Affective individualism

Many of us may take “emotional attachment” in family for granted. Please read the Kelly’s answer to Darly’s questions, which is well explained.

The theory comes from Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1977, New York: Harper and Row which traces the rise of ‘affective individualism’---the emotional and affectionate relationships in families. He advances the theory that such changes took place amongst the upper middle class and the gentry and eventually caused the aristocracy and the lower classes alike to absorb this new mode of thinking.

In sum, the growth of affection in the family according to Stone was the product of several complex forces. The result was the recognition of a division between childhood and adulthood, whereby the child is recognized as a separate entity and not a ‘mini-adult’. This resulted in the increased sentimentalization of children. Companionate relationships in marriages also developed during this time. I summed up some of the main points from, you may also choose to read the full article which can be downloaded from JSTOR
Taken from The history of the Family in Modern England

Mary Lyndon Shanley
Signs, Vol. 4, No. 4, The Labor of Women: Work and Family. (Summer, 1979), pp. 740-750.

To sum up from Shanley’s article, Stone argues that between 1500 and 1800 there were three successive modes of family life: "the open lineage family," "the restricted patriarchal family," and "the closed domesticated nuclear family." The open lineage family was an inheritance from feudal and even earlier times. Its members had a strong loyalty to ancestors and living kin, and their main concerns with respect to the family were to keep intact and if possible expand the family estates. Neither personal autonomy nor privacy was valued very much in this family system. Individual happiness in marriage was similarly of little importance. "William Stout's comment on a marriage in 1699 could stand as an epitaph for many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century couples: 'they lived very disagreeably but had many
children' " (p. 103).

Beginning around 1530, and especially between 1580 and 1640, the ties to the extended kinship and the patron declined and were replaced by bonds with members of the nuclear family (especially the husband father) and the hierarchy of state and church. This was the age of formal patriarchy in both family and state. Patriarchal households were marked by constant reminders of hierarchy and signs of deference. Children knelt for their parents' blessing and stood in their presence. By and large, women were not educated (in 1754, only one woman in three could sign the parish marriage register) (p. 206). The arrangements for marriage reveal the subordination both of women to their husbands and of children to their parents. Marriages were arranged by parents with more regard to wealth and station than to affection or mutual attraction, and children were expected to accept gratefully the spouse chosen for them. Once married, a woman was similarly expected to defer to her husband's wishes concerning matters as diverse as domicile, frequency of intercourse, and whether she should nurse their children.

Family practices in the sixteenth and seventeenth century reinforced political patriarchy, but as liberal theorists assaulted royal absolutism with contractarian and individualistic premises, family habits which encouraged deference and absolute paternal authority gave way to warmer human relationships and the development of Stone's third pattern, the nuclear family. Mothers of the gentry increasingly nursed their own offspring. The rise of strict marriage settlements, which guaranteed money or land to all the children of the marriage, undercut paternal power. Similarly, marriage settlements which protected the financial interests of wives against their husbands and their husbands' kin were more frequent. And increasingly, marriages were not arranged by parents acting alone, but were initiated by the romantic interests of their children. All these changes add up to what Stone calls "affective individualism," a recognition of the individuality and uniqueness of one's husband, wife, or child, which Stone thinks increased the ability of family members to love one another, because they saw and respected each other as irreplaceable personalities.