Family
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
household, including lective body of persons who reside under one roof, and under a manager; those who descend from one one head, or common ancestor ; kindred; as, the human family; lineage; tribe or race; familia was applied to all persons in the line of ancestors . Among the Romans, daughters, grandchildren and slaves; power of a paterfamilias-as his sons, including all objects of property, even but it was also used in a wider sense, inanimate. The family is the cornerstone of the social edifice. Hence, it has been taken as a model for forming other associations-political, civil, or religious. Among the early early Hebrews, and in of government is only an extension of Eastern countries, the patriarchal form the family relationship. The Greeks regarded the family as a type of the state; and among the Romans the natural basis of the whole social and political power of a father was taken as the organization of the people. The family life is based upon the wants and necessi ties of our nature, and is essentially fitted to develop and foster those habits and affections on which the happiness and welfare of mankind depend. It can, however, exist in a state of purity only where monogamy prevails. In botany, a synonym for ORDER (q. v.). In zoölogy, the group above the genus. An order of animals should be divided into families according to the form of species, but, in fact, the greatest confusion reigns in the classification of the animal kingdom.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's wrote in 1921 that the family "can exist in a state of purity only where monogamy prevails" and that patriarchal authority was its natural basis; both claims have been overtaken. Divorce, near-impossible for most couples in 1921, became commonplace across the West after the no-fault reforms of the 1960s and 1970s; cohabitation and births outside marriage are now ordinary rather than scandalous, and same-sex marriage became legal in the Netherlands in 2001 and across the United States in 2015. Anthropologists have also abandoned the confident nineteenth-century scheme, echoed here, in which the patriarchal household was the single seed from which states grew. The taxonomic note has aged better, though the confusion the writer complains of has largely been resolved: botanists dropped "order" in favour of "family" as the standard rank above genus, and classification is now built on DNA evidence rather than form alone.
Written for this edition, 2026.