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Hans Bertram

We often characterize the “traditional” family as one in which the children live in one household with both of their parents, where a loving and caring mother looks after the children, keeps house, and spends her free time with the father and the children. Meanwhile, the father provides the economic foundation of the family and at the same time represents the values of career and society to the children. Many academics and journalists today who are between the ages of 40 and 70 have experienced this lifestyle. In this generation of children, who grew up after World War II, the perception of the family and the duties of the family in our society has been deeply shaped by the image of the “good” mother who was caring, always available, and had an eye toward her children’s needs and fears, and the father who was predominantly committed to his work and and was almost never around during the day, only able to look after his children in the evenings and on weekends.

However, the historical demography of Peter Laslett, Jean Louis Flandrin, Richard Wall, and Tamara Hareven has shown that this idea of family and this sort of family life was an achievement of a developing industrial society that increasingly separated economic wage labor from work that was done in the household. Donald Hernandez (1993, 2005) uses data from the U.S. census to show that until the mid 19^th century, most children in the United States grew up in farming families, where they could not experience this type of division of labor between mother and father because of the production conditions of agricultural work. The model of the “traditional family” reached its peak in precisely the era when those who are writing and arguing about the family today developed their ideas of what it is – namely, after World War II. A division of labor of this kind requires not only the separation of housework from jobs outside the household, but also the availability of the appropriate living space for this lifestyle. This living space was first realized through the expansion of suburbs in the United States (Levittown 1949) and Europe – a development that began after World War II (Aries/Duby 1993).

This form of love and caring, along with the support of children in the private context of family and household, was usually interpreted by mothers in the Fifties and Sixties, as well as in academia and in policy, as being “quasi-natural” and “universal” in theory. When the American sociologist Talcott Parsons referred in his writings to families as “factories” that produce the personalities of modern societies, he was therefore simultaneously formulating the idea that a mother transmits her expressivity, emotionality, and orientation toward the family and the household to her daughters, and that a father transmits his more rational action, oriented toward universalist values and norms, to his sons.

This interpretation is by no means limited only to American sociology; textbooks from German sociologists and even government reports (Zweiter Familienbericht 1975) were oriented toward this normative picture that interpreted love and caring as the familial basis of children’s personality development and above all as elements of the maternal personality and mode of behavior. Of course, in this model the father’s economic efforts to support the family and the manner in which he brings up the child on the basis of universal values and norms are also informed by caring, but this is based to a large extent on rationality, without the expressivity and emotionality that has been and continues to be ascribed to the mother’s role.

Today, when 60 to 80 percent of mothers in most European countries and the United States who have children in day care, kindergarten, or school (depending on lifestyle and number of children) are employed in the workforce, this 1950s image of the family seems antiquated, because it is rarely experienced. The increasing participation of mothers in working life has also been accompanied by a differentiation in familial lifestyles, so that children today are more likely to experience a parental separation or to have parents who date, than children in the Fifties and Sixties. These newly developing family forms can also be comprised of very different familial contexts. Even if in most highly developed industrialized countries the great majority of kindergarten- and school-aged children live with their natural parents, a diverse array of lifestyles and various relationship models has developed.

These far-reaching changes are described in detail in several chapters of this book. Yet it still seems to be the case today that in spite of the increasing frequency of women’s employment outside the home, the expectation remains that the care of children and the responsibility for their development is substantially the mother’s responsibility. Thus a “good mother” is equally responsible for the care and development of her children whether she is as just as busy with her career as the father or whether she embodies the model of the “traditional” mother who is oriented toward the household and the family.

A crucial motive for this book was to analyze and discuss solutions to the “cultural contradiction” (Hays 1996) that is appearing between the expectation of a good mother who is there for her children wholeheartedly, and the expectation on the other side that she stand her ground in the working world. This contradiction has been described and discussed by many authors, male and female (Pfeil 1966, Tilly/Scott 1987, Lewis 1991, Hayghe/Bianchi 1994), in many different countries, and will also be addressed in various essays in this book. Most authors have not attempted to simply analyze this inconsistency, however, but rather have continually developed perspectives on how these discrepancies can likely be avoided in a society that feels obligated to ensure the equal participation of all its members in social development.

Stephanie Coontz, thus, not only describes in her contribution the historical evolution of the “traditional” family model and the triumph over it, she also shows that Betty Friedan’s 1960s work “The Feminine Mystique,” which emphasized women’s dissatisfaction with their living situation as housewives and mothers and their marginalization from other social spheres, no longer applies to young women today. But today there is still a “career mystique,” or the expectation that subjective satisfaction with one’s life is primarily dependent on the complete integration of the individual into the labor market. As a consequence of this, people invest as much of their own energy and time into their careers as possible, while at the same time it is accepted that their employers will take these things for granted.

