1162
Reviews of Books
of twentieth-century theory, but he competentiv
handles a number of major schools and develop-
ments. Second, Lloyd gradually elaborates his own
argument, partly through critical rendering of ex-
isting approaches. He is concerned, for example, to
define the relationship between social structures and
the intents and acts of people in determining social
change, and he urges essentially a compromise po-
sition in which structures and "agential" humans
interact. Unlike some partisans of a structural ap-
proach, Lloyd is at pains to bring in some grasp of
social psychology and ritual, and not simply through
Foucault's stiff archaeology of discourses (which
Lloyd does not in any event greatly fancy). Lloyd
warns convincingly about the limits to purely de-
scriptive, qualitative social history that eschews con-
cern with theory and so faits ultimately to explain. In
sum, in developing a resounding call for new inte-
grations in the study of society, Lloyd presents a
number of key issues with sensitivity. And the en-
couragement to more informed examination of the-
oretical problems is certainly welcome.
Yet, I confess to a certain disappointment with the
end result, despite considerable sympathy with the
author's basic aims and individual passages in his
book. A final substantive chapter proves somewhat
conventional in reminding of the important theoret-
ical work of sociologists such as Antony Giddens and
Philip Abrams who set the stage for an integration
of history and sociology that they were unable to
accomplish and in praising Hobsbawm and LeRoy
Ladurie as exemplars of "scientific social history," a
choice that is hard to fault. But the lack of awareness
of issues generated within social history, some of
which overlap his own concerns, and the lack of
application of his pleas and definitions to any con-
crete social-historical cases !end a certain vagueness
to Lloyd's overall approach. At the least, further
work is needed to apply this framework to the actual
practice of historica! research or to the generation of
the theory that the book calls for.
PETER N. STEARNS
Carnegie Mellan University
EMMANUEL TODD. The Explanation of Ideology: hand))
Structures and Social Systems. Translated by DAVID
GARRIOCH. (Family, Sexuality, and Social Relations
in Past Times.) New York: Basil Blackwell. 1985. Pp.
230. $24.95.
A fascinating, albeit problematic, idea drives this
book: ideology corresponds to basic sets of attitudes
that determine what kinds of doctrines a people Eind
acceptable—and these attitudes originate in the
form and workings of the family. The family con-
sequently takes center stage in explanations of ide-
ology. This argument grows out of Emmanuel
Todd's experience with the Cambridge Group for
the History of Population and Social Structure and
his work in French electoral sociology.
The author develops seven categories of families
to which all world families are assigned, categories
based on inheritence rules, cohabitation patterns,
and the extent of the incest taboo. The bulk of the
study links those family types to the political and
social systems of Europe, Asia, and the Western
Hemisphere. The exogamous community family of
Russia, for example, which emphasizes equality
among brothers and parental cohabitation with
married sons, creates a receptivity to communism
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that is lacking in Poland where the egalitarian nu-
clear family reigns.
Todd's explicitly anthropological argument will
be unattractive to mant' historians because it is
ahistorical and antimaterialist. In discounting both
material and intellectual contributions to historica!
and political processes, the author denies their cred-
ibility. "The political history of France," or any-
where else for that matter, "is a pseudohistory" (p.
121). Predictably, the argument falters most seri-
ously in explanations of historica! phenomena, such
as the American Civil War and the Khmer Rouge
movement. Problematic sources exacerbate the im-
plausible aspects of the study; for example, the
section on Cuban families relies on suicide rates and
census data rather than on anthropological studies.
Todd does not view liberty or equality as rational or
universa' objectives—an equanimous but controver-
sial scholarly stance.
Yet the anthropological view is not a neutral one,
for some family forms and their concomitant ideol-
ogies are judged severely. Todd sees the authoritar-
ian family (multiple generation households with
primogeniture inheritence) as a "neurotic machine"
producing "psychologically pathogenic" social sys-
tems in times of stress, such as in Nazi Germany
(p. 65). Community families, such as those in Russia,
produce anxiety that is revealed in high suicide
rates. By contrast, the nuclear family can do no
wrong: incapable of supporting totalitarian regimes,
it rather releases that "wonderfut elementary social
particle," the individual (p. 100).
The attractiveness of Todd's study lies in its global
scope. Despite an attachment to certain family
forms, the argument itself is a weapon against
ethnocentrism and such narrow notions as the ex-
istence of an inevitable link between secularization
and modernization. Moreover, Todd's far-ranging
and thought-provoking argument is delivered with
lucidity. Perhaps more importantly, the book will
produce discourse as well as discomfort; it will
generate debate on the meaning of family form,
 General 1163
raise the visibility of the family in society, and
entourage comparative studies.
