A Sociology of Family Life

Change and Diversity in Intimate Relations

Deborah Chambers, Pablo Gracia

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509541379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Family relations are undergoing dramatic changes globally and locally. At the same time, certain features of family life endure. This popular book, now in a fully updated second edition, presents a comprehensive assessment of recent research on 'family', parenting, childhood and interpersonal ties.

A Sociology of Family Life queries assumptions about a disintegration of 'the family' by revealing a remarkable persistence of commitment and reciprocity across cultures, within new as well as traditional family forms. Yet, while new kinds of intimate relationships such as 'friends as family' and LGBTQ+ intimacies become commonplace, such personal relationships can still be difficult to negotiate in the face of wider structural norms. With a focus on factors such as class, gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality, this new edition highlights inequalities that influence and curb families and personal life transnationally. Alongside substantial new material on cultural and digital transformations, the book features extensive updates on issues ranging from demography, migration, ageing and government policies to reproductive technologies, employment and care.

With a global focus, and blending theory with real-life examples, this insightful and engaging book will remain indispensable to students across the social sciences.

1
Traditional Approaches to the Family

This chapter outlines key approaches to family and kinship studies from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. Sociological accounts of family and personal relationships in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were characterized by anxieties about the decline of traditional family values. Still in evidence today, this perception of ‘family decline’ forms part of a broader set of concerns about the breakdown of community ties. Rising individualism and privatization are identified as being among the causes. During the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, it was argued that neighbours no longer supported or knew one another; families were more insular; traditional forms of respect and deference were weakening; and individuals were becoming more self-absorbed and materialistic. By the mid twentieth century, these fears of moral decline coincided with anxieties about the break-up of the nuclear family. It was feared that rising individualism would lead to an abandonment of marriage, particularly by women. Against this backdrop, two enduring but opposing views have steered debates about the family, namely: (1) a consensus approach that accents the role of families in creating social cohesion and supporting the social order; and (2) a conflict approach that explains how power relations within and outside the family structure societies.

This chapter introduces a series of themes that highlight these opposing views. The first theme concerns late nineteenth-century perspectives that aimed to prove or disprove the universality of a particular kind of family. Late nineteenth-century anthropological influences on early sociological debates in Europe and North America are outlined. These perspectives contrasted radically with the socialist study of the family developed by Frederick Engels, forming the second theme of this chapter. Engels associated women’s oppression with the rise of the patriarchal family and private property during a particular historic phase. He explained that women’s low status was directly related to production, reproduction and capitalism. The third theme is the notion of the ‘functional family’ which relates to early and mid-twentieth-century moral anxieties about a decline of family values. Most early twentieth-century theories about the family examined the effects of industrialization and urbanization on family structures. The academic endorsement of a ‘functional family’ is set against the backdrop of moral anxieties prompted by the transformation of the family from a producing to a consuming unit.

The fourth theme is the idea of the ‘companionate marriage’, which was introduced to deal with these moral anxieties. The idea that the family was moving from being an institution, involving extended kin, to a relationship of friendship between couples was a response to fears about the breakdown of traditional values. Conjugal friendship marriage was presented as an exclusive affiliation between couples, and perceived as emotionally and physically fulfilling for both partners.

The fifth theme concerns sociological studies that contradicted notions of moral decline and a weakening of family ties. The classic British urban community studies of kinship during the 1950s and early 1960s provided empirical research evidence that refuted sociological anxieties about family and community decline. The issues of race and ethnicity comprise the following theme. Functionalist approaches and dominant conservative views on the family during the 1950s and 1960s typically disregarded the distinctive histories, cultures and socio-economic inequalities that disadvantaged Black families and minority ethnic groups. The chapter’s final theme involves feminist debates of the 1970s and 1980s that identified and critiqued patriarchal assumptions made in earlier sociological studies. Feminist scholars exposed the ideological nature of gendered power relations and the structural constraints placed on women both in the family and in other areas of society, including the use of women as a reserve army of labour, gender-segregated employment, and low pay for women. Feminist approaches prefigured the rise of more recent queer theories, from the 1990s. These new social theories influenced contemporary sociological debates about gender relations and sexual identities by drawing attention to the fluidity and changing meanings of ‘family’ and personal relationships

