The Family, Politics, and Social Theory (RLE Social Theory)

D.H.J. Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317651895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

This book explores and clarifies all the major issues and developments within 'family theorising'. It covers the extraordinary growth and variety of approaches to the family over the last decade, the most significant being the impact of feminism and the professional and state intervention into the family through marital and family therapy. The author focuses on the growth of family counselling, giving a detailed analysis of the Home Office publication, Marriage Matters. He looks at the rapid growth of historical studies of the family, European theoretical developments, the work of the Rapoports, the role of systems theorising, and phenomenological and critical approaches to the family. He shows the relevance of family theorising for contemporary debates about the state of marriage and the family, and argues for the centrality of 'family themes' within wider sociological debates.

Part I
ISSUES

If there has been something of a growth in the interest in the family in Britain in recent years this growth has little to do with developments within the academic discipline of sociology. A glance through the articles accepted for Sociology, the journal of the British Sociological Association, should underline this point. The stimulus to family studies, broadly conceived, would appear to come from two sources: the continuing development of feminist-inspired scholarship, both within and outside sociology, and the growth of more policy-orientated studies represented, most recently, by the work of the Study Commission on the Family. The more specific feminist or feminist-inspired studies will be considered in Chapter 10. In this first part, I shall concentrate on the more policy-orientated studies, focussing on one such intervention, the publication of Marriage Matters.

The apparently narrow focus in Part I is justified on two grounds. In the first place, I intend this part to serve as an extended case study of the issues which should be at the heart of family analysis: the intersections of the private and the public, the intimate and the political, the interpersonal and the structural. In the second place, I hope to show that theory is not some kind of rarified luxury at the opposite pole from the immediate and the practical, but that in all kinds of ways, directly and indirectly, it is built into the ways in which people attempt to confront everyday concerns and practical issues. I also hope to show, in the second part of this book, how theory can hold up these concerns and issues to critical scrutiny.

1Marriage Matters

In 1975 a Working Party was set up by the Home Office in consultation with the DHSS. Its terms of reference were:

To assemble information relating to marital problems and the provision of helping services as regards:

(a) the existing range of relevant activities and liaison between the individuals and bodies concerned;

(b) the use being made of marriage counselling;

(c) coordination of knowledge and treatment methods;

(d) training;

(e) research

and to produce a consultative document containing suggestions for any improvement in relation to these matters. (Working Party on Marriage Guidance, 1979, para. 1)

The report of this Working Party was produced in 1979 under the title Marriage Matters. A one-day conference on the report was held in London in April 1980, chaired by Judge Jean Graham Hall and addressed by Robert Morley of the Family Welfare Association, Lord McGregor and Sir George Young, Minister of State at the DHSS. A transcript of this conference was produced towards the end of 1980.

The Appendix to Marriage Matters lists twenty-two persons as members of the Working Party, six of whom are listed as serving at earlier stages. Of these twenty-two members, five (including the chairman and two secretaries at different times) were connected to the Home Office and the Probationary Service; five were connected with the Social Services Division of the DHSS; five were connected with various aspects of marital counselling and guidance (including the National Marriage Guidance Council and the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council); and four had some medical or psychoanalytical responsibilities. Men slightly outnumbered women on the Working Party as a whole. In the list of bodies that served as witnesses, there was a high representation from social work agencies or the social services and from medical bodies. Medical authorities dominated the list of independent witnesses. A similar spread of witnesses, but concentrated in the marriage guidance, medical and legal fields, can be gathered from the list of participants to the conference which also included several clergy, some academics and three members of the House of Lords.

Something of the flavour of the report can also be gained from the sources consulted and cited in its pages. There are several references to official reports such as the Finer Report on one-parent families and the Denning Report on procedure in Matrimonial Causes. There are, as might reasonably be expected, several references to reports or publications by the National Marriage Guidance Council (NMGC), and similar bodies and books published by or about the Tavistock Institute also stand out. In contrast there are relatively few works by sociologists cited: these include Gorer, a brief reference to Goldthorpe et al., the Rapoports, McGregor and Jacques.

To cite these sources is not to imply any conspiracy theory. The Working Party did not have the time or resources to commission a survey or study of its own and it can be assumed that existing networks were used and mobilised in order to seek out witnesses and source material. But it is important to note that this way of proceeding did have the effect of editing out some of the more discrepant views on marriage and divorce which might have been available. Such views would include not only those from members of the feminist movement but also, at the other extreme, fundamentalist religious views.

