Reinventing Couples

Tradition, Agency and Bricolage

Julia Carter, Simon Duncan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781137589606
• eBook ISBN: 9781137589613
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents a new approach to understanding contemporary personal life, taking account of how people build their lives through a bricolage of 'tradition' and 'modern'. The authors examine how tradition is used and adapted, invented and re-invented; how meaning can leak from past to present; the ways in which people's agencies differ as they make decisions; and the process of bricolage in making new arrangements. These themes are illustrated through a variety of case studies, ranging from personal life in the 1950s, young women and marriage, the rise of cohabitation, female name change, living apart together, and creating weddings. Centrally the authors emphasise the re-traditionalisation involved in de-traditionalisation and the connectedness involved in individualised processes of relationship change.

Reinventing Couples will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including sociology, social work and social policy.

© The Author(s) 2018

Julia Carter and Simon DuncanReinventing CouplesPalgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Lifehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58961-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Julia Carter¹ and Simon Duncan²

(1)

School of Psychology, Politics and Sociology, Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, UK

(2)

Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Bradford, Bradford, UK

End Abstract

Change and Tradition in Personal Life: A Case Study

The ideas in this book emerged from our own empirical research on contemporary personal life. Like many other researchers, we found a mismatch between what we actually found ‘on the ground’ and the leading conceptualisation of what we should have found, as provided by individualisation theories. In these accounts, tradition and traditional bonds and beliefs become increasingly enfeebled and irrelevant in modern societies, causing structuring social forms to atrophy. Expectations and understandings of ‘family’ are just one example, notoriously dismissed by Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim as a ‘zombie category’—still existing in some debased form but really dead (2002: 204). Such de-traditionalisation then leaves individuals to ‘decide for themselves’ how to conduct their personal lives in a ‘search for new ways of living’ according to Beck-Gernsheim in her book ‘Reinventing the Family’—indicatively subtitled ‘In search of new lifestyles’ (2002: xii). This conclusion rests on implicit assumptions about agency: in late modern societies individual agents discursively and reflexively create their own biographies just as in historical societies, people acted habitually according to tradition.

There is a glaring problem with individualisation theories. As Carol Smart puts it, they are ‘largely devoid of empirical support’ (2007: 20) and simply do not match with contemporary personal lives—nor, we might add, historical lives (Duncan 2011a). Theorists have confused what people might potentially do with what they usually do, a confusion buttressed by a romanticised, one-sided view of agency which overemphasises the exotic and neglects the unmarked majority (Brekhus 1998; Duncan and Smith 2006). But, despite this empirical mismatch, individualisation theories remain dominant as a means of framing research on families and personal lives, partly for lack of an alternative. It is perhaps individualisation theories that have fallen under the ‘zombie category’.

In this book, we work towards an alternative framing which can provide a more helpful account of the ways in which people build their personal lives. In contrast to individualisation theories, we stress the mixing of ‘tradition’ and ‘modern’. People use, adapt or even invent tradition as they improvise family practices in new or changing situations. This is a process of bricolage as people make do with what they have at hand (Duncan 2011b). Similarly, we emphasise the mixing of ‘the individual’ with ‘the social’. People make their decisions and choices in relation to others, sometimes as individuals, sometimes as collectives or institutions. Throughout, the nature of their agency varies in different circumstances. De-traditionalisation also involves re-traditionalisation, and individualisation involves relationality.

In this introduction, we introduce these themes by drawing from one particular case study interview from earlier research. This allows us to point to some of the fundamental concerns of this book: tradition, relationality, agency, and bricolage. It should be noted here that the voices represented in this book do not represent the UK’s full diversity of ethnicities. Sociology in general, and much of family studies in particular, have a problem with race- where whiteness and white families are still considered the norm and too often this is not called into question. Often this is due to methodological approaches which target ‘known’ groups, available participants or majority groups, all of which exclude those who are less visible, less accessible or in a minority. This book presents data from a number of different studies, none of which were explicitly focused on majority white populations but all of which, nonetheless, recruited samples with majority white participants. This includes the nationally representative surveys used in Chapters 4 and 6 on cohabitation and living apart together and the ‘elderly’ survey material used in Chapter 2, just as much as the small qualitative samples supporting the chapters on marriage, name change and weddings. Exceptionally, the qualitative interviews with cohabitants were supplemented by small purposive samples of cohabitants of African-Caribbean and Asian heritage, groups which displayed marked differences from the white ‘norm’. Although not always accounting for ethnic diversity, we feel that our arguments concerning tradition, agency and bricolage may be abstracted from particlar identity positions to explain wider social processes. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that theory built on the study of majority white groups and individuals will necessarily produce a biased account.

