Read Chapters 1 and 2. In 2 – 3 pages, summarize the key terms and concepts that will form the foundation for understanding the material in this course. It is best to start with an outline and then craft the paper in a cohesive and flowing manner as a short essay. Use shifts in major concepts to separate out at paragraphs and do not forget to use transition sentences from one paragraph to the next. Write all papers in Times New Roman, 12 point font, APA style and post in a . or x word document.
A Sociology of the Family
Americans have a long-standing interest in genealogy—the study of ancestry and family history—looking back through the generations for a feeling of connection to a larger family tree. They may search for links to early colonial settlers or immigrants, try to unearth the painful past of slavery among their ancestors, or maybe gain a piece of a long-lost family fortune. Traditionally, this involved research into family archives and public libraries, but recently such sleuths are using genetic tests to trace their family trees. Even when the link is literally microscopic, it can establish family ties across formidable social barriers. That was the case for Vy Higginsen, a Black woman who runs a Harlem school for gospel singers, and Marion West, a White cattle rancher from Missouri. The two discovered through DNA testing that they shared a distant common ancestor and celebrated their discovery at a reunion in Harlem. West, whose grandfather fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, addressed his newfound Black family members, saying, “Dear God, thank you for this beautiful night and this great family we got here” (Kilgannon 2007:E3). The promise of a genetic connection is also how a 63-year-old woman named Derrell Teat ended up following a suspected descendant of her great-great-great-grandfather’s brother to a local McDonald’s, hoping to secure a piece of castaway DNA after he refused to give her a sample voluntarily. “I was going to take his coffee cup out of the garbage can,” Teat said. “I was willing to do whatever it took” (Harmon 2007:A1). In both cases, the family connection was symbolic; the connection West, Higginsen, and Teat shared was meaningful to them because they believed that it was. genealogy The study of ancestry and family history. 4 Chapter 1: A Sociology of the Family To see how far you can take this symbolic form of family, consider the variety of virtual family members: • People who have received transplanted organs from dying patients are increasingly becoming involved in the lives of their donors’ families. For example, when Jeni Stepien married Paul Maenner, her father wasn’t available to walk her down the aisle, because he had been murdered 10 years earlier. But the man who received her father’s transplanted heart was there to do the honor. Arthur Thomas, whom the Stepien family had never met before the transplant, carried “a physical piece of my father” down the aisle with her, Stepien said—his new heart. And the wedding photographer snapped a picture of her placing her hand on his chest during the ceremony (Rogers 2016). • For homebound elderly people, or those living in institutions, a company called GeriJoy sells a virtual “caregiving companion” service, in which a talking pet appears on an iPad app, interacting with its companion 24/7 under the direction of remote staff (who may be on another continent). The companion asks questions about relatives and flips through old family photos. And because the GeriJoy looks and speaks the same way even when it’s operated by different staff members, clients can develop a personal relationship with it over time. • Of course, in a country where more households have a dog (44 percent) than have children (31 percent), animals are an important part of family life, and they are often treated as family members (U.S. Census Bureau 2015a, Table H2; Humane Society 2016). On the Internet, for example, Americans have posted thousands of photographs showing off their “grandpuppies,” referring not to the offspring of their dogs but to the dogs of their human children. These examples of the many ways people establish family connections or develop relations that mimic families help illustrate the commonplace reality that our families are what we think they are. Defining Families We usually know what we mean—and whom we mean—when we use the word family. The clearest family connections are biological, as between parents and their children. Legal recognition binds people into families in the case of marriage or adoption. And emotional connections often rise to the level of family as well, as when people use the term “auntie” to refer to family friends who are not related by blood or marriage. In the simplest definition, then, families are groups of related people, bound by connections that are biological, legal, or emotional. As we will see, however, not everyone agrees about which biological, legal, and emotional connections create families.