Marriage Matters is not, it must be stressed, a particularly conservative document, and certainly not a Conservative document. Indeed, the general tone of the report may be described as humane and liberal, concerned with the pain sometimes brought about by divorce and marital disharmony, but not concerned in any simple or direct way to support a traditional model of Christian marriage. This sense was certainly reinforced by attending the 1980 Conference: if feminist views appeared to be placed at the margin so too did the view of one clergyman who objected to the failure of the Working Party to consider the Christian sense of marriage (Marriage Matters, 1980, p. 38).

Much can be gained from a study of the style of the report, indicated in the following quotation:

We have come to the view, which we think is shared by many informed people in the educational and caring services, that the part which marital disharmony plays in the creation of social problems is a frequently neglected cause of personal and social distress. Similarly we consider that, in marital relationships, the potential for the development of the couple and their children is too often overlooked in the current climate. We hope that this document will enable these views to be more widely investigated. (Working Party, op. cit., para. 10)

This paragraph indicates the general sense of humane concern which informs the document as a whole; the references to ‘personal and social distress’ and to ‘potential for development’ indicate this. Yet we can also see a particular definition or understanding of marriage being presented here, one which emphasises interpersonal relationships and growth, a therapeutic, possibly medical model of marriage. Of particular significance is the opening sentence which, it might be imagined, constitutes standard official discourse. The ‘We’, while clearly referring to the collective membership of the committee, both indicates a consensus or a striving for consensus and, as becomes apparent, a membership of a wider community of ‘informed persons in the educational and caring services’. There is more than a hint here of the informed, objective professional as against the relatively uninformed or more subjective lay-person. It is other people’s pain, other people’s marriages and divorces we are concerned with, not our own experiences of love or betrayal or separation. This theme will be considered in more detail in a later chapter but it is something that must inevitably pervade much of the discussion around this document.

These considerations of style become more relevant when we examine some of the specific themes of the report. Here I shall outline some of the main themes leaving until later chapters a more detailed treatment.

(i) THE DEFINITION OF MARRIAGE

In the first place, marriage is defined in terms of cohabitation rather than in terms of a formally defined legal or religious status:

We decided to interpret the word ‘marital’ as including any cohabitating relationship between a man and a woman, and the evidence showed that almost all organisations offering a counselling service interpreted the word similarly. (Working Party, op. cit., para. 3)

This understanding is in line with more recent, although not uncontested, legal understandings (Polak, 1975; Samuels, 1976), yet whether it adequately represents the more complex patterns of meaning that exist elsewhere in society remains open to question. As we have seen, the report had to confine its sources of evidence within a relatively narrow professional range; it is likely that some sections of the population, while accepting, ‘cohabitation’ particularly as a temporary pre-marital status, might still operate with notions of ‘proper’ weddings and being ‘properly married’ (Leonard Barker, 1978; Leonard, 1980). The issue of definitions will be taken up again in Part II of this volume; here it is enough to note that the definition offered is in accordance with the general ‘liberal’ approach of the report as a whole.

This definition of marriage as ‘any cohabiting relationship between a man and woman’ clearly excludes homosexual couples from its field of reference. It also excludes any reference to relationships involving more than two individuals, patterns of complex marriage or communal arrangements, for example. While this is probably in accordance with general understandings of the word ‘marital’ (and it is likely that many members of these ‘alternative’ arrangements would also reject the label ‘marital’ and notions of conventional heterosexual coupledom (Plummer, 1978)), the definition does have an excluding effect. Since the concern of the report is with ‘relationships’ and since these interpersonal relationships are seen as a source of growth and maturity, the exclusion of possibilities other than the heterosexual couples does imply, if not state, some kind of hierarchy of human relationships. However liberal-minded the general tone of the report, it still continues to give a privileged place to heterosexual marriage.

This formal definition of marriage is in accordance with the report’s general understanding of the substantive content of marital relationships. The analysis in the report hinges on a set of oppositions, roughly ranked along some kind of time continuum from the past to the present. Thus marriage, in the view of the report, has shifted from being an institution to a relationship. Here the word ‘institution’ is used in a sense somewhat different from the general sociological understanding of the word as almost any more or less stable clustering of roles, behaviour and expectations. A more specialised formal understanding is adopted: an institution here is something which has all kinds of formal, legal or quasi-legal underpinnings and circumscriptions, chiefly from the Church and state. To treat marriage as an ‘institution’ implies that the main points of reference for what constitutes appropriate marital statuses and roles comes from outside and ‘above’; to call it a ‘relationship’ implies that the main points of reference come from within, from the parties themselves. That this variation of the move from ‘status’ to ‘contract’ has some paradoxical features (i.e. professionals stating what constitutes the ‘relationship’) is a point that will be taken up later.

