World revolution and family patterns

There is a dominant world-wide trend toward the conjugal family, according to the author of this work - a study of monumental scope unmatched in any language. William J. Goode illuminates for the first time the meanings of changing family patterns during the last fifty years. He bases his study on a vast storehouse of original source materials on family structure and change in sub Saharan Africa, Arabic Islam, the West, China, Japan, and India.

The resulting detailed analysis overthrows many current cliches about the "disintegra tion" of the family, supposedly due to indus trialization and the large-scale entrance of women into the labor force. It also debunks popular theories that such "disintegration" is the cause of run-away divorce rates, rising illegitimacy, and similar social problems.

Although to the superficial observer it often seems that rapid changes in the modern world are wreaking havoc on basic family structures, Mr. Goode demonstrates that a process of orderly social change is actually at work. The misunderstanding arises from the fact that each society has started from a different point and is moving toward the con jugal family pattern at a different rate.

He also cautions that the nostalgic vision of the "extended family" of the past is largely false, based on an ideal commonly found in literature and folklore. In fact, the evidence demonstrates that this ideal was never fully realized, even fifty years ago.

Mr. Goode's unparalleled collection of up to-date population data yields other startling results. He finds that industrialization, for example, far from being a cause for the de cline of the extended family is a parallel pro cess - both arise from changing social and personal ideologies over the past fifty years. The rising divorce rate in a large part of the world (except Japan and Arabic Islam) is described as a temporary phenomenon also caused by changing ideology: As the adjust ment from predominantly arranged marriages to freely-chosen marriages is accomplished,

divorce figures will level off.

A particularly fascinating section of the book draws on recent original data to explore the resistance of the Chinese to the new fam ily pattern of the commune. This book is an unparalleled contribution to the study of family patterns, certain to be the foremost source of authoritative information in this field for years to come.