While in the Sixties these career expectations were usually associated only with the role of the male breadwinner, today they are equally valid for all women and mothers, and obviously also for those fathers who intend to combine the different spheres of life. But if politics, economics, the media and the labor world all hold to the idea and expectations that social participation can essentially only be realized through above-average performance and attendance in the workplace, then it is relatively unlikely that fathers and men will develop a new form of caring, and mothers who wish to combine both spheres are subject to precisely this cultural contradiction.

In conceiving this book, we began with the theory that the idea of a complete (mostly male) dedication to career and of subordinating other social requirements and options to the demands of the labor market and the professional world – an idea that is generally accepted in society and continues to have an effect – is also connected to the reflexive assumption in highly developed industrial societies that society can only be modernized once all of those fit to work are as highly integrated into the labor market as possible. This theory is borne out well in Europe with, for example, the “Lisbon Strategy of the European Union” (Rat der Europäischen Union 2001). In this jointly adopted strategy, all European governments assume that European economic development can only be ensured if at least 70 percent of men and women are integrated into the labor market in all European countries. At the same time there are thoroughly critical debates over whether this strict labor market orientation can, realistically, be successful in the long term, because this also requires that there is appropriate employment available for all of those willing and able to work. Paul Krugman (2008) critically asks of some studies whether it is precisely the advances in modern information technologies that could be putting highly skilled occupations into question.

This touches on a second question that again is dealt with in the various contributions throughout the book: without exception, care that includes the willingness to take on the responsibility for another, to make a commitment and support another person, is interpreted as a highly private and personal decision, one that, in contrast to work, is to be performed voluntarily and without social expectations and norms. At the same time, however, doesn’t such an idea of care and support for others also mean that one’s own life course and life path is directed toward those spheres that can use sanctions to ensure that the efforts expected in these areas will be made?

Phyllis Moen, Erin Kelly and Rachel Magennis undertake the difficult endeavor of integrating the meaning of care for others – and not just for children, but also for older people – into a life-course theory perspective that does not center the organization of daily life and the life course on labor and the labor market alone, but where there are also opportunities to integrate those spheres of caring and supporting others into life, such that this sphere is not permanently subordinate to the labor market.

However, such a model also requires the suspension of traditional gender roles. Thus, Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers delineate a model of an earner-caregiver society in which men and women have the right, independent of their gender, to both care for those they love and to participate in all other social spheres. The authors also admit how difficult it would be to actually implement such utopias.

According to the historical analyses of Arland Thornton, William G. Axinn, and Yu Xie, the relationships between men and women and between parents and children also depend on their respective societies. They show that many parts of Europe and the United States exhibit a high level of agreement in their development of increasing liberalization and acceptance of various lifestyles, and the institutional regulations associated with these. At the same time, however, it also becomes clear that such processes of liberalization do not necessarily lead to a change in gender roles. Just as Coontz convincingly demonstrates how the economic structure, cultural developments and normative expectations in certain historical contexts influence gender roles, partnership, and the relationships to parents and children, Thornton, Axinn, and Xie show how these connections are once again embedded into certain institutional contexts. This begs the question of whether and how modern societies are in the position to develop such earner-caregiver societies at all.

The response to this question from John R. Gillis turns out to be rather sobering: as long as the role of men derives chiefly from their social participation in professional roles, and the role of fathers is largely as breadwinners, Gillis views the role of the father in modern society as increasingly marginalized. Many men can no longer fulfill the traditional breadwinner role at all, because their opportunities for income in post-industrial society are not nearly sufficient to provide for their families. Or, the middle and upper classes become slaves to the career mystique and have no more time for their families. Gillis sees a chance in reconstructing the role of fatherhood if it is no longer solely defined through the male gender role.

This consideration is shared by Barbara Hobson and Susanne Fahlén, who confront the issue of whether and to what extent it is possible in post-industrial societies to also define fathers’ participation in social development by their capacity for care. Comparing various European family policies, Hobson and Fahlén are cautiously optimistic; at least, the reader has the impression that through influencing the cultural context of gender roles and also, through a family policy that centers on fathers, more fathers may be motivated to discover that the capacity for caring can be worth taking a stand for. Their chapter also clearly shows that the policies in individual European countries and parts of the United States are developing through comparisons with other countries, as measures and perspectives from other countries are adopted and implemented in each particular cultural context. Michael Mitterauer (2003) considers this strategy to be typical of the historical evolution of family, the family household, and the economic basis of the family in Europe.

Against this background, then, it is hardly surprising that Hilary Land not only endeavors to break the connection between care and gender roles and redefine it, she also attempts to formulate a social policy that makes care and caregivers the focus of policy for the welfare state. Thus, work and family are not discussed as just a simple issue of mutual compatibility, but also as a question of the integration of care into the infrastructure and institutions of civil society. From this perspective, care is not only central to the family sphere, but must also be integrated into other spheres of the welfare state in the same way.