Some family reunions are big enough to fill a city park pavilion, and few of those people know how everyone is related. But that is not the universal modern experience. For every sprawling family that includes hundreds of living relatives—distant cousins, stepfamilies, and in-laws—there are many others living as insular units of only a few people, either by choice or as a result of family dissolution, death, or isolation. Out of 242 million adults in the United States, 53 million live alone or only with people to whom they are not related (U.S. Census Bureau 2015a: Tables A1 & H2). Usually, the label family signals an expectation of care or commitment, which is partly how we know who counts as a member of the family. That’s why some people refer informally to a cherished babysitter as “part of the family.” Family relationships are the basis for a wide range of social obligations, both formal and informal. For example, an illness or death in the family is usually accepted as an excuse for missing work or class (with no proof of a blood relationship required). People are expected to sacrifice their personal time, energy, and money for the well-being of their family members. That means waking up at night for a crying baby and spending your own money to send your kids to college—which is why college financial aid is affected by how rich or poor a student’s parents are (Goldrick-Rab 2016). But caring is also the law, and failing to care for a family member—for example, by abandoning a child—may be a criminal offense. That differs from caring for members of society at large, a function that in the United States is mostly delegated to government and religious or charitable organizations. If family relations imply caring, they also carry with them lines of authority. Challenging such authority can have unpleasant or even dangerous consequences. In the United States, many parents (or other caregivers) use moderate physical force against their children for discipline, and this is usually tolerated as a reasonable exercise of family authority; almost half of parents say they at least sometimes spank their children (Pew Research Center 2015a). Parents don’t apply for a permit to spank their children; their discipline is informally approved Some people have families large enough to have reunions in city parks, while others live alone. Almost a quarter of American adults live alone or with people to whom they are not related. 6 Chapter 1: A Sociology of the Family based on common cultural understandings of family boundaries and relationships. Nonfamily authorities such as the police or social welfare agencies can also discipline children but only with legal permission, and generally not with violence (an exception is corporal punishment in some schools, where teachers and administrators are seen as extensions of parental authority). Thus, family authority is recognized both informally by common practice and formally by the law. Biological or not biological, formal or informal—clearly, we don’t all agree on a single definition of families. And rather than insist on conformity on the issue, I find it helpful to think of several types of definition: the personal family, the legal family, and the family as an institutional arena. Each of these conceptions is useful for different circumstances, and together they identify the subject matter of this book—the sociological approach to families. Sociology is an academic discipline that studies the nature and development of human society, in our case specifically the family. Often, that means looking at the same phenomenon from different angles, as we do with defining families. The Personal Family Any attempt to create a single definition of family from all the different ways people use the term runs the risk of being overly vague. For that reason, I define the personal family simply as the people to whom we feel related and who we expect to define us as members of their family as well. By this definition, a group of people who mutually define themselves as a family are a family, based on their own understanding of the concept related. Whom people choose to include in these groups changes from time to time and differs from place to place. Thus, over time it has gradually become acceptable to consider stepchildren and stepparents as bona fide members of the same family (see the discussion of blended families in Chapter 10). Because definitions of personal families follow common patterns, they are partly a product of the larger culture in which we live. In China, for example, some girls are informally adopted by families that do not have daughters and that may be prevented from having additional children under the country’s restrictive fertility laws, and this is culturally consistent with ancient practices of informal adoption in that country. So even if our family choices seem highly personal, they reflect the interaction of our own decisions with all the influences we face and the practices of those around us. As you can see, this definition is quite vague, but a more specific definition inevitably would exclude families as many people see them. In fact, most of us learn to recognize members of our own family before we are old enough to understand how the term family is defined. This personal family as we experience it in our daily lives sets the boundaries for our most intimate interactions from an early age. According to child psychologists, understanding the difference between family members and others is an important part of our development in early personal family The people to whom we feel related and who we expect to define us as members of their family as well. Defining Families 7 childhood. Young children who cannot “exhibit appropriate selective attachments” or who show “excessive familiarity with relative strangers” may be diagnosed with a psychological disorder that is usually associated with inadequate emotional or physical care (American Psychiatric Association 2000). Lack of family definition also causes many of the tensions in newly formed stepfamilies, which have difficulty establishing clear boundaries around units within the family or between the family