations in the Indies, especially those that were placed in family albums
4 Family matters: Euro-American orphans, the bildungsroman, and kinship building Implicit in a phrase like ‘loved ones’ is an open-ended notion of kinship that respects the principles of choice and self-determination in defining kin, with love spanning the ideologically contrasting domains of biological family and families we create. (Weston, 1997: 183) As we have seen in Chapter 3, contemporary orphan tales typically foreground alternative, or non-normative, families. In this chapter we focus on John Irving’s The Cider House Rules (1985), and Kaye Gibbons
Chabrol’s depiction of the middle classes usually concentrates on the family. The rituals of the bourgeois household, above all those of the dinner table, are the focus for his dissection of manners and morals in A double tour (1959), La Muette (1965), La Femme infidèle (1968) and Que la bête meur e (1969). If the Hélène cycle as a whole tends to balance satire with idealisation, La Muette
prohibition and devout veneration (Hollier 1995 : 143–4). The secret society, which unites its members in the shared burden of an inviolable secret, operates, as the Collège de Sociologie argued, 1 a kind of displacement of the taboos that organised primitive societies. In later films by Rivette, the community depicted is precisely that which is absent from Paris nous appartient and Out 1 : the micro-community of the family
of challenges that real mothers faced. ‘Human drama’ features introduced the general reader to ‘handicapped’ children and the implications for family life. Such children were problematised, setting them in counterpoint to ‘normal’ children, and revealing a different side of motherhood experienced by some women. ‘Unmarried’ mothers were compared unfavourably with those women who had a wedding ring on their finger when they had given birth. They were generally included in the magazines as warnings to readers, who were