making time for family: the invention of family time(s) and the reinvention of family history

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http://jfh.sagepub.com/content/21/1/4The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/036319909602100102

1996 21: 4Journal of Family HistoryJohn Gillis

Family HistoryMaking Time for Family: the Invention of Family Time(S) and the Reinvention of

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MAKING TIME FOR FAMILY:THE INVENTION OF FAMILY TIME(S)AND THE REINVENTION OF FAMILY HISTORY

John Gillis

John Gillis teaches at Rutgers University. He is the author of For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600to the Present and recently edited Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. His cultural historyof European and American family life, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest forFamily Values, will be published by Basic Books in the fall of 1996.

Families are not only subject to time constraints but also produce their own senseof time. The time families live by is not the same as they live with. Historians, whohave been primarily concerned with the quantitative dimension, have neglectedthe phenomenon that is commonly referred to as "quality time. " This articleexplores the origins of modem family times, paying particular attention to therituals involved in daily, weekly, and annual family occasions. It suggests that abehavioral approach to family history is incapable of capturing the symbolicprocesses that have become central to modern family life, and it calls for a culturalhistory of family that would take into account myth, ritual, and symbol.

Time is not given but ... fabricated. Chronotypes are themselves temporal and plural,constantly being made and remade at multiple individual, social, and cultural levels....They change over time and therefore have a history or histories.

-John Bender and David WellberyChronotypes1

In December 1990, the New York Times announced with evident relief: &dquo;Even in the

Frenzy of the 90s, Dinner Time Is for the Family.&dquo; A national phone survey of familieswith children under eighteen had revealed that 80 percent said they had eaten dinnertogether the night before, and 46 percent reported having seven meals together duringthe previous week. Even those who had not been able to be together as often said thatthey wished they could have done so. &dquo;Nearly all these people said eating dinnertogether provided a peaceful respite from the frenzy of their day. Without it, many said,they would no longer feel as though they were a family.&dquo;’

Two years later, the timers returned to the subject, this time reporting a study basedon actual observation of families. The results were quite different. Only a third offamilies with children actually sat down to eat together every night of the week,

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suggesting that, as in so many things having to do with family, people tend to reportmore togetherness than is actually the case. But after correcting one unsupportedgeneralization, the article was content to leave the readers with another misapprehen-sion when it concluded that &dquo;while there are no precise comparative figures fromearlier decades, researchers agree that family dinner is on the decline.&dquo;’

It appears that scholars as well as the families they study prefer to think that thingshave always been better in the past. The notion that earlier periods always had moretime for family is as persistent as it is pervasive. This is not the first time that the eclipseof family time has been the subject of public concern, however. It was an issue in the1940s, but also in the 1920s, when Middletown fathers were lamenting: &dquo;It’s gettingso that a fellow has to make a date with his family to see them. &dquo;4 But the desire formore time with family goes back even farther to the Victorian era, when Sarah Elliswas already complaining that wives and children saw so little of husbands and fathersthat &dquo;we almost fail to recognize the man, in the machine.&dquo;’

Memory has been playing strange tricks on us ever since the mid-nineteenthcentury. From that moment on, family time-dinners, Sundays, holidays, vacations-appeared to be endangered despite the fact that, far from declining, all family occasionswere actually multiplying. Everything that we now call &dquo;quality times,&dquo; namely thosehighly ritualized times-out-of-time whose origins we can trace back to the Victorianera itself, have actually increased over the last century and a half. Today, they take upan ever larger quantity of time, though they remain a hidden dimension of modern life,largely ignored by historians and the social sciences. In existing time studies, familytimes are usually quantified as leisure, a method that distorts both their origins andtheir meaning.

Today, the question of time is now on everyone’s agenda, having become a crucialmeasure of the quality of contemporary family life and even an issue in the currentdebate over family values. In one recent study, lack of time was reported to be thebiggest perceived threat to American families. A majority of respondents agreed withthe statement that families spend less time together than they did thirty years ago; mostalso subscribed to the notion that spending more time with family was the most likelyway to strengthen family values.6 A sense of &dquo;time famine&dquo; is pervasive in bothlate-twentieth-century Europe and America, even though the amount of time off workthat most Europeans enjoy tends on the whole to be much greater.’ There seems to beno question but that the pressures of the global economy have worked to diminishAmerican free time, however. Juliet Schor has found that Americans were working onaverage a month longer in 1992 than they did in 1969.~ The major part of this increasehas been borne by women, but child labor is also on the increase, particularly in theteen years. Even where unemployment remains high, there has been little effort at timesharing. Companies prefer to have their employees work longer hours, with the resultthat for the employees, leisure diminishes, compacted into the weekend, becomingmore rationed and regimented, more like work itself.9

Those who do time studies tell us that families have been the losers in the

competition for scarce days, hours, and minutes. Even though the time spent byAmericans on housework began to fall in 1970 after a steady rise over the previouscentury, parents complain they do not have enough time for their children, much lessfor one another. Mornings and afternoons have long since been lost to school and work,and now the evening is endangered, as both parents in two-earner families arrive homelate, with only minutes to spare before the children’s bedtime. According to recent

studies, children’s bedtimes are becoming later, even as television programming ismoved forward an hour to allow parents to retire earlier. Under these circumstances,children often outlast their parents, even becoming an audience for late night televi-sion, a situation that has caused concern about the timing as well as the content ofprogramming. 10

However one wishes to interpret them, the trends in the quantity of time availableto family are reasonably clear. What is far less certain is the question of quality time,which has received far less systematic attention. The family time I am concerned withhere cannot be plotted against the coordinates of standardized clocks and calendars. Itbelongs to what Edward T. Hall has called the &dquo;hidden dimension&dquo; of time, that

intersubjective temporality that modernity supposedly abolished but that turns out tobe quite resilient, reappearing virtually everywhere we look in contemporary society.&dquo;We are only now becoming aware of just how plural and complex are the kinds oftimes that coexist in modern societies. The old evolutionary model of time that positeda development from cyclical to linear consciousness is now discredited. &dquo;Life in

