There are many external factors that affect marriage and families. Slavery affected the African Americans with their kin and kith (people considered family, but are not related by blood). Slavery put a great strain on slave families. The slave men were stripped of their role as “man of the house” and even denied rights within their own marriage due to the authoritative power their masters held over them. The slave families’ attempts to maintain their family life were a type of protest against their owners.

Migration from the South to the North affected African Americans and immigration into the US had a profound affect on foreigners because of the distance that disrupted family networks.The theme of families who migrate from one area to another in search of better lives occurs in all three novels. Although the ultimate goal is the same for every family, the reasons vastly differ. Some families are escaping from discrimination, new families emigrate from foreign countries in search of the “American Dream”, while other families must leave their homes to go to other parts of the country in order to find work. Different locations due to weather and geography affected how the family would achieve a successful better life.

Prior to industrialization, men and women were considered equal in the work place, there was not as great a separation between gendered labor. Industrialization changed the family roles due to the growing dichotomy between the public and private sphere of life where men went out of the household to work and women were expected to stay at home and be housewives. Men helped their wives with what we now consider to be “women’s work”. The men would be involved in her regular tasks: “carrying water on washday, sewing shirts on he machine, starting dinner while she and he children attended church (13).” Because people worked on farms prior to industrialization men and women were able to be flexible in the kind of tasks that they performed. Women were thought of as capable of doing the same workload as a man even though it was not always necessary.