Family?

So I recently read this book, title appears below the quote, and this passage below really struck me. Actually, many things in the book were particularly noteworthy. This one, I think, requires us to recast our understanding of what the term "traditional family" may actually be pointing towards.

“Although chattel slavery was under attack at the end of the eighteenth century, it belonged to a long and some thought honorable tradition. Slaves were among a crowd of dependents subject to household authority. When people today talk about assaults on the “traditional family,” they demonstrate the limits of historical memory. The medieval historian David Herlihy has explained that the English word family comes from the Latin familia, which in its earliest uses connoted “a band of slaves.” The Latin word for father, pater, has an equally complex derivation. It originally meant someone in authority, not a biological parent.
The concept of the family as an authoritarian conglomerate of unrelated persons persisted in early modern Europe. A fascinating passage in the work of the sixteenth-century French jurist Jean Bpdin begins with a question: How many persons does it take to make a family? Bodin answers that it takes a master and at least three other persons, whether they be his children, slaves servants, or free dependents who have voluntarily submitted to his authority. Then, almost as an afterthought, he acknowledges that a family must also include a wife:

But for as much as Families, Colleges, Companies, Cities, and Commonweals, yea, and mankind it selfe would perish and come to an end were it not by marriages... Preserved and continued, it followeth well that a family cannot be in all points perfect and accomplished without a wife. So that by this account it cometh to passe, there must be five persons at least to make up an whole and entire family.”

P 124-5
Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History
By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich


This website entry cites some other, relevant information about the topic:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=familia&searchmode=none