Western societies ... takes place not only on the two dimensional plane of linear,chronological time,&dquo; writes Barbara Adam, summing up recent findings in a widevariety of fields. &dquo;Clock time has not replaced the multiple social, biological, andphysical sources of time; it has rather changed the meanings of the variable times,temporalities, timings, and tempos of bio-cultural origins&dquo; [Adam’s italics]. 12 MichaelYoung arrives at very similar conclusions in his book The Metronomic Society, arguingthat different kinds of time, the linear and the cyclical, can and do coexist in modernsociety. 13

In this new understanding of temporality, time is no longer a passive measure ofsocial change but itself an active agent. &dquo;With time we create and shape the world welive in,&dquo; writes Jeremy Rifkin, &dquo;yet we take our time values for granted, never stoppingto consider the critical role they play in defining the social order.&dquo;14 In a series of booksthat have established time as a sociological category, Eviatar Zerubavel has establishedthe importance of time in the construction of everyday social reality. Just as the waynations mark their history shapes their destiny, so the way individuals and groups marktime creates their identities.&dquo;

Time can no longer be considered as something we simply live in or with, as if ithas some preexistence apart from history. On the contrary, it is something we live by,something we use to think about the world and to act on it. It is simply no longer usefulto think of time as objective and universal. The challenge is now to understand itculturally, a task that historians and social scientists who have traditionally seenthemselves as society’s designated timekeepers have had a good deal of difficultycomprehending. 16 Social science has tended to treat time as a grid by which to mapand measure social change, a source of quantitative data used for comparisons butevacuated of its original meanings. Studies of family time that do exist have limitedthemselves to a single temporal dimension, ignoring the many different forms andfunctions that time itself can take.&dquo; Historians have not done much better, confess

Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson. They note that &dquo;we cleave to precise locations,dateable periods, delimitable fields of study. Our chronologies are marked in numberedyears rather than the succession of generations or lost golden ages. We are happier

dealing with aggregates than images, with functional interests rather than fantasyselves.&dquo;’g

This certainly characterizes the vast majority of studies in family history. Emergingin collaboration with and deeply influenced by the behavioral sciences, especiallyhistorical demography, the field has been concerned mainly with the dateable andlocatable families people have lived with rather than the symbolic families, the familymyths, stories, and symbols, they have lived by. We have as yet no cultural history offamily life for either Europe or America. Family legends, rites of passage, images, andicons have been treated as the ephemera of an ephemeral subject. Myth and ritual,things we take very seriously when we encounter them in other cultures and otherperiods, are ignored when they appear in modern Western settings. We have acceptedthat these belong to other times and places just as we have assumed that family belongsto nature not to culture.

This is not to say that family historians have ignored family time entirely. TamaraHareven and John Modell, among others, have been influential in arguing that familiesthemselves have been active agents in organizing time in response to the centripetalpressures that modernity has exerted on their members. Hareven was one of the firstto note that &dquo;the increase in uniformity in family time has coincided with a growingdiversity both in career and opportunity choices and in familial and non-familialarrangements.&dquo;’9 Subsequent studies have confirmed a trend, beginning in the latenineteenth century and continuing through the 1970s, wherein the measurable pointsof family time become increasingly more tightly scheduled, regimented, and, withrespect to the timing of key life events of birth, marriage, and death, ever morenormative, governed by ever more uniform expectations of the life course. MartinKohli has endowed this process with a name: &dquo;chronologization.&dquo; In this conception,family time becomes ever more uniform and predictable.&dquo;

Today, the chronologization thesis seems less plausible than it did a decade ago. Itis now clear that the trend toward standardization began to falter as early as the 1970s.Summarizing recent American and European findings, Marlis Buchmann concludesthat there was a movement toward standardization in the period roughly 1870 to 1970but that &dquo;educational, occupational, and family concerns no longer seem to followstable, continuous, and highly predictable courses .,,2’ Not only has the timing ofcareers become less certain, but also the life course has lost its previously orderlycharacter. The measurable features of family time-the timing of birth, marriage, anddeath, the sequencing of the life course, and the duration of its stages-all these showincreasing variability. The temporalities of individuals have become both less stan-dardized and less synchronous with those of other family members.27

It is now common to substitute the concept of a life course, a term that impliesdiscretion and variability, for the more deterministic language of the life cycle, anothersign of the changing perception of temporality among social scientists. Recent historicalwork reflects a similar consciousness of variability, finding much greater diversity inthe historical patterns of aging than had been previously recognized. Harvey Graff’srecent study of American life patterns since the eighteenth century casts doubt on thepossibilities of generalizing across class, ethnic, and gender boundaries in earlierperiods.23 Illana Krausman Ben-Amos’s study of seventeenth-century English livessuggests that early modern people had more than one model of aging to choose from. 24And Thomas Cole’s superb cultural history of aging has shown us that the life coursehas always been a reflexive project. Today, there is good reason to think of time in a

quite different manner, stressing its intersubjective qualities, considering it as an activeagent in the historical process rather than as something simply to measure changewith.&dquo;

If the histories of aging, the life course, and family time are a good deal morecomplicated and uneven than they were once thought to be, we can no longer be contentto plot them along the measurable points of linear time alone, but must begin to takeinto account the fact that other kinds of time, not so easily plotted or measured, arepresent and must be taken into account if we are to have a fuller, richer understandingof the human experience of time. &dquo;The cyclical depends on the linear as much as thelinear depends of the cyclical,&dquo; Michael Young has written.26 I would argue that thisalso applies particularly to family time, but I would also want to substitute a historicalexplanation for Young’s essentially psychological analysis, for cyclical time has notalways been a part of the Western family’s experience with time. The kind of ritualizedmoments of time-out-of-time that we have come to call quality time made theirappearance only in the second half of the nineteenth century. They appeared first andmost prominently in the Protestant middle-class strata of North America and Britainbut were also present in Germany and parts of Scandinavia.&dquo; Similar developmentscan be found in Catholic Europe and America, but the ritualization of family life seemsto have proceeded fastest where Protestantism had the deepest roots. 28 The origins andsubsequent dynamics of family time cannot be understood apart from gender andgenerational situations that produced them. But, in addition, they must be seen in thecontext of a Victorian Protestant culture that found itself confronted with the challengeof finding for itself new kinds of time that would help it cope with the unprecedentedtemporal experiences associated with modernity.29