and the outside world (Braithwaite et al. 2001). In short, defining our families is an important step in the construction of our personal identities, and the personal family is the definition we apply in that process. The Legal Family Most people don’t judge the definitions others apply to their own families. We don’t ask for proof that a student was emotionally close to her deceased grandfather before giving her permission to miss class for the funeral—that relationship is assumed. Increasingly, however, as families have become more diverse in their structure and as public rights and obligations have been tied to family relationships, the government’s definition of families has grown more complicated. It also has taken on greater social and political importance. There is no universal legal definition, but the legal family is generally defined as a group of individuals related by birth, marriage, or adoption. This appears to be a straightforward definition, but in law the meaning of almost every word may be contested and subject to change. The most contentious term in this definition is marriage, which carries with it many rights and responsibilities overseen by the government. In fact, most debates over the definition of family in recent years have had to do with what marriage is (Powell et al. 2010). In 1996, when it first appeared that some states might start granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples, the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly passed, and President Bill Clinton signed, the Defense of Marriage Act. The law specified that the federal government would not recognize same-sex married couples as “married,” even if their marriages were legally recognized by their home states. However, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Windsor (2013) that the federal government must recognize all marriages that are legally valid in the states, granting same-sex couples access to all federal benefits, from health coverage and Social Security pensions to the right to be buried in veterans’ cemeteries with their spouses. Then, in the 2015 decision known as Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court went further, finally guaranteeing same-sex couples the right to marriage in every state. (We will return to this issue in Chapter 8.) legal family A group of individuals related by birth, marriage, or adoption. Hannah Rocklein was adopted as a toddler from a Russian orphanage. Her adoptive parents later divorced. She now lives with her adoptive mother and siblings, stepfather, and dog. 8 Chapter 1: A Sociology of the Family Such official definitions clearly have implications for the distribution of limited resources. For example, until the Windsor decision, a same-sex couple married in Massachusetts, with one citizen and one immigrant spouse, could not use that marriage to gain citizenship for the immigrant spouse (J. Preston 2013). But many other aspects of life are affected as well. In New York State, for example, the official recognition of same-sex marriage affected some 1,300 statutes and regulations, “governing everything from joint filing of income tax returns to transferring fishing licenses between spouses” (Peters 2008:A1). The government’s definition also lends credibility—or legitimacy—to some families and contributes to a sense of isolation or exclusion for those whose families do not conform. In some cases, a legal definition of family relationships is enforced nationally, as in the federal tax code, immigration rules, or Social Security and the Medicare health insurance program. But usually the states apply and enforce their own laws regulating family life. Local legal definitions underlie many conflicts, ranging from adoption (who can adopt?) to residential zoning (how many “unrelated” people can live in one household?). Further, because the laws contribute to our personal definitions, and because legal definitions are inherently subject to political debate, they have gained symbolic importance, which may explain why so many people care how other people define their families. Even though local laws and definitions vary, the U.S. Census Bureau, which gathers much of the data on American families that we will examine in this book, uses the federal government’s definition of the legal family (see Changing Law, “How the U.S. Census Counts Families”). The history of the U.S. Census offers important lessons about the definition of families. It also serves as an example of the emergence of individuality in modern society and the “institutionalized individuality” referred to by the modernity theorists studied later in this chapter (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2004). The U.S. Constitution in 1789 ordered an “actual enumeration” of the population every 10 years, for purposes of apportioning political representatives among the population. A nationwide census has been carried out every 10 years since 1790. But the idea of counting everyone in the population is at least as old as the story of the Jews wandering in the desert after fleeing Egypt, in which God commanded Moses to “take the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, by families following their fathers’ houses; a head count of every male according to the number of their names.” In all modern societies, the census plays a crucial role in the development of public infrastructure and the administration of services. These data collection efforts are large government projects, conducted at great expense. Even with use of online forms and mobile technology, the 