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Individuals, Families, and Communities in Europe, 1200–1800: The Urban Foundations of Western Society by Katherine A. Lynch Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003 268 pp., $65 |
If you ask the average European woman of child-bearing age how many children she would like to have, you are unlikely to receive the answer "2.1." That number, however, is crucial for European bureaucrats. When women on average bear less than 2.1 children, as has happened in most European countries over the last several decades, the country can no longer reproduce itself and must rely on immigration to keep its population stable and its social system healthy. Retirement benefits and social services require a pool of young, healthy workers to carry the costs; when young workers are missing, how to make up the shortfallthrough accepting more immigrants or encouraging more birthsbecomes a hot political question. Private choices about having babies have worked their way into public debate.
And whether or not to have children is but one personal choice that affects others, suggesting that private choices may not be so private after all. Recently sociologists have noted the myriad decisions that reduce participation in public life in the United States. Social commentators report that rather than joining social, professional, political, or religious organizations, people are spending ever more time in solitary activitieseven to the point of "bowling alone," as the title of Robert Putnam's recent book suggests. The simple, private decision to watch television rather than writing a letter to the editor or inviting a friend to dinner, can have far-reaching consequences for public life.
Much of the literature devoted to European population studies and American public life is cast in terms of decline; the halcyon days of babies and bridge clubs are gone, and all that remains are pensioners and individualists. But how accurate is that declensionist view? What does history have to say about it? Were women having lots more children in years past? What constituted public life in the good old days? How were ties between people built? And why were people involved in their neighbors' lives in the first place?
Katherine Lynch's Individuals, Families, and Communities in Europe, 1200-1800 offers a good starting point for investigating the evolution of European demographics and the roots of American civic life. Lynch describes distinctive patterns of familial and communal life in late medieval and early modern Europe, corralling three seemingly disparate subjects for her argument: the historical demographics of European families, involvement in religious and charitable organizations, and attempts by French revolutionaries to reform families and charities. At first glance not much connects the marriage age of Italian brides in the 14th century and charitable provisions for French soldiers in the 18th, but both questions speak to the structure and function of family and society.
Lynch suggests that the distinctive character of European social life is to be located not only in the Protestant work ethic or capitalism or democracy but alsoand perhaps even primarilyin the interaction between family and society. She argues that small, nuclear, urban families whose members entered into family-like relationships outside their homes formed the backbone of European communal life and the basis of civil society.
Lynch starts with a demographic survey of European families. Her evidence indicates that the broad outlines of urban Western European families remained fairly static for hundreds of years. (Lynch concentrates on urban families and mostly ignores rural communities.) The lure of urban employment drew people to cities: by 1300 close to 15 percent, and by 1800 almost 20 percent of Western Europeans lived in towns with populations of 2,000 or more. Although Lynch disputes the theory that city life during this period significantly shortened the life-span of most residents (the so-called urban graveyard theory), she acknowledges that European town dwellers had no choice but to encounter death frequently. High mortality often lowered marriage ages and increased the age gap between spouses; it also meant that few children, sometimes only one or two per couple, survived their parents.
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