A Sociology of Family Life. Deborah Chambers
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1980s, feminist research critiqued wider perceptions of gender inequalities as a natural expression of biological sex differences by pinpointing the gendered power relations involved in housework and the socialization of children. This approach was advanced by Simone de Beauvoir’s famous critique of gender inequalities in her book The Second Sex (1972 [1949]), where she made the famous statement ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ Feminist authors argued that the apparently more physical and energetic behaviour of boys, and caring and obedient behaviour of girls, were the result of gender socialization and sexist ideologies (Oakley 1972; Stanley and Wise 1983). For example, the maternal deprivation thesis advanced by professionals such as John Bowlby (1953) elevated the mystique of the emotional and psychological bonding between mother and child, promoting the idea that women who take on paid employment do not make good mothers. According to Bowlby, a separation from the mother, when the child is cared for by another person (such as the grandmother), was perceived to have an adverse effect on the child. Bowlby’s maternal deprivation thesis, which assigned biological mothers the primary role of caregiver, was critiqued by feminist perspectives as an ideology of ‘bad mothering’ (Davidoff et al. 1999).
Gender segregation in the labour market was also critiqued by feminist interventions as a mechanism by which gendered roles in the family are extended to and naturalized in paid employment. The exploitation of women as a ‘reserve army of labour’, to be used in times of labour shortages or during wars, and the belief that their wages were just ‘pin money’ for superfluous luxuries, were driven by the widespread view that women’s employment was simply a side-line to husbands’ wages. Feminist scholars pointed out that gendered power relations that underpinned the division of labour in the family were reflected and perpetuated by a gendered labour market. Women continue to be channelled into low-paid ‘feminized labour’ that reflects the domestic and childcare tasks assigned to women, such as nursing, teaching and catering (Delphy and Leonard 1992; Hartmann 1976; Oakley 1974; Walby 1985; Woodroffe 2009). Women still face discrimination in highly paid professional and managerial careers, where they confront a ‘glass ceiling’ resulting from a ‘motherhood penalty’ over the years after parenthood (Budig et al. 2012; Cukrowska-Torzewska and Lovasz 2020). Feminist scholars criticized gender disparities in the distribution of resources at home and the control of family finances by husbands (Pahl 1989).
Feminist studies of the 1970s and 1980s also addressed the way the family serves as a context for the oppression and physical abuse of women. Formerly, violence in the home, including ‘wife battering’, marital rape and child abuse were routinely ignored, but now they were being uncovered and researched as key issues within feminist research. The prevalent idea of the home as a haven for children, women and older people was challenged (Dobash and Dobash 1992). Domestic violence, child abuse, divorce, widowhood, mental and physical health problems, poverty and homelessness were now being exposed (see Dallos and McLaughlin 1993; and chapter 3). Feminist writing on the family in the 1970s and 1980s was, then, diverse in its political and theoretical objectives, and extensive in empirical scope. Feminist contributions to the sociology of the family were so fundamental that feminist scholarship formed a set of overriding critiques that challenged conventional sociological views of family life as harmonious and egalitarian (Smart 2007). It was pointed out that the family was no longer viewed as sacrosanct or inevitably functional for its members, and that men benefitted from family life more than women.
In the 1950s and 1960s, all other forms of intimacy that did not conform to heterosexual marriage and family life were perceived as inferior or deviant (Holden 2007; Porche and Purvin 2008; Rosenfeld 1999). In Britain, male homosexuality was illegal until 1967. In the USA, homosexuality was defined as a mental disorder until as late as 1973 by the American Psychological Association. Under these circumstances, men and women felt pressured to conceal their sexual identities, with some feeling pressured to marry (Rosenfeld 1999). Legal recognition of non-heterosexual relationships took place in 2005 in Britain, when civil partnerships were introduced. This history is more complicated in the USA since it differs from state to state, with Massachusetts being the first to authorize same-sex marriage in 2004. Feminist work also contributed to the foundations of queer theory by questioning the naturalness of the heterosexual relationships on which family life is founded (Dalton and Bielby 2000; and see the Introduction to this book). ‘Heteronormative’ is a term used in queer theory, introduced by Michael Warner (1991), to describe the expectations, social pressures and constraints exerted on individuals when heterosexuality is taken as the norm in society.
By the 1990s, debates about sexual politics were advanced by queer theory to question the naturalness of heterosexual relationships and expose the historical and cultural labelling of alternatives to heterosexuality as deviant (see, for example, Berlant and Warner 1998, 2000; Butler 1990; Seidman 1996). The following chapter addresses some of queer theory’s key influences on the sociology of the family to understand LGBTQ+ intimacies and accent the fluidity of relationships.
Conclusions
This chapter has shown how the roots of certain enduring ideas about the family, which remain with us today, lie within the work of classical thinkers. It demonstrates how late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century sociological theories about the family contributed to or sustained biological and social discourses, often drawing on quite contradictory frameworks of thinking. On the one hand, the family was assumed to be a universal biological unit. On the other hand, sociologists were preoccupied with the effects of social and economic change on family structures. Although the family was mainly viewed through a biological lens, it was a lens used selectively to authenticate and legitimate an approved, monogamous, patriarchal and nuclear version sanctioned by a companionate partnership.
A second area of concern among sociologists was the effects of industrialization and urbanization on family structures, and the desire to elevate a recent, nuclear model as the norm. A major and continuing fear among both academics and governments was the nuclear family’s state of decline caused by encroaching individualism and privatization. The ideal companionate marriage was promoted to strengthen modern conjugal relationships in response to this fear of a decline in both the family and traditional communities. Based on positive intimate relationships between partners, this new kind of marriage was viewed as proof that the ‘modern marriage’ was becoming more egalitarian. By narrowly defining a small, mobile nuclear family as universal, functionalism treated all other family types as deviations from this family form.
Dramatic changes in family structures across the twentieth century revealed that the nuclear family was neither universal nor permanent. Parsons did not predict the dramatic rise in divorce rates by the end of the twentieth century. In the USA, the number of households with two parents and children declined by 20% between the 1960s and 1990s (Casper and Bianchi 2002:11 and 99). And in 1950, 93% of children in the US lived in a nuclear family, while only 6% lived with only their mother and 1% with only their father. By 1998, 73% lived in a nuclear family, 22% with only their mother and 5% with only their father (Casper and Bianchi 2002:99). Similar changes occurred in Europe. More recently, for example, 66% of children in Denmark aged 11–15 were not living with two parents by 2006, while in France it was 73%, in Hungary it was 74%, in Ireland it was 81%, and in Spain 84% (Lappegard 2017). Similar demographic transformations occurred transnationally (for example in Europe, Latin America, North America and Southeast Asia), with higher births outside marriage, increasing rates of cohabitation, and rising divorce rates occurring until the first decade of the twenty-first century (Lesthaeghe 2010). This demographic trend diverges from the mid-twentieth-century vision of the family promoted by structural functionalism.
These trends indicate that social attitudes and behaviour changed dramatically during the twentieth century and beyond. However, certain traditional family values and norms endure. This is illustrated in the next chapter which engages with recent research that demonstrates the importance of continuity and connectedness among family members. One of the major distinctions between traditional and more recent approaches to families, households and individuals is the shift away from the idea of ‘the family’ as a social institution governed by rigid moral conventions towards an idea of family and wider personal life as diverse and fluid sets of social customs