The Sociology of the Family 12.10.10

1. Sociology The Sociology of the Family12.10.10

2. What is a family? • Any combination of two or more persons who are bound together by mutual consent, birth and/or adoption or placement and who, together, assume responsibility , for, inter alia the care and maintenance of group members through procreation or adoption, the socialisation of children and the social control of members’ (UN cited in Donohue and Gaynor, 2003:242)

3. ‘There is no such thing as the family only families’ (Gittins, 1993 in Macconis and Plummer)

4. The changing structure of the family • ‘The major difference which engaged sociological research and debated concerns the transition from a predominantly extended family form in pre-industrial times to the nuclear or conjugal family more typical in modern industrial society.’ ( IPA 1992: 34)

5. 1. The Extended Family • Parents + children and other relatives living together or in close proximity. • 2+ Generations • Basic social unit of trad. or pre-industrial era. • Family a separate economic unit • Religion • Irish ‘stem’ family

6. 2.Nuclear Family • Typical family of the industrial era • Two adults + their biological/adopted children/ one parent + child/ren. • Lives separately from the wider family • Makes own decisions • ‘help may come from other individuals or from government welfare agencies but this help is meant to be temporary.’ (Curry in MacDonald, 82)

7. 3. The reconstructed familyor step family • The ‘blended’ or re-constituted family. • Two partners make a new family with their children from previous and/ their new relationship/s.

8. Marriage • Kinship ties ‘are connections between individuals through marriage, or through lines of descent that connect blood relatives.’ (Giddens 2001: 173) • Marriage → ‘ ..legally sanctioned relationships involving economic co-operation as well as normative sexual activity and child-bearing, that people expect to be enduring.’ (Maccionis and Plummer 2002: 436).

9. Why do people marry? • For pragmatic wealth/power-related reasons. • Romantic Love → in societies where extended family ties are weak. • Why do you think this might be the case?

10. Romantic Love – A construct? • 1. ‘ in industrial societies romantic love provides an incentive to marry and form families • 2. Romantic love is more highly valued in industrial societies because it provides a support in times of stress, and • 3. When spouses are in love they become committed primarily to each other , rather than their families of orientation.’ (Curry 2005: 317 in MacDonald, 82).

11. Family Patterns • Marriage compositions: • Monogamy – One woman married to one man. • Polygyny – one man married to several women. • Polyandry – one woman married to several men. • (See MacDonald p. 83 for more details on these patterns).

12. Family Patterns • Power: • Patriarchal • Matriarchal • Egalitarian

13. Family Patterns • Descent: • Patrilineal • Matrilineal • Bilineal • And…exogamous marriage → permits s.o. to marry another from outside their social group • Endogamous marriage → individuals are expected to chose from within their social group.

14. The Family – A Functionalist Perspective 1. Primary socialisation and Personality Stabilisation (Parsons/Giddens) 2. Regulation of Sexual Activity (incest taboo , see MacDonald p. 84) 3. Social Placement – What we are born into..wealth, race, etc. 4. Material and Emotional Security - Families depend on each other economically and emotionally ( N.B. Parsons’ roles: male breadwinner/female nurturer)

15. Limits of the Functionalist Perspective • Children also socialised outside the family • People have sexual relations outside the family • Families can be dysfunctional • Functionalism takes no account of this • Family plays a part in reproducing and maintaining the capitalist system • Other social institutions help meet our needs • The contentious role of family life in regards to mental illness (see here the anti-psychiatry movement of the 60s and 70s).

16. Class-based analysis of the family: Conflict Theory • A perspective that emanates from the work of Marx and Engels. • Through the socialisation of children the family reproduces labour power and false ideology thus maintaining capitalism. • Maintenance of the patriarchy. Engels stated that ‘The emancipation of women becomes possible only when women are enabled to take part in production on a large social scale, and when domestic duties require their attention only to a minor degree.’

17. Class-based analysis (2) • Marx following Fourier declared that the status of women provided a barometer for the level of humanity attained by a society. • Engels; private property, class antagonism and the emergence of the modern form of the state are co-terminous with the patriarchal monogamous family. • Privileging of production inherent in the classical theoretical canon.

18. Engels ‘ the elimination of the economic justification for marriage opened the way to true monogamy based on an historically new element – individual sexual love.’ Engels infl. by 19th century utopian socialists. He dreamed of a situation where: ‘the individual family ceases to be an economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of children becomes a public matter.’

19. The socialist family • Nuclear family reborn as the socialist family in which worker-mothers were committed to bearing and rearing future socialist citizens in addition to their labour-force participation. Family as basic cell guaranteed stability. But in general the family functioned not as a social unit embodying individual rights in a partnership of equals, but as one with specific duties towards society and the state.

20. The problems with socialism • Women’s emancipation relegated from being a process integral and essential to the emancipatory project of society as whole, to a separate and secondary status. The nature of gender relations as relations of power disappeared from the agenda. • The dominant discourse, dictated, in the words of Hilda Scott, that ‘men set the goals, define the socialist norms, and order the priorities by standards according to which men and women are equal but it is women who are different.’ ‘equality as something which can be given to women without affecting the position of men. • (Source for this last section, Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and the Women's Movement in East Central Europe by Barbara Einhorn, Verso, 1993)

21. Race and Ethnicity • Endogamy → if people continue to marry within their own race/ethnicity, racial and ethnic categories will continue to persist. • What is your response to this?

