All in the Family: A Cultural History of Family Life

Dominique Marshall is an associate professor of history at Carleton
University in Ottawa.

Interviews on love and marriage prepared for the CBC radio program Ideas
constitute the central material of this ambitious review of the history
of family life.

Starting with prehistory and traveling across cultures, the book
follows the cycle of family life, from the meeting of partners to
child-rearing to the many functions of the extended family. It closes
with two chapters on the role of the church and the state. To the
comments of experts (such as Lawrence Stone, a British historian of
divorce aristocracy, and Janice Boddy, an anthropologist of Sudan),
journalist Suanne Kelman adds examples drawn from her own life—her
Canadian childhood, a teaching trip in Africa, and a recent marriage. In
trying to make sense of contemporary dilemmas of family life, she
focuses on such issues as the status of women, the involvement of
fathers in the care of children, and the place of love in the
constitution of families.

Kelman draws on disciplines ranging from biology to theology to support
her arguments. She accepts at face value such controversial concepts as
“genetic self-interest” and pre-empts debate on a number of complex
issues. These tendencies serve to undermine the authority of her
analysis.