The Anti-Social Family

Mary McIntosh, Michèle Barrett

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781781687598
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781687611
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

The stereotypical nuclear family is in the minority of households, yet remains a powerful ideology. This classic of socialist feminism charts how the family reinforces conditions of inequality, and asks: Why does the family enjoy such popular support, including by feminists and the left? Despite its many problems, The Anti-social Family answers, the family meets real needs. These needs must be taken seriously, and alter-native ways to meet them developed, giving people more choices and collectively taking on the work and responsibilities currently privatised within the family.

III
Contemporary Social Analysis

1. Deconstructing the Family

It is important to note an ambiguity in our expression ‘the anti-social family’. Do we suggest that the family, recognizable in its different forms, is an essentially anti-social institution, or that this particular type of family is anti-social? In one sense there is a ‘correct’ answer to this question: we must refer to a particular, historically and socially specific, form of family since no general or essential category can be derived analytically from the many and varied arrangements commonly lumped together as the family. This is not a particularly original or revolutionary insight, but is widely accepted among historians and sociologists working on these questions. Michael Anderson, for instance, writes in the introduction to his beginner’s guide to family history that ‘the one unambiguous fact which has emerged in the last twenty years is that there can be no simple history of the Western family since the sixteenth century because there is not, nor ever has there been, a single family system. The West has always been characterized by diversity of family forms, by diversity of family functions and by diversity in attitudes to family relationships not only over time but at any one point in time. There is, except at the most trivial level, no Western family type’.¹ Anderson is of course right, but his statement is one that writers on the family usually find difficult to put into practice in the way they conceptualize and present their material and interpretations. His own book, presumably, would have been more accurately entitled Approaches to the Histories of Western Family Types 1500–1914 but such formulations are clumsily pedantic in tone and used infrequently.

Olivia Harris sees the problem as arising from the broader ideological significance of ‘the family’ to our culture and consciousness. She writes: ‘Why then, given all we know about the variation in domestic arrangements, is it so common to find the domestic domain treated as a universal, or at least very widespread institution? Even those who recognize that the coresident nuclear family is a historically specific idea will in the next breath talk of ‘the’ family, ‘the’ household in a way that surreptitiously reintroduces an assumption of universalism. Working as an anthropologist I have often noticed myself perform this same slippage and have wondered why it comes so easily. One explanation is that the image of the household as a separate, private sphere is so powerful in contemporary capitalist organization that we extend it to cover other radically different structures, using our own categories of thought to interpret different realities.’² When we look at ‘the family’ in detail we see that the naturalistic unit so widely referred to comprises many distinct elements, all of which may vary, such as kinship, marriage, sexuality, household size and organization, and so forth. Furthermore, the relationships between the sphere designated domestic and that seen as ‘public’ also vary from society to society.

Consideration of the social significance of family organization has been an important focus in sociology and anthropology, a central political concern of feminism, a recurring preoccupation in Marxism, and has generated a productive sub-field within historical research and analysis. These different standpoints understandably pose questions of varying kinds, and it is not to be expected that the answers can readily be compared systematically. Yet this alone does not explain the contradictions, disagreements and confusions that strike the reader of these various treatments of ‘family and society’. On virtually every fundamental point of fact, interpretation and analysis there is a complete lack of consensus. Each writer demonstrates an experiential certainty of the object under the microscope – the family – but the reader is left with the impression, from accumulated accounts, that they are simply not talking about the same thing.

To take an example within a specific perspective, that of family history as an academic discipline, we find that Anderson’s position, quoted at the beginning of this chaper, is entirely denied by Peter Laslett. Far from endorsing the view that no single family form is characteristic of the West, Laslett maintains that, pending evidence to the contrary, we should assume that the nuclear form of the family prevails. He argues, on the basis of historical evidence that has been much discussed since the publication of his work, that departures from this family form are merely the ‘fortuitous outcomes’ of localized demographic, economic or personal factors. In his insistence that the extended family is no more than a sociological myth, Laslett puts forward the proposition that ‘the present state of evidence forces us to assume that the family’s organization was always and invariably nuclear, unless the contrary can be proven’.³

Anderson and Laslett are the most influential representatives of family history in Britain and it is for this reason that we draw attention to this basic difference as puzzling to the non-specialist reader. How can it be that one authority says there is no ‘family type’ of Western Europe while the other believes the evidence demonstrates incontrovertibly that such a generic form does exist?

In general terms, some of the difficulties in comparing different accounts of the family arise from the wide range of current meanings of the term. It is instructive to look at those specified in the OED, since the choice listed there makes for considerable variation and points to a need for rigorous specification of what is at stake. Among the major meanings for the term – disregarding the obsolete ones that no doubt still colour usage – are:

1. The body of persons who live in one house or under one head, including parents, children, servants, etc.

2. The group of persons consisting of the parents and their children, whether actually living together or not; in a wider sense, the unity formed by those who are nearly connected by blood or affinity.