Late nineteenth-century sociological perspectives

Many early sociological ideas about marriage, the family and kinship in the late nineteenth century were influenced by anthropological studies. During this period, anthropology was preoccupied with biological discourses of relatedness. The institution of marriage was traditionally viewed as biologically determined to address three needs: (1) procreation and the rearing of children; (2) the lengthy period of dependence of children on their parents; and (3) the need for prolonged parental care and training. Through biological relatedness, individuals recognized as kin were divided into those related by blood (consanguines) and those related by marriage (affines). As such, biological blood ties dominated the ordering of social relations in societies where procreation was a defining characteristic of relatedness (Beattie 1964). While contemporary studies of family and kinship now acknowledge that family relatedness is socially constructed (e.g. in adoption, same-sex unions, single-parent households, step-relations, donor-assisted conception), biological relatedness continues to shape ideas about the structuring of kin.

The social significance given to biological ‘blood ties’ as the defining features of ‘family’ can be illustrated in a variety of ways. Examples include DNA testing to prove biological parentage; the attempt made by adopted children to find their biological parents; and the current public fascination with family history. Television programmes and social media that follow adopted individuals who try to trace their ‘real mother’ show that genetic connection remains a paramount element of identity (Black et al. 2016; Stanworth 1987). These practices indicate the allure of discovering the ‘self’ through biological heritage. For example, DNA testing has reunited slave descendants of Afro-Caribbean origin among populations in Africa, and particularly Equatorial Guinea. Such attempts reveal the social, legal, and symbolic significance of blood relations (Taylor 2005). How this family connection through blood operates today in a complex context of new reproductive technologies is considered later in the book (see chapter 8).

Much anthropological work on kinship and marriage in the nineteenth century was concerned not only with biological relatedness but also with classifying kin relationships. Social scientists used these ties in order to validate contemporary western family structures ideologically as universal, to confirm their ‘naturalness’. Anthropologists documented a bewildering variety of marriage types across the world, including monogamy (having only one spouse), polygamy (having more than one wife or husband at a time) and polyandry (having more than one husband at a time); matriarchal (woman as ruler of the family) and patriarchal (man as ruler of the family) unions; households with matrilocal residence (move to the wife’s home) and patrilocal residence (move to the husband’s home). The aim of early sociological studies of the family was to navigate a path through these variations to create hypothetical constructions about ‘original’ or ‘prior’ forms of marriage. The aim was to prove that the acceptable western version of monogamous marriage is the final, correct and highest stage of social evolution.

Early biological and anthropological studies employed analogies with the animal kingdom by referring to the mating behaviour of higher primates. These analogies justified dominant western conceptions of the family in the nineteenth century (Saini 2017). Despite the lack of any representative examples, evolutionary schemes were devised from selected aspects of existing ‘simple societies’ to pinpoint and prove a natural earlier stage of marriage organization. For instance, the nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropologist Lewis Morgan constructed an evolutionary scheme in Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity in the Human Family (1870) in which he interpreted matriliny (descent through the female line) as preceding patriliny (descent through the male line) and monogamy as the final evolutionary stage. Morgan’s position was refuted by Edward Westermarck in his History of Human Marriage (1921), first published in 1891. He contested the hypothesis that primitive societies were promiscuous, believing that humans were originally monogamous.

For proof, Westermarck used a biological discourse influenced by the ideas of Charles Darwin. He relied on selected examples of monogamy both among anthropoid apes and among hunter-gatherer peoples, who were considered by social evolutionists as the most primitive societies. In this way, Westermarck argued that the nuclear family was prefigured among the anthropoids and was therefore the primary and universal unit from which contemporary society evolved. The child’s need for parental protection generates the need for a family as a unit for the continued existence of the species. The male remains with the female and child to protect them, and this is governed by instincts achieved through natural selection. These kinds of anthropological attempts at explaining kinship and marriage were no more than elaborate hypotheses. Yet they were accepted among academic and wider communities because biological determinism supported a particular ideology to identify and reaffirm a ‘proper’ kind of family.

