The History of the Family in Post-Industrial Society

1. The History of the Family in Post-Industrial Society Families today are said to more nuclear, privatised, affluent and symmetrical, than in the past. If this is true, what triggered these changes?

2. The History of the Family in Post-Industrial Society • Were families once all extended kinship groups? • Is the modern ‘Nuclear Family’ a product of Industrialisation? • What views do Marxists and Feminists take about the origins of the modern family? • How has the increasing affluence of the working class changed traditional working class families and communities? • Is Childhood a product of Industrialisation and Victorian values?

3. Talcott Parsons: Socialisation & Interaction 1955 • Industrialisation and urbanisation caused a change from Nuclear to Extended families • A mobile labour force was needed • Family no longer defined status/class: people could ‘improve’ themselves = social mobility • Kinship declined in importance also because professionals replaced kin, in providing assistance: in sickness, unemployment, for childcare or for education.

4. Engels: Origins of the Family 1902 • A Marxist view • Nuclear Family was product of Capitalism • Nuclear families were patriarchal • Capitalism rests on the unpaid labour of women: caring for old/sick/young/men & still having to work in the factories as well • Bourgeois morality had a double standard: women had to be virtuous (because they were property), but men did not

5. Peggy Morton:Women’s work is Never Done 1980 • Neo-Marxism: Capitalist societies don’t look exploitative because people are socialised by the media, into accepting the structures of class and patriarchy (EG: adverts assume women mind kids) • Families help to enforce stereotypes that result in women having the illusion of choice over gender roles, whilst mostly functioning as a reserve army of cheap or unpaid labour and unpaid carers in the home.

6. Benston 1980: Politics of Housework Radical Feminism suggests women don’t need the family Working class women are doubly oppressed: 1st as proletarians 2nd as wives Carby 1982 White women listen! The boundaries of sisterhood Black women triply oppressed: 1st as proletarians 2nd as women 3rd as blacks Capitalism and the Family

7. Zaretsky: Personal Life & Capitalism 1976 • Zaretsky supports the Marxist view of the family under Capitalism, as patriarchal & exploitative. • The positive function of the nuclear family was to provide workers with a gentle & supportive refuge from the dark satanic mills of brutal cities. • BUT: the pressures placed upon workers were so great that their families were bound to collapse under the strain. • The solution was to build caring & sharing socialist society; only that could really satisfy the psychological needs of workers and families.

8. Laslett: The World We Have Lost 1965 • Social historian..using quantitative data: Parish Records from 16th C., Census from 1801, Central Births/Deaths/Marriages from 1830’s. • Most households were ‘nuclear’ before industrialisation. Extended households were more common in Southern Europe. Was that the advantage that helped the North to industrialise? • Records had many gaps. Village households might be nuclear, but if relatives lived next door, the organisation of families could be extended

9. Anderson: Family Structure in the 19th Century 1971 • Analysis of Census for Preston (mill town) using 10% of population in 1851 (big sample) • 23% of households had extended family/kinship networks in close proximity (neighbouring streets). • People needed family around them for social security: illness, unemployment, childcare, financial backing, sharing, emotional support - extended relationships were a WC survival trait. • Roberts, in Family Life & Duty 1984, found that women’s caring was not based on family self-interest, but extended across the community; indeed it was women who created the community.

10. Cathy Hall: History of the Housewife 1980 • Victorian working class women worked at home (unpaid) and in the factories (1s 6d compared to a man’s 8s 6d - 1 Day’s bread = 1s 2d. Children 6d.) • Middle Class women were housewives: birds in a gilded cage, there to serve their husbands, whose property they were. • Embourgeoisement of the WC gave better off workers the chance to keep their wife at home, to improve their status. Men got the Family Wage.

