Editorial: Family in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Abstract

The 19th century was the period witnessing frequent and rapid transformations affecting material, economic, cultural, and political aspects of social life, in which only the family seemed to have maintained its significant role, remaining a specifically unchangeable and permanent social group. The family was supposed to guarantee the preservation of the decades-long status quo existing between its members: parents and children, husbands and wives. However, industrialization and urbanization were the factors which substantially influenced the changes taking place in the nineteenth-century society, including also its smallest social group, the family, which underwent gradual alterations in its structure (a shift from the multi generational to nuclear family), functions and tasks. A new attitude to the role a woman played in the family and the tasks she performed, along with her co-responsibility for the welfare of the family, was observed. Interest in children and their development increased noticeably and their individuality began to be respected. The family continued to be a natural upbringing environment, because the upbringing of the next generations remained its most important goal, even in the dynamically changing nineteenth-century society.