3. Those descended or claiming descent from a common ancestor; a house, kindred, lineage.

The adjective ‘familiar’ is listed as having the following meanings: pertaining to one’s family or household, private, domestic, friendly, intimate, domesticated, well known, ordinary, usual, homely, plain, easily understood, unceremonious.⁴

In these definitions we see the fundamental ambiguity of the term ‘family’: does it refer to the members of a residential household or to people connected by ties of marriage and kinship? The French historian Jean-Louis Flandrin has argued that these two meanings were relatively separate in the past and that it was only in the nineteenth century that they became conflated, with the modern meaning of ‘family’ as co-residing close kin emerging as the dominant one.⁵ There is obvious evidence, however, that this dominant meaning has not entirely carried the day in that the term ‘family’ still carries the connotations of the earlier different meanings. From the definition of family as household we have – leaving aside the rather archaic inclusion of servants – the idea that the family is the locus of all that is domestic, private, intimate, well known and unceremonious. From the definition of family as based on marriage and kinship we have a belief that its meaning transcends specific domestic arrangements and provides a basis for wider genealogical identification, patterns of inheritance, and the rights and obligations associated with consanguinity. It is, perhaps, not surprising that a term whose connotations have so much resonance should have the symbolic significance that it does. Criticism of the family can be perceived simultaneously as criticism of both day-to-day living arrangements and of wider patterns of kinship and their meaning.

The difficulty of placing any particular usage of the term family is not a merely technical or academic one. It underlies the many contradictions in analyses of household, sexuality and kinship, and is the root of the apparently inexplicable failure to develop a systematic understanding of the history of these arrangements. Confusing, as these various definitions do, the empirical analysis of household organization with ideological, political, moral and religious dimensions of sexuality and kinship, has led to serious problems of interpretation. These difficulties are not simply analytic, however, since the analyses themselves are locked in political positions related to the desirability of the various possible arrangements. The definition of ‘family’ is in itself a politically contested one and the vehemence with which academic and historical points of view are argued bears tribute to this fact. At present, the debate is particularly explicit about the political significance of defining specific arrangements as ‘family’, but these political dimensions colour discussion and interpretation at all levels. In a very precise sense ‘the family’ is an ideological construct and when we consider debates on ‘its place in society’, ‘its historical development’ and ‘its relationship to capitalism’ we have to look at the extent to which the analyses are themselves constituted in political and ideological terms. This we shall attempt to do by looking at two propositions, both the subject of continual debate but both commanding considerable popular and academic credence.

(i) ‘The nuclear family is suited to the functional requirements of the capitalist mode of production.’

This proposition can be expressed in differing vocabularies; in sociology, for instance, it always used to take the form of ‘a functional fit between the nuclear family and industrial society’. It is a shorthand statement that covers a number of separate arguments contrasting the family in capitalism with its supposed predecessor. The main points of the argument can be sketched out as follows:–

Capitalism needs the family to reproduce biologically the working class as labourers for capitalist production; it needs these labourers to be reproduced into the divisions of class. Whereas under feudal relations of production, the household was a unit of production and consumption, in capitalism the family is principally a unit of consumption for goods produced outside the home. Feudal society could support an extended family structure, since the majority of peasants were tied to the land, but the demand for wage labour in capitalism requires a mobile population of small families. Many features of the family in capitalism relate to this transformation. The separation of home from work led to the identification of women with childbearing and childrearing; to the development of the home as a privatized and personal realm, distinct from the public world of social production; to the assumption that women (and children) would form a secondary, or reserve, labour force rather than a primary one; to the notion that this privatized family would in the main be supported by a breadwinner’s wage. Over time this family form became adept at the task of socializing children into appropriate expectations of class (and gender) and has taken on a conservative role in the transmission of capitalist ideology. The split between the public world of work and the private life at home provides an integrated mechanism for reducing the worker’s alienation and compensating for the cash-nexus character of capitalist society.

This series of points, though obviously a simplified statement of some complex arguments, represents a train of thought that has achieved considerable consensus. Indeed many of the elements are regularly put forward as accepted truth, or simply assumed prior to discussion. It would be possible to analyse the points one by one and demonstrate contradictory evidence or theoretical weaknesses in them all. Such an exhaustive exercise is beyond our present scope, but we do want to take up some of the most interesting problems for discussion.

In the first place it is probably not widely appreciated that the shift from the extended to the nuclear family, so confidently mentioned in everything we read, is a phenomenon for which little decisive empirical evidence can be found. Peter Laslett maintains that the family in England prior to industrialization always was nuclear, with a mean household size of 4.75 remaining constant from the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. Indeed he regards the notion of the extended family as an ideology, existing in the minds of social scientists rather than in fact, representing an uncritical reading of the ignorant sociologist Frederick Le Play and some obscure desire to evoke a ‘world we have lost’.⁶ On the other hand we have the equally vehemently stated findings of the classic study Family and Kinship in East London, whose authors found – much to their surprise – that the extended family was alive and well and living in Bethnal Green in the 1950s.⁷ Young and Wilmott’s findings challenged the assumption of the nuclear family by describing a com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• I: A Question of Values
• II: The Anti-social Family
• III: Contemporary Social Analysis
• IV: Strategies for Change
• Postscript to Second Edition