Family rhythms

The changing textures of family life in Ireland

Jane Gray, Ruth Geraghty, David Ralph

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781784997847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Matrimonio y sociología familiar

Family rhythms is the first textbook of its kind with an explicit focus on Ireland and Irish families. Uniquely, the book draws on original in-depth interviews with people of different ages to introduce contemporary scholarship on the family and to illustrate how Irish families have adapted and changed over time. With chapters on childhood, adolescence, parenting and grandparenthood, the book shows the resilience of families in different social and historical contexts. Each chapter includes a discussion of the challenges that face families and how social research can inform policy makers' responses. Family rhythms is a comprehensive, user-friendly textbook that offers a variety of strategies for engaging readers, including direct encounters with qualitative data through the use of classroom oriented discussion panels. Synopses of landmark Irish studies are included throughout, bringing the insights from these key studies together in a single textbook for the first time.

Part I

Questioning the modern family

1

The idea of the modern family

Traditional family unit dying away. (Quinn – Irish Independent 16 December 2011)

Traditional family farm under threat. (Irish Examiner 6 February 2014)

We are used to reading news reports and commentaries about the ‘traditional family’. We also frequently come across advertisements urging us to enjoy a ‘traditional family holiday’ or buy produce from a ‘traditional family run’ firm. But what do we mean by ‘traditional family’? Consider the following vignettes derived from the LHSC interviews:

Seamus (b. 1916, LHSC) grew up on a small farm in the 1910s and 1920s and met his future wife, a farmer’s daughter, ‘on an open platform’ – that is, a dance in the open air – in the mid-1940s. Four years later they married. He was in his early thirties and she two years younger. Seamus’ father made the farm over to him the previous year. The agreement included stipulations that Seamus’ parents would continue living in the house and that ‘you should bury them and everything like that, keep them clothed’. Although Seamus’ mother died shortly after his marriage, his father lived for another twenty years and his wife’s mother also came to live with them because she did not get along with her own daughter-in-law. Seamus and his wife had seven children, ‘they came too fast’. He told the interviewer that there was nobody with whom you could discuss things like family planning in those days. (Seamus, b. 1916, LHSC)

John (b. 1946, LHSC) grew up on a small farm in the 1940s and 1950s and started going to dances as a teenager. He remembered ‘some of the lads coming home from England … [with] a ‘French letter’ [condom] and of course they would be big guys and they wouldn’t even know how to use it!’ At age sixteen John secured a job in the public service. He met his future wife, Sharon, at a trade union meeting. They married four years later when he was in his late twenties, ‘which was old at the time for a fellow … a lot of my friends were married at twenty-one’. Sharon left work two years later and when John was promoted the two of them moved to a large urban centre. They were four years married before the first of two children arrived. They offered to build a ‘granny flat’ for Sharon’s mother, as Sharon didn’t want her to live in the same house because her ‘husband and children came first’ and she felt that her mother would interfere in raising the children. Sharon returned to work shortly before John retired, when their second child had finished his education. (John, b. 1946, LHSC)

From today’s perspective, both Seamus’ and John’s families might seem quite traditional. However, at the middle of the last century, John’s family would have been thought rather modern. Throughout this book we will argue that many of the assumptions we often make about the decline of the ‘traditional family’ are based on nostalgic and inaccurate images of family life in the past, and ‘snapshot’ images that make us unduly pessimistic about families in the present. Nevertheless, as Seamus’s and John’s stories illustrate, there were significant changes in Irish family life between the 1940s and the 1970s.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, the idea that the ‘modern family’ has a different size, structure and set of functions from traditional families dominated sociological thinking about family change. This chapter traces this idea from its origins in the classical, evolutionary statements of the nineteenth century to the structural-functionalist perspective that predominated in mid-twentieth-century sociology. The chapter also introduces the theory of demographic transition and the emergence of new challenges to the idea of the modern family that are explored further in Chapter 2. Along the way, we introduce some key concepts in family sociology, and describe some classic studies of Irish family life.

The nineteenth-century heritage: classical perspectives on families and social change

During the nineteenth century European social thinkers began to accumulate systematic evidence from around the world that seemed to show that ‘the family’, as they understood it, did not exist in all societies. In trying to make sense of these differences, they developed explanations that centred on the idea that modern families had evolved from older or more primitive forms. The nineteenth century was also a period of rapid social change in Europe itself, with many families leaving the countryside to seek employment in industrial urban centres, leading to concerns that the overthrow of long-established social hierarchies – of generation, gender and class – would give rise to increasing disorder. These social conditions gave rise to ambivalent perspectives on family change that have, in varying guises, persisted to the present day.

Here we will examine the ideas of two nineteenth-century thinkers who have had considerable influence on sociological theories about families: Friedrich Engels and Frédéric Le Play. In the course of our excursion through past ideas, we illuminate some of the concepts that are essential for thinking clearly about what we mean when we talk about ‘families’. We also provide an introduction to how these concepts have been used in research on Irish families.

Kinship and marriage systems: Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels was, of course, Karl Marx’s friend and collaborator. In 1884, after Marx’s death, he published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State where, drawing on the work of anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, he linked the emergence of the family, as his fellow Victorians understood it, to the evolution of state ordered societies based on private property. In order to understand Engels’ (1972 [1884]) argument, we need to know something about kinship systems.

