Reconsidering the Northwest European Family System: Living Arrangements of the Aged in Comparative Historical Perspective

that economic development was inversely associated with complex family forms. The idea originated with Frédéric Le Play, one of the earliest scholars to undertake empirical analysis of the family. Le Play idealized stem families, in which one child remained at home to work on the family farm and even-tually inherit it, thus continuing the family line. In 1872, Le Play wrote that stem families were disappearing “among the working class populations subject to the new manufacturing system of Western Europe ” (Silver 1982: 260). Durkheim (1888) expanded on Le Play’s interpretation, stressing the loss of specialized functions of the family and weakening of kin ties with the growth of social differentiation (Lamanna 2002: 61). Burgess (1916) generalized the theory that the nuclear family emerged as a consequence of industrializa-tion, and by the middle of the twentieth century the idea that simple nuclear families were functionally adapted to industrial society became a fundamental tenet of sociological thought (Ogburn 1933; Parsons 1944). Goode (1963: 6), reflecting this consensus, wrote that “wherever the economic system expands through industrialization... extended kinship ties weaken, lineage patterns dissolve, and a trend toward some form of the conjugal system generally begins to appear.” Policy analysts discussing changes in the living arrangements of the aged in the first half of the twentieth century similarly emphasized the declining importance of agriculture and the rise of industrial wage labor. The creators of the Social Security system—the landmark US old-age support program, adopted in 1936—routinely justified the need for assistance in terms of the decline of farming and the flight of the younger generation to cities (Elio