Christina

Christina¹ was interviewed in 1999 as part of a project concerned with how mothers combine paid work and motherhood (see Appendix 1). Aged 41, white and married, she had five dependent sons aged 2–12. Her major job was running the house, and caring for her children, her husband, and an ailing father. Timed around this caring work, she was also employed 25 hours a week in a poorly paid part-time job as a factory cleaner. This employment gave her some financial independence and she spent the small income it provided on her own car, holidays, children’s treats, and horse riding.

At first, acting as unpaid homemaker and carer combined with some part-time unskilled work appears as a rational response to Christina’s lack of human capital (Christina had only low-level school leaving qualifications and her employment experience was all in unskilled work). This role also fits the ‘traditional’ normative expectation that mothers, wives, and daughters should take on unpaid caring as required. Similarly, her husband worked full-time as a foreman painter and decorator, and worked away from home most weeks. He saw himself as the ‘breadwinner’, and while he undertook do-it-yourself (DIY) home improvements and enjoyed cooking as a ‘hobby’, took on little domestic work. Employed full-time at the birth of her first child, Christina had gradually relinquished identity and role as a worker. Her paid employment was now subordinate to a primary caring role. Established constraints of class and gender had certainly not disappeared for Christina.

But this was not the whole story. For Christina was not content with simply accepting this combination of low-level employment and unpaid care, and as the children got older her ambitions lay with job fulfilment and ‘career’:

I’m still deciding what to do with my life at this age…all I’ve done I’ve had babies and done menial jobs … ‘cos I’m quite a caring person and I feel like I could do summat useful and more than being a cleaner.

What was more, Christina was doing something about this. She had just started a course that would qualify her to be a childcare worker, and in the meantime she was planning to leave her cleaning job for a better position assisting in a nature reserve. In agentic terms, she had rejected ‘patiency’ (having things done to her) and was discursively and purposefully taking action to realise a project of the self.

However, Christina’s individualistic employment project did not exist in a social vacuum. In fact, her plans for self-improvement clashed with her own given understandings of proper motherhood and those of her husband and her neighbours. First and foremost, Christina took the view that ‘the mum should be with the kids,’ and that mothers provided the ‘ideal’ childcare. The childcare arrangements she had made with friends and an aunt (her own mother had died) were not just unsatisfactory for the children, but displaced her own emotional engagement with her children:

I couldn’t see t’point of having a child and then leaving him with somebody else …I felt like everything were pointless and I thought I’m having these babies and I’m going back to work and I don’t see ’em and seem like I’m missing out on things with me children.

The fact that a carer’s role also meant taking on nearly all domestic work ‘didn’t bother’ her. As for mothers who worked full-time, she just could not ‘see why they’ve had their kids… I can’t see why they want to go back to work when they’ve had a baby.’ In contrast mothers who give up work altogether to stay at home ‘are very brave and I think they’ve made the right decision’.

So after every child, at the end of each period of maternity leave, she told herself she would leave work to look after her children full-time. But instead she went straight back to work, at first full-time ‘but hated every minute, I didn’t like it….through all that time I thought I’m going to leave, I’m going to leave, I don’t like this, I couldn’t settle’. The only reason she had kept at least some employment was ‘just financial financial, financial, it were financial, yeah, yeah. I would [have left paid work] if finances had have been better yes I would have, I would have.’ In fact, she would reverse government policy to support what she saw as proper motherhood:

I think they encourage people to go back to work but - it would encourage mothers to stop at home if they paid’em to stay at home ’cos this were summat that were mentioned once at Government, if there’d been summat in in t’ law ye know that gave me £50 or £80 a week to stop and look after me kids.

So, on the one hand Christina wanted better paid and more fulfilling employment, but at the same time she experienced paid work as a cowardly retreat from proper behaviour as a mother, and as a risk to the fulfilment motherhood brings: ‘if I’d just been a bit more braver and I wish I’d have stayed at home with the kids.’