2020 U.S. Census is projected to cost more than $13 billion and employ hundreds of thousands of workers visiting American households. The census also is one of the government’s direct interventions into personal life, requiring the formal definition of all individuals’ relationships and family boundaries. So the definitions that government officials use are important for how commonly accepted roles and identities are developed (Coontz 2010). Until 1840, the U.S. Census recorded only the name of the “head” of each household, with an anonymous count of other people present (slaves were counted as members of their owners’ families, though they only counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation). Starting in 1840, individuals were recorded separately, though still listed by household, under the “family head.” At that time, census forms were filled out by enumerators, who knocked on doors and recorded information by hand. In 1870, confronted for the first time with large urban buildings that did not separate families into distinct households, the census defined a household as a group of people who share a common dining table. That idea stuck, and some variation of the concept of “live and eat separately from others” has been used to define households ever since (Ruggles and Brower 2003). What Is a Census Family? Today, the Census Bureau uses the legal definition of the family presented in this chapter, but with one qualification: a family lives together in one household. By the personal or legal census A periodic count of people in a population and their characteristics, usually performed as an official government function. household A group of people that lives and eats separately from other groups. CHANGING LAW 10 Chapter 1: A Sociology of the Family definitions I presented earlier, members of the same family could live in different households. In fact, one person could be a member of any number of families. When it comes to collecting statistical data, however, that is not practical. So the Census Bureau limits each family to one household, and each person can only be counted in one place. That is why students living in college dorms are not counted as part of their families’ households (which is also the case for military personnel abroad or on ships, prisoners, or people in nursing homes). With this definition—putting each person in only one household—the 2010 census showed that among the 301 million people living in 117 million households, there were 78 million families, or groups of people related by birth, marriage, or adoption who live together in one household (U.S. Census 2012a). But how does the Census Bureau apply the legal definition of family? The task seemed simple at first. The 1880 census was the first to record information about each individual’s relationship within the family. After listing the “head” of each family (always the husband in the case of married couples), the enumerator made a list of all other individuals in the household and made a note of the “relationship of each person to the head of this family—whether wife, son, daughter, servant, boarder, or other” (Ruggles et al. 2013). Those six categories now serve as a quaint reminder of a simpler time in family life. Starting in the 1960s, as families became more complicated, the categories on the census form proliferated, and now people usually fill out the forms without assistance, choosing the category for each person in the household themselves. The idea of a “household head” came under attack from feminists in the 1960s, because they didn’t like the presumption of male authority that it implied (Presser 1998). That pressure was successful, and by 1980, the census form dropped the category “household head” and now simply refers to a “householder,” defined as anyone who legally owns or rents the home. That was one of many changes that followed. Figure 1.1 shows the relationship categories planned for the 2020 census, now including no fewer than 16 ways people can be associated with “Person 1,” the householder. The historical concept of a “man and his family” has clearly been supplanted with a long list of individual relationships and identities. The most important recent change to this list is asking couples directly whether they are same-sex or opposite-sex, a question the Census Bureau did not ask before same-sex marriage became legal nationally in 2015. They further ask couples to identify whether they are married or “unmarried partners.” Biological children are differentiated from adopted children, stepchildren, and foster children. In-laws and grandchildren are identified separately. You might notice another subtle distinction from the list in Figure 1.1. The categories “other relative” and “other nonrelative” appear toward the end. Although these are not defined on the form, their placement implies that the last two— housemate/roommate and foster child—are nonrelatives, while the rest are relatives. In fact, however, official statistics on families do not (yet) include those listed as unmarried partners as family members, even though many people in such relationships obviously think of themselves as being part of the same family. When society changes rapidly—as it is now with regard to family relationships—then laws, government policies, and cultural attitudes often contradict each other, which can provoke feelings of insecurity or conflict. The Family as an Institutional Arena Individuals define their own families. The state imposes a legal definition of families—“state” used in this way refers to the