by E. J. Graff
Maybe—or maybe not. Romans didn’t consider birth the only way to acquire offspring. Just as they felt free to expose (in other words, kill) any child they didn’t need, they also felt free to adopt—adults, that is. Adoption’s goal was not to nurture a child but to install an heir to carry on the house, a goal better served by adults—and so nearly all adoptions were of grown men (yes, men). Adoptees were usually nephews or grandsons or cousins, sometimes adopted through a will. As one historian explains, “A citizen of Rome did not ‘have’ a child; he ‘took’ a child. . . . The Romans made no fetish of natural kinship.” Choice, not biology, made a familia.
Since so much of the Romans’ attitude toward human life seems foreign, perhaps it’s not strange to discover their families feel foreign as well (except by comparing them with Southern plantation owners who might sentimentalize their extended enslaved “family”). What is strange is discovering that the Romans’ idea that “family” meant everyone under one roof, biologically related or not, lasted until the eighteenth century’s end.
Historians and anthropologists frankly throw up their hands and admit they can’t define “family” in a way that works universally. “Before the eighteenth century no European language had a term for the mother-father-children group,” one pair of historians writes, mainly because that grouping—although widespread—wasn’t important enough to need its own word. A 1287 Bologna statute defined “family” to include a father, mother, brothers, sisters, and daughters-in-law (sons brought home their wives), but Italy was an exception. For Northern and Western Europe, the extended family is a myth. New-marrieds almost always launched their own households—if their parents signed over the farm, the contract often included a clause insisting that the old folks must be built their own separate dwelling—and socialized as much or more with neighbors and work partners as with kin. Rather, the European family, like the Roman, included people we’d consider legal strangers: they were grouped together in that word “family” not by blood but by whether they lived under one roof. “Most households included non-kin inmates, sojourners, boarders or lodgers occupying rooms vacated by children or kin, as well as indentured apprentices and resident servants, employed either for domestic work about the house or as an additional resident labour force for the field or shop,” writes historian Lawrence Stone of the British between 1500 and 1800. “This composite group was confusingly known as a ‘family.’ ” A baker might have a family of a dozen or fifteen, including four journeymen, two apprentices, two maidservants, and three or four bio-children, all of whom worked, lived, and ate under his roof, at his table, and by his rules. A baronet might have a family of thirty-seven, including seven daughters and twenty-eight servants. Or was that ten daughters and twenty-five servants? Historians grind their teeth as they try to figure out from church, census, and tax records which “menservants” and “maids” were children, stepchildren, or nephews and which were hired labor. Children, apprentices, servants—all were under the master’s rule. In other words, until very recently, not love, not biology, but labor made a family.
Sometimes, of course, that family’s labor was less than voluntary. As Africans crossed the ocean into slavery, they often created “uncle” and “aunthood” amongst shipmates. Those new-hatched kinship links were taken so seriously that they were taught to the children—and even, as much as possible, to the masters—by insisting that a particular woman or man be respected as “Aunt” or “Uncle,” with all the attendant obligations.
While it might seem strange to see hired or enslaved or indentured labor called “family”—not just patronizing but actually meaningless—it makes more sense when you remember that children, whether bio- or borrowed, were laborers. By age four, a child might be minding the infants; by age six he or she was herding geese, fishing, gathering firewood, drawing water, doing laundry, sieving flour, carrying goods to market, and so on. That might be at home—or it might not. Depending on era and region, a late medieval or early modern British or French or Swiss middle- or upper-class man indentured or “fostered out” his children—at age six or eight or ten or, at the very latest, twelve—as servants or apprentices in other families. Just as regularly, he took relatives’ or friends’ or neighbors’ children to be servants or apprentices or pages in his own. Aristocrats, shopkeepers, artisans, lawyers, butchers, blacksmiths: everyone did it, however rich or poor. The custom seems to have hung on longer in Britain than on the Continent. One sixteenth-century Italian traveler wrote,
The want of affection in the English is strongly manifested towards their children . . . at the age of seven or nine years at the utmost, they put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people . . . and few are born who are exempted from this fate, for everyone, however rich he may be, sends away his children in to the houses of others, whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own. And on enquiring the reason for the severity, they answered that they did it in order that their children might learn better manners.
No good father wanted to see his child morally warped by his own, or his wife’s, over-tender affections.
But children didn’t leave their parents only at seven or eight; they often started life with “strangers.” Until the eighteenth century, in a startling number of Western societies, regions, and eras, infants and toddlers—except those of the extremely poor—were sent off to wetnurses miles away on a farm or hidden in the manor’s back halls, despite (or because of?) the fact that wetnursed children died at a much higher rate. Among Tuscan pre-Renaissance householders, for instance, three out of four children spent their first months away from their families—more than half until they were eighteen months old. Not always, not everywhere, but often enough that, for centuries, the Catholic Church inveighed vehemently against wetnursing—to the point of commissioning Madonna-and-child paintings as propaganda, one historian believes.
