Permanence and Change in the History of the American Family and Some Speculations as to Its Future

WV HAT do we know about permanence and change in the American family ? We can be reasonably sure of only two things. One of these pertains to its structure; the other to its functions. The first is that there seems to have been considerable shrinkage in the average size of household. The median size of household was 5.4 in 1790, 4.2 in 1900, and 3.3 in both 1940 and 1967.1 Thus the average household shrank by about two persons between 1790 and 1967. In a moment I shall interpret the structural significance of these statistics. The second point we can be reasonably sure about concerns the decline of certain functions the family has been performing. In 1929 Ogburn published a study showing that several functions were being increasingly transferred from the family to outside agencies. The functions that were being transferred, he said, were the economic, protective, recreational educational, and religious functions. Such statistical series as the proportion of meals eaten outside the home, the degree to which foods consumed within the home are finished or semi-prepared outside the home, and indeed, the proportion of married women in the labor force-all of these and many more constitute evidence for the now widely accepted formulation of the decline in the instrumental functions of the American family.2 How shall we interpret the statistics about size of household? First is the proposition that although the average size of household has decreased by something like 40 percent, still that statistic does not seem to signify a marked change in the structure of the family. Most of the reduction in size of household seems to derive from decline in the birth rate. Toward the close of the 18th century the average fertile married woman was bearing eight children; the