Letter

Family Matters

To the Editor:

With regard to the interview by Carol Iannone of Professor David Popenoe of Rutgers University in your Winter 2008–09 issue [“Family Matters: A Conversation with David Popenoe,” vol. 22, no. 1], I wonder if Professor Popenoe is familiar with Family and Civilization, a seminal work in family sociology by Carle Zimmerman, which was first published in the late forties and which predicted the steep and accelerating decline of the family, already well underway even as he wrote and having been for sometime already. A distinguished scholar in his field, I assume Popenoe is, although some of his answers to Iannone’s questions—particularly those with regard to the decline as beginning in late sixties and the fifties as being a high point of domesticity—leave me wondering.

Zimmerman defined “marriage” as a social institution whose primary function