Phyllis Moen, Erin Kelly, and Rachel Magennis attempt to anchor this way of integrating care into women’s and men’s lives in a life-course perspective, which makes Land’s theoretically grounded claim appear to be a possibility, at least in terms of perspective. Care as a part of women’s and men’s own life plans obviously has a different status than care that mostly affects the children in one’s own family. However, they believe that such a perspective could only have a chance of being realized if the monopolistic obligatory character currently claimed by the work world were redefined to also benefit other social obligations.

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas presents a completely different solution for redefining care in our societies and separating childcare from being the exclusive responsibility of the mother. According to Parreñas, a society can also take the burden off of its highly qualified and professionally aware women during the time that they need for their professional obligations and development by bringing in the support of women from a developing or threshold country, as part of an international division of labor. On the one hand, the international caretaking transfer takes the burden off of privileged and high-income women in highly developed industrialized countries, and on the other, it gives the women who take on this caregiving work the opportunity to purchase reproductive labor for their own children in a similar way in their home countries.

Arlie Russell Hochschild not only continues this discourse, she also criticizes this “care drain” for infringing upon the rights of children, who are entitled to have contact with their own parents without hindrance. She agrees with the preceding authors that the process of ultimately always “passing down” the work of care will only stop when it becomes possible in this process to include men into the core area of the work of care.

In view of this development, Nancy Folbre establishes that ensuring care for children and the elderly requires either reverting to the old structures in which women are subordinate to men, or potentially establishing a low-wage sector that could cover care for others by means of immigrants, who are especially inexpensive for reception societies. Her suggested solution primarily involves making sure that the societies where the migrants come from establish labor conditions and pay wages that will render migration unnecessary.

While Land and Moen, Kelly, and Magennis argue for separating the issue of care from the tight sphere of family and gender relations and integrating it into the general context of a redefinition of welfare state policy and life-course policy in general, Parreñas, Hochschild, and Folbre summarize the current developments as largely an “outsourcing” of care among highly qualified women. In addition, the obviously dependent relationships among countries of various levels of wealth are used by affluent countries to their full advantage, which can presumably be interpreted as a right to exploitation. These three essays should be interpreted as a warning about how care could develop in modern societies if there are no new reflections on the transformation of gender roles, the redefinition of care and work, or the reconception of social policy over the life course.

Toward this purpose, Nel Noddings delineates a model of social policy with a new form of morality of care. This morality of care sets aside the model of career mystique and its appeals („I give everything for my career; I am the best; I’m at the top!”) in favor of a cooperative relationship between the members of society carried by the awareness that everyone is dependent on one another in the same way. Care relationships are “good” relationships that interpret mutual understanding and the insight into mutual interdependence as the foundation of one’s own actions.

Along with the contribution from Noddings and the previous articles on care, we cannot overlook the studies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. She presents a picture of family, parenthood, and care that not only radically differs from the model of the “classic” father-mother-child family, but also potentially delivers a series of suggestions on how care could be organized in societies with a different model of the family. According to her analyses, children’s survival in the history of our evolution presumably depended on the fact that their natural parents, who conceivably were together for a certain amount of time, not only supported each other but were mutually supported by other parents, usually other mothers in similar situations or with the appropriate experience, in order to give children the safety that was necessary in such highly dangerous life situations. In Hrdy’s vision, family is therefore not only the nuclear family, but also the flexible and highly mobile family that was propped up by relatives but could also fall back on freely chosen paternal involvement. The cooperative raising and development of children in such a unit includes fathers without binding them in the long term.

Against the background of the crises discussed above, Hrdy’s analyses can have two results. On one side, children rely during their development on the continuous support of (at least) one adult, who themselves can fall back on a network of sympathetic persons in similar situations, generally other mothers, grandmothers, sisters and aunts; genetically related fathers in this context are voluntarily incorporated into this support process. Thus, modern societies offer the opportunity to substantially rely on such networks, even in the form of exploitative relationships as have here been described in various essays, as well as to reflect on how the resources of male care can be incorporated into this process.

Hrdy’s analysis concludes on a very positive note with a call to develop and encourage male care resources. If the above discussions in the individual chapters in this book that deal with sex roles are developed further into the future, however, we could also arrive at the idea that Hrdy’s model does not imply an optional paternity and a reinforced male care construct in developed industrialized countries, but rather that it emphasizes “multiple maternity” because the solidarity that women and mothers share with one another and with their children gives the necessary safety to children, and the networks of solidarity between mothers and women render paternal efforts at support redundant.

The articles that follow deal more specifically with individual regions, beginning with Europe. The contribution from Norbert Schneider on the evolution of the family in Europe can almost be interpreted in this direction: he engages with the diversity of family lifestyles, particularly over the life course, but at the same time he, like the foregoing articles, emphasizes the constancy of gender roles as a specific feature of this development. For him, plurality is a specific characteristic of the evolution of family lifestyles in Europe amid the partial equalization of the economic circumstances of family life. He also, very likely, sees the cultural particularities of the individual countries, even if the commonalities clearly predominate.