LESLIE PAGE MOCH
University of Michigan,
Flint
JANE RENDALL. The Origins of Modern Fenanism:
Women in Britain, France, and the United States,
1780-1860. New York: Schocken. 1984. Pp. vi, 382.
$21.50.
This is an ambitious project. Examining the social
context in which feminist practice became possible,
Jane Rendall looks at the origins of association
among women in a comparative way. The path she
takes is a familiar one. Rooting the modern debate
on woman's function and role in the problematic
legacy of the Enlightenment, she demonstrates that
women inverted the language of domesticity to
claim for themselves positive educational, religious,
and inspirational functions. As Harriet Martineau
said, "Women pursued religion as an occupation"
and thereby spurred the development of associa-
tions among them. Also integral to women's devel-
oping sense of themselves and their mission was a
greater understanding of the disparity between
men's and women's education and the heightened
importante attached to the mother's task as educa-
tor and socializer. The demand for work and the
circumstances of women's work were continuing
factors in the generation of feminist thinking. In-
volvement in moral reform movements—philan-
thropy, domestic visiting, abolition, temperance,
health reform, and social purity—was highly signif-
icant for women's emergence into public roles in all
three societies, but in different degrees. The impact
of women on the literary scene in the first half of the
nineteenth century, their desire for autonome and
independente outside the married state, and the
challenges to monogamy and the cult of domesticity
launched by utopian socialists were all additional
elements, according to Rendall, in the expansion
and redefinition of women's sphere of action. Al-
though none of this is new or original, her compre-
hensive enumeration of the multiple sources of
feminist consciousness and her sensitivity to its dif-
fering nature and scope in all three societies are
impressive.
Most noteworthy about Rendall's analysis is her
ability to find meaning in heretofore-neglected as-
pects of women's experience. She highlights, for
example, the collective side of women's domestic
activities. Gathering wood, baking in the communal
oven, fetching water, and meeting at a quilting bee
were all important social occasions and a means of
asserting female solidarity. In addition to balancing
conflicting arguments and outlining varying inter-
pretations, Rendall targets work that remains to be
done: uncovering the differing marriage practices
of communities rather than accepting the universal
validity of bare legal frameworks; detailing the im-
plications of the spread of piped water in changing
the locus of household activities and encouraging
women to stay at home; evaluating the particular
experience of girls in the history of mass elementary
education; tracing what became of the radicalism of
Chartist women after 1850. Rendall acutely explores
the subtle differences in the three national contexts
and shows that the character of the women's move-
ment owed much to the pattern of class and political
conflict in each nation. Whereas American feminism
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became part of the genera] reformist ethos and
British feminism was subject to the politics of class,
French feminism faced particular difficulties after
1848. Rendall succeeds admirably in isolating the
barriers French feminists faced. Although abolition
was a powerful trigger to women's public conscious-
ness in both Britain and the United States, the
silencing of protest activity in France after 1848 and
the absence of a strong evangelical network under-
lying the campaign served to slow the growth of
antislavery sentiment. Factors that had spawned
feminist activism elsewhere were also affected by the
particularities of the French context. Improvement
in female education was caught up in the debate
between clerics and anticlerics; state regulation and
toleration of prostitution inhibited the growth of a
social purity crusade of the Anglo-American type.
The historical analysis of the roots of feminism is
a vast topic. Although Rendall has relied primarily
on secondary literature rather than on original
research, she has created a useful synthesis, mined
from a wealth of sources and rooted in a keen
understanding of the major works in women's his-
tory to have appeared in the last two decades.
MARIE MARMO MULLANEY
Caldwell College
MANDEL CASTELLS. The City and the Grassroots: A
Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. (Cal-
ifornia Series in Urban Development.) Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1983.
Pp. xxi, 450. Cloth $29.95, paper $14.95.
This bonk by Manuel Castells appears to have two
authors, whom I shall call Castells (I) and Castells
(II). Castells (I) is an austere, abstract, often incom-
prehensible, neo-Marxist theorist intent on proving
that all grass-roots urban protest movements are
somehow part of a single worldwide class struggle.
Castells (II), however, is a wonderfully eclectic social
investigator whose empirical findings are constantly
breaking out of his self-imposed theoretical rigidi-
ties. Whereas Castells (I) in the theoretical chapters