We like to think of diurnal, weekly, and annual family times as universal, evenprimordial. They are presented to us as tradition, as something essentially unchanging,something that may decay but is essentially outside the historical process. Yet virtuallyall our family occasions, from the daily dinner to the annual holidays, and includingthe great life-cycle events like christenings, weddings, and funerals, are the productof the second half of the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, bourgeoishouseholds everywhere still ate on the run and only rarely in family groups. There wasneither a time nor a place for the family dinner: the dining room as we know it had notyet been invented, and the big meal was still located closer to noon. While it had begungradually to move toward evening, dinner did not become a fixed time in a fixed placein Britain and America until the 1860s, where it has remained virtually unchangedright up until the present.We can also trace a similar history with respect to the family week. Early in the

nineteenth century, the seven-day cycle was much less clearly defined. Sunday wasmore a communal rather than a family day and had yet to acquire the kind of ritualquality that became so evident in the United States and Britain from the 1850s onward.The workweek, like the workday, was task- rather than time-oriented. Neither reallyhad a fixed beginning or a fixed end. Monday was the more common day off thanSaturday, and it was not until the 1880s that the word &dquo;weekend&dquo; came into use, for itwas only then that work was concentrated in the first five and a half days of the week

(five-day weeks did not become common until the interwar period), and only then wasit possible for the family weekend to develop.&dquo;

What is now recognizable as the modern family year took shape at the samemoment. It was also at midcentury that Christmas took pride of place as the pivot ofthe annual cycle. Until the Victorian era, families were more likely to gather inmidsummer, during those slack times between planting and harvest when British sonsand daughters returned for the annual &dquo;wakes,&dquo; which were more communal thanfamily occasions. Yuletide did not begin to take on its association with homecominguntil the midcentury. Up to that point, it too had been more a communal than domesticfestival, with none of the intergenerational rituals or concern with keeping family (asopposed to communal) traditions that we associate with the modern Christmas.31

As for the events of the life cycle, these too were occasions for communal ratherthan familial celebrations. Christian baptism had traditionally constituted a &dquo;secondbirth&dquo; into a larger spiritual family. Fathers played a central role in the churchceremony, but mothers were often absent, prevented from full participation until theyhad been ritually &dquo;churched,&dquo; a rite that usually took place some time after baptism.Nor was marriage the family occasion that it was later to become. Parents, if still living,were involved in the property arrangements that were its basis, but the traditional bigwedding was a communal affair in which neither the family of the groom nor of thebride had any formally recognized role. By the eighteenth century, big weddings werelargely restricted to the lower strata of society, and the middle classes preferred to wedas quickly and quietly as possible.32 With couples determined to avoid the fuss andexpense of a big wedding so as to conserve their resources (including time itself) fortheir own purposes, weddings had become, as Ellen Rothman has described them,&dquo;generally simple, almost informal affairs, which required little planning and advancedpreparation.&dquo;3’ It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that marriage became thefamily event it is today.

Of all the events in the life cycle, the only one that really required a family gatheringwas death, and in Protestant regions this too was without much ritual until the secondhalf of the century. Families grieved and dispersed quickly; family graves were poorlymarked and rarely visited. The kind of family reunion organized around the burialplace of ancestors did not yet exist, for earlier generations had paid little attention tothe dead or to ancestry. The seventeenth-century English clergyman Ralph Josselinhad thought of himself and his wife as the trunk of a tree and his children as itsbranches. What is striking in Josselin’s metaphor is that his family tree has no roots. 34An indifference to ancestors remained a significant attribute of the Anglo-Americanmiddle classes for another 200 years. Only the aristocracy had felt compelled to bringthe past into the present through anniversaries of birth and death. As far as the middleclasses were concerned, both were reserved for private meditation rather than forfamily gatherings.35 As late as 1828, we find William Gladstone marking his date ofbirth with the following diary entry: &dquo;Oh may the day of my birth bring to my mindthe consideration of the day of my death.&dquo;36 In the Protestant tradition of spiritualjourney, the evangelical Gladstone was more concerned with destinations than origins.In Protestant culture, death dates continued to mean more than birth dates until themiddle of the nineteenth century.

As long as people felt in touch with the past, there seemed no need to seek it out orremember it in a collective, ritualized manner. As Natalie Davis has noted, the earlymodern family’s arrow of time pointed forward rather than backward.3’ People still

lived in a present that provided room for both the past (the dead) and the future(unborn). Living generations also shared the same present, for all generations still feltthemselves equidistant from death.38 The young and old, parents and children, did notalways get along smoothly, but their problems derived more from a perceived scarcityof space than of time. It was the availability of household that determined when acouple would marry rather than anything as abstract as age. Couples courted andmarried with an indifference to temporal proprieties of sequence and duration that wefind quite shocking. And the kinds of temporal issues that find expression in modernweddings-getting to the church on time, the maintenance of so-called family tradi-tions, the connecting of generations through the bride’s wearing &dquo;something old,something new&dquo;-were then overshadowed by rituals having more to do with com-munal than with family relations.&dquo;

Today, the neglect of family times, whether it be a meal or a funeral, is seen as asure sign of family disintegration. While during the preindustrial period, familymembers may have shared more time together, and given more time to one another inthe household economy that prevailed up to the mid-nineteenth century, the importantthing is that this was done unselfconsciously, determined by the tasks at hand andwithout any effort to anticipate or remember particular events. Family gatherings weresimply an aspect of what Karel Kosik has defined as everyday life: &dquo;instinctive,subconscious, unconscious and unreflected mechanism of acting and living: things,people, movements, tasks, environment, the world-they are not perceived in theiroriginality and authenticity, they are not tested and discovered but they simply arethere&dquo; [Kosik’s italics].40 The household before 1850 was a semipublic, low profile,informal place; and family time was neither highlighted nor ritualized, for it too wassimply there. Time and space were still bound together in a powerful sense of place,which gave all the members of the household, related or not, a common sense of timeand identity.