Alexia Fürnkranz-Prskawetz and Thomas Fent deal with a topic that has intensively shaped the European debates of the last few decades. Even though Europe is an aging continent, some of its countries, such as France and Great Britain, have a replacement-level fertility rate; taken together, however, low rates of reproduction and significantly increasing aging are leading to a new demographic structure in these societies. While some authors call these processes catastrophic, Fürnkranz-Prskawetz and Fent make it very clear that such catastrophes will very likely fail to appear. According to their analysis, the potential of the workforce has not been exhausted, nor has the potential of older generations and their resources yet been used for the economic development of society.

Rosemarie Nave-Herz refutes another myth in the history of the family that is not only still present in today’s scientific debates, but also has served in politics and the media as a justification for familial solidarity between the generations, namely the idea that the older generation used to receive financial and custodial support from the younger generation. Economic theories of reproduction frequently explain the higher numbers of children in families of the early 19^th century with the argument that these children would be necessary as old-age insurance for their parents in later years. Nave-Herz now shows that such provisions of support were not only impossible because of the low life expectancy and the very high rate of child mortality, but also that many social regulations actually led the older generation to care for themselves as long as possible, or to be institutionalized. A crucial idea in her essay is that, at least in Europe, the care and support provided to the older generation today is more pronounced than it ever was in earlier eras. This does not constitute a decline of the family, but rather a gain in solidarity between the generations. Nave-Herz also shows that these benefits are not necessarily one-sided, but instead that there are also benefits that the older generation provides to the younger generation and should, in turn, be identified as a new development.

A a new theoretical challenge thus presents itself, based first on the very demographic analysis from Fürnkranz-Prskawetz and Fent and then on the essay from Nave-Herz: to define and substantiate a familial solidarity that clearly leads beyond the discussions of care and the provision of care as a division of tasks between the sexes.

Margund Rohr and Frieder Lang take up this subject from a theoretical perspective focusing on psychological motivation and the life course. In their essay they show that solidarity between the younger and older generation should sensibly be interpreted as a reciprocal relationship that is shaped by the caregiver and the recipient of care and is embedded in life-course decisions. Here the sociological and sociohistorical perspective of Nave-Herz is justified by motivational psychology; at the same time, however, it also becomes clear how little we know thus far about this development of familial solidarity.

Umut Erel broadens the family research discourse dealing with a subject that is very present in European political discussion, namely the care of children and their socialization and upbringing by mothers who have a migration background. In addition, she concentrates on the largest group of migrants in Germany, Turkish families and their mothers, and shows how these mothers attempt in a very difficult process to introduce both elements of the society of origin and elements of the society in which they live into their childrearing, in a process that is conscious and actively shaped. After the “Tiger Mom” debates of how mothers with Chinese ancestry integrate various ideas of care and childrearing from different cultures, it has become clear that the shape of care for children and for their aging parents in Europe in the future will not develop only on the basis of European traditions. To the contrary, we can assume that the intercultural experiences and reinterpretations of contexts will also change the cultural model in Europe itself.

Bernhard Nauck takes this expansion of perspective further in his international comparative study on the desire for children. Starting from economic theories on the rational decision to have children, Nauck is able to show on the basis of comparative data that, just as in intergenerational relationships, the value of children to their parents depends on the specific constellations within various social developments. Both intergenerational relationships and the desire for children closely correlate with the respective social developments, which allows us to expect certain results when it comes to the associated political reactions. Nauck takes a theoretical perspective and puts primary emphasis on the necessity of putting the prevailing development of the family, explained here by the example of inter-generational relationships and the desire for children, into a cross-cultural context. Doing so allows us to avoid treating the developments in a certain cultural space as a general or even universal phenomenon.

Gisela Trommsdorff and Boris Mayer take up this subject and analyze inter-generational relationships from a similarly cross-cultural perspective. In the process they are able to establish a correlation between prosperity level and relationship quality. It also becomes clear that the previous models of cross-cultural comparison and of intergenerational relationships should be further differentiated in order to better understand the interactions between cultural context and the sociopsychological and psychological conditions of intergenerational relationships.

If we are to attempt an interim result based on the chapters that have been rather briefly introduced above, we must first declare that virtually all authors work out quite clearly that the dominant picture of the family in European and Anglo-Saxon countries has become the practical reality for a mere fraction of families, and that it has been this way for only a relatively brief period in the development of family lifestyles in Europe and the United States. But although this model has had greater importance for only a relatively short period of time, today we are still experiencing the sustained continued effect of certain expectations and role models that were developed as part of this model of the family, even as family lifestyles have become greatly differentiated. What’s more, the role of women and mothers in most countries has distinctly changed, because education and wage labor is an obvious part of women’s life plans today, but the expectations of a “good” mother have not necessarily changed. The paternal role may have disappeared as that of breadwinner, or has certainly lost some of its significance, but we cannot say that the paternal role has become any more caring in practice than it was in the 1950s. It is therefore also unsurprising that the suggested solutions for future development are strongly concentrated on the issue of separating caring from its gender-specific allocation in order to develop care into a central element of a forward-looking social policy; the development of a morality of care would certainly go along with this. We must ask ourselves whether the exploitative relationships that result from importing the provision of care into highly developed industrialized sociaties can be prized open by an appropriate policy. It is also to be hoped that the available care potential in men will be better utilized in future.