By the early twentieth century, however, it became increasingly clear that bonds of family require social recognition, rather than simply relying on the factor of biological procreation. Anthropologists were finding that, especially in societies beyond the so-called ‘West’, kinship is defined by social as well as blood ties. Societies were being discovered in which the physiological role of the male in reproduction was not recognized. In some non-western societies, little or no significance was attached to the relationship between sexual union and the arrival of a baby nine months later. The husband regarded a child born to his wife as his own simply because she was his wife. In parts of Melanesia, for instance, it was found that the family to which a child belonged was not determined by the physiological act of birth but by the performance of some social act (Malinowski 1932). The social-cultural construction of kinship and meanings of feminine and masculine was further examined by anthropologist Margaret Mead in works such as Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). Drawing on this pioneering work, contemporary anthropologists have referred to the radically different role of fathers in nurturing and family involvement across two neighbouring tribes in East Tanzania: the Hadza people (hunter-gatherers, where men are highly involved in caring for children) and the Datoga people (skilled farmers, where men are socially expected to be warriors and to be kept outside the domestic sphere) (see Saini 2017).

American sociologists Ernest W. Burgess and Harvey J. Locke defined the modern family as nuclear in The Family: From Institution to Companionship (1945), describing it as a group of people united by marriage, blood or adoption. This family group was defined as a single household whose members interacted with one another in their respective social roles of husband and wife, mother and father, brother and sister, to create a common culture. Importantly, then, Burgess and Locke included not only blood ties but also the social family tie of adoption in their definition of the modern family. This social family tie was normatively underlined by the practical requirement that a man should publicly acknowledge himself to be a child’s ‘father’.

Engels: family, private property and the state

Many of the prominent political ideologies preceding the twentieth century failed to advance the cause of women. The idea that the position of women in society is an indicator of social progress emerged through the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. But this did not yet translate into equal rights for the sexes (Therborn 2004). Although science overtook religion as the established authority for advancing knowledge in the nineteenth century, gender inequality and women’s inferiority persisted in scientific discourse. The rationale for gender difference was now established by Nature, rather than God. With his colleague Karl Marx, Frederick Engels challenged this account by arguing that women’s oppression was merely treated as fixed and unchangeable. Engels explained religious or ‘natural’ accounts as flawed ideological rationalizations employed to support a system of exploitation. He argued that the family was an unnatural institution designed to ‘privatize’ wealth and human relationships.

Engels’ book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1972 [1884]) is a seminal work that traced the evolution of family organization from prehistory to the present. It comprised a historical approach to the family in relation to the issues of social class, female suppression and ownership of private property. His aim was to offer a social explanation for women’s oppression with regard to the rise of the patriarchal family and private property during a particular historic period. This explanation was quite daring for the time: it challenged the dominant view that women’s inferior status was God-ordained or founded on biological, physical, intellectual and moral inferiority. According to Engels, the traditional monogamous family household was a recent concept that supported capitalist, property-owning societies. He argued that the division of labour and commodity exchange between individuals emerged as social class distinctions at this last phase of social evolution, and that the repression of women then became clearly visible.

For Engels, the patriarchal nature of the current family system was one in which women were not only servants to men but, to all intents and purposes, prostitutes. He claimed that liberation from class and gender oppression was possible for all. Engels explained that, originally, unrestricted sexual intercourse prevented a sure way of determining parentage. Descent could only be traced by the female line, in compliance with matriarchal law. As mothers, women received respect and deference which led to complete rule by women (gynaecocracy). The shift to monogamy, in which a certain woman was reserved exclusively for one man, undermined the primeval religious law of sexual freedom. Engels claimed that property and inheritance through family ties prevent people from engaging in free, passionate relationships. In his view, it was only through socialism that ‘individual sex love’ could occur and a communist society could lead to communal living, equality, sexual freedom and the collapse of the state.

Feminist writers have criticized Engels for not giving sufficient weight to women’s issues. Although Engels distinguished between social production and reproduction, he subsumed reproduction under production by claiming that women’s liberation is dependent on economic liberation (Evans 2011). Engels’ work has also been criticized for using inaccurate anthropological sources. Nevertheless, his book represented a significant critique of the Victorian nuclear family and continues to reverberate as a daring critique of sexual inequality. By studying the connection between patriarchy and capitalism, he was able to address the question of sexual inequality and the family, both historically and politically. By exploring how social divisions arise through the family, Engels identified both production and reproduction as the material bases of society. This approach has been a key resource for subsequent sociologists in theorizing the intersection of class and gender. Engels made a significant contribution to feminism and the study of inequalities from a conflict-based approach. By contrast, the emergence of American sociological studies in the early twentieth century, addressed below, was concerned with explaining a systematic connection between the structures of capitalism and the composition of the family by using a consensus-based approach.

The twentieth-century functional family

Sociologists of the twentieth century continued to fo...