This shift from institution to relationship, charted in the report, has important qualitative consequences. Marriage has become a ‘source of personal well-being and happiness’ (Working Party, 1979, para. 1.4). These shifting expectations for the marital relationship are related to rising affluence and standards of living; the very forces which contribute to these rising standards of living, however, also serve to give marriage an important set of new functions in terms of primary relationships:

In so far as marriage affords a supportive environment within which the emotional development and growth of the individual is fostered, it can contribute to adaption and help to compensate for the loss of a more communally defined identity, (ibid., para. 2.27)

The view of marriage that is being presented, therefore, is very much a view of marital counsellors; the key words are ‘growth’, ‘close’, ‘personal’. Sexuality plays a key part in this close interpersonal relationship.

There are one or two other aspects of this definition – in its substantive rather than formal aspect – which are worthy of comment. In the first place, the report appears to accept the argument that marriages, as they have moved from institution to relationship, have become more egalitarian and com-panionate. This is seen as a corollary of the fact that marriages are based upon the personal choice of the spouses and have increasing expectations in terms of personal growth. In the second place, it would appear that this model of marriage is increasingly widespread; the only important source of possible variation considered in the report is in terms of different ethnic groups. In the third place, the particular understanding of marriage adopted here also entails the recognition of the need for divorce and separation in some cases. It is part of the general liberal orientation of the authors of the report that divorce is seen as being necessarily related to their particular understanding of the changing nature of marriage. However, in spite of these rising divorce rates, marriage is seen as a statistically normal goal, part of the normal expectations of adolescent men and women (ibid., para. 2.22).

The report adopts the now familiar argument that rising divorce rates do not necessarily indicate a repudiation or essential weakening of the institution of marriage (Morgan, 1975, Ch. 3).

(ii) THE NATURE OF MARITAL PROBLEMS

The central concern of Marriage Matters is with marital disharmony and marriage breakdown. In common with several recent publications and in keeping with the general liberal tone of the report, the emphasis is not on the morality of divorce or separation or simply on the consequences of marital breakdown for the partners or children but more on the multiple ‘personal and social distress’ occasioned by such crises. The authors of the report operate with a notion of a benevolent state that has, over the years, come to be concerned with the well-being of its members. This concern is threatened on a ‘large scale’ by marital disharmony. The problem, therefore, is understood not so much in terms of divorce as such but in terms of the multiplicity of problems that accompany marital disharmony and divorce and the cost of all these individual problems added together. There are the problems of one-parent families, legal aid, the recognised and unrecognised costs in terms of calls upon medical services, and so on. This ‘massive level of domestic change’ presents a particular challenge to all the agencies that come into contact with marital problems and their consequences: not just marriage guidance counsellors but also GPs, social workers, the legal profession, the police, and so on. The business of con structing a social problem will be examined in more detail in a later chapter but it may be noted here that what is involved is a shift in focus: from seeing divorce (taking this to be the key, although not the sole, indication of marital disharmony) as a concern of a number of individuals and their children, to seeing it as some kind of nodal point connecting a whole set of diverse institutions and spheres of life. The ‘problem of divorce’, therefore, is not simply a problem of scale but also a problem in terms of the range of ramifications.

On the question of causation, the report tends to lack precision. To a large extent, as has already been indicated, the rising rate of divorce and marital disharmony can be seen as a necessary corollary of marriage’s move from institution to relationship. Put simply, an emphasis on freedom of choice in relation to whom one might marry also implies a freedom of choice in the matter of getting unmarried. There are also loose references to the turbulence of our times (ibid., para. 2.21 – a somewhat out of context reference to a work by Emery and Trist), while the advice columnists consulted by the Working Party gave emphasis to the unreal expectations that many parties bring to a marriage (ibid., para. 2.23). In general, divorce and marital disharmony seem to be accepted as facts of life, consequences of the times in which ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I ISSUES
• PART II THEMES
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index