Fast Families, Virtual Children

A Critical Sociology of Families and Schooling

Ben Agger, Beth Anne Shelton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317259619
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Internet, cell phones, and other technologies have changed the ways in which people conduct their family lives, raise children, and navigate the blurry boundary between work and home. Private life is colonized by employers, teachers, corporations; family time is taken up by work, homework, and shopping. What it means to be parents and children has changed dramatically. This book shows how the nurturance of family has increasingly become a willful, radical idea in an era of pervasive technology. The authors analyze important trends, including the acceleration and attenuation of childhood, and offer a children s bill of rights and accompanying parental responsibilities."

1Mapping Families in Fast Capitalism

DOI: 10.4324/9781315634630-1

This is a book about our family. As such, it is necessarily biographical and autobiographical. Our lives, and our kids’ lives, provide insights and data. This book is not value free; we are partisan. We want to slow down childhood and remake families, schools, and, thus, all of society. This is also a book about your family and many families. One of our main contentions is that “the family” of nuclear lore has been dispersed into many different configurations. We spend much of this book analyzing the causes and consequences of these transformations. We view “family,” or actually families, as a utopian ideal, a source of radical energy at a time when we all want and need “family,” including in our working lives. We also view the concept of “school” as potentially progressive. Together, family/families and schooling can become progressive ideals that energize a movement of women, progressive men, gays, lesbians, and even children in the ongoing struggle against fundamentalist “traditional” values. In this opening chapter, we map families in the early twenty-first century in their increasing diversity. We also explore assumptions about human nature that inform differing parenting and schooling styles.

This is also a book about gender,¹ the ways in which men and women play out their sexual identities and orientations. Men and women have tended to play rather bifurcated roles, with men viewed as the stronger (and perhaps more emotionally obtuse) sex and women viewed as the weaker (but more intuitive and nurturant) sex. The Victorians created a sexual division of labor, with women staying home and tending the household and children and men entering paid labor. This division creates differences in power between men and women. The ways in which we have structured our family lives revolve around our definitions and practices of gender, as we explore.

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¹ The ways in which women and men are taught to express their sexual identities, usually, in this society, sharply divided into masculine versus feminine identities; gender is learned, whereas one's sex is more or less biologically fixed.

This book is intended to be a contribution to sociologies of family and marriage, childhood and children, schools and schooling, gender roles and gender inequality. Our book is different from many standard texts in these fields in that we have a definite theoretical perspective, which we derive from critical theory,² feminist theory,³ and postmodernism.⁴ We use theory to illuminate the assumptions underlying families, childhood, and schooling. But a sociological background is not required—this book is also addressed to general readers who live in families, work, and send kids to school. These readers want to bring up kids who are unburdened by the world, to promote more enlightening schooling, and to enjoy more meaningful work. We provide footnotes to define terms and describe theorists perhaps unfamiliar to readers, encouraging them to do further reading in the sources that inspire us.

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² Theories of the Frankfurt School that stress the role of big government and media in perpetuating capitalism into the twenty-first century.

³ A social theory emphasizing the importance of gender roles and gender inequality for understanding women's lives.

⁴ A European theory that challenges Marxism as overly economic and stresses the importance of culture, media, and discourse for understanding human behavior; associated with Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, and Lyotard, who sometimes reject Habermas's project of modernity as an overly optimistic theory of progress.

Many Families

On May 17, 2004, gay and lesbian marriages were legalized in Massachusetts. Gay marriage has received much notice in the press because the issue is contentious, dividing conservatives and progressives as few issues have since abortion and, before that, the rights of women and Americans of color (Donlan 2005; Neilan 2003). Conservatives quickly proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriages, fearing that such marriages will destroy the fabric of American culture and morality. Progressives hailed the Massachusetts court decision as a landmark ruling that recognizes the various ways people live. This debate over gay marriage and civil unions mirrors the broader discussion of what is or should be considered a family.

As sociologists we take the position that family is the way in which people live together. It is the way you split up or pool the household's income(s); how you raise children; whether you have children in the first place, and whether you conceived or adopted them; whether there are one or more adults living under one roof; whether there are actually several roofs under which family members live; who initiates having sex; how much television is watched; who makes decisions about what to have for dinner, whether to buy a new house, and how to teach the kids about religion and politics; who goes shopping and does the driving; and who helps kids with homework.

Families are the places and ways in which these, and many more, issues are decided. These are private decisions in the sense that most people do not allow people outside of the household to make them, but they are public decisions in that they are often heavily influenced by the larger social, economic, cultural, and political institutions surrounding us. For example, the more the husband earns, the less likely the wife is to work for pay outside the home (Jacobson 1998; Lehrer 1999). The less time women spend working for pay, the more time they spend on housework and the more we reinforce the idea that women stay home and men go out to work (Blair-Loy 2003). Indeed, the image of wealthy women tending the household suggests that the only reason less wealthy women work is that they must, for economic reasons.

The United States is nearly alone among Western industrial countries in lacking both a national health-care plan and a child-care plan (Kamerman and Kahn 1991). Canada, our near neighbor, has had publicly funded medical insurance for many years (Ostry 2006). And Canadians are now debating how to implement a child-care policy (Greenaway 2006). Canada also recently legalized same-sex marriage (Andrew Mills 2005). European countries are also far ahead of the United States in their family-leave and child-care policies (Kamerman and Kahn 1995). We are interested sociologically in why the United States is so different from these other countries, especially when the United States is so similar to most of these countries and regions economically and politically. A good deal of the answer to this question involves—again—the notion of what a family is and how people should best conceptualize the relationships among person, government, and church.

