World Revolution and Family Patterns

Abstract

World Revolution and Family Patterns. W J. Goode. York: Free Press. 1963. This book, as one reviewer (Slater, 1964: 287) admiringly wrote at time, was indeed a tour de force. Directing what must have been a hardworking staff, William J. Goode collected, organized, and wrote huge mass of material available four decades ago on family lives in what he labeled cultural areas of Arabic Islam, SubSaharan Africa, India, China, Japan, and West (the New World, Europe west of Urals, Australia, and Zealand). Looking back from perspective of what we know about today's families, it remains a remarkable compilation, although revolution Goode wrote of then has continued, outdating much of his material and conclusions. Nonetheless, nothing comparable has appeared in interim, and book continues to be cited-16 times in 1995, for example, according to Psychological Abstracts. Goode, thanks to his diligent staff, appears to have had knowledge of just about every available survey at that time with some family relevance. He chose to include results regardless of their sample sizes and representativeness. This can make for hard going for someone attempting to find out what author thought was going on in families of that era. And Goode, himself, wrote in his preface (p. v), how presumptuous is his undertaking, presumably because of its size and lack of documentation. He recognized and often commented on poor quality of much of data he had, as well as its complete absence with respect to a number of issues. Fortunately, Goode occasionally attempted to draw some conclusions from his voluminous data and make some predictions as to what future might hold for families in areas he wrote about. His first and last chapters lucidly presented his framework of analysis, why he wrote book, and his general conclusions after doing so. The book's importance was twofold. It widened research horizons of family sociologists and helped legitimize family sociology as an area of scholarship. With respect to first contribution, some people studying families in first half of century continued to be content to study middle-class families, families whose members got along with each other and lived comfortably on husbands' paychecks. Certainly, years of Great Depression and World War II led other observers to examine effects of these cataclysmic events on families, but there were still family folks writing about white bread families or happy, self-sufficient, rural families Goode had labeled the classical family of Western nostalgia. He had already, in After Divorce (1956), indicated to family students that some marriages and families did break up. In World Revolution, he discussed family patterns in faraway places that were wildly divergent from those of U.S. families of that era. Whether it was concubinage and bigamy in China, polygyny in sub-Saharan Africa, or infanticide in Arabic Islam (to list just some of subject headings within chapters), book covered a heady mix of family behaviors. Goode, though, was circumspect in warning about overgeneralizing about incidence of such patterns then or earlier. He also was cautious in his conclusions about how much changes in most family ways were due to industrialization. Serious readers of Goode book, if I may be pardoned this pun, could not escape becoming more aware of variety of family patterns existing in world at that time. The second contribution book made to family scholarship was to increase its respectability as an area of study. …