The salience of this view was buttressed by Christina’s husband, Richard, who strongly advocated a breadwinner/homemaker-carer arrangement, even to the extent of undermining her part-time job: ‘he sees [himself] as breadwinner, he says you leave your job, you don’t need to work, you stay at home and I’ll support yer.’ From Richard’s viewpoint, this was fair enough. As Christina relates:

after a bit of time unemployed and with not having a job I felt like I weren’t contributing and although - me husband always says “you are contributing because you’re bringing us family up and it’s what you wanted in t’ first place.”

Richard (who was interviewed separately) saw this gendered caring as natural:

To look after children, oh it’s gotta be mum hasn’t it, always has…I’ve always thought the mum should be with the kids, I’ve always thought that, it’s an old fashioned thing but that’s the way I’ve always been, the mum should be there for the kids.

Similarly, a wife’s domestic role was a historical fact:

It’s always more the wife, it always is, it’s always been through hundreds and thousands of years, it’s always been t’woman… You’ll sit down, you’ll get your tea made which is nice, you come home from work, even though she’s been at work, you let ‘em do it.

Indeed, in his own childhood:

Me dad did ‘nowt, nothing in t’house, nothing, nothing, all me dad did were go to work, come home, entertain us for a couple of hours then go to t’pub at night. As everybody did then… me mam did everything, yeah.

This gendered view was replicated by neighbours who, according to Christina, made fun of her for going out to work: ‘they’re not patting yer on t’ back, they’re taking t’ fun on yer - making fun on yer ’cos you work.’

All this was consistent with normative views in the local area. Christina and Richard lived in an ex-coal mining village near Barnsley in South Yorkshire, had both been brought up locally, and made their social lives there. This region is notorious as a type-case male-breadwinner/female-homemaker area both by repute and on an aggregate statistical level (Duncan and Smith 2002). In the interview sample, most male partners had been miners or, if younger, had expected to be so like their fathers and grandfathers. Interviewees’ mothers had been carers or at most part-time workers. The economic basis for these roles had weakened or even disintegrated as mining jobs disappeared, with fathers now in low wage unskilled or casual work and mothers thrown into a more active wage-earning role. Arthur was an example, coming from:

a mining family, all me parents have been miners and miners and miners over the years but obviously the pits have died and so has the mining community but other than that, we still find jobs and still work.

But the local social definition of proper gender roles still referred to this more settled past (it was disturbing that several male partners were said to be depressed or ill because of this disjuncture in their expected biographies).

Christina did not uncritically accept this tradition, whether expressed by neighbours or even her husband, because of the threat to what financial independence she did have:

My husband always, always wanted me to stop working, yeah. Ye know, this were always a bit of friction between me and Richard ’cos he’d always say we’ll cope and we’ll manage ye know but I were always, I’ve always had money so I were always scared of just relying on his wage …I’ve always had a job, from 19 I’ve always worked and I’ve always had me own money.

This ‘friction’ had led Christian to be economical with the truth. For Richard knew his wife was leaving the factory cleaning job, and thus believed she would be unemployed, leaving him as complete breadwinner. But Christina had not told him about the replacement job in the nature reserve: ‘Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah ’cos he thinks I’m leaving in October but I’m not.’ Christina’s critique of this tradition was only partial, however, limited to her appreciation of financial pressures; her view of proper motherhood—unemployed and at home with the children—remained dominant. Consequently, she would ideally have accepted a traditional homemaker–carer role: ‘but as I say, if things had been, if he’d have been in a better paid job, I could have packed it [employment] in.’

As we have seen, Christina understood emotional engagement with children as being a mum at home. She particularly liked caring for babies and infants and, now that her youngest had turned two years old, wistfully wanted another child: ‘just having children, every aspect of having children is enjoyable, yeah. Yeah, I want another one, yeah. H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Pragmatic Tradition: Personal Life in the 1950s
• 3. Choosing Tradition: Getting Married
• 4. Inventing Tradition: Cohabitation and Common Law Marriage
• 5. The Leakage of Meaning: Traditional Naming Practices
• 6. Differential Agency: Living Apart Together
• 7. Individualised Conformity: Creating a Wedding
• 8. Afterword: Extending Intimacy
• Backmatter