Radical Challenges to the Family

From the Sixties to Same-Sex Marriage

Ashley Lavelle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472456199
• eBook ISBN: 9781317072003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Defending the nuclear family and extolling 'family values' have long been central features of politics in capitalist societies, in spite of radical left challenges from social, counter-cultural and gay rights movements. This book examines these challenges as they emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, re-appraising their relevance in the light of recent developments, including the spread of more diverse family forms and the rise of the same-sex marriage movement. Drawing on archival research in the US, UK and Australia, the author asks what the emergence of same-sex marriage movements and legislation mean for challenges to the nuclear family in the light of an original general hostility to marriage and family structures in the gay liberation movement, whilst considering the extent to which the nuclear family might be included in the list of social and economic institutions subject to criticism on the part of more recent anti-capitalist movements, such as Occupy. A detailed study of the extent to which the nuclear family remains susceptible to the radical critiques of the last century, Radical Challenges to the Family examines whether the original challenges shed light on ensuring social problems, including domestic violence, child abuse, homophobia, and growing marital dissatisfaction. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and politics with interests in gender and sexuality, the sociology of the family and feminist thought.

1 In the Blink of an Eye The Transitory Modern Family

DOI: 10.4324/9781315603445-2

Most contemporary discussions about aspects of family life skate over the novelty of the modern institution. A case in point is the emphasis some psychologists place on the importance of the parental communicative presence in a boy’s life as part of fostering healthy father–son relationships (Biddulph, cited in Morris 2014, 30). Similarly, with no attempt to provide historical context, commentators write with presumed authority on how parents can help their daughters safely navigate the murky waters of sex, drugs, alcohol, and eating disorders (Irwin, de Vries and Wilson 1998). Meanwhile, a recent ‘survival guide to tangling with teen brains’ warned mothers and fathers about what to expect from their pubescent upstarts: ‘Buckle up, it’s going to be a long and messy ride. Expect slammed doors, tears, tantrums and moments of handwringing despair … For parents and teens alike, the adolescent years can be a traumatic time. How to survive it is one of the great familial challenges’ (Stark 2014a, 24). These are assumed to be age-old challenges, with proffered tips believed to have eternal generalisability. What the feminist Juliet Mitchell (1990, xvii) called ‘the claustrophobic nuclear family’, huddled together behind walls and fences, is assumed to be the natural order of things. This is often as true for discussions in the popular press as it is for the sophisticated academic literature (e.g. Cheal 2002).

In contrast, many in the women’s and gay liberation movements ‘60s era sought to deliver a wakeup call from capitalist society’s amnesia by drawing attention to the modern family’s status as a late-comer. The leftist psychiatrist R.D. Laing suggested that, while families have existed for possibly 100,000 years, they were previously ‘very different from ours’ (Laing 1971, 85; emphasis in original). Shulamith Firestone in her second-wave classic The Dialectic of Sex, suggested that the nuclear family had a ‘short history’ that commenced in only the fourteenth century (Firestone 1971, 84). Similarly, one radical feminist magazine contrasted nuclear family methods with those that were followed in so-called primitive societies, where ‘the burden of work was shared by all: Production was communal, there was no private property and the whole community provided for the children’ ( Vashti’s Voice 1973, 2). The feminist demand for free childcare became necessary only in ‘an urban society where each small nuclear family lives in isolation from others, where the extended family has disappeared, and where many mothers must work’ (Lathom n.d., 12). Given the very limited history of present hierarchies, feminists were hopeful of other, more egalitarian, structures emerging in the (not too distant) future (Craik 1984, 2).

Few would doubt that much has changed since the 1960s and 1970s. But the radical counter-idea of the modern family as a recent experiment in human history – leaving open the possibility of something better being designed in the future – is a powerful one, which is worth exploring at greater length.

State of Nature?

Virtually all human beings are socialised to believe that their adopted way of life is ‘natural’ (Edgar and Ochiltree 1980, 5; Morphy 2006, 25). And so it is with the modern family, despite its presence on Earth for an infinitesimally small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of years that humans have wandered the planet. Yet, in western capitalist societies, the family unit is often presented as a timeless structure to which any resistance is futile.

One of the crudest examples of this remains Desmond Morris’s biologically reductionist The Naked Ape. First published in the late 1960s, it located the basis of the nuclear family, its strictly allocated sex roles, and monogamous nature in the need for Mother to remain at ‘home base’ (the future suburban bungalow) close-by the toddler while Father went off to hunt. Morris derided anthropologists who wasted time studying other peoples, with their ‘bizarre mating customs, strange kinship systems, or weird ritual procedures’. For what would be the point when these societies had ‘failed, [or] “gone wrong”’? (Morris 1969, 22, 38, 10).

Of course, Morris was not alone: as Knight comments, many ‘would-be Darwinian scientists recurrently mistook monogamy, paternal inheritance and other contemporary instantiations of Judeo-Christian morality for core features of human nature’ (Knight 2008, 74). Similarly, right-wing proponents of ‘family values’ have often flatly denied the modern family’s short lifespan. Mount, for example, claims that historians, Marxists, artists, intellectuals, Christians, and various rulers have tried to bury the family’s existence for nigh on two millennia. In fact, in relation to the family’s age, even if the estimate he provides of 2,500 years old is accurate – it is not – it is still akin to the blink of an eye in human history (Mount 1982, 6, 42). Like Mount, numerous other commentators have asserted the inevitability of the family, monogamy, and heterosexuality (e.g. Tucker 1993).

The nuclear family, as defined by Morgan, consists of ‘two adults of opposite sexes, living together in some socially recognized form of relationship and [with] children who are biologically or socially related to these adults’ (Morgan 1975, 8–9). Precisely because this represented an unforeseen and unprecedented development, Edgar and Ochiltree (1980, 5) employed the language of the late scientist David Attenborough to suggest that the nuclear family mother ship crashed to earth ‘at about one minute before midnight of the “life on earth year”. The middle-class traditional nuclear family, of Mum at home with two or three kids and Dad the breadwinner, barely precedes the midnight chimes’. Something similar can be said of the nuclear family’s various offshoots, including same-sex parent families, which also tend to be private, detached, and small spaces of domesticity that represent a turning point in human history. Up until around 15,000 years ago, all humans were hunter-gatherers who moved in bands or tribes bearing little resemblance to the modern family. While Redfield argues that in ‘primitive societies’ the ‘primary arrangements of personal status and role are those connected with that universally persistent kind of family anthropologists now call “nuclear”’, he goes on to say that ‘this primary kinship [extended] into many, possibly even all, of the other relationships in the community’ (Redfield 1968, 10).

It may well be that some form of ‘family’ has always existed (Gough 1971, 760). But the earliest humans would not have survived if individual nuclear families were left to produce their own food, take care of defence, and ensure the welfare of children and the elderly (Coontz 2005, 38–40). Indeed, with the rise of what he called the ‘conjugal family’, Durkheim had written of the way in ‘the old familial communism has been shaken apart to an extent that we have never before encountered. Until this type of family developed, communism had been the basis of all domestic societies, with the possible exception of the patriarchal family’ (Durkheim 1978, 231).

Historians may disagree about the reasons for the recent dominance of the family in its current small and isolated form. For explanations, this author looks to the impacts of capitalism, including its tendencies to break people up into progressively smaller units, the necessity of having a mobile squad of people who could gravitate to wherever work was available, and the need to nurture future labour power within a stable and disciplined environment (see further below). But the salient point is the modern family’s originality – a fact that frees people from the pressure to conform to something that is far from ‘natural’. While there are differences in the timing of developments across the western world, Shorter argues that up until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the family was much more integrated in the community by comparison with the hermetically sealed nuclear version that followed (Shorter 1975, 3). Fossier (1996) concentrates on the earlier period of 1000–1300 when in Europe ‘the family passed a point of no return: the nuclear family (conjugal family, household) crystallized, as an individual unit, from the clan, the lineage, the kindred’. But, if true, this hardly reaches much further back into humanity’s history. Even the historian Laslett, who argued that a small nuclear family preceded industrialisation in Britain, has speculated that the latter’s comparatively earlier development was attributable to her smaller family size (Laslett, cited in Humphries 2011, 52). In other words, it was somewhat exceptional. It also must be conceded by the likes of Laslett that his thesis could not apply to the much older hunter–gatherer societies. Furthermore, many of those who assert the continued presence of the nuclear family throughout history ignore the impacts of alienation and capitalism, which have dramatically transformed family life and interactions between members, independent of size considerations.

The evidence suggests that people have often lived by rules that collide heavily with those governing the flash in the pan that is today’s family. For example, Edgar and Ochiltree propose that, while childrearing has been carried out by myriad means since the dawn of humanity, it was not always a responsibility with which individual females were landed. A ‘father’ might be not a genetic male parent, but instead a woman or multiple individuals, and the child’s interaction with the biological mother might be minimal if senior representatives of the kinship group cared for her. The welfare of the little one would be of communal concern. Moreover, the child was a contributor to the group, unlike in capitalist society where her raising is a ‘cost’ to be haggled over by sharp-dressed lawyers in divorce proceedings (Edgar and Ochiltree 1980, 5–6).

There is a risk here of generalising too much. The emergence of the nuclear family was a complex process, unfolding in different ways in diverse locales. What is beyond doubt, though, is that the etymology of ‘family’ is brief, with the word having entered the English language only in the fourteenth century, stemming from the Latin words familia (‘household’) and famulus (‘servant’). According to Gilding, prior to the mid-seventeenth century the word denoted common household residence rather than necessarily biological relations, meaning that servants and others were sometimes part of the crew. Another element of its definition included kinship, referring to people connected by blood but not necessarily by common residence. Only between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries did these two meanings combine to refer to a small kinship-based group residing in the same dwelling. A further narrowing of the term occurred in the 1950s and 1960s when the family came to mean the nuclear model (Anderson, cited in Gilding 1997, 19). According to Guichard and Cuvillier (1996, 338), the ‘word Familie, denoting “wife and children” or “household”’, did not appear in the German language until the fourteenth century. Alternatively, Gies and Gies suggest that none of the European languages prior to the eighteenth century had a word for the mother-father-children group (Gies and Gies 1989, 4).

In relation to kinship, Morgan notes that it was regarded in anthropological literature as referring to relationships brought together by descent and birth. But it could also pertain to relationships devoid of such connections, and to ones that extend beyond the procreative nuclear family (Morgan 1975, 68–9). Hull, in her survey of the family and its evolution into its current form in western Europe, suggested that even as recently as a thousand years ago the typical group consisted of people who had either relatively distant blood connections (or kin), or none at all (kith), but who were nonetheless bound together for protection and the provision of mutual support (Hull 1981, 25).

In keeping with this definitional fluidity, the pre-capitalist family of the West tended by comparison to be ‘somewhat larger and certainly more complex’, containing possibly more than one set of parents and children, other relatives, servants and boarders, additional members of the community, and kids from a previous marriage. This was particularly the case with wealthier households (Shorter 1975, 23, 39). Size is therefore not the only consideration: also important are the composition of the household, the affiliations of its members, and its connections with the wider community.

Some have argued that there is evidence for a growth in extended families in the nineteenth century, particularly in the UK, where poor people banded together as a survival strategy (Ruggles, cited in Adams 2010, 500). Yet, overall, its shrunken state arguably does represent one defining feature of the modern family. Family households of the nobility could swell to 25 members (Ariès 1970, 391–2). Others put the figure as high as 200 for such gatherings (Mousnier and Flandrin, cited in Poster 1978, xi). Fossier notes that sources prior to 900–1000 reveal that some ‘[p]eople lived in groups of 30 to 50 in large huts, at least in northern Europe’ (Fossier 1996, 410–11). As Susan Squire writes of living arrangements in medieval Europe: ‘Sleeping naked en masse – servants, kids, elderly relatives, married couples, houseguests, and the occasional farm animal, all tumbling onto the same enormous mattress’ (Squire 2008, 163). In pre-modern Europe, it was not uncommon for all family members to bunk down in one room, in the same bed or in multiple beds (Shorter 1975, 40; Ariès 1970, 107, 394). In what today might be a worst nightmare for some western men, in Sicily in 1410 it was recorded that a father-in-law and son-in-law got on famously, to the extent that they not only ate, drank, and slept under the same roof, they also shared the same bed! (cited in Bresc 1996, 460).

By contrast today, when children grow up, move out, and start nuclear families of their own, the household often dwindles down to two lonely occupants – or even to one, in cases of divorce or separation. Writing of the American nuclear family, Talcott Parsons regarded its characteristic isolation, economic independence, and geographical separation from grandparents as ‘in strong contrast to that common in the historic structure of European society, where a much larger and more important element have inherited home, [a] source of economic support, and specific occupational status … from their fath...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Radical Challenges to the Family in a Contemporary Context
• 1 In the Blink of an Eye: The Transitory Modern Family
• 2 Here Comes the Bride: Marriage as a Historical Institution
• 3 In a World of its Own: The Strange Modern Family
• 4 The Family: Still a Historic Defeat for Women?
• 5 A Room with No View: The Family and Housewifery
• 6 ‘Little Children Are Sacred’: The Family’s Raison d’Etre?
• 7 A Tale of Two Halves? The Family, Monogamy, and Relationships under Capitalism
• 8 Subversion or Sleaze? Pornography, the Family, Monogamy, and Relationships
• 9 ‘Blood is Stronger than Bigotry’? The Family and Homosexual Oppression
• 10 Love and Other Disasters: The Family, Monogamy, and Relationships in the Eyes of LGBT People
• 11 Rainbow Wedding: The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage
• 12 The Great Indoors: Haven in a Heartless World, or, Enemy of Community?
• Conclusion: Beyond the Family
• Archival Collections Cited
• References
• Index