government at all levels. What about sociology? I can’t tell you that sociology resolves the different or conflicting definitions of a family. But by stepping back and thinking analytically, we may be able to usefully frame the way families are defined. To do that requires the use of some terms and ideas that may seem abstract. But I hope that once we get over the hurdle of these abstractions, you will find that they help make your understanding of families more concrete. Rather than identify certain groups of people as families or not, this sociological definition conceives of the family as the place where family matters take place. I will refer to that as an institutional arena, a social space in which relations between people in common positions are governed by accepted rules of interaction. In the family arena, for example, there are positions that people occupy (for example, father, mother, child, brother, sister). And there are rules of interaction, most of them informal, that govern how people in these positions interact. When a social position is accompanied by accepted patterns of behavior, it becomes a role. Family rules include obligations as well as privileges. For example, parents must feed, clothe, socialize, and otherwise care for their children in the most intimate ways. And children are usually expected to obey their parents. The family arena, then, is the institutional arena where people practice intimacy, childbearing and socialization, and caring work. Not everyone fits perfectly into these positions or follows these rules, but when they do not conform—for example, when parents abuse or neglect their children—it only serves to reinforce the importance of the rules (Martin 2004). An institutional arena is not a physical space with a clear boundary, like a sports arena, but a social place where a set of interactions play out. If you think of a game like soccer, there may be an ideal place to play it—a soccer field—but you can sort of play it anywhere. The rules are a little bit different here and there, and many of them are informal. You don’t need lines on the ground or fixed goals. A great example of this is the common practice of widening or narrowing the space between the goal posts according to how many players are on the field. In the same way, the family is not a specific social arrangement or something that happens in one home or one type of home. Its rules and positions evolve over time and take place in the area of social interaction where intimacy, childbearing and socialization, and caring work are enacted. These aspects of family life consume much of our personal, social, and economic energy and passions. But they do not encompass the domains of two other important institutional arenas that have direct interactions with the family: the state and the market. To understand the family’s place in the society overall, we need to define these overlapping arenas. The state includes many different organizations filled with people in many roles. But at its core, the state is the institutional arena where, through political means, behavior is legally regulated, violence is controlled, and resources are redistributed. The regulation of behavior is set out in laws and policies, and these are enforced with the threat or use of violence (from family court to the prison system to the armed forces). The state affects families directly through regulation, such as granting marriage licenses and facilitating divorces, and by redistributing resources according to family relationships. Redistribution takes place by taxing families and individuals and then spending tax money on education, health care, Social Security, welfare, and other programs. The state also regulates the behavior of economic organizations and collects taxes and fees from them. In that way, the state has direct interactions with our third institutional arena, the market, which is the institutional arena where labor for pay, economic exchange, and wealth accumulation take place. All these activities are closely related to family life. For example, when parents decide whether to work for pay or stay home with their kids, they have to consider the jobs they can get and the costs of day care and other services. These decisions then affect family relationships and future decisions, such as how to divide labor within the family, how many children to have, whether to pursue advanced education—and maybe even whether to get divorced. The key features of these three institutional arenas are shown in Table 1.1. Each arena signifies a certain type of social interaction, each is composed of organizational units, and each specifies certain roles for its members. Clearly, most people have roles in all of these arenas and take part in different organizational units. For example, a parent might care for his or her own children at home but also work as a nurse or day care provider in the market arena and act as a citizen on political questions, such as whether welfare programs should use tax money to pay for poor people’s day care services. One way to look at such overlapping roles is to see them as interactions between the institutional arenas. state The institutional arena where, through political means, behavior is legally regulated, violence is controlled, and resources are redistributed. market The institutional arena where labor for pay, economic exchange, and wealth accumulation take place. Defining Families 13 The interaction of institutional arenas is illustrated in the Story Behind the Numbers, which shows examples of overlapping roles. We