The 'Irish' Family

Linda Connolly

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780367868239
• eBook ISBN: 9781135008147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

When situated in the wider European context, 'the Irish family' has undergone a process of profound transformation and rapid change in very recent decades. Recent data cites a significant increase in one parent households and a high non-marital birth rate for instance alongside the emergence of cohabitation, divorce, same sex families and reconstituted families. At the same time, the majority of children in Ireland still live in a two-parent family based on marriage and the divorce rate in Ireland is comparatively lower than other European countries. 21st century family life is, in reality, characterised by continuity and change in the Irish context.

This book seeks to understand, interpret and theorise family life in Ireland by providing a detailed analysis of historical change, demographic trends, fertility and reproduction, marriage, separation and divorce, sexualities, children and young people, class, gender, motherhood, intergenerational relations, grandparents, ethnicity, globalisation, technology and family practices. A comprehensive analysis of key developments and trends over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is provided.

1 Locating the Irish family

Towards a plurality of family forms?

Linda Connolly

Introduction

The central role of ‘the family’ in Irish history, culture and society has been a longstanding concern both in the interdisciplinary arena of Irish Studies, and in the social sciences internationally. Historians, demographers, anthropologists and sociologists have investigated a wide range of issues in relation to the family in Ireland over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as: the deeply embedded relationship that existed between family, kinship and community in rural Ireland (Aransberg and Kimball 1968 [1940]); poverty and class (Prunty 1998; Daly 1989); family, gender and women’s rights (Bourke 1993; Connolly 2003; Daly 2006); illegitimacy, reproduction and fertility (Farrell 2013); infanticide (Rattigan 2011); domestic violence (Steiner-Scott 1997); childhood and child welfare (Buckley 2013); religion (Inglis 1998); sexuality (Ferriter 2009); and the distinctive demographic patterns that emerged in relation to marriage, non-marriage, fertility and emigration in the post-Famine period (Daly 1999; Guinnane 1997; Clancy 1992; Kennedy 2001; Connell 1962).

The family has also occupied a core position in public debates about the ‘common good’ and national identity formation in Ireland since the foundation of the State. The family, for instance, has privileged mention and protection in the Irish Constitution of 1937. Under Article 41.1 the State promises to ‘protect the Family’ and recognizes the family as having ‘inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law’. Given the pivotal role of the family in the social structure and religious ethos of the State historically, it is not surprising that it is still at the centre of social and political debate in the public sphere. Various individuals and groups in Irish society frequently argue for the preservation of what they view as the ideal form of marriage and family. Conflicting interest groups such as the Catholic Church, the women’s movement, gay and lesbian movement, new right campaigns and institutes, and political actors continue to stimulate a vibrant traditional family values versus family diversity/libertarian discourse.

In the social sciences, more generally, ‘the family’ has also been a central issue. Sociologists, for instance, considered the family to be the core social institution in society and the main agent of socialization. In his early work, Giddens (1993: 390) defined a family as ‘a group of persons directly linked by kin connections, the adult members of which assume responsibility for rearing children’. Kinship ties are connections between individuals, established either through marriage, or through lines of descent that connect blood relatives (mothers, fathers, grandparents, etc). When two people marry they become kin (or next of kin) to one another.

Marriage was defined as a socially acknowledged and legally approved heterosexual sexual union between two adults (Giddens 1993). Marriage remains a major rite of passage in many societies and traditionally it has been marked by elaborate marriage ceremonies and ritual. The custom in Ireland that the bride’s father pays for the wedding and ‘gives her away’ is reflective of more elaborate formal exchanges of economic resources that took place in the past (a dowry system known as the ‘match’ was a widely practised form of arranged marriage in Ireland into the twentieth century). In patriarchal societies, this transaction typically represented the direct transfer of a bride from her family of origin to her family of procreation and formal entry into adulthood. A new set of community and kinship relationships is then created by marriage and reproduction renews the social group.

For much of the twentieth century, social theorists tended to define the basic concepts of family, kinship and marriage through the lens of the nuclear family. The middle decades of the twentieth century have been described as a golden age for marriage and the nuclear family in Europe and the developed world (Lunn et al. 2009: 12). More people were married and married at a younger age than at any other time in the modern era. According to Giddens (1993: 391), the nuclear family was defined as two adults living together in a household with their own or adopted children. In most societies, nuclear families were, however, embedded in a larger kinship network of some type: the extended family.

