Goody – Fuller

In Goody’s piece on the family, we see the development of the French structure of the household in terms of marriages and procreation. I found it interesting that only one couple per household were essentially in charge of carrying on the household line, making the other siblings of the couple in charge of such a task simply the support of the head couple. In another sense, looking at the elite of the society – such as Henry VIII, as well as other royalty – the importance of heirs and maintaining the family line in order to keep political power is prevalent. Where we see the lower-class households maintaining family lines for daily survival, the royalty and other upper class elites focused on family as a means for political and societal survival. Focusing again on the common citizen’s family structure, it was interesting to note that remarrying was a means to maintain economic stability and domestic help. Marriage here serves a huge economic function – and this is especially apparent when Goody mentions the idea of the necessity to keep the women inside the village away from outside males, to prevent the women’s dowry from exiting the community and to keep their own men from “remaining a bachelor and a servant in the house of another” (188).