The chapters introduced up to this point are strongly concentrated on the European discussion. In addition to their perspectives on the differentiation of lifestyles and certain convergences in Europe, however, they have also made it clear that the far-reaching changes in demographic development in Europe, particularly the gains in life years, have not only generated new expectations of care among the older generation, but have also witnessed the emergence of new forms of care relationships between the generations that individuals are integrating into their life courses in very specific ways. At the same time, however, it has become clear that the question also occurs in this debate as to how much the existing care cultures and care relationships are changing because of the experiences and ideas of migrants from other cultures, who are developing new concepts of care and relationships between parents and children in highly developed industrialized countries. Until now, there has been relatively little to say on this because there are few cross-cultural studies on such developments.

All authors have also attempted to highlight perspectives on further evolution in the future, but without outlining precisely what underpins their expectations and perspectives for the future. Neither were they asked to do so, which could be interpreted as an oversight by the editor. But this circumstance has a very interesting and important effect: in the social sciences, we tend to outline future development against the background of our own cultural experiences and the theories developed within these cultural contexts. This is also true for research on the family, which took the model of a couple living together with their children under one roof as an almost universal model, especially in the fifties and sixties (Parsons/Bales 1955). William J. Goode (1963) not only considered this structure of the family to be universal, he even presumed that this division of labor within the family would be implemented worldwide. Stephanie Coontz is already considering this idea to be historically problematic in her introductory article, because this family form did not even emerge in industrialized countries until the 19^th century, and presumably only became the dominant interpretive model of a “family” after World War II.

The title “The Plural Modernity” was chosen for this introductory chapter in order to indicate that this book, with its selection of other regions such as Japan, China, Africa, and the Middle East, makes another analytical assumption that is not only to be found in research on the family. William J. Goode justified his idea that the American family of the 1950s would spread across the globe as a model of development with the argument that the challenges of modern industrial societies and the social, cultural, and political transformation they induced worldwide would more or less follow the same model that Western industrial societies had gone through. For Goode and for many authors of his era, such as Parsons, this idea was very plausible against the assumption that the functional requirements of the social and technical systems that were differentiating themselves from one another would lead to specific solutions. Assuming that the family is primarily the production site of human personality in industrial society (Parsons/Bales 1955), we can very likely also presume that the organizational division of labor of industrial society, with its functional differentiation of tasks in order to increase efficiency, will be fully realized within the family as well. There is a reason that the “breadwinner” model of the family was reproduced in Goode’s theoretical explanation (1963) for the organization of small groups in the working world. The “universalist” leader of a group can only ensure his group’s efficiency what there is a simultaneous “expressive” leader looking out for the emotional interests of the group and making sure that as tasks are being carried out, the personal and social needs of the group are being considered along with the rational decisions and universalist orientations of the firm. From this perspective the family, as the “production site” of personality, was the optimal solution for the socialization of children in the breadwinner model of industrial society.

This model shall not be criticized in detail here, because the essays in this collection include a wealth of arguments compiled against this position. The articles from various regions of the world have now been put together into one collection of articles, just as William J. Goode undertook for his compilation. This was not done in order to ensure that these regions exactly followed the perspectives on the future as they had been developed from the European and American context, but rather to show that similar challenges of industrial and post-industrial developments in various cultural contexts need not lead to the same solutions at all: instead, solutions are being developed according to the respective cultural structures that are appropriate to each specific context. Perhaps it may even be very plausible that Japanese social philosopher Kenichi Mishima (2005), in his comparison of the developments in Japan and Germany in the 19^th century, has formulated a triad of the evolution in dealing with the challenges of industrial society and their consequences.

The 19^th century, in which Europe and, to some extent, the United States attempted to subordinate the world through strategies of colonialization, is dubbed by Mishima as the divided modern age, because in these strategies was planted the idea that the model of European development, along with European technology and European political development, implied a world model. Even the sociologists of the fifties and sixties like Parsons and Goode pursued this model in their assumption that the family model that had developed in the United States was the appropriate reaction to the challenges of industrial society. As Mishima also asserts, deeming the 20^th century the riven modern age is presumably a good characterization of the endeavor to take divergent paths in family lifestyles, just as these paths have emerged in disparate regions with the processes of urbanization and qualification in response to the various challenges in the transition to highly industrialized societies. Mishima now characterizes the 21^st century as a century of “multiple modernities” because the different regions have developed specific models in the economic, political, and cultural spheres that are now opening up certain culturally specific solutions to new challenges.