However, in recent decades, previously accepted definitions of family, kinship, marriage and reproduction through the lens of the nuclear family have been fundamentally challenged by the proliferation of more diverse expressions of family and ‘personal’ life in Western societies (Smart 2007). For example, in the case of divorce and re-marriage, complex new sets of kinship relationships can be created in ‘reconstituted’ or ‘blended’ families. Contemporary studies show that increasing numbers of children in the West now adapt to and live with step-parents who may, for instance, have previous children of their own, and post-divorce childhood has been coined an intrinsic feature of twenty-first-century families (Smart 2007). Likewise, recent decades have witnessed a greater acceptance of gay partnerships and same-sex families, evident in Ireland, for instance, in the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1993 and in the passing of the Civil Partnership and Obligations of Cohabitants Act 2010. New reproductive technologies, involving donor sperm and egg or surrogacy, for instance, are also fundamentally challenging the traditional relationship between family, biology and reproduction. Heterosexual marriage and biological reproduction no longer have a monopoly on family formation and increasing numbers of children are born outside marriage or live with non-biological step-parents. A search for new ideas and perspectives on twenty-first-century families has accordingly emerged.

This chapter will chart how sociologists historically have theorized the transition from the traditional to the modern to the postmodern family, and will consider how these ideas apply to the particularity of the Irish case. The question of whether or not the family is an institution in crisis will be explored. In addition, the analysis will draw on empirical data to analyse family trends in Ireland and locate them in a comparative-historical and comparative-European context. A detailed overview of the changing trends in marriage, divorce, cohabitation, reproduction, lone parenthood and gender in Ireland will be provided.

Conceptualizing ‘the family’

Social theorists have developed different theoretical interpretations of the changes occurring in family life, over time. During the 1960s, theories of industrial society enjoyed pre-eminence as a framework for sociological analysis (Giddens 1993). A specific type of interpretation of the family tended to prevail. Briefly, this implied that prior to industrialization the family was deeply embedded in a broad set of kinship relations – the extended family – and was the hub of economic production and community life (Goode 1963). The transition from an agricultural to industrial society, in which the family is no longer the fundamental unit of production, was considered to have dissolved the extended family and replaced it with a more compact and mobile family form (the nuclear family), which was more suited to the needs of industrial, urbanized societies. The family became a smaller and more specialized unit, with many of its previous functions increasingly performed by the State.

In the 1950s and 1960s Parsonian functionalism dominated the field. Functionalism understood the family as a universal social institution with fundamental functions. The significance of the family in the functionalist approach was related to the stabilizing tasks or functions it is said to perform in society, including bringing new members into society and socializing them according to the norms and values of that society. Family life was considered to play a key role in fitting children for existence in a complex society. Moreover, it also nurtures the labour force, provides for the physical needs of all its members on a shared basis and is a unit of consumption. The smaller, nuclear family is a more intense and specialized unit but, in the functionalist view, it remained the ideal focus of procreation and upbringing of children and a source of emotional support and satisfaction for its members. The male breadwinner model of family life was also considered an important feature of this paradigm and the sexual division of labour in the home and in the workplace was not questioned. For Gilding (2010: 758), modernization and industrialization had reduced the family to ‘ … two basic and irreducible functions: first, the primary socialization of children so that they can truly become members of the society into which they have been born; second, the stabilization of the adult personalities of the population of society (Parsons and Bales 1955: 17)’.

From the late 1960s on, conflict theorists, on the other hand, suggested that idealized, inaccurate views of the family informed functionalist interpretations of the family (Morgan 1996). According to feminist and Marxist theorists, functionalist theories of the family romanticized the past and concealed the real diversity of experience as well as conflict in family life. Conflict theorists also consider the family as central to the operation of society. However, rather than emphasizing the ways that kinship simply benefits or holds society together, conflict theorists investigated how the family divides society by perpetuating unequal power and social divisions. Marxist theorists asserted the primacy of the economic function of the family and its relation to capitalism to the exclusion of the stabilizing functions emphasized by functionalism. Engels (1972 [1884]), for instance, originally argued that the ‘modern’ family as a social group was, in effect, the direct result of the acquisition of private property. In other words, it was primarily a social construct (as opposed to a natural social grouping or biological necessity) created by the growth of male dominance and the desire of men to ensure that they could leave their property to male heirs. For Marx, marriage itself was a form of exclusive private property, evident in the fact that women and children historically were commonly legally owned by their husbands. The notion of women as chattel has woven itself into legal codes throughout history. In some Middle Eastern societies and Orthodox cultures, for instance, women are still considered chattel, having no legal existence outside their husbands, fathers, sons and brothers. In some contexts, chattel law is modified to include only sexual and reproductive rights as owned by husbands.