The ritualization of family time that took place from midcentury onward must beunderstood in the context of the emergence of the capitalist industrial society organizedin the form of the modern nation state. While certain sectors of production departedthe household, the overall development was extremely uneven not only across classesbut within the house itself. The history of modern families is usually described in termsof a gendered separation of spheres, using bipolar notions of life/work, work/leisure,and public/private, but such terms mystify rather than clarify a process that actuallyintroduced into the household the same mechanical notions of time as prevailed in thelarger socialized units of production.

Time, including the life cycle, was now broken into smaller units, producing whatWilliam Greg called in 1875 &dquo;life at high pressure,&dquo; demanding &dquo;an amount and

continued severity of exertion of which our grandfathers knew little.&dquo; Greg declaredthat the &dquo;most salient characteristic of life in the latter portion of the 19th century isits SPEED.&dquo;41 New modes of transportation had conquered the problem of space buthad exacerbated that of time. Greg’s was the first generation to experience theimplosion of the present, the pastness of the past, and the remoteness of the future.Henceforth, there would never be enough time for the nuclear family, much less kin,generations dead, or those yet to be born.

By midcentury, linear time had entered the domestic sphere to the same degree thatit had penetrated every other dimension of society. Housework was already beingtalked about in the language of &dquo;business&dquo; and &dquo;management,&dquo; and working relation-ships, especially those with servants, were becoming increasingly rationalized.42 Theschedules of family members, particularly men but also children of school age, wereincreasingly determined by new standardized times. No well-managed householdcould afford to be without a full complement of clocks and calendars carefullysynchronized to the beat of the new industrial and political order. As early as the 1830s,Americans were being advised that &dquo;in a well-regulated family, all clocks and watchesshould agree,&dquo; and that in every respectable home &dquo;the dining-room should befurnished with a good-looking clock; the space over the kitchen fire-place with another,vibrating in unison.&dquo;~3 By midcentury, mechanical time had made its appearance inevery room of a house whose calendars were now also synchronized with chronotypesexternal to itself.

What David Harvey has called modernity’s &dquo;time-space compression&dquo; vastlyaccelerated the pace of life and simultaneously shrunk space so that there seemed tobe no refuge from life at high pressure.44 Anthony Giddens discusses a similar tendencyfor modernity to separate time from space, thus terminating that firm sense of placethat had given households their identity in previous centuries. This produced both timefamine and agoraphobia but also provided an opportunity for the recombination oftime and space into novel new forms that constituted a creative cultural solution to this

modern dilemma .41 Both Giddens and Harvey see the mid-nineteenth century as aformative moment in modem temporality, when linear and circular time took on theirpresent dialectical relationship, producing a variety of new times that worked tocounter temporal fragmentation and ephemerality.4s

Indeed, from the midcentury onward, Americans and Europeans began to representtime and space to themselves in wholly unprecedented ways that.we can now see werenot the survivors of some archaic chronotype but entirely new creations. Notions oftime-out-of-time, previously associated with communal rituals, now took up residencewithin the household itself. Mechanization had entered Western private life throughthe back door to dominate domestic life in the kitchen and below stairs, but in other

parts of the Victorian house, there existed a different time zone, one that was a havenfrom life lived at high pressure. While clocks kept ticking relentlessly in some areasof the house, time stood still in others. Spatially as well as temporally segregated, theVictorian home became the principal site where conflicting temporalities were recon-ciled on a symbolic if not on a practical level. This became the central function of therituals that came to dictate the rhythms of the middle-class day, week, and year.

During the weekday, family members went their separate ways, their lives regulatedby schedules emanating from work and school over which they had little control. Butthe evening was now set aside for family, a time of synchronization but also ofritualization, organized around the newly invented family dinner, parlor, and bedtimes.The week was similarly divided into time zones. The workday and school days weredominated by a linear chronotype, but Sunday now moved to an entirely differenttempo. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Sabbatarianism triumphed as itnever had before. Sunday became the archetypal family day, when, from the obligatory

family dinner fixed at midday, time flowed both backward and forward, creating asense of duration interrupted only by church going. Even when religious observanceceased to be a factor in middle-class life in this century, the special character of Sundaywas preserved in a new set of secularized rituals, such as the drive in the family car,which have now expanded to fill the entire weekend, a time that we still see as

belonging to family rather than individualized activities.&dquo;Never had time so divided families, separating men’s time from women’s time,

children’s time from adult time, and expanding the perceived gap between generations.The chronologization introduced by age-graded education made everyone more in-tensely aware of age itself, reflected in the increasing preoccupation with birth datesand the invention of the modern children’s birthday. But the same rituals that nowmarked the passage of time with such relentless certainty also provided people withsecurity against the terrors of time. Birthdays became major family celebrations,providing members with a moment to synchronize their lives and to symbolically closethe gap between the ages that had become such a problematic feature of modernaging. 48

Finding themselves without much of a present, and cut off both from the past andthe future, Victorian families fashioned for themselves symbolically what they couldnot sustain physically. This was the moment when the child became the central symbolof family life, the guarantee of its future. The death of the child, previously calculatedin terms of lost earnings, became a loss that no amount of money could evercompensate .49 Even as children became economic liabilities, and Europeans andAmericans reduced their fertility, the symbolic importance of children began its steadyinflation. Children not only provided the opportunities for the new moments of giftexchange that came to constitute the symbolic &dquo;tie signs&dquo; within nuclear families andbetween them and kin, but they were also the focal point of the images that familiesfashioned for themselves through the newly invented medium of photography. 50

The Victorian era also saw the beginning of the modern tendency to haunt the dead,another means of symbolic reassurance. Family graves, previously neglected, werenow visited regularly. The Victorian cemetery was redesigned to make room forweekly and annual pilgrimages. 5 Never had mourning been so extended and thememory of the dead kept alive for so long, a task that was assigned mainly to women.52Women also became the principal keepers of the family past and its future. Increas-ingly, it was women’s time that went into the preparation of those family times thathad become a regular part of the middle-class calendar. In the course of the nineteenthcentury, ritual became increasingly home centered. Home, itself a symbolic construct,was now associated (especially in the minds of men) with return, with pastness, andwith roots. The home was now a museum, the newly created parlor a sacred space setaside for family portraits, albums, and mementos, a room where time stood still, wherethe past was always present. Alwyn Rees remembered the turn-of-the-century parlorof his family’s cottage in Wales as &dquo;a kind of museum or sanctum-the repository ofthings which have, or which once had, an emotional significance: wedding dresses andother old clothes some belonging to the departed.&dquo;53

