Vol. 19, No. 19

Feb. 10, 2000

Professor examines social history
of families across cultures

Tamara Hareven, Unidel Professor of Family Studies and History, with a joint appointment in urban affairs and public policy, has been a pioneer in the relatively new field of family history. Recently, a series of articles and chapters, which she has written over the course of her career, has been collected in a new book entitled Families, History and Social Change, published by Westview Press. As she writes in the introduction, the goal of the social history of the family is “retrieving the experiences of ordinary people in the past” and telling the story “from the perception of the participants rather than from the vantage point of the upper classes, employers and custodians.” Her own research focuses on the family because, she wrote, “the family is the ‘missing link’ for understanding the relationship between individual lives and the larger processes of social change.” How families cope with change is a major focus of her research, she said. As she writes in the new book, “Since work, family and community are interlocked in people’s lives, they should not be compartmentalized in historical research.” In the 1970s, Hareven began her studies of the families who had worked in the Amoskeag Mills in Manchester, N.H., resulting in Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory City (1978), followed by Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship Between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community (1982). Focusing on the family’s relationship to the process of industrialization, she interviewed generations of families about their work and family lives and about how events–such as the closing of the mills and World War II–and how personal responsibilities–such as caring for aged parents–affected their lives. She then began comparative studies with other cultures, including silk weavers in Kyoto, Japan, in Lyon, France and a textile-producing region in Austria where the centuries-old skills were handed down from one generation to the next. This type of production of luxury textiles was a cottage industry for over a century but is fast disappearing. In her book she wrote, “The remarkable discovery in this comparative research is the extent to which the commonality in the experience of textile work transcends cultural and national boundaries.” Another area of research she explored was divorce in China, which she researched while lecturing there as a National Academy of Sciences Distinguished Visiting Professor. A broad spectrum of her research is represented in Families, History and Social Change. Glen H. Elder, a professor at the University of North Carolina of Chapel Hill called the book “ A treasure trove of essays on the human experience,” adding that “Hareven reveals the varied and nuanced meanings of family and work from the perspective of generational status and national culture.” Maris A. Vinovskis, a professor at the University of Michigan has called Hareven, “the foremost pioneer in family history today [who} has produced a thoughtful and innovative study of family life and social change in the past.” Hareven has been an international lecturer, visiting professor and scholar in many countries. She was a senior Fulbright Fellow in India and Japan, and she founded The Journal of Family History in 1975, serving as editor for 20 years. In 1995, she founded The History of the Family: An International Quarterly, of which she is coeditor. She has received several honors for her work, including the Radcliffe Graduate Society Medal and an honorary doctorate from Linkoping University in Sweden in 1998. –Sue Moncure