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Susannah Ottaway, Arland Thornton. Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life. (Population and Development.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005. Pp. x, 312. $39.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 111, Issue 5, December 2006, Pages 1465–1466, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.111.5.1465
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Like so many works of family history, Arland Thornton's book begins with an explication of the myth that Northwest European family life underwent a dramatic transition from traditional to modern form by 1800. Thornton's primary concern is not to prove the fallacy of the myth, which has been thoroughly refuted in the past half-century, but to explain its origins. He locates these origins in what he terms developmental thinking and methodology, and he then goes on to assess the impact of “developmental idealism” on world history. This is an accessible and provocative book, but its dramatic claims rest on a rather slender and uneven base of evidence.
In the first half of the book, Thornton argues that scholars of the family from the 1700s through the mid-twentieth century worked within a developmental paradigm: the belief that individual and social change through a series of uniform and progressive stages is inevitable and desirable. In particular, they believed that the family as an institution progressed from its traditional form, characterized by early and universal marriage within authoritarian, extended households, to a modern form with nuclear households that supported individual autonomy and higher status for women. This teleological view of civilizations' progress was reinforced and legitimated by the common methodology of “reading history sideways.” Assuming that contemporary “less developed” cultures exhibited traits that were common to European societies in the distant past, researchers from the West used their observations of societies in Asia, the Americas, and Africa as a substitute for missing historical sources on family life and social history in their own countries. This methodology produced the conclusion (accurately enough) that the Northwest European marriage pattern was distinctive, but it also (fallaciously) led to the belief that this pattern emerged in Europe only after a dramatic transition out of the traditional stage in the early modern period.
