The family : an ethnographical and historical outline with descriptive notes, planned as a text-book for the use of college lecturers and of directors of home-reading clubs / by Elsie Crews Parsons.

  • Parsons, Elsie Worthington Clews, 1874-1941.
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The family : an ethnographical and historical outline with descriptive notes, planned as a text-book for the use of college lecturers and of directors of home-reading clubs / by Elsie Crews Parsons. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    64/430 (page 30)
    The Family arrangement. We find all kinds and degrees of home- leaving, from this formal arrangement to a more or less fortuitous setting out to seek one's fortunes. On the other hand, parents and offspring may con¬ tinue to live in the same dwelling long after the latter are mature. We shall consider this fact of common residence later in connection with the compound family.^ Customary age at In this, as well as in other connections, the custo- tnarriage 9 . • • • r n /г тагу age at marriage is an important fact. Mar¬ riage frequently indicates the separate establishment of youth or maiden. Membership in a compound family, as we have seen, however, precludes sepa¬ rate residence at marriage as well as at other times. We should note that in marriage by service^ the bride continues to live for a time under the care and protection of her parents. Parental care often extends to non-resident married daughters and the maltreated or deserted wife often returns to her par¬ ents. Sometimes protection of this kind, however, is rather to be classed as a function of kinship, like ' See p. 277. ® The age at which puberty or nubility is reached is naturally an important factor in determining age at marriage. It varies with girls from eight or ten to eighteen or twenty years of age. The corresponding period with boys is two or three years later and there is probably in their case less variation, de¬ velopment usually occurring between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. The causes behind this range of age are still obscure. See Floss and Bartels, Z?as Weib, i., 362-381, also Marro, La Pubertà studiata nell uomo e nella donna Turin, Igor, chap. i. Their determination would be of immense significance to anthropology in general and to the history of the family in particular. We should note that the age at which reproduction begins is often to be dis¬ tinguished from the age at marriage, an important fact in considering the duration of infancy. Even when marriage occurs after nubility it may be cus¬ tomary to delay maternity for several years. Strictly speaking (see p. 120.) such a relation is not marriage. * See p. Ьг.