It was essential in the preceding pages, which revisited some major un-resolved historical controversies of the past generation, especially around the role of western Europe in prompting major global change after 1500, to paint with a broad brush. The object was to make a case for the importance of the largely ignored late-marriage pattern, identify a plausible source for its origins, and describe how different some key developments in the Western past would look if that pattern were taken seriously. A postscript remains to be added, however, about the versatility of this interpretive approach for many other sorts of investigations, large and small. There are potential uses not only for reviewing some perplexing historical and contemporary issues within the European and North American context, but also for assessing such items as the debate on a convergence of weak- and strong-family systems in a global context.

A long perspective on household systems and an even longer one on how gender arrangements work can help, for example, to explain the more extreme reactions in an ongoing contemporary debate over abortion that periodically erupts into violence. Awareness of the peculiar proximity of the sexes promoted by the late-marriage system, as well as of the nerve of anxiety and hatred that has been exposed again and again at times when male identity (however constructed at the time) was under pressure, makes it possible to understand more fully a controversy whose capacity to call forth such visceral responses is otherwise extremely puzzling.