22. ‘Feminists highlight the continuing exploitation of women in capitalist societies, not least in terms of the way in which their contribution to the bulk of private domestic work remains unrecognised, unrewarded and undervalued labour.’ (Marsh 2000: 552) Is the division of labour an outcome of capitalism or the patriarchy, which pre-dates capitalism? Feminist Approaches to the Family

23. 1918: Right to vote for Irish women over 30 1922: Right to vote for Irish women over 21 Below, early Irish feminists, Hannah Sheehy Skeffington and Margaret Pearse. Historical Note..

24. 1924 to 1973: Married women banned from working in civil service Sit on a jury Buy contraceptives Drink a pint in any bar Collect her children’s allowance money Get a barring order against a violent partner Be entitled to equal ownership of the family home Refuse to have sex with her husband (marital rape was not a crime till 1990). Choose her official place of domicile Receive equal pay for equal work http://www.irishtimes.com/indepth/sisters/changes-from-1970s.html Ten things a woman could not do in 1970…(Irish Times 25/10/10)

25. Feminists argue • That women have little decision making autonomy within the family. (Symmetrical decsion-making?) • Have to do more housework than men and still spend more time looking after the children, the sick and the elderly (Finch, 1989, cited in Macionis and Plummer 2002: 441). (Division of labour?/Caring activities incl. emotional labour?) • That violence and abuse i.e. the dysfunctional nature of the (nuclear) family has been overlooked by the law and academia. (Unequal power relationships)

26. Feminist perspectives highlight: 1. The importance of women within the core domestic unit. 2. The changing attitudes to and roles of women in the areas of marriage, divorce and co-habitation. 3. The increasing significance of women’s roles as carers within the community. (Marsh 2000: 554). It has been argued that feminists fail to take sufficient account of progress towards equality.

27. In June 2004 the then Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr Michael McDowell, told the Irish Catholic: • "A dynamic liberal economy like ours demands flexibility and inequality in some respects to function." It was such inequality "which provides incentives". • "Driven to a complete extreme, the current rights culture and equality notion would create a feudal society. A society so ordered, static, and where the Government tries to order everything by law, it would become as atrophied as a feudal society.”

28. Response of Niall Crowley, the then CEO of the Equality Authority: • Equality is about celebrating diversity rather than imposing homogeneity. It is about securing real choices for all groups in our society rather than merely allowing opportunities that are all too often illusory. It is about dismantling the barriers of discrimination that flow from individual prejudice and action and from institutional practices and systems. • See also: http://www.irishtimes.com/indepth/oireachtas/putting-women-in-the-frame.htm • Ireland in 5th place in the 2012 Global Gender Gap report: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/1024/breaking53.html

29. Changing Family Patterns in Irish Society • The family, in Ireland as elsewhere, has been identified as an important symbol of collective identity, unity and security.’ (O’Connor, in Tovey and Share, 2003: 89) • Studies from the 1930s and 1970s show how the Irish family has changed. • 1930s → Farm/Household, family a unit of production/reproduction, family roles = work roles, marriages often arranged.

30. Finola Kennedy’s From Cottage to Crèche (2001) • Until 1980 marriage rates in Ireland relatively low due to • The legacy of the famine (inheritance patterns) and • Economic conditions → high fertility rates, Church control, contraceptive ban, female migration and emigration, large numbers of singles.

31. Surveys in the 1970s and after.. • More diversity in family types in the 1970s – shift also towards more modern urban middle-class family. (Hannan, 1976) • Continued persistence of traditional family roles esp. amongst those men and women not working outside the home. • Care of children etc, could now be transferred to other social institutions.

32. See McDonald p. 89 - 90 for a summary of Bacik’s (2004) findings on marriage trends in recent times. Fluctuating marriage rates in Irish society seem to be influenced by factors such as modernisation, economic conditions and changing attitudes towards marriage itself. Marriage Patterns

33. And… • Increase in births outside of marriage (31% in 2002 acc. Bacik, 2004:65) • Status of Children Act 1987 abolished the concept of illegitimacy. • Lone parents still experience discrimination. • Increase in the number of one-parent families (86% headed by females in 2006). • Smaller family sizes • More women in employment

34. Divorce.. • Introduced by the Family Law (Divorce) Act in 1997 following a November 1996 referendum. • 818,842 people voted in favour and 809, 728 voted against. • Massive increase in the numbers seeking divorce since 1996, nevertheless Ireland still has the lowest divorce rate in the EU (Eurostat, 2006). • Why? Religion, high home ownership rates, rural populations, late marriage age, (relative) cultural homogeneity.

35. Violence (Covert) domestic violence Murder Barring Orders Child Abuse 1999 publication of the Children First document Abuse can be physical, emotional, sexual or based on neglect, Family disintegration and breakdown

36. The Children Act 2001 The Domestic Violence Act 1996 The Status of Children Act 1987 The Adoption Act 1988 The Childcare Act 1991. The Dept. of Justice, Equality and Law Reform The Dept. of the Environment and Local Government The Dept. of Social and Family Affairs The Dept. of Health and Children. Barnardos ISPCC The Family and Social Care

37. Giddens on the modern family • Rise in divorce and lone parenting, emergence of re-constituted families, ‘beanpole’ families, gay families, popularity of cohabition. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/jan/30/britishidentityandsociety.uknews • Giddens’ The Transformation of Intimacy (2003) → ‘plastic sexuality’, romantic love has been replaced by confluent love within the context of the pure relationship. • Beck – competing labour market biographies, increased antagonism between the sexes.

38. Questions for further thought (Source: Giddens, 248) • Are all family forms equally acceptable in modern societies? • How can rising divorce rates indicate that the marriage relationship has become more rather than less important? • With the decline of the male breadwinner, what new roles are there for men within families? • Is love enough to secure the institution of the family? • Are family values in decline? Does this matter?