Each of us is related to other people (living or dead), either through ‘blood’ – that is, the biological link between parent and child, brother and sister – or through the sexual connection between man and woman. The term kin refers to the group of living persons who are related to us, while kindred refers to the group of relatives we recognize through the genealogical links in our memory (Segalen, 1986: 43 and 55). Kinship, however, refers to a social institution that governs society to a greater or lesser extent. In some societies, the institution of kinship governs all aspects of social life, including politics, the economy and religion. From the perspective of individuals, the kinship group to which they belong may determine who they marry, and where they work and live. Moreover, societies differ as to how they identify the members of different kinship groups. A detailed account of kinship – a specialist topic within the field of anthropology – is beyond the scope of this book. However, a brief discussion of some key concepts will suffice to make sense of evolutionary perspectives on family change, and to provide the context for understanding contemporary ideas about extended family relationships. See Chapter 2 for more on this topic.

Kinship systems vary according to rules of filiation – who is considered to be your ancestor or your descendent – and according to rules of alliance – which persons you are permitted to marry. In contemporary Ireland the system of filiation is undifferentiated: we recognize both our father’s and mother’s ancestors as part of our kinship group, although we do have a leaning to our father’s side. If you were to trace your family tree, you would probably find it easier to begin with your father’s ancestors because the family name and any property are likely to have descended along your father’s line. However, in other societies, only ancestors and descendents on either the father’s or mother’s side are recognized as relatives. This is called unilineal filiation.

Most commonly, in patrilineal (or agnatic) systems, names, privileges, rights and obligations are passed from father to son. A newly married couple will live with, or near, the husband’s father’s family (patrilocal residence). In some (matrilineal) societies, however, descent is traced from mother to daughter, and husbands tend to live with or near their wives’ families (matrilocal residence). In societies with unilineal descent systems, individuals may be identified as members of a particular descent group, or lineage, traced to a common ancestor. Lineages are at the heart of how such societies are organized. The term clan refers to descent groups where the common ancestor has become mythical, and no direct genealogical link can be traced to living individuals. Lineages may therefore be subsets of clans.

In addition to rules of filiation, all societies have rules about who a person can and cannot marry. In every society incest is prohibited, but the definition of incestuous relationships varies to some extent. In some societies, marriage rules not only ensure that individuals marry outside their own kinship group (exogamy), they also prescribe the group from which a spouse must be taken (endogamy). Such elementary marriage systems (which may seem quite complicated to us) ensure that different descent groups are socially linked through marriage. Under complex marriage systems – like our own – the rules specify only those people who we may not marry. In practice, however, the range of people from whom we choose a partner is not entirely open. Sociological research has shown that we tend to choose partners from within our own social class or ethnic group. For example, in Ireland, people tend to marry partners with the same average level of education as their own (Halpin and Chan, 2003). This phenomenon is called homogamy.

Now, having introduced some key concepts in the study of kinship, let us return to Engels’ argument about the origin of the family. Synthesizing Morgan’s ideas he argued that marriage systems had changed alongside the evolution of human ‘modes of production’. The Marxist concept of mode of production refers to the major ways in which societies are organized in order to meet the material needs of their members – for food, warmth and shelter – and to ensure their continuity over time.

Engels argued that as human societies became more dependent on agriculture, rules about marriage and sexual intercourse became increasingly restrictive. In the first phase of this transformation, women and men formed partnerships, but monogamy was not strictly enforced and the marriages could be easily dissolved. Most importantly, Engels argued that the matrilineal ‘clan’ remained more important in everyday life than the marital relationship, because it controlled access to resources for cultivating crops or grazing animals. This meant that women and children were socially and economically dependent on the clan rather than on husbands and fathers. However, in the second phase this changed alongside the development of civilization and the state.

As agriculture became productive enough to support groups of people who were directly engaged in production, such as political rulers, priests, soldiers and craftsmen, kinship became less important for how societies were organized and governed. In state societies, agricultural production was carried out by family based households rather than by clans. According to Engels, alongside the development of civilization, the nuclear family became separated from the clan group, and there was a switch from matrilineal to patrilineal descent and patrilocal residence. This secured male dominance over women and children leading, in Engels’ colourful phrase, to ‘the world-historical defeat of the female sex’.

How did this happen? According to Engels, over time, the domestication of animals led to a decline in the significance of hunting for human subsistence, so that men displaced women in the fields and spent more time around the home. The accumulation of wealth by individual men led to conflict between the marital family and the matrilineal clan. Men wanted to see their property passed on to their own children, rather than having it dispersed amongst the members of their wife’s clan. They therefore enforced the change to patrilineal descent and, in order to ensure that their property was passed on to their own children, insisted on monogamy for women.

Before the advent of DNA testing, enforced chastity for women was the only way that men could be absolutely certain that the children their wives gave birth to were their own. This led to the consolidation of the patriarchal, bourgeois family, which predominated in the England of Engels’ own time. In such families the father ruled over his wife and children and acted on behalf of the household within the public sphere governed by the state. However Engels believed that the development of industrial society would lead to a further change in the family, both because the growing class of people who worked for capitalist employers had no property to protect, and because women’s employment outside the home reduced their dependence on men.

Many scholars have been fascinated and inspired by Engels’ extraordinary attempt to link kinship and family change to socio-economic evolution. Today, we know that both Morgan and Engels made some false inferences from their limited ethnographic knowledge. Engels, in particular, erred in confusing matrilineal descent systems with matriarchy. While women often do have more social influence in matrilineal systems (and such systems are indeed more commonly found in horticultural societies), women are not the dominant sex, nor do they have equal status with men (although they may have higher status than in patrilineal societies). In matrilineal societies a woman’s uncles and brothers are the dominant men in her life, in contrast to patrilineal societies where fathers and husbands dominate. Despite these problems, as we will see, scholars continue to be inspired by the basic logic of Engels argument – that particular forms of family life (including patterns of power and inequality within families) – emerge in different socio-economic contexts.

Households and family systems: Frédéric Le Play

Engels tried to develop a big theory of family change, linking kinship and marriage practices to the evolution and transformation of social relations in different modes of production. By contrast Frédér...