The parlor was also the place where Victorians laid out the dead, a place of specialoccasions~ourtships, weddings, christenings, and, most notably, the family Christmas.It also became the site of the gift exchanges that became increasingly characteristic offamily life from the mid-nineteenth century onward.54 Yule had replaced midsummer

as the pivot of the family year, the obligatory moment of homecoming. As the MorningChronicle described Christmas 1860:55

On Christmas Day England gathers round the hearthstone and assembles in the family.The son separated by the cares of the world in the battle for life is reunited with hisfather, his mother, and his sisters. But this grand opportunity of reuniting the love offamilies is in some danger of being lost to us. Our intense commercial life has broughtwith it something of a peripatetic existence to us all.

From the beginning, Christmas was not just a return to place but to past. Althoughonly a decade old at this point, the modern holiday was already constructed as anendangered tradition that put the participants in symbolic if not real touch with thepast. Even as they were inventing it, the Victorians &dquo;built a festival of nostalgia forChristmas past.&dquo; Their passion for the &dquo;traditional&dquo; Christmas was more than just adesperate attempt to reconnect with a &dquo;lost&dquo; Merry Old England but was, as onecontemporary observer noted, &dquo;a deliberate attempt to throw ourselves back into the

past, or to reenter for a moment the mental childhood of the race. ,,16 Every effort wasmade to conform to the wholly invented rituals of the domesticated Christmas. Evenas the holiday changed-adding its modern commercial dimensions-it was alwaysrepresented as &dquo;old,&dquo; &dquo;customary,&dquo; &dquo;traditional.&dquo;

Family had been redefined from people sharing a place to people sharing a past andfuture. In the course of the nineteenth century, the word &dquo;family&dquo; ceased to mean allthe members of a household, unrelated as well as related, and came to signify only thenuclear units By the twentieth century, it had narrowed even further, first to the unitof mother and child, and later to children themselves. Today, when we speak of a couplewhose children have grown up we say, &dquo;Their family has left them.,,58 In modern familyworlds, children remain a symbolic presence long after they have exited. Attics andbasements are filled with their toys, clothes, and school assignments; their rooms arekept as they left them; and, of course, true home is always the childhood home, theultimate place of return, of reunion.

In effect, family had become as much a symbolic world that people lived by as anactual physical world they lived in. The pressures of linear time had deprived familymembers of both propinquity and contemporaneity, but they had found compensationthrough those ritual moments whose anticipation and memory were at least asmeaningful as the actual togetherness. The intersubjectivity stimulated by new familyrituals provided the reassurance of family stability and continuity that could no longerbe found in everyday interaction. One could say that family was put into culturalproduction, representing itself to itself in a series of daily, weekly, and annualperformances that substituted for the working relationships that had previouslyconstituted the everyday experience of family life.Women and children figured most prominently in this cultural project. Next to the

offspring, mothers were not only the principal focus of family imagination but itscreators. They were the ones who kept the diaries and pasted up the albums, wrote thebirthday cards, and wore the crepe of mourning.59 It was mothers’ graves that werevisited, and, long before there was an official Mother’s Day, there was an equivalent

every Sunday, when, as Ann Douglass has observed, the &dquo;neglected Cinderella [wastransformed into a] courted princess.&dquo;6&dquo; But the Victorian sabbath, with its obligatorybig dinner, was anything but a day of rest for mothers. Making time for family producedthe very Cinderellas whose work was re-presented in ritual as a labor of love. Even asreal mothers found it increasingly difficult to keep up with everyday tasks assignedthem, there was added to their burdens the assignment of fashioning themselves intomother figures. At the same moment that fathers’ domestic role became significantlyless demanding, mothers’ became much more so.6’

Women’s and children’s time had become identical with family time. Men mightspend time with family, but it was women who spent time on it. The cards women leftbehind in their busy round of &dquo;visiting&dquo; were symbolic of family in the same way thata man’s card was symbolic of his firm. But even more important was the time theyspent representing family to itself through the increasing occasions that demandedmuch more in the way of preparation and remembrance. Women made time for familythrough a myriad of daily, weekly, and calendar rituals, which, along with thehousework and networking between households, by 1900 amounted to a full-timecareer, whose hours were rising even as men’s working hours were falling. 61 In thecourse of the nineteenth century, ritual, and its discursive companion, &dquo;tradition,&dquo; tookup a new location within the domestic sphere. Earlier generations had left home insearch of the sacred; now, for the first time, they returned home for the same purpose.The house lost its low-profile, semipublic, and informal character to become tightlybounded and highly formalized, different from all other places.63 And middle-classfamily life took on a ritualized quality that still distinguishes it from working-classhouseholds

Without women’s work, no family occasion was conceivable, much less possible.Family times were something, like their homes, that men looked forward to, that gavethe time they spent on their careers and public lives its justification and meaning. Justas home provided men with a secure point with which to cope with the agoraphobiainduced by the empty public spaces, so fixed family times gave them a past and futureto cope with the terrors of time.65 But apart from those family times when they wereobligated to play out their roles as fathers and dutiful sons, men’s time was much moretheir own than was women’s. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, men’s andwomen’s times sharply diverged, not just quantitatively but qualitatively. Womenfound it as hard to find time of their own as room of their own, and, from the verybeginning, there were those women who resented the fact that while men had an almostunlimited right to their own time and careers, the females of the house were alwayson call to represent the family to itself and to others regardless of their personalcommitments. &dquo;The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they areintended to be, but for what it wants them for-its own uses,&dquo; Florence Nightingalerecorded in her diary. 156 This was a truth that women did not dare to examine collectivelyuntil much closer to our own era, when they have again begun to question a culturethat makes them the principle creators and bearers of family time, with less and lessof their own time than men with whom they must now compete in school and at work.6’