In other words, a child might well live with her own parents only from age two to age nine, making Mom and Dad just one stop in her peripatetic family life. And why not? In some ways, which “family” you lived with didn’t matter, since you were always under someone’s authority: you had no local social or political power until you ruled a household yourself. That throws new light on the word “patronizing”: whether your patron or pater, the master was equally able to rule and condescend to you. The difference between servitude for an upper-class youngster and servitude for everyone else: the young male aristocrat knew someday he’d be in command. In the baker’s or tanner’s or husbandman (farmer)’s “family,” sons, daughters, apprentices, maidservants, and journeymen might someday hope to be master or mistress themselves—but only if they made enough money to marry and found a “family” themselves. What’s different in our own time: today’s young people feel free to marry before they’ve finished their apprenticeships and saved a down payment on a house, whether via medical school or working a UPS route. We get sex and companionship comparatively young; but (except for that blip downward in the 1950s, when making a living was startlingly easy) most of us who believe that our futures can be prosperous wait until we’re financially settled before we start making babies.
But the household merry-go-round was not as orderly as those descriptions imply. Often, children spilled into a new family because they lost their own. Even if you and your brother were the two out of three children who lived to adulthood, you probably didn’t get there with two parents—either because of desertion, plague, famine, flu, fever, childbirth, or accident. “Less than half of the children who reached adulthood did so while both their parents were alive,” explains Lawrence Stone. Marriages lasted, on average, seventeen to twenty-two years, depending on region and century—which is how long my own parents’ marriage lasted (a pretty good run when you realize they raced down the aisle at barely twenty-one and twenty-four during the 1950s marriage madness, each a significant five years younger than Europe’s historic norms).
Although I was nineteen and off in
college when my parents split, my baby sister was only six—and therefore grew up in a stepfamily, making her upbringing more “traditional” than mine. Since Roman aristocrats divorced at will and children always stayed with their fathers—who sometimes sent the kids home to be raised by granddad—most Roman upper-class children grew up alongside step- and half-sibs and cousins, in addition to semi-acknowledged half-sibs born to their father’s masters/slaves. At the end of the seventeenth century, 50 percent of all French children had lived with a stepparent at some time in their lives. Roughly a quarter of all British premodern families included stepchildren, or at the very least, orphaned or abandoned nephews and nieces. That’s quite a bit more than the 11.3 percent of American children who lived in stepfamilies in 1990. Remarriage was often the time to “foster out” or indenture the first marriage’s children, in contracts binding for roughly seven years. Some children did spend their entire early lives with one biological mother and one biological father—but that was not as common as it is today.
Today’s families, historians note over and over, are vastly more stable than their predecessors, however defined. To put it another way, children today spend twice as many years with their bio-families than they did in the past. One historian suggests it’s no wonder far more murders happen within the family today (only 8 percent of fourteenth-century Britain’s homicides were between family members, while today’s proportions are 53 percent in Britain and 30 percent in the United States). You have to feel pretty strongly to kill someone—and perhaps the earlier versions of the “family” weren’t confined tightly enough to cause our era’s nuclear explosions.
In 1996, Christianity Today called Gary Bauer, president of the Family Research Council, a “defender of the two-parent family and other radical ideas.” The “radical” tag, surely intended as an ironic comment on today’s morals, turns out to be historically accurate. In fact, the nuclear family has so recently become the standard household unit that U.S. demographers can’t accurately track it before 1940. Bauer and his ideological kin want the definition of “family” to remain static at the recently-minted sense of “people related by blood, marriage, or adoption.” But why should the rest of us pay attention to his prescription? The adaptable human young have throughout history managed to grow into successful adulthood under the tutelage of wetnurses, tutors, godparents, step-parents, nannies, uncles, neighbors, masters, lords—whichever version the ever-vanishing family happens to take in a given lifetime, region, and class. We might, however, want to be wary of the tightly confined stationwagon version, which did leave an awful lot of people carsick (or rather, depressed, addicted, eating-disordered) before many women and children burst out of it, gasping for air.
Despite this century’s uprush in family stability, the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s—like our own time—saw a flood of writing about the family’s imminent death. As one pair of historians recently wrote about Scandinavia, which today has (as it has had historically) the highest rate of cohabitation and unmarried births, “The irony remains, however, that during the whole period of the ‘death throes of the family,’ the family continued to prosper. Although we can nowadays establish that the intellectuals were wrong, they were no less anxious about the . . . fall in the birth rate, relaxed divorce laws and premarital sexual relations, etc. What they forgot, however, is that the family is not a thing but a network of human relations, which survive even when their forms change.”
What Do We Do about Those Little Bastards?
Among the many places we can see change in family forms is in the changing meaning of the word “bastard.” Keeping parents tied to their children—and ensuring that people made only babies that they could and would feed, clothe, and rear responsibly—has always been one of society’s key interests in “the family.” And so, since marriage was the one and only way to be a fully functioning economic unit, societies urgently worked to confine parenthood within marriage—or to put it more clearly, if you were going to have a baby, you had to marry first. From Murphy Brown to Heather’s two mommies to Madonna, this mandate has notoriously collapsed—giving rise to a great deal of political hand-wringing. Not surprisingly, during today’s boom in independent motherhood, we may use “bastard” as a bad word meaning an especially bad person—but we no longer use it to mean someone stuck permanently in an outcast (or rather, under-caste) status because of his parents’ premarital sex. When and why did that stop being so sternly enforced? What has made possible today’s unrepentant and unpunished surge in mom-only childrearing? Have we fallen from a moral order in which virginal brides-in-white patiently awaited their wombs’ owners to a moral chaos in which loose women employ their wombs with dangerous recklessness—or have economic changes altered mother- and fatherhood, making the two parents far more equivalent? In other words, inside the book’s title question lurks yet another one: what is “legitimacy” for?
Bastardy really did once bar you from your class or caste, from the property and status and possibilities you’d have had if your parents had married. And yet European history teems with a lot more bastards—and a lot more brides preggers at the altar—than most of us would suspect. Or does it? How do you know which child’s a bastard and which one’s legitimate—or to put it differently, who counts as married? The answer depends on who’s counting, and why. Different groups answered that question differently, based on their own worries—worries unrelated to today’s psychological concerns about children needing to know their two biological parents.
For ruling classes, the worry was: Can that baby claim my property or power? Almost everyone else was asking: Who’s gonna pay for that baby? Among Greek citizens, that first question was a stern one. They wanted to be absolutely sure each new citizen was properly conceived, that he had two citizen-grandfathers who fully approved of sending property and status his way, that no concubine’s bastard claimed political or inheritance rights. This concern, shared by the British aristocracy, was put with admirable clarity by Samuel Johnson: “Consider of what importance to society the chastity of women is. Upon that all the property in the world depends. We hang a thief for stealing a sheep, but the unchastity of woman transfers sheep, and farm, and all from the right owner.” Besides worrying about wives or daughters who foolishly believed their bodies to be their own, a British aristocrat wanted protection in case some kitchen maid insisted that his philandering (or rapist) son must marry her and legitimate their baby. British jurist William Blackstone wrote that to allow children to be legitimized by their parents’ later marriage “is plainly a great discouragement to the matrimonial state; to which one main inducement is usually not only the desire of having children, but also of procreating lawful heirs.” Clearly that’s what the British aristocracy thought marriage was for. As a result, in British law a bastard was fillius nullius, literally, the child of no one. No one was obliged to care for her: she could not legally demand food, clothing, housing, or inheritance. In practice, that wasn’t much different from the Greeks and Romans who “exposed” or abandoned any child they didn’t want. Across medieval and early modern Europe, from 68 to 91 percent of infants sent to foundling hospitals died before they reached age six—and foundlings’ death rates actually went up in the eighteenth century. And even if the bastards managed to make it to adulthood, their parents had guaranteed them a harder life than usual for a child from their class: premodern aristocracies wouldn’t or couldn’t pass them a full inheritance, while German guilds refused membership to any child who could not prove “honest birth.”
Fillius nullius, of course, meant the most to aristocratic men who wanted to protect their property from the consequences of their brothel-going. Everyone else worried more that the child would, in their language, “fall to the parish.” Except for the period when the early Protestants were actively policing souls (whipping fornicators or putting them in the stocks, even if the fallen pair was engaged), medieval and early modern European societies worried less about preventing sin than about controlling c
osts. Priests trying to convert the Irish complained that mothers didn’t think an unmarried daughter’s pregnancy was as bad as, say, theft. The French and Germans had a category called “mantle children”—children who were made legitimate by being held under a mantle during their mother’s subsequent wedding (not necessarily to the biological father).
Of course, individual interests were always at stake in deciding who was a bastard and who was legitimate. One fourteenth-century English peasant tried to bastardize his older brother “because he was born before the marriage was solemnized at the church porch, but after the plighting of troth privately between them. Robert, the elder brother, says it is the custom on the lord’s land in these parts for the elder brother, born after trothplight, to be heir.” The peasant jury agreed with Robert—endorsing the idea that a working couple’s bodies were their own. Had the brothers been an aristocrat’s sons, Robert would have been out on his ear. In just the same way, the Anglican Church was more interested in a child’s and her mother’s souls than in inheritance rights—and so decreed that a child was legitimate so long as her mother married, no matter when (or, for that matter, whom). Since the child was then considered legit ecclesiastically but illegit civilly, her condition was called “special bastardy.” Robert’s parents certainly behaved as many of my friends have: living together and having kids before bothering to make things formal. Unlike today’s pundits, the peasant jury was not shocked; they saw it as customary. The local Church was more concerned that the mother get married to someone, anyone, using her children’s legitimacy as a kind of carrot to urge her into wedlock, than it was with punishing their slippage.