The romantic revolution of the Western Middle-Class family

The essay analyzes how the parent-children relationship changed within the bourgeois family between the Eighteen and the Nineteen centuries, also with a look to gender differences. The birth of the love marriage, the transformation of the parent-child relationship towards a more intimate and equal affective relationship, the transformation of the education style, the nineteenth-century cult of motherhood are some of the topics analyzed, that are deemed essential for understanding the complex transformations of family relationships in the western society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of the first representatives of these changes of mentality. The radical critique of the family initiated by Rousseau, in fact, opens the way to a slow shift towards a democratic conception of the relationship between parents and children. The new model of family proposed by Rousseau - notwithstanding the male superiority in terms of "natural law" - is grounded on the agreement and mutual support between the spouses. Finally, the analysis of certain family stories - Manzoni and Rosselli - offers a micro-historical glance to family relationships during the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. The sources relate not only to the educational literature but also to novels on education, i.e. those non-official narratives (diaries, epistolaries, literary sources) that can explain the educational experiences and the network of social and educational conditionings individual lives.