Ritual and myth lend an appearance of stability and continuity where theseconditions are threatened or missing. We tend to think of them as belonging to times

and places when change is minimal, but, in fact, just the opposite is the case. &dquo;As

anthropologists have agreed,&dquo; the late Barbara Myerhoff wrote,

ritual is prominent in all areas of uncertainty, anxiety, impotence, and disorder. By itsrepetitive character, it provides an image of pattern and predictability. In requiringenactments involving symbols, it bids us participate in its meanings, even enactingmeanings we cannot conceive or believe; our actions lull our critical faculties,persuading us with evidence from our own physiological experience until we areconvinced. In ritual, doing is believing, 68

Ritual time differs from linear time not just in its repetitiveness but in the way iterases the distinctions between past, present, and future. To quote Myerhoff again:69

Ritual inevitably carries a basic message of order, continuity, and predictability. Newevents are connected to preceding ones, incorporated into a stream of precedents sothat they are recognized as growing out of tradition and experience. By statingenduring and underlying patterns, ritual connects past, present, and future, abrogatinghistory and time. Ritual always links participants one to another and often beyond, towider collectivities that may be absent, even to the ancestors and those yet unborn.

Ritual had come to perform the same compensatory function for families as it oncedid for communities. And, in this century, we have come to rely more and more onritual to provide us with a stable, reassuring family that we can live by even when weare no longer living in stable familial relationships. Ritual provides not only thosemoments when families are actually with one another but, more important, when theyimagine themselves as family. For today’s families confront the same problem ofvisibility as any other fast-paced modern institution. Given the disparate schedules ofits members, families-like nations, corporations, and universities-would be invis-ible to their constituents if it were not for the images provided by ritual. Like all moderninstitutions, the family &dquo;must be personified before it can be seen, symbolized beforeit can be loved, imagined before it can be conceived.&dquo;&dquo;

Family life has come to resemble a religion. We talk about it in sacred terms; it evenhas its own ritual specialists. But while religious ritualists are trained, salaried, andhonored, family ritualists are self-taught, unpaid, and undervalued, if not just down-right ignored. This is perhaps not surprising given that ritual in the domestic contextis largely, if not exclusively, women’s work, yet even feminist scholars have left ritualout of their analyses of domestic work. Like the interhousehold exchanges that Micaeladi Leonardo has recently given the name &dquo;kinwork,&dquo; ritual is rarely taken seriously ineither historical or social scientific analyses.&dquo; Difficult to locate and to date becauseso much of the work involves imagining and remembering rather than actually doing,ritual falls out of history into that timeless category of altruism or tradition.

Rituals are time-out-of-time, but they take more time from women than from men.While it is difficult to calculate just how much of housework is ceremonial, it wouldappear that the amount of time and money spent on rituals has recovered from its low

point in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century to surpass that which a RalphJosselin spent on ceremony in the seventeenth century. 72 However, men no longer dothe unpaid work of ritual. They prefer to pay for ceremony or, better yet, have itprovided by the unpaid labor of wives and kinswomen. The persistence and power of

ritual remains one of modern society’s best-kept secrets, disguised as somethingwomen supposedly do &dquo;naturally,&dquo; often jealously guarded by women themselvesbecause, as di Leonardo points out, it is one of the few areas of life where females canfashion claims on the time and resources of men.’3

The capacity of family time to unite what linear time has put asunder depends onthe substitution of myth for history. The pasts and futures that rituals bring into thepresent are rarely specific. Like the symbol of &dquo;home,&dquo; the images rituals conjure forus are multifocal, condensing and unifying a variety of diverse, even contradictorymeanings that different ages and genders project onto them.74 Even families that findit difficult to synchronize their lives to any appreciable degree rely on their mythicpasts and imagined futures to provide a sense of unity.

Recently, there has been a growing interest in ritual among family therapists. Somestudies suggest that families troubled by alcoholism have a better chance of stayingtogether if their times together are highly ritualized than if they are not, leading somespecialists to become enthusiastic advocates of ritualization. &dquo;If you grow up in a

family with strong rituals, you’re more likely to be resilient as a result,&dquo; argues StevenWolin, a psychiatrist. But other psychologists have observed that family rituals are justas likely to produce frustration and disappointment, &dquo;lightning rods for family ten-sions,&dquo; as one has put it.75 The phenomenon of &dquo;holiday trauma&dquo; is fairly wellrecognized both in North America and in Europe. Counselors offer advice on how tosurvive the holidays; and hospitals set up holiday hot lines from Thanksgiving throughNew Year, the period of greatest mental and somatic disturbance. 76

But psychological interpretations of ritual, focusing as they do on individuals andindividual family units, ignore the larger cultural and historical contexts of ritual’smodern presence, scarcely scratching the surface of the contradictions expressed inthe family times that take up more and more of modern family life. Ironically, it isprecisely at such family times that families find they have least time for one another,for it is then that their gender and generational assignments are most asymmetrical.Time spent in dream and memory rarely involves real communication, for, by defini-tion, family times exist apart from the here and now. These are also nonnegotiabletimes, whose forms are set in the concrete of that unquestionable thing called&dquo;tradition.&dquo; All are highly staged performances in which the members are so engagedin playing out their assigned parts that they have little chance to know one another inthe here and now. At such times, mother is Mother, father is Father, and the children,regardless of age or martial status, are again all Children.

Family times tend to be anxiously anticipated and fondly remembered, but, asevents, they are often experienced as stressful and frustrating, because it is whenfamilies are together physically they are furthest apart in terms of their generation andgender assignments. It is the moment when women and men, young and old are leastable to communicate or negotiate freely with one another. For that reason, modernfamily time is perversely dialectical, dividing even as it unites, creating the verydiscontinuities that it is meant to resolve, producing the terrible yearning for somethingthat, given the highly gendered and age-specific temporal and spatial structures ofmodern capitalist society, can never be fully realized.