When President George W. Bush gave his victory speech the morning after the 2004 election, making way for his second term of office, he said that he stood for “faith and family.” These are code words, as many voters recognize. This code embraces a narrow definition of the family as “nuclear,” a sociological term connoting a heterosexual couple, legally married, with children and the father usually working for wages outside the home and the mother often staying home to raise kids and tend the household. It is said that Bush's victory hinged on his perceived support of traditional values, which supposedly differentiated him from his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. At the heart of these differences are people's views about women's roles in the family, abortion rights, and same-sex marriage and civil unions.

A book about family, then, must contend with the various overlapping and sometimes contradictory meanings of the term. Moreover, we address the idea of family as much as the empirical forms families take. Idealized notions of family often signify what people lack in their lives, or what families are not, as much as they describe the family arrangements people construct for themselves. The family, then, is both absent and present, something for which people yearn and something that people invent, even if their inventions defy conventional wisdom about what a family should look like.

By some accounts, fewer than one in four households is made up of a married couple living with their minor children, only a subgroup of which is composed of families where only the father is employed (Fields 2004). This sitcom-style family was idealized mainly by men who benefit from women who are subordinate and by the Victorians, who, during Queen Victoria's era in the late nineteenth century, wanted to persuade women and their children to retreat from factory work and instead take up residence in the family home. This was because industrial technologies could perform jobs formerly staffed by humans; men were allowed to keep their wages, while women were encouraged to find other work, albeit uncompensated work that would suit their supposed nature as helpmates and nurturers. Women would lose wages but in return receive deliverance from the din and dangers of the factory. They would also gain the “family wage,” supposedly paid out by the husband in return for getting his shirts ironed and receiving sexual favors and for, yes, being loved, cherished, and obeyed. Feminists contend that the family wage is a myth in that employers pay men wages blind to the number of their dependents. The Victorians set up the “nuclear family,”⁵ as sociologists term it, in order to establish a sexual division of labor that would supposedly prove beneficial to men, women, and children. The motivation for this was not to oppress women but to set up a sharing of roles, with women and men each doing what they supposedly did best. Women would perform important but uncompensated duties such as childrearing, cooking, and cleaning. Upper-class Victorian women would hire a nanny to care for their kids and would spend their time planning their families’ social lives.

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⁵ A family composed of a father, mother, and children still living at home; traditionally, the father was employed outside the home and the mother stayed home to raise the children and maintain the home.

Why do only a minority of Americans inhabit this sort of family? And what are the consequences of this fact? These are complicated and interrelated issues. Suffice it to say that the very fact that the male-headed nuclear family is increasingly a thing of the past makes a lot of people “deviants,” by which sociologists mean that they deviate from norms governing their behavior. Here the norms are to get married and have kids biologically, with the wife staying home to care for the family and household and the husband leaving in the morning with briefcase, laptop, or, in increasingly rare cases these days, hard hat and lunch pail. There are many people “doing” family differently or not doing it at all.

There are four ways in which people could be said to “do” family. They do not take the forms of family from a textbook but invent them in meeting the challenges in their daily lives. We contend that many people improvise their families, producing forms and styles that can be quite unconventional. People are flexible and dextrous in negotiating family life, requiring us to look beyond textbooks and marriage manuals to sample the diversity of their improvisations.

Marriage

You love your partner. You have been dating and perhaps even cohabiting for a while. You pool your money. Do you apply for a marriage license and vow to stay together until death? To get married in most American states you have to be heterosexual. In some states, only civil unions are acknowledged between gay and lesbian partners, with only one state, Massachusetts, currently allowing same-sex marriage. (Connecticut, Vermont, and California allow “legal unions” of gay people that are stronger than civil unions and similar to marriage except in name.) This is very different from Canada and Europe, where gay and lesbian marriage is increasingly common (Gardner 2003). So, if you are not straight in the United States, you are automatically a deviant because you cannot get married except in Massachusetts. Even if you are straight, you may not want to get married. Let's say that you have been married twice before and feel burned by the institution of marriage. No more wedding vows for you! But you still love your partner and want to have a relationship with her/him, perhaps even to move in together. Disavowing the married state automatically makes you a deviant from the norms of the nuclear family and possibly a sinner if you choose to cohabit without being married, “living in sin,” the old-fashioned term for cohabiting—pretending that you are married, living under one roof, having sex, sharing finances.

Patriarchy

It is deep-seated in Christianity that men should make the major decisions in the family, a political arrangement called patriarchy.⁶ From male authority in the family stems male authority in the larger political arena. Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz (1983) find that in married couples and in cohabiting straight couples and gay male couples, the highest earner (typically, the male) makes the decisions. Only in couples without any men—lesbian—is power shared nearly equally. Male rule is said to be biblical, and it has been a norm of the nuclear family. Only with 1960s feminism did women begin to question male rule in the family along with a host of other dubious family practices such as women having to stay home.

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⁶ Rule by men, either in the lar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Mapping Families in Fast Capitalism
• 2 Implosion I: The Work/Family Boundary
• 3 Implosion II: Accelerated Childhood
• 4 Home/School: Toward a Rote Culture
• 5 Class in Class: Capital, Human Capital, Cultural Capital
• 6 Children of Parents, Children of Democracy
• References
• Index
• About the Authors