The family and marriage in Britain : an analysis and moral assessment / Ronald Fletcher.
- Fletcher, Ronald, 1921-
- Date:
- 1966
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: The family and marriage in Britain : an analysis and moral assessment / Ronald Fletcher. Source: Wellcome Collection.
16/260 (page 14)
![14 INTRODUCTION of Study. We still suffer from the infancy of social history. There is no good social history of the family in British society, for example, to which we can refer. In this study, I have drawn what social historians have had to say about various aspects of family life in the past from their larger treatises about other subjects. But, at least, the findings and views of many historians are brought together here in a form not available elsewhere, and I can only, hope that readers may be sufficiently stimulated by this brief taste of their writings to read them more deeply later on. No literature is more fascinating. My crucial point, however, is that a knowledge of history is just as essential to the soundness of our judgement about present-day issues, as a knowledge of contemporary facts. There is, thirdly, a much broader point which I men¬ tioned at the outset, but which deserves further emphasis. This book is a contribution to the study of the family and marriage in Britain. It examines the ways in which the family and marriage have changed in Britain during the past two centuries of industrialization ; attempts an analysis and evaluation of these changes; and then offers some comments on the ways in which we ought to approach questions of social policy. But there is a sense in which its Conclusions may have a wider relevance. The process of industrial change which Britain has ex¬ perienced during the past two ]iimdred years is now becoming a world-wide process, and it is giving rise to problems which are common to all societies. This means that what has happened to the family in Britain during the course of industrial development may well be indicative of what is likely to happen elsewhere. What we have seen here may enable us to foresee what might happen elsewhere. The kind of family to which industrial change has given rise in Britain might be the kind of family which is coming](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18027064_0017.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