can see the interaction of family and state arenas in the state licensing of marriages, and the interaction of family and market arenas in the role that commercial services such as day care providers make available to families. An additional interaction (not shown) is between state and market arenas, as when the state regulates the market by restricting companies’ behavior. For example, under the Family and Medical Leave Act, the federal government requires large companies to give most of their workers (unpaid) time off from work when a child or another family member is sick. Finally, the figure illustrates one area where all three arenas clearly overlap: welfare policy. As we will see, state support of the poor is based on certain conceptions of family relationships (thus regulating family life), and market forces affect the ability of families to support themselves with or without welfare— even as family decisions affect the market arena (such as poor single mothers entering the labor force). As we will see in Chapter 2, thinking about institutional arenas can help tell the history of the family. For example, Andrew Cherlin has argued that the growth of individual choice in family relationships signifies a weakening of marriage as an institution as its rules become more flexible (Cherlin 2004). Family history is also a story of changes in how different arenas interact. Returning to the example of parents punishing their children, the state intervenes when its authorities enforce laws against child abuse or acts of violence. The history of change in these two arenas is partly the story of how the line between parental and state authority has been drawn. The state’s role also has evolved in the growth of public services in health care and education and in the changing state definitions of marriage, all of which alter the borders of the family arena and the roles of its members. Throughout this book, we will use the idea of institutional arenas as a way to understand how larger forces interact with individuals and families to shape family life and how the family in turn contributes to larger social trends. Considering the relationship between individual experience and larger social forces is one of the main promises of sociology. And the family has been the subject of sociological scrutiny throughout the history of the discipline. Therefore, before going further into the main subject of this book—the family as a diverse, changing feature of our unequal society—we will need to establish some additional theoretical background. The Family in Sociological Theory In this section, I present some prominent sociological theories and explain how they are useful in thinking about families and changes in family relationships. I want to emphasize that we are not necessarily marrying (to choose a metaphor) any one theory. Rather, we will consider a range of theories and perspectives that offer different kinds of explanations for the patterns we see. If we use theory to our advantage, we might be able to predict the future—or at least avoid being taken completely by surprise (Dilworth-Anderson, Burton, and Klein 2005). In sociology, as in any other science, theory is a way to apply logic to a pattern of facts, to structure the way we think about our subject matter, and to help us generate ideas for research to enrich that understanding. Some factual descriptions of family life are widely known—for example, the modern tendency to leave home and live in a two-parent nuclear family after marriage, the growing practice of cohabitation outside of marriage, and the decline in the number of children per family in the last 100 years. (These and other historical trends will be discussed in Chapter 2.) But those are just facts, and there are different ways to make sense of them, to make them fit with our understanding of social life more broadly. That’s where theory comes in. Rather than choosing between theories, we may find that different theories work better to answer different types of questions. Some may seem more wrong or right than others, but most sociologists do not stick to any one theory, especially in family research (Taylor and Bagdi 2005). I will introduce two broad perspectives with deep historical roots—the consensus perspective and the conflict perspective—and tie them to the study of families. Then I will discuss several more recently developed theories to help us form a common understanding for the rest of the book. Broad Perspectives Consensus The consensus perspective projects an image of society as the collective expression of shared norms and values (Ritzer 2000). This is an ancient view of society, with roots in Greek philosophy. It was also used to support democracy and the American Revolution, with the argument that society cannot consensus perspective A perspective that projects an image of society as the collective expression of shared norms and values. The Family in Sociological Theory 17 work without the consent of the governed (Horowitz 1962). That doesn’t mean that everyone agrees on everything, but rather that society exists as the enactment of social order. It means that most of us voluntarily get up in the morning (or thereabouts) and play our roles each day, instead of making the infinite other choices available to us that would lead to general chaos. This does not imply that society never changes or that there are no conflicts, but it does mean that order is the core of social life and that social change works best when it takes place in an orderly fashion; chaotic or rapid change is to be