Family

Abstract

Chapter 2 recounts how social scientists were already fretting about the family early in the century. The institution, according to sociologists through the late interwar period, was especially vulnerable to the disorganization wrought by modern social change. Concern for the family's fate took on a new, international cast in the early Cold War period, in conjunction with the rise of demography as a cross-disciplinary field. In the contest with the Soviets, the drive to modernize the “new states” had, as its demographic dimension, a concern for large family size. The claim that economic development, and insulation from socialism, hinged on fertility control was advanced by demographers, many but not all housed in sociology. By the mid-1960s, a domestic-facing research landscape was gathering momentum, supported by government and foundation interest in the family's role as transmitter of inequality. The domain of family demography, a resource-intensive specialty clustered in cross-disciplinary centers, spread throughout the remainder of the century—dwarfing other claimants, including Gary Becker's economics of the family.