Family rhythms is presented as a textbook. All seven chapters contain ‘panels’ and ‘key ideas’ sections; there are frequent ‘summaries and conclusions’ and a useful glossary of ‘key concepts’ at the end. But the outcome is much more than a textbook. It is the first monograph to exploit the outcome of two major publicly funded Irish research projects of the 2000s: ‘Life Histories and Social Change’ (2007; life history interviews of people reaching adulthood in the 1950s, in the 1970s, and in the 1990s) and ‘Growing Up in Ireland’ (2008; interviews conducted with a representative sample of nine-year-olds and their parents in the 2000s, part of an ongoing panel study of Irish children). In all, it invokes extensive interviews with 217 participants. Hardly ‘big data’, perhaps, and geared to a qualitative, as distinct from a quantitative, sociology. But the authors make a strong case for such a qualitative approach, as a means of discovering ‘the shared meanings and practices that give rise to the trends captured by quantitative researchers’ (p. 7).

The sociology of the Irish family begins with Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball's Family and community in Ireland (1940), and so Gray et al. rightly accord that classic work a prominent role. Based on fieldwork in rural Clare in the 1930s by two Harvard graduate students, it described an ‘Irish’ household structure and system of family life that had its roots in the rural economy's adjustment to the shock of the Great Famine. Key features included mixed farming mainly reliant on family labour, impartible inheritance, arranged and late marriages, high celibacy rates, and the stem family. However, what one early reviewer dubbed Arensberg and Kimball's ‘classic of functional description’ was heavily criticised in the 1970s and 1980s, with Peter Gibbon in a much-cited paper dismissing its claims as ranging ‘from the inaccurate to the fictive’.Footnote ¹ Others rowed in with quantitative critiques of Arensberg and Kimball's arguments.

More recently, critics have been kinder to Arensberg and Kimball; a good example is the Japanese sociologist Yoshifumi Shimizu's exhaustive analysis of the 1901 and 1911 Irish censuses in 2014, which finds that the stem family survived in parts of the country into the twentieth century. The authors are also kinder to the Harvard duo, even where they disagree with them, recognising that Family and community was not too far off the mark if treated as an account of a rural community in transition 80 years ago. Thus some of Family rhythm’s older subjects remembered outcomes such as arranged, loveless marriages and oppressive parental hegemony, very much as described by Arensberg and Kimball (pp. 102–3, 113–14, 132–3). Note too that tensions linked to such outcomes were a frequent feature of the fiction of the Irish literary revival (for example, Patrick Kavanagh's epic poem, The Great Hunger).

The book also pays due respect to other classics of Irish family sociology, which lends it a strong historical and comparative dimension and which should broaden its readership. By applying a loosely chronological approach to their data, the authors do a good job of capturing how the Irish family has changed over the past century or so. The ‘LHSC’ and ‘GUI’ interviews – often prosaically, sometimes colourfully – describe the prevalence of child labour in the 1940s (p. 66); the taboo of pre-marital sex in the 1950s (p. 107); the stigma associated with working mothers in the 1980s (p. 134); and the slower transition to independent adulthood today (p. 117). Change was slower in rural areas, where births outside marriage and marrying ‘out’ were still largely frowned upon in the 1950s. As history, the story can be seen as one of liberation: gradual reductions in the incidence of domestic violence; less patriarchy; less gender inequality; less guilt; and more consensual sex. But far from associating these changes with the ‘Beatles’ first LP’, Family rhythms identifies early signs of rebellion among young adults as far back as the 1930s and 1940s.

The evidence produced here also points to some continuities. Paradoxically, perhaps, the recent controversy over same-sex marriage in Ireland, which culminated in a facilitating amendment to the constitution, testifies to the enduring importance of marriage as an institution. Even the extended/stem family household retains a presence, albeit a ‘virtual’ one, in Family rhythms, which devotes a whole chapter to the increasing role of grandparents in present-day family life.

Ireland was a bit different, and still is. The rhythms of Irish family life in the past as described here show that culture clearly mattered. Early in the last century Ireland stood out for its late marriages and its high marital fertility, and even today it remains unusual for its low divorce and high fertility rates. Yet the authors are also at pains not to exaggerate Irish exceptionalism, and their evidence highlights the marked convergence with other modern societies that has taken place since the 1980s. Have they identified those ‘shared meanings and practices that give rise to the trends captured by quantitative researchers’? Time will tell. In the meantime, this is a very fine contribution to a lively field, and of interest to both the specialist and the general reader.