His comparison, similarly to those of other authors who have confronted these developments (Zapf 1991, Eisenstadt 2001, 2006, Wittrock 2002, Berger/Huntington 2002), generally refers to the social developments as a whole and less to the more specific sphere of the development and organization of care, attachment, and love in a society. Nonetheless, it is an extraordinarily rewarding perspective to assume that for most of the regions studied by Goode, the 20^th century also brought a wealth of new challenges with it in the sphere of care, family relationships, partner relationships, children’s growth, and the support of the older generation, challenges that in the 21^st century may now be converted into new solutions. One should begin with such a perspective when confronted with the cross-cultural comparison of many regions and cultures with similar problems, without having to assume that there can be only one path to solving these problems.

One particular advantage of this concept, however, lies in the fact that cultures and regions do not develop completely independently from one another, as Mishima shows, but rather are interconnected in diverse ways. These are mainly economic connections, but also include those that emerge because of mobility, the media, and processes of migration, as well as connections arising from the communication and interaction of subjects with one another as an expression of the interaction between the various regions and cultures. In a certain way, perhaps, it is also paradigmatic that a Japanese scholar who studies Japan and Germany has so clearly worked out these very interdependencies in situations of simultaneous independence.

Those who use such a perspective when reading the articles presented above will ascertain that the assumption of plurality is a running theme in most of the essays on family lifestyles that are written in the context of Europe and United States. In the essays on care in the European-Asian cross-cultural comparison, interdependencies receive just as much discussion as the issue of how cultures deal with ideas and views from other cultures, as is evident in the essay from Umut Erel on the issue of the socialization of children from different cultural contexts in one specific culture.

In this respect, then, this perspective on the diversity of the modern age and its associated connection to various regions and cultural living spaces fits well with the discussion on the development of the family. But the articles that follow were not chosen in order to put the model of the plurality of the modern world in various regions up against the concept of the divided modern world of Goode, which is how we believe that the dominant model of the 19^th century should be viewed. To the contrary, the aforementioned essays from the U.S. and European context have already made it clear that when it comes to how love, care, and attachment are anchored and organized, even in highly developed industrial societies, there is a wealth of unanswered questions. It can therefore be singularly exciting to reconstruct such developments from the point of view of other regions in order to perhaps also learn the interconnections in how other societies deal with organizing care for the elderly, for example. This question has received a good amount of scientific attention in Europe (Kocka/Staudinger 2009), but there are still no solutions in sight that allow for certain fixed models to be recognized at the individual level of relationships among the generations.

In the concluding section of the book, which again includes commentary on the articles, it will be determined whether we should also react constructively to the interconnections in some of the designs and ideas from other countries. It is obvious that Japan would follow as the first country, because the interactions between the cultural developments among Japan, Europe, and the United States are presumably quite close, and we have frequently assumed in our ideas that this country in many respects is the most similar to ours.

In Makoto Atoh’s article on the evolution of the Japanese family, he takes up a theme that also played a large role for Thornton, Axinn, and Xie: namely, the prevention of the legal regulation of familial obligations and relationships. Until World War II, the Japanese family was strongly oriented toward the model of the stem family, with the corresponding obligations between the generations to support each other; legal developments in postwar Japan also led to increased significance for the neolocal husband’s family. Despite these institutional changes and other processes of transformation in Japanese society, however, Atoh considers these relationships and the obligations between the generations owing to the Japanese culture to still exist today. In addition, the discussion that has taken place in Europe and the United States on gender inequality has also become part of the Japanese discussion.

Bernd von Maydell draws attention to the similarities and differences in legal regulations in family and social law between Germany and Japan. For example, the long-term care insurance in Germany gives stronger legal and financial support to care by family members than does the system in Japan. This leads to the question of whether and to what extent such different regulations may also have something to do with the fact that the obligation to provide the older generation in Japanese families with support and care is interpreted as such a natural element of that same culture that it does not even have to be supported by appropriate financial provisions. According to the arguments from Nave-Herz, these provisions of support in Germany are socially desired, but may not be viewed as such a natural thing as they are in Japan.

Sepp Linhart also deals with this subject and shows that in contrast to Germany and many parts of Europe, there is indeed a larger proportion of the older generation in Japan that is coresident with the middle generation, and that for this reason the provision of support and care as an issue presents itself differently than in the European context, at least in Northern Europe. He offers a series of reasons for this difference. Taking into account the arguments by Atoh and von Maydell, the question also presents itself here of whether and to what extent these forms of intergenerational relationships and provisions of support for older generations are not the expression of that plurality of the modern world that Mishima describes as a development of the 21^st century.

