Chapter 3 blog

The chapter opened with talking about the old colonial family, which was in reality not nearly as great as many make it out to be today. Parents worked together constantly to make sure the family survived. Men had physically demanding jobs in poor working conditions. The women were in charge of the family, house, and the family’s faith. Most marriages actually began while the bride was pregnant, despite the use of bundling. Roughly a fifth of these children did not live to be a year old as a result of inadequate hygiene and living conditions.

Following this the authors then switched to the earliest American families, the Native Americans. The authors went into detail about the young ages of marriage, and the simple methods of divorce. Also puberty as a rite and how the Europeans wrecked their way of life was covered. Examples of this were the high mortality rates of males, the forced converts to religion, and loss of their lands.

The authors then went on to describe how the Europeans destroyed the African Americans lives from day one. Going in depth to talk about how “marriages” were encouraged between plantations to ensure a new generation of slaves, which even after the emancipation to legalize these marriages cost two-week’s pay.

Moving onto another group of people wrecked by the Europeans, the chapter then shifted to Mexican Americans. Here an interesting idea was brought up, compadrazgo, which is the intense involvement of not only parents, but god-parents as well. In this culture the women were responsible for the family which lead to girls being raised to be good mothers.

The book then described life after WWII which lead to women leaving unhappy marriages, and children weary about fathers they barely knew returning home from war. This then moved into the golden fifties which is still view socially as the best time in America. Families had great cookie-cutter houses, most of which were subsidized by the government, dads had great jobs from the education they picked up by using their g.i.-bills and mother were the “perfect house wives”. This chapter then concluded with a brief section describing the family structure since the 1970’s which has been covered greatly by the previous two chapters.