11. Anne Oakley: Housewife 1976 • The ideal of the Housewife is an invention of patriarchal Victorian Society, where women were property, designed to serve the needs of the husband • Embourgeoisement encouraged working class men to aspire to owning a housewife • Feminism, birth control, political liberation & divorce allow women to rid themselves of the oppression that the nuclear family represents

12. Young & Wilmott: Family & Kinship in East London 1962 • Working class communities used extended networks for social security. Women maintained these networks • Embourgeoisement & the move to the suburbs undermined these links, leaving the Family more Privatised • Women were more isolated & symmetrical • Families relied on outside agencies for : insurance, childcare, healthcare, education, housing & loans

13. McGlone @ Policy Studies Inst.: Families & Kinship 1998 1 • O’Brien & Jones, surveying 600 people in East London, found that family lifestyles had become more ‘pluralised’, since Willmott’s study, but that kinship was very important to people. • McGlone confirmed this from the British Social Attitudes Surveys for 1986-1995. • Half of the sample saw their mother every week. • 35% of the childless and 45% of parents saw their fathers, once a week. • The %’s were higher for those living within an hour’s drive of the parent.

14. McGlone @ Policy Studies Inst.: Families & Kinship 1998 2 • Where contact had declined it was explained by people moving further afield for work. • Contact was falling for MC families, where both partners worked & had less time to network. • Family contact was relied on for help with money, accommodation, gardening, decorating, repairs, childcare, rites of passage & leisure activities. • Even where there was little direct contact, links were maintained & people said that family mattered greatly to them and they always hoped to stay in touch, to help & to rely on each other.

15. Goldthorpe: The Affluent Worker 1969 • Embourgeoisement of car workers produced more nuclear families. • Working class ideal of ‘community’ became less important than the individual. The inward looking family developed. • Conjugal roles more symmetrical and women more likely to work • Asked men how much housework they did: poor methodology, they lied!

16. Janet Finch: Family Obligations 1989 • Interpretive study of working class communities in Manchester showed extended networks: 90% borrowed money from family and obtained childminding, 60% had cohabited with parents when first married or partnered • State provision assumes women will provide most care for sick, old & disabled. Care in the Community means leave it up to women with a conscience.

17. Fiona Devine: Affluent Workers revisited 1992 • Showed that the affluent car workers still had extended family networks, even when they had moved out of the traditional community • People lived in close contact with kin through phones, net, cars & social gatherings

18. Janet Foster: Villains 1990 • Working class traditional extended family networks continued in the East End of London, with relatives often living close by and visiting each other frequently • Perhaps this study was warped by the existence of subcultures on the edge of the law that cluster together to share criminal facilities and to protect each other from the Law • Perhaps people romanticise and imagine a sense of community which does not in fact exist

19. Brannen: Beanpole Families 2003 • People are living longer, marrying later and having fewer children (1.7) • Impact on the Family is to create multi-generational families that have few members in each generation: • Great Grandparent, Grandparents, Parents (with a small number of siblings), 1or 2 Children.

20. Aries: Centuries of Childhood 1 1962 • Aries argued that childhood is socially constructed and is in fact quite a recent concept. • Historically there were infants (without responsibility for their actions) and adults, but no children in between.Children became responsible at 6 or 7, began work and were married soon after puberty (9-12). Children were simply little adults. • Children were sold in marriage, apprenticed, sold as servants, sent down the mines,recruited to the armed forces or put to work on the family’s land.

21. Aries: Centuries of Childhood 2 • Affection was limited by high infant/child mortality rates, famine & early death. • As a Structuralist Aries argued that Industrialisation created a change in Society’s view of childhood. • Middle Class affluence created a more romantic sensitivity to family life, especially as infant mortality rates fell dramatically after the agricultural revolution.

22. Aries: Centuries of Childhood 3 • It was the increase in food production that raised the population of Britain. Victorians invented Christmas & childhood. • Religious and social reformers began to enforce the protection of WC children from exploitation as miners, factory hands, prostitutes, servants & thieves. • Childhood as a separate period between infancy and adulthood was created by state education(primary 1870, secondary 1944) & the idea that children were vulnerable.