The contributions from Susan Orpett Long on the transformation of care and from Margund Rohr and Frieder Lang deserve to be summarized. First, Long once again emphasizes the obligatory character of generational support in Japan, but does so in order to show that not only do traditions and cultural models play a role at the level of acting subjects, but so do individual life experience over the lifespan, motivations, feelings of responsibility, and relationships to those in need of care. She also outlines how the model of support through caring that has been passed down and is concentrated mainly on daughters and daughters-in-law is being transferred to a new system today and in the future in which gender roles alone no longer play a role, and professional support for caregiving family members is also involved. At present, Japan has the highest percentage of people of advanced old age in the world and at the same time demonstrates a model in its economic development for many countries. Perhaps we may at least learn from dealing very sensitively with certain cultural models and new responses to this model how the interplay between the challenges of the modern world and the cultural developments particular to other cultures may be addressed with possible new solutions.

Thomas Scharping reports on the demographic development and the consequences of the population policy in China; although it represents only one individual case, it is quite a large one. Goode took the one-child policy in China as an example that China would develop in the direction of the North American model of the family. Scharping now reports on the astonishing situation that the one-child policy was to continue to be implemented at great expense, as well as force, even as ideas were developed on family sizes and numbers of children during the latter third of the 20^th century that made the one-child policy rather superfluous, since naturally the young adults in China increasingly observed one child as “normative.” As a consequence, the “soft landing” of the Chinese population policy with the goal of 1.8 children per woman has actually become a permanent one child per woman. Scharping describes high uncertainty in the workplace, mobility processes within the society, and urbanization and migration as causes of this development; we are seeing all of these processes in Europe as well.

Baochang Gu takes up this subject and shows on the basis of his own empirical surveys in a relatively affluent Chinese province that the desire for children among Chinese women is now closer to one child than to two or more. But the extremely low desire for children is not related to the population policy; to the contrary, in surveys on decisions to have children the primary reasons cited are economic. Since in China care for the older generation is also predominantly the responsibility of women, the low number of children also has the consequence that the burdens in the demographic transition will permanently increase, substantially influencing women’s economic independence and the possibility of their social participation. Gu estimates the social challenges presented by the aging process to be much larger than the individual support of the elderly by the younger generation.

Juhua Yang begins with the previously described demographic development in China and studies which population groups may expect to be disadvantaged by these demographic changes. Until now, the predominant assumption was that reducing the number of children would reduce the relative poverty of children and families. In an aging population, however, this can also lead to the positive effect, with regard to the children, having an opposing negative effect for the older generation. In order to theoretically illustrate the connection between fertility development, aging, population structure, and poverty, Yang develops a multi-level model that clarifies these different effects.

In all three texts, the authors (who had not read one another’s articles) tend to highly concur with the view that, despite the clear decline in births and very low desire for children, demographic change does not contribute to improving women’s position in Chinese society and providing them with possibilities for participation at all ages. Cultural traditions, such as the gender-specific division of care (particularly of the older generation) and the poverty among the elderly that is to be expected for at least some older women, are determining factors that these women will benefit very little from development.

In order to vividly evoke the meaning of Mishima’s term, the “riven modern age,” the articles on the development of the family in Africa are an impressive and sometimes nightmarish example of how 20^th century epidemics such as HIV and AIDS, civil wars and guerrilla wars, but also droughts, as possible harbingers of climate change, have not only stricken this continent but presumably have also changed it profoundly. This is clear early on from the description of the demographic situation in sub-Saharan Africa by James P. M. Ntozi. Alongside the increasing population development that continues to be shaped by a very high, albeit decreasing, fertility rate as well as by a high level of infant and maternal mortality, poverty in rural regions is growing because of increasing processes of urbanization, alongside migration processes that are leading to a brain drain of precisely those qualified experts needed in the regions. These immigrants in turn earn money in their reception countries that they then send back home. Here we can see a demonstration of the process described by Folbre for Asian countries and the United States, shown from the point of view of a part of Africa, with largely consistent implications.

Against the background of these far-reaching trends of transformation, Erdmute Alber and Tabea Häberlein formulate the theory that attachment and every-day care for others represents a central element of family relationships for all African societies, but the relationship structures – the values and norms that regulate these attachments and care – are not safeguarded by fixed institutional structures. Not only do attachments and relationships change in the course of life as a result of critical life events such as divorce, poverty, or illness, but they also lead to social and cultural changes that require attachments and everyday care in this relationship structure to be continually recreated. Alber and Häberlein therefore argue very explicitly in the case of Africa for what the editors generalize as their theory: that attachments and care for others should not be connected from the outset with a specific family form but rather that the different social networks that emerge in societies in order to organize attachment and care should be researched and strengthened as regards their fulfillment of this function. They use the example of West Africa to show that the rigid focus on certain family types cannot possibly appropriately describe the diversity of role models in the relationships between children and parents, men and women, grandparents, brothers and sisters, because the organization of attachment and care in these social networks is constantly changing.