Family time presents itself to us as neutral cultural practice, when, in fact, it is anideologically constituted form of prescription, with a power to convince us of eventhat which is contradicted by our everyday experience. As such, it is deeply implicatedin the formation and continuation of age, class, and gender relations that it simulta-neously conceals and mystifies.&dquo; For this reason, the thing that people say they wantmost is no solution but part of the problem, especially if it increases the unequal andunjust division of labor within and between households and does not alter the genderedand age-specific dimensions of family time. The real solutions, like the real causes,lie somewhere else. As is the case in other kinds of scarcity, the cause of time famineis not just the scarcity of the thing itself, but inequitable systems of time productionand distribution. In this case, quality time can use up quantities of time that might beput to better use. The problem arises when rituals atrophy and cease to perform thecultural functions for which they were originally created. Ironically, traditions mustbe constantly renegotiated if they are to be effective. &dquo;When rituals are rigid, the familyattends only to the continuity dimension and to remaining the same, despite the needsof people to change and grow,&dquo; warn Evan Imber-Black and Joanne Roberts.78

Those who see themselves as the champions of family values and would have usreturn to certain religious and class traditions, to the configuration of rituals theyremember from their own childhoods, ignore the degree to which these are historicaland require alteration if they are to continue to serve the purposes for which they wereoriginally intended. The great weakness of the current family values movement, withall its nostalgia for a family world that never was, is that it misunderstands the verynature of family time itself and the modern culture that has produced it.

In the final analysis, it is not just the quantity of time but the quality of time availableto contemporary families that is the heart of the problem. In today’s two-earner family,neither men nor women can afford to hold too rigidly to the old divisions of labor,including the work of myth and ritual. Men need not only to give more real time tofamily but to renegotiate with women the cultural tasks associated with creating afamily life that everyone can live by. Women also need to rethink their position,recognizing that their tendency to cling to control of certain areas of family life arisesfrom the fact that for so long control over family time was one of women’s few sourcesof power and self-esteem.’9

Short of a radical reallocation of linear time, which seems unlikely given theintensification of time-space compression on a global scale, the best we can hope forat the moment is greater consciousness on the part of both sexes and all ages of the

chronotypes that it has been their fate to inherit. A discussion of the relationship ofmen’s and women’s time is long overdue. So too a reconsideration of chronotypes thatcurrently shape our consciousness of aging. Historians can make a contribution to thisprocess, but only if we rethink our own narrowly defined understanding of temporality,broadening it beyond the dateable and locatable points of linear time to take seriouslytime’s mythic and ritual dimensions. We will have to step back from some of ourprofessional preoccupation with being society’s official timekeepers and begin toexplore some of our own encounters with those chronotypes that do not fit with ourblinkered ways of looking at things. Male historians, whose identities have been soclosely bound up with linear notions of career, may have more difficulty in doing sothan their female colleagues who have been more exposed to other temporalities. Theolder generation may have more trouble with the idea of plurality than the young, but

it seems worth making the effort to reinvent family history in such a way as to takeaccount of its cultural dimensions.

We can no longer afford to treat family as a reified object, whose history consistsprimarily of &dquo;facts of life&dquo; that are by themselves quite meaningless apart from thesymbolic value that people at the time assign to them. For some time now, we havebeen urged to recognize that &dquo;it takes more than making babies to make families,&dquo; thatthe meanings of family relationships are never universal but culturally determined.’oFamily languages, stories, images, and rituals are not just reflections of some preexistingreality but are themselves reflections on reality and active agents in its construction.If our understanding of family past and present is to be enhanced, the existing historyof the families people have lived with physically must be supplemented with a historyof the families people have lived by symbolically. Only when these two are combinedwill we have a history of family depicting the true complexity and richness of itssubject. This brief excursion into the history of family time(s) is but a small beginningin the reinvention of family history, but it is hoped that it may provide some stimulusand guidance to those who wish to further this project.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank all those, especially Rod Phillips, Erika Rappaport, Peter Laslett, andLawrence Stone, who listened to and commented on this article when it was first givenat the First International Conference on the History of Marriage and Family in WesternSociety, held at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, in May 1992. I am also indebtedto my colleagues at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences atStanford who discussed a slightly different version in October 1994.

1. John Bender and David Wellbery, eds., Chronotypes: The Construction of Time (Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 4.

2. New York Times, December 5, 1990; concern about family time had been noted earlier in"The Struggle to Keep Family Time Quality Time," New York Times, May 12, 1988.

3. "Family Rituals May Promote Better Emotional Adjustment," New York Times, March 11,1992.

4. Quoted in Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of theAmerican Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 162; when James Bossard andEleanor Boll surveyed family ritual in the late 1940s, they too thought the family meal wasunder siege. See their Ritual in Family Living (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1950), 100ff.

5. Sarah Ellis, Women of England, Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (London:Rischer, 1838), 55-6.

6. Mark Mellman, Edward Lazarus, and Allen Rivlin, "Family Time, Family Values," inRebuilding the Nest: A New Commitment to the American Family, ed. David Blankenhorn,Steven Bayme, and Jean Bethke Elshtain (Milwaukee, WI: Family Service America, 1990),88-9.

7. On French concern with time famine, see Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History ofMankind (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 352.

8. Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York:Basic Books, 1991), 30.

9. Witold Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend (New York: Viking, 1991).10. Schor, Overworked American, 11-3, 21, chap. 4.11. Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life : The Other Dimensions of Time (New York: Anchor

Books, 1983).12. Barbara Adam, "Perceptions of Time," in Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology

(London: Routledge, 1994), 508, 513.13. Michael Young, The Metronomic Society: Natural Rhythms and Human Timetables

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).14. Jeremy Rifkin, Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History (New York: Henry

Holt, 1987), 1.15. Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago:

University of Chicago, 1981); The Seven Day Cycle: The History and Meaning of the Week(New York: Free Press, 1985); and The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (NewYork: Free Press, 1991).

16. John W. Murphy, Postmodern Social Analysis and Criticism (Westport, CT: Greenwood,1989), 111-2.

17. Tamara Hareven, "Family Time and Historical Time," in The Family, ed. Alice Rossi,Jerome Kagan, and T. Hareven (New York: Norton, 1978); also Hareven, Family Time andIndustrial Time (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); John Modell, Into One’sOwn: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States, 1920-1975 (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1989).

18. Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, introduction to The Myths We Live By, ed. RaphaelSamuel and Paul Thompson (London: Routledge, 1990), 1.