avoided. In the tradition of this perspective, the dominant sociological theory is known as structural functionalism, which has roots in the work of French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). It became the dominant theory in American sociology around the middle of the twentieth century with the work of Talcott Parsons (1902–1979). Although few sociologists today identify as structural functionalists, key elements of the consensus perspective remain influential. Researchers adopting this perspective in general examine some common pattern of behavior and ask, “What are the functions of this? What good is it doing that permits it to survive?” The theory often assumes that there is a good reason for things to be the way they are and tries to explain them based on this premise. As a result, the consensus perspective tends to focus on stability rather than change, in keeping with its harmonious image of society. Examining American family life in the 1950s, when the dominant family structure was the breadwinner-homemaker family (an employed father, a nonemployed mother, and their children), Parsons mistakenly believed that major change was unlikely. That was good news to him, because he ardently believed that what he saw as the essence of families—the harmony created by the complementary roles of husband and wife—was essential to the preservation of the family as an institution (Parsons and Bales 1955). When Parsons looked at that family structure and asked himself why it worked, his answer was that it provided the basis for stability and cooperation. There was mutual compatibility between men and women, with each one performing a separate, necessary function. He called these functions the instrumental role of the husband and the expressive role of the wife. After studying different kinds of organizations (not just families), Parsons concluded that successful organizations had instrumental leadership that took charge of interaction with the outside world—for example, on questions of economics and trade. Balancing that was the expressive leadership necessary to provide emotional support, nurturing, and caring for the group (Parsons 1954). The division of labor within breadwinner-homemaker families, in which the husband works outside the home and the wife works inside the home, fit into Parsons’s notion of a dichotomy between instrumental and expressive leadership. And maintaining this balance was essential to the success of the family as an institution. To critics, all this looked like a long-winded rationalization of the male-dominated status quo, serving a conservative political agenda. In fact, the whole consensus perspective has been criticized as something people in positions of power use to justify the social structure that exists at any given time or place (Ritzer 2000). There may be some truth to that; we all have our biases. However, at its best, this theory helps us understand the nuclear family as a model and how it might work as an ideal. Conflict If structural functionalism starts from the premise that consensus and harmony form the basis of society, the conflict perspective takes the contrary view: opposition and conflict define a given society and are necessary for social evolution. Historically, this position has opposed the consensus perspective’s tendency to portray the status quo as good and the forces of change as dangerously destabilizing. More specifically, in sociology this theory developed in reaction to the dominance of structural functionalism, suggesting that change, rather than stability, is the dynamic we need to explain. What came to be known as conflict theory drew on the work of Karl Marx (1818–1883; see Chapter 4) and others who believed that inequality and the conflict it causes are what drive history forward. In its moderate form, the theory argues simply that expressing conflict over differences is often the best way to arrive at positive changes in families, organizations, and society at large. Conflict theorists focus on the competing interests of family members to understand family problems—for example, child abuse or divorce. Randall Collins, a leading writer in this field, believes that men use their greater strength to gain power in the family and achieve their own ends (R. Collins 1975). Some take a more expansive view of family conflict to describe the modern nuclear family as a tool for enhancing the profits of the rich at the expense of the poor. Connecting family inequality to Marx’s theory of capitalism, they argue that the work that wives have historically done at home without pay—nurturing and caring, cooking and cleaning, raising the children, and so on—takes care of men, so employers don’t have to pay them as much. In turn, husbands maintain domination within the family and provide stability to the system (Zaretsky 1976). Rather than see the different roles of men and women as harmonious and functional, conflict theorists see them as part of an unstable system ripe for conflict and change. If structural functionalism can be faulted for projecting an overly rosy view of family relations, conflict theory may suffer from the reverse: an emphasis on opposition and power struggles to the exclusion of the many ways that family members truly love and care for each other. In fact, neither theory can explain everything, but both may be useful for understanding some elements of family life. Contemporary Theories The debate between structural functionalism and conflict theory raged in the middle of the twentieth century, when the breadwinner-homemaker family was