| 39764 |
abstract |
Histories of family troubles in Britain through the 20th century have been written
from a number of different perspectives and have taken a range of conceptual and analytical
approaches. Autobiographical and biographical accounts have thrown much light on personal
experience (Sage, 2001; Harding, 2006) and the effects of welfare encounters though
which families with perceived troubles were identified, regulated or supported (Steedman,
1986). Social histories of family lives have been equally revealing about the ways
in which the constitution of "normal" family relationships has shifted over time (Gillis,
1997; Davidoff et al, 1999; Davidoff, 2012).Tracing, <i>inter alia</i>, demographic,
economic, political and cultural change as well as shifts in gender relations, familial
ties and patterns of employment, such accounts have illustrated the significance of
context not only for understanding how the norms of family lives are always contingent
and in flux, but also for mapping their continuities. Other accounts have been generated
in legal and policy histories concerned with the more public arenas of political intervention
and professional accountability around family troubles, wherein the work of government
commissions, legislative reform and public inquiries has been interrogated (Parton,
2004; Cretney, 2005). There are also rich analyses that take as their focus a particular
dimension of what would have been regarded as family troubles in the past, such as
unmarried motherhood (Evans and Thane, 2011), bereavement (Jalland, 2010), unemployment
(Burnett, 1994), disability (Atkinson et al, 2003), migration (Webster, 1998), child
abuse (Ferguson, 2004) and child poverty (Platt, 2005). These variously illustrate
how experiences and discourses of "troubles" have changed and how, in turn, they have
impacted upon and shaped the dynamics of family relationships and practices. |