History of the American Family

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

How have Americans structured intimacy and care throughout U.S. history? This course asks students to analyze the concept of “family” and examine the ways ideas and practices regarding familial formation have changed in the past few centuries. When and why have certain relationships been legally incentivized? Regulated? Criminalized? Ignored? How have various historical processes impacted the ways people have cared for themselves and each other? How have people politicized family matters to enact their own social agendas? This course covers the broad sweep of U.S. History, 1783-present. We will analyze how the structure and function of households changed over time. What were the legal, economic, social, and political dimensions of households across the nation and how did these affect, reflect, and reinforce broader cultural trends? We will explore the variable ways households were private and public spaces and show how not everybody had equal access to domestic privacy. In this course, we will examine a variety of topics, such as fights over polygamy, emancipation, institutionalization, the transition to a wage economy, fights over marriage and divorce, declining birthrates, eugenics, the development of public education, the proliferation of birth certificates and marriage licenses, the postwar baby boom, the advent of birth control, sexual liberation, 20th-century social rights movements, and fights over abortion.