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This is a landmark piece of social History. Shockingly over-written, but more than right than incorrect.

Jun 18, 2020 J.S. Giles rated it information technology was amazing

A very thorough and remarkable book that dispels a lot of BS that was propagated in afterwards years about the black family unit that was just not true.

May 24, 2020 Steven H rated it it was amazing

Herbert George Gutman (1928–1985) was professor of history at the Graduate Center of the Metropolis Academy of New York.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1974 book, "This volume… was stimulated by the bitter public and academic controversy surrounding Daniel P. Moynihan'south 'The Negro Family In America: The Case for National Action.' … the controversy between Moynihan and his critics sparked a preliminary study in 1967-1968, which led to this volume… that early on study… tested the historical arguments

Herbert George Gutman (1928–1985) was professor of history at the Graduate Center of the Urban center University of New York.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1974 book, "This volume… was stimulated by the biting public and academic controversy surrounding Daniel P. Moynihan's 'The Negro Family In America: The Case for National Action.' … the controversy between Moynihan and his critics sparked a preliminary study in 1967-1968, which led to this book… that early study… tested the historical arguments on which the 'Moynihan Report' rested. Our objective was elementary: if enslavement acquired the widespread development among African-Americans of 'a fatherless matrifocal … family'… such a status should have been even more common among urban African-Americans closer in time to slavery. The 'tangle of pathology' should accept been as astringent (if non more than astringent) in 1850 and 1860 as it was in 1950 and 1960.

"[Nosotros] studied the Buffalo, New York blackness community… These Buffalo lower-grade blacks bore no visible relationship to an alleged 'tangle of pathology.' … This study is an exam of the Afro-American family prior to and later the general emancipation, simply information technology is too a written report of the cultural beliefs and behavior of a distinctive lower-class population. It examines its adaptive capacities at critical moments in its history. Slavery is viewed equally an oppressive circumstance that tested the adaptive capacities of several generations of man and women."

He notes, "Most of the registrants [he studied]… were unskilled laborers and subcontract hands, not servants and artisans, a fact that contradicts the assertion that double-headed households had existed mostly among 'aristocracy' slaves. Much that flaws the written report of slaves and ex-slaves flows from this belief… These misconceptions accompany another erroneous conventionalities: that when slaves did honour the two-parent household they did so either equally a event of the encouragement offered to 'favored' slaves by owners or because of daily contact between whites and slave servants and artisans… permitted these few slaves to 'imitate' marriage 'models' common among owners and other whites. Implicit in such arguments, none of which rests on significant evidence, is the assumption that such 'models' were infrequent amongst the slaves themselves." (Pg. 13)

He observes, "That many distinguished betwixt prenuptial intercourse and 'licentiousness' and believed prenuptial intercourse and pregnancy compatible with settled marriage escaped the detect of all but a few observers." (Pg. 43)

He summarizes. "Enslavement denied Africans and their many Afro-American descendants essential choice available to much better-situated eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Americans. An elderly ex-slave put it well in the 1930s. 'White folks,' he observed, 'do equally they please, and the darkies exercise as they can.' … He meant that [enslavement] narrowed the choices slaves could make." (Pg. 99)

He comments, "Here was the male person-absent slave household that E. Franklin Frazier and then many others content was the common plantation family, 'the maternal family unit' … Their presence convinced the historian Kenneth Stampp that 'the typical slave family was matriarchal in form.' Together with many others, Frazier and Stampp misfile a statistically significant fact---the presence of some male-absent slave households---with the feature, or typical, domestic arrangement, an fault that wrenches the male-absent-minded household from its slave cultural context." (Pg. 116)

Of ex-slaves entering Virginia in 1862-1863, he states, "Although nearly one-half of the couples had gone without any union ritual sponsored by a white, seven in x District registrants had lived together for at least a decade. Family solidarity did non demand the social cement associated with the prescribed ceremonious and religious norms of the national (or even the regional) civilisation. These marriages derived their force from norms within the slave civilisation itself." (Pg. 273)

He points out, "Not all sexual ties between slave women and white men were exploitative, and not all interracial contacts between slaves, ex-slaves, and free persons involved black women and white men. The wartime and early postwar records particular isolated but yet significant instances of slave women and white owners deeply fastened to one another." (Pg. 389)

In the 1880s. "Nigh southern blackness women headed neither households not subfamilies. Far greater numbers of single black women under thirty, for example, lived with their parents than headed households. The 'three-generation' male-absent-minded household (a female parent, her daughter, and the daughter'southward children), considered the archetypal 'matrifocal' family, hardly existed amidst southern rural and urban blacks. Far greater numbers of elderly black women lived with their husbands or their married children than in such households." (Pg. 445)

He says, "Fundamental Harlem may not accept been Mecca in the missile 1920s. But neither was it Sodom. No evidence whatever sustains the assertion in Gilbert Osofsky's 'Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto' that 'the slave heritage, bulwarked by economic conditions, continued into the twentieth century to make family unit instability a common factor in Negro life.' And that is so because such large numbers of lower-class southern black migrants had adjusted familial and kin ties---rooted in their prior historical experiences first equally slaves and after as free rural southern workers and farmers---to life in the emerging ghetto." (Pg. 455)

He summarizes, "Urban unemployment and underemployment greeted those driven from the [southern] country. The cities had besides few jobs… The nonwhite subemployment rate was 21.6 per centum, three times the white percent. Subemployment rates in nine slum ghetto areas … averaged 33 percentage. These were the pressures operating on the mid-twentieth-century lower-grade black family. Not surprisingly, the rate of family breakup (measured past male person presence) increased between 1950 and 1970. But that 'charge per unit' had little if whatsoever connection to 'a tangle of pathology' rooted in 'deep-seated structural distortions in the life of Negro Americans,' The behavior of poor southern blackness migrants to Central Harlem, amongst others, in 1925 makes that articulate." (Pg. 468)

This volume volition be of keen interest to those studying the African-American family unit and its history, and sociology.

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