Parsonian functionalism was heavily criticized by conflict theorists for its universal and normative dimensions and for its disregard for power and con-flict (Gilding 2010: 759). For modern Marxists the most important issue remains the way in which the family acts as the primary vehicle for the reproduction of capitalist society and transmission of class. The family is also central to the transmission of gender as well as class inequality in socialist feminist thought. Feminist theorists from the 1960s on largely took up Engels’s theme of subordination, and explored the wide-ranging consequences of the fundamental inequalities between husbands and wives throughout history. Feminist theory, in general, stimulated a root and branch questioning of women’s role in all aspects of family life, and many of the changes in the family in recent decades have impacted on women in a particular way. For liberal feminists in the second half of the twentieth century, gender inequality stemmed from traditional differences in what men and women are expected to ‘do’ (conjugal role separation). Feminists argued, for instance, that because housework is unpaid labour and confined to women, it is undervalued in both social and economic terms (for instance it is disregarded in the calculation of gross domestic product, or GDP). Anne Oakley (1974: 138), in her early influential sociological study of housework and the housewife role in society, suggested:

The characteristic features of the housewife role in modern industrialised society are 1. its exclusive allocation to women, rather than to adults of both sexes 2. its association with economic dependence i.e. the dependent role of the woman in marriage 3. its status as non-work – or its opposition to ‘real’ economically productive work, and 4. its primacy to women, that is, its priority over other roles.

For radical feminists, writing from the 1960s on, the family was considered in an even more critical light as the central location of women’s oppression in society, with marriage invariably considered a form of domestic slavery. Radical feminist theory was also very influential in revealing domestic violence and what can be referred to as ‘the dark side of the family’. Functionalist analysis was heavily criticized for over-emphasizing the family as a haven from the dangers of the outside world and ignoring the potential dangers within it. In the past, the Catholic Church and the law in Ireland, for example, regarded domestic violence as a private matter to be dealt with within the family. Steiner-Scott (1997) has demonstrated the extent and prevalence of domestic violence in Ireland historically. During the 1970s, feminist research on violence discovered a seemingly ‘new’ problem, critiqued the authority structure of the family and challenged the assumption that the sanctity of the family must be preserved at all costs. Theoretically, feminism shifted the analysis of violence in the home from being based on isolated individuals (i.e. an individual who is violent is an exception and their behaviour can be explained by pathological reasons), to one based on the wider system of unequal power relations between men and women (i.e. patriarchy) in society and in the family (see McWilliams and McKiernan 1993). In recent decades, the emergence of childhood studies combined with the exposure of cases of child abuse in modern societies, both in families and institutions, has also led to the widespread analysis of abuses of power between children and adults.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the prevailing theories of family life became increasingly flexible, plural and open-ended. Use of the term ‘the family’ was called into question. As Gilding (2010: 759) points out in his extensive analysis of the field, ‘David Morgan (1996) deployed “family” as an adjective, not a noun, and framed his analysis in terms of “family practices”, defined as “sets of practices which deal in some way with ideas of parenthood, kinship and marriage and the expectations and obligations which are associated with these practices” (1996: 11)’. In order to capture social change and the emergence of diverse family forms, sociologists began to employ the concept of ‘families’ rather than ‘the family’. More recently, critical sociologists have also proposed even more open-ended conceptualization of the field, in terms of ‘personal life’, ‘intimacy’ and ‘relationships’ (Gilding 2010). Smart (2007) resisted conceptualizing the family as a social institution and understood it as a set of practices. As an alternative term to ‘the family’, the concept of per-sonal life incorporated ‘all sorts of families, all sorts of relationships and intimacies, diverse sexualities, friendships and acquaintanceships’ (ibid.: 188).

By the 1990s, postmodernism therefore began to influence the way family and intimacy was being theorized. As outlined in the Introduction to this book, prominent social theorists began to conceptualize the diversification of family life in European societies as symptomatic of detraditionalization. New forms of personal life and intimacy that were not reflective of established family forms (such as gay relationships, high rates of divorce, re-marriage, single parenthood, one-person households and cohabitation) were connected to greater fluidity, reflexivity and individualization in the life course. Giddens (1993) claimed that a particular form of intimacy, ‘the pure relationship’, is increasingly sought in personal life. For a couple, ‘the pure relationship’ involves opening out to each other, enjoying each other’s unique qualities and sustaining trust through mutual disclosure.

Giddens (1993) postulated that a transformation of intimacy in all personal relationships had particularly radical consequences for the gender order. Women in this perspective were afforded greater agency and equality in relation to their bodies, vis-à-vis contraception and sexual freedom. Lynn Jamieson (1999) and others, however, questioned the extent to which more relaxed social attitudes and greater democracy in personal relationships have been exaggerated, and instead have moved to reinsert gender inequality and class patterns, in partic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Locating the Irish family: towards a plurality of family forms?
• 2. Marriage, fertility and social class in twentieth-century Ireland
• 3. The family in Ireland in the new millennium
• 4. Family and the meaning of life in contemporary Ireland
• 5. A premature farewell to gender? Young people ‘doing boy/girl’
• 6. Non-sectarian mothering in Belfast: the emotional quality of normative change
• 7. ‘One of the best members of the family’: continuity and change in young children’s relationships with their grandparents
• 8. Children, cousins and clans: the role of extended family and kinship in the lives of children in returning Irish migrant families
• 9. ‘Going home’ to where the heart is: mixed international families in the Republic of Ireland
• 10. Staying connected: Irish lesbian and gay narratives of family
• 11. Untangling the wired family
• Index