Deborah Fahy Bryceson takes up the subject of transformation when she studies the consequences of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and shows that in this situation, when frequently both parents and sometimes also grandparents, aunts and uncles, and great-aunts and great-uncles have passed away, the survival and welfare of children cannot be absorbed by the family lineage, but rather that other networks of social support should be developed. In other words, children must find someone on their own who is willing to care for them. On the whole, this is easier for girls than it is for boys, since girls can find work as domestic servants. In such extreme situations, family networks based on lineage seem to reach their limits as far as care and attachment are concerned. According to Bryceson, this also leads parents to concentrate on their nuclear family and children and to “pool” their attachment and care. This example shows how care and attachments are continually reconstructing themselves even under extreme conditions, which Alber and Häberlein’s theory confirms.

While Bryceson clearly discusses the limits of the resilience of social networks based on rules of lineage when faced with this crisis situation, Reimer Gronemeyer and Michaela Fink see these burdens as well but also show that these systems of lineage families in rural regions sometimes continue functioning, even if these burdens are usually borne by mothers and grandmothers because the men are either deceased or have migrated. In these contexts too, care and attachment are evidently maintained and safeguarded mainly by women. In the urban regions, these lifestyles are in more of a decline, and here it is frequently the grandmothers who endeavor to bring up a larger number of their grandchildren under difficult conditions. But Gronemeyer and Fink emphasize that even in such emergency situations, not only can a high organizational capability be observed, but rituals and family celebrations that are of great importance for social cohesion also continue to be maintained in the rural and urban regions.

Gerd Spittler very impressively illustrates the division of labor in the farming families that Coontz describes in the first essay of this book, when in his group of Tuareg the men and women cooperate in the production of agricultural goods. He also makes it clear that this production of goods in the family economy is dependent on the involvement of children in the work. When analyzing such forms of the family economy, he rightfully demands that we not use our “Western glasses” to interpret child labor, the production of agricultural goods, and the family economy, because under the given conditions, this form of economy may be one of the few strategies for those who live there to survive at all. In this context, work and family are not opposites; attachments and relationships are not concentrated on the immediate family alone, but rather involve the neighbors and the whole oasis. But Spittler also impressively describes the fact that even in the famines he describes in these family economies, it was not just about survival but also that in such emergency situations morals and customs were maintained, and in this way the possibility of surviving “honorably” was created.

Ute Luig begins with an outline of the change in gender relations in modern Africa in the context of the continent’s integration into the global economy in order to then analyze these gender relations in the civil and guerrilla wars that Africa suffered so intensely during the second half of the twentieth century. There were obviously also new concepts of gender relations discussed, argued, and fought over in these armed conflicts: the female guerrilla warrior as an “emancipated” woman, one, however, who more or less must give up her essential femininity and behave like the men, and at the same time ought not to enter into any sexual relationships with other warriors. Some of these women paid a high price for this role, because after the conflicts ended, it was incredibly difficult for them to reestablish attachments and relationships in civilian life. But Luig also shows that, despite the unbelievable atrocities in these civil wars and the difficult initial situation in the development of a civil society, falling back on cultural traditions can help to reestablish moral principles, stable relationships, and mutual care. Her argument shows that it is once again mainly women who initiate such things and who also press ahead with them.

Valentine M. Moghadam describes the changes in familial relationships in the Middle East and in North Africa that used to be described as patrilineal, patrilocal, patriarchal, endogamous, and sometimes polygamous. Today, however, these have changed significantly because of the reforms in family law that have taken place in these regions. First, she again outlines the duty of the men in these societies to provide for the maintenance of their wives and children, while the wives manage the household and provide for the children. According to her analysis, this conservative view of the family has much to do with Parson’s interpretation of families in industrial society, with a similar distribution of tasks as is functional for industrial society. The increasing participation of younger women in the education system, together with the urbanization of lifestyles in combination with women’s increasing work outside the home, is also leading to a transformation of the gender contract, because now women who are better educated and frequently professionally established are not marrying until a later age, which in turn has an effect on family law.

Hoda Salah describes one of these changes with the example of the “pleasure marriage” in the Sunni world. Whereas the conventional Muslim marriage stipulates the rights and obligations of the partners, as Moghadam describes, the pleasure marriage facilitates a rather amorphous commitment by witnesses to a marital attachment that can exist in addition to the main marriage, and has as its goal the mutual sexual satisfaction of the couple. The “wife” has no claim to financial support, but in this way the rules on sexuality can be followed. In Salah’s view, the pleasure marriage is a legitimate instrument for both young adults and older couples to give full expression to their sexuality even outside of traditional marriage.

The extent to which this model has actually spread in the countries where Muslim marriage predominates has no role in our discussion, because it can serve as an example of how there can be different ways of reacting to certain changes and problems that come with social change than one would expect from a European or even an American perspective. Here we can see a part of the plurality of the modern world outlined above: in this world, as both authors report, care and attachments are incorporated into a patriarchal model of marriage with clearly stipulated duties for men and women. At the same time, however, within the framework of a certain religious perspective there have evidently been opportunities created to combine classic lifestyles with variations from other lifestyles. This strategy can also be interpreted as an attempt to hold on to certain forms while nonetheless accepting changes.

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