19. Hareven, "Family Time and Historical Time," 67.20. Martin Kohli, "The World We Forgot: A Historical Review of the Life Course," in Later

Life: The Social Psychology of Aging, ed. Victor W. Marshall (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1986).For some of the problems with Kohli’s notion, see John Gillis, "The Case against Chronologization:Changings in the Anglo-American Life Course, 1600 to the Present," Ethnologia Europaea 17,no. 2 (1988): 97-106.

21. Marlis Buchmann, The Script of Life in Modem Society: Entry into Adulthood in aChanging World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), xiii.

22. Ibid., chaps. 2, 8. Gail Sheehy summarizes similar findings in her New Passages:Mapping Your Life across Time (New York: Random House, 1995).

23. Harvey Graff, Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1995).

24. Illana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

25. Thomas Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

26. Young, Metronomic Society, 14.27. For Germany, see Ingeborg Weber-Kellerman, Saure Wochen, Frohe Feste: Fest und

Alltag in der Sprache der Brauche (Munich: Bucher, 1985); on Swedish developments, OrvarLöfgren and Jonas Frykman, Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle Class Life(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), chaps. 1, 3.

28. Anne Martin-Fugier, "Bourgeois Rituals," in A History of Private Life, ed. MichellePerrot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 4:262-336.

29. There is no space here to develop the connection with Protestantism fully. The religiousas well as the social and economic conditions will be explored more fully in my forthcomingbook on the subject, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for FamilyValues, to be published by Basic Books.

30. Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend, chap. 6 passim.

31. John Gillis, "Ritualization of Middle Class Life in Nineteenth Century Britain," Inter-national Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 3, no. 2 (1989): 213-36.

32. John Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York:Oxford University Press, 1985), chaps. 1-3.

33. Ellen Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 77; also Gillis, For Better, For Worse, chap. 5.

34. Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970),83, 101-2, 167.

35. John F. Walzer, "A Period of Ambivalence: Eighteenth Century American Childhood,"in The History of Childhood, ed. L. de Mause (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974), 358;John Gillis, "The Cultural Production of Family Identities in the Nineteenth Century" (paperpresented at Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, September 1989).

36. William Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, vol. 1, ed. M.R.D. Foot (Oxford, UK:Clarendon Press, 1968), 218.

37. Natalie Zemon Davis, "Ghosts, Kin and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in EarlyModem France," in The Family, ed. A. Rossi, J. Kagan, and T. Hareven (New York: W. W.Norton, 1978), 87-114.

38. Cole, Journey of Life, pt. 1.

39. Gillis, For Better, For Worse, pts. 1, 2.40. Karel Kosik quoted in Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country (London: Verso,

1985), 6.41. William Greg quoted in Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 7.42. I want to thank Erika Rappaport for this insight.43. The advice was that of a Dr. Kitchener, a New Yorker writing in 1830. Lynn Mahoney,

"’Order and Method’: Visions of Housework in American Cookery Books, 1800-1860"(unpublished seminar paper, Rutgers University, May, 1990).

44. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of CulturalChange (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 240.

45. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress, 1990), 19.

46. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 260-1.47. Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend, 75-80, 105-7.48. Cole, Journey of Life, 136-8, 146.49. Vivianne Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children

(New York: Basic Books, 1985).50. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Delta Books, 1972), 9.51. On the pilgrimages and family reunions, see Gwen Neville, Kinship and Pilgrimage:

Rituals of Reunion in American Protestant Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987),chaps. 1, 4.

52. Philippe Ariés, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Vintage, 1981), 510-43.53. Alywn Rees, Life in a Welsh Countryside (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975), 46.54. David Cheal, The Gift Economy (London: Routledge, 1988).55. Gavin Weightman and Steve Humphries, Christmas Past (London: Sidswick & Jackson,

1987), 88.56. Clement A. Miles, Christmas in Ritual and Tradition: Christian and Pagan (London:

T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), 18.57. On the changing meaning of the word "family," see Raymond Williams, Keywords, rev.

ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).58. Joan Busfield and Michael Paddon, Thinking about Children: Sociology and Fertility in

Post-War Britain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 134-40.

59. Micaela di Leonardo, "The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families andthe Work of Kinship," Signs 11 (1987): 440-53.

60. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1971), 111.61. Gillis, "Ritualization of Middle Class Life," 226; and Ann Dally, Inventing Motherhood:

The Consequences of an Ideal (London: Burnett, 1982).62. Schor, Overworked American, chap. 4.63. For an interesting discussion of other places, see Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place

(New York: Paragon House, 1991).64. These contrasts are discussed in Pierre Bourdieu, Distinctions: A Social Critique of the

Judgment of Taste (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).65. For the functions of "home" in modem space, see Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The

Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), chap. 10.66. Quoted in Jenni Calder, The Victorian Home (London: Batsford, 1977), 145.67. Evan Imber-Black and Joanne Roberts, Rituals for Our Times: Celebrating, Healing,

and Changing Our Lives and Our Relationships (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), chap. 4.68. Barbara Myerhoff, "Rites and Signs of Ripening: The Intertwining of Ritual, Time, and

Growing Older," in Age and Anthropological Theory, ed. David Kertzer and Jennie Keith(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 305.

69. Ibid., 306.70. David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

1988), 6.71. di Leonardo, Female World, 441-3.72. For calculations of the amount of money spent on ceremonial, see Macfarlane, Family

Life, 198.73. di Leonardo, Female World, 451.74. On the nature of symbols, see Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, 11.75. "Family Rituals May Promote Better Emotional Adjustment," New York Times, March

11, 1992.76. Nils Arvid Bringeus, "Bitte, keine Feier oder Das Fest als Trauma," Hessische Blatter

für Volks- und Kulturforschung 7/8 (1978): 39.77. I am indebted to Sonya Rose for her formulation of this way of looking at rituals.78. Imber-Black and Roberts, Rituals for Our Times, 65.79. Ibid., 127-9.80. Jane Collier, Michelle Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako, "Is There a Family? New

Anthropological Views," in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barrie Thornewith Marilyn Yalom (New York: Longman, 1982), 33.

making time for family: the invention of family time(s) and the reinvention of family history

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