The Making and Breaking of the Australian Family

Michael Gilding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780044423485
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000248012
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Once everyone knew what the family was. It was something natural and without a history - mum, dad and the kids.

Divorce, women in the workforce, de facto relationships and the sexual liberation movements have fractured the old certainties. Nowadays there is more talk about the family than ever, even if no-one is quite sure what it is anymore.

The making and breaking of the Australian family looks at the family in history. It traces the shift from the household economy of the late nineteenth century, to the child-centred nuclear family of the mid-twentieth century, to the recent proliferation of households. The book argues that the so-called traditional family was a quite recent creation, and that its fragmentation is obscured by new redefinitions of the family.

The making and breaking of the Australian family addresses the changing experiences of childhood, parenting, home, neighbourhood, work, birth and sexuality. It examines the expansion of the market and the state, patterns of class mobilisation, the reconstruction of masculinity and femininity and the creative strategies of ordinary people in everyday life.

This is a lively and accessible book, which will prove a valuable reference for students of history, sociology, women's studies and Australian studies, and will generate wide discussion amongst people concerned with family policy, welfare and contemporary social issues.

1
Writing a history of the family

THE family has only recently become the focus of sustained historical inquiry. A number of models for research are now available, but the path is by no means straightforward. This chapter outlines the course taken in the writing of this history of the family; first, coming to grips with the concept of family, and second, defining the scope and methods of the study. In the process, the chapter introduces the main themes and overall structure of the book.

The concept of family

On first appearances, it seems odd that defining the family should be so difficult a task. After all, we all know what families are—mum, dad and the kids. Admittedly, it has become a little confusing in recent times. Sometimes there is mum and the kids; or dad and the kids; or mum and her new husband and the kids; or mum and her kids, and her boyfriend and his kids; or even ‘de factos’ without kids; but these are all variations on a theme. Tucked away there is something fundamental; the building block of society, as some people say.

The appeal of ‘commonsense’ definitions of the family is closely associated with a belief in biological determinism. The family is ‘natural’, and so are the roles of its various members. This view has underpinned several prominent accounts of the family: notably the functionalist sociology of Talcott Parsons, which dominated the field in the 1950s and 1960s.¹ More recently, the social historian Edward Shorter conceptualised ‘the making of the modern family’ as the triumph of sentiment over tradition. Employing the metaphor of the family adrift on high seas, Shorter argued that ‘it was the ship’s own crew—Mum, Dad, and the kids—who severed the cables by gleefully reaching down and sawing through them so that the solitary voyage could commence’.²

Certainly there are biological imperatives. All societies must find ways of meeting their material needs and reproducing themselves. Yet the ways in which they do so are highly variable. So too are patterns of relations between men and women on the one hand, and adults and children on the other. Take, for example, the oft-cited Nayar of south-west India, whose women took as many as twelve ‘lovers’ for sexual relations and reproductive purposes; or the Menangkebau of Sumatra, where brothers and sisters formed the residence group and husbands only visited for sexual purposes; or the Sambia of Papua New Guinea, where boys are separated from their mothers around the age of seven and enter into extensive homosexual experience until marriage as part of the process of achieving ‘maleness’.³ Parson’s sociology was insensitive to cross-cultural variation and the potential for change in the family.⁴

In relation to European societies, social historians have established that the nuclear family did not ‘sail’ through history as a discrete unit. Accounts of early modern Europe have noted in particular the pervasive influence of kinship and community, the transfer of children from poor to wealthy households, and the institution of wet-nursing.⁵ Shorter’s argument that the modern family represented the triumph of sentiment over tradition begs the question as to how tradition got the better of sentiment in the first place. More broadly, the focus on the nuclear family bestows on it a spurious identity, obscuring substantial differences in the past.

In any case, consider the complex diversity of circumstances even at the time when the nuclear family was most widespread in the mid-twentieth century: children born out of wedlock adopted by ‘respectable’ families; households including ageing parents and lodgers; barracks accommodating single immigrant workers; husbands who spent only intermittent periods with their wives on account of their work; men who married for appearances and visited homosexual beats; children who spent most of the year at boarding school; ‘broken families’, where women raised children on their own; and so on. Sociological research during the period ignored or obscured such circumstances, precisely because of conceptual limitations. The point is that mum, dad and the kids are not a pre-given unit, but a set of relations constructed in history.

In this respect, the origins of the word ‘family’ are revealing. The word entered the English language in the fourteenth century from the Latin words familia, ‘household’, and famulus, ‘servant’. Until the mid-seventeenth century, its usage was divided between notions of co-residence (members of a household not necessarily related by ties of blood or marriage), and kinship (persons related by blood or marriage but not necessarily living together). Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries these usages were amalgamated and the dominant meaning of family came to be a small kin group living in the same house.⁶

Even so, the dominant meaning of family was not the only meaning of family. The older usage of family as ‘household’ (including servants) survived in late nineteenth century Australia. In 1880 Margaret Lyon, the daughter of a Sydney small businessman, began her diary, ‘I must tell the names of our family’; there was Mama, Papa, Maggie aged 18, Johnny aged 12, Percy aged 10, Bertie aged 8, Lily aged 4, Elsie aged 2, ‘and Julia, the girl, or as she is generally called our Julia’.⁷ The other usage, as ‘kinfolk’, survives today as a subordinate sense of the word. On this account social scientists have invented a distinction between the nuclear family and the extended family, but the distinction is not usually observed in everyday language.

In the course of the twentieth century there have been ongoing disputes over the meaning of family in relation to various changing social practices; notably birth control, divorce, informal cohabitation and new reproductive technology. In 1904 a New South Wales royal commission described birth control as a threat to ‘the value of the family as the basis of social life’.⁸ By the 1950s social scientists described birth control as a feature of the Australian family, and regularly distinguished between large families and small families. At the same time they identified divorce as a new threat to the family, resulting in ‘broken families’.⁹ By the 1960s broken families had become ‘one-parent families’.¹⁰ In the 1980s the growth of informal cohabitation and ex-nuptial births led the Australian Bureau of Statistics to incorporate unmarried couples and ex-nuptial children in their definition of family.¹¹ At the same time new reproductive technology forced legal refinements of definition, with unprecedented evaluation of the relative significance of egg, sperm, womb and post-natal care. A small co-resident group of kin the family may well have been, yet the make-up of this group was still fluid. More generally, the nuclear unit is no more pre-given in language than in social life.

One response of historians to such problems has been to adopt broader definitions. For example, Lawrence Stone in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 defined the family as ‘those members of the same kin who live together under one roof’.¹² On another tack, Mark Poster defined the family as ‘the place where psychic structure is formed and where experience is characterised in the first instance by emotional patterns’.¹³ The problem with these definitions is again that they assume too much, imposing an illusory unity upon the past. Shifting meanings illustrate the point. Stone’s definition excluded servants, who were certainly understood as family members in past times. Poster’s definition, on the other hand, led him to define peasant communities as families, when they clearly were not understood as such. The bottom line is that the family is not a pre-given unit of any kind, nuclear or otherwise.

As the meaning of family has been problematised, some researchers have given up on the concept and reduced their focus to the household or, hedging their bets, the ‘family-household’. The Cambridge school of demographers, led by Peter Laslett, blazed the trail here by measuring household size in past times.¹⁴ Since then there has been a growing number of books organised round the concept of household. A recent Australian study on domestic production, for example, was entitled Households Work.¹⁵

There are several problems with this shift in focus. First, it preempts (as James Casey has pointed out) debate concerning significant categories for analysis, no less than the concept of family. Household membership says nothing in itself, given diverse arrangements for economic cooperation, sexual relations, sleeping and so on.¹⁶ This is true not only for the past but also the present. Take the example of domestic production: ‘households work’, yet as households become smaller a growing amount of unpaid caring work occurs between households. More specifically, women less often have ageing parents move in, and more often care for them in independent households with the help of car and telephone. Ironically the basis for this care is ‘family’ responsibility. Second, the shift in focus implicitly reduces family to household. The Cambridge school, for example, measured households but then proceeded to make generalisations concerning families. In other words, the focus upon household does not resolve problems of historical diversity and shifting meaning, but displaces them.

The family must be defined. If it cannot be defined in terms of a particular group of people or set of activities, then it follows that a more flexible definition is in order. This has been the case advanced by a growing body of writers, operating from a range of theoretical positions. Take, for example, the Marxist-feminist theorist Juliet Mitchell; the French historian in the Foucaultean school, Jacques Donzelot; and the English social historian James Casey, who drew heavily from Durkheim and Le Play. Mitchell in her pioneering study Woman’s Estate argued that any analysis of woman and the family needed to ‘uncoil this ideological concept of their permanence and of their unification into a monolithic whole’.¹⁷ Donzelot conceptualised the family not as a point of departure, as a manifest reality, but as a moving resultant, an uncertain form whose intelligibility can only come from studying the system of relations it maintains with the sociopolitical level’.¹⁸ Casey argued that the family was more readily understood if viewed as a flexible way of ordering social relationships, rather than in terms of objective criteria.¹⁹ In broad terms, these writers converge around issues of meaning and ideology. The unity of the family is conceptual rather than material.

While the family may be, in Casey’s words, ‘a creation of [people’s] minds and their culture’,²⁰ it is not just any creation. As countless writers have pointed out, the concept consistently addresses biological and household relations. The point is that it does not address these relations in a consistent way; nor do these relations themselves have a discrete unity through history. The concept, as Casey put it, ‘orders’ these relationships in a flexible way. Sometimes servants are family; sometimes they are not. Fathers are family when they live with their children; when they are sperm donors related by biology alone they are certainly not family. Mothers who gave up their children for adoption were not family thirty years ago; in the current climate of finding one’s ‘real’ family this has retrospectively changed.

The ordering is flexible, but not random. As Donzelot argued, the intelligibility of this ordering comes from studying the ‘sociopolitical level’. More to the point, the sociopolitical system necessarily addresses the social relationships which inform kinship and co-residence. In particular, it is concerned with patterns of obligation and dependence. The concept of family, then, represents a sociopolitical ordering of kinship and co-residence in order to affix relations of obligation and dependence.

Obligation and dependence can mean different things. Some groups—the young, old, sick and disabled—are necessarily dependent. Any society must settle upon some way of affixing responsibility for these groups. The concept of family designates responsibility, working over relations of kinship and co-residence. In the late nineteenth century, for example, the pioneers of adoption attacked institutions for destitute children on account of their ‘utter variance from the family system recognized by nature in the constitution of human society as the best fitted for the training of the young’.²¹ Similarly, new criminal codes for children in the early twentieth century were designed ‘to improve home surroundings and home conditions (as the primary cause of children lapsing into crime or vice)—without in the first instance removing the child from the family circle‘.²² More recently, government agencies have redefined family to include informal cohabitation and ex-nuptial births, thereby containing a potential blow-out of social security payments to unmarried mothers.

While some groups are necessarily dependent, others are forced into dependence. This is most obviously the case with women, whose dependence is an artefact of the market (or, in earlier societies, of law and custom). Here the concept of family constructs dependency and orders the consequences. In the early twentieth century, for example, the professional and political leaders of Australian society defined birth control as a threat to the family. By the same token, arbitration judges defined a reasonable wage for a man as a ‘family wage’, or the amount needed to support a wife and dependent children. As one New South Wales judge stated in 1905, it was his duty ‘if possible to arrange the business of the country so that every worker however humble, shall receive enough to enable him to lead a human life and marry and bring up a family’.²³ In the 1950s ‘working mothers’ were said to be a threat to the family. In recent times this view has fallen by the wayside. Even so, there are heavy pressures on women to put their ‘family’ before their job. (See any issue of Women’s Weekly or New Idea.)

Servants are a special case of this type of dependence. The inclusion of servants in definitions of the family was based upon the overlap of co-residence and dependence upon the paterfamilias, or head of the household. Here the concept of family designated the responsibilities of the head of the household and the service expected from the servant. As the market increasingly regulated this relation and removed servants from the household, servants were excluded from definitions of family. A 1940s treatise entitled Old Order Homes or New Order Houses: Some Reflections of a Middle-class Woman was symptomatic in this respect. The author, ‘Camina’, warned of the disturbing effect that servants could have on child development. ‘Camina’ recalled her own experience with servants:

One, when I was five years old once took me into her bed persuading me to ‘play babies’ and suck her nipples … Another apparently sanctimonious religious woman, was in reality a thief and terrified me with the old-fashioned ‘cupboard-bogey’ threats if I told my parents what I had seen … A third introduced me to some most revolting and terrifying sex notions when I was ten.²⁴

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Writing a history of the family
• 2 The making of childhood
• 3 The making of the nuclear family
• 4 The making of the housewife
• 5 The making of the small family
• 6 The remaking of motherhood
• 7 The making of the homosexual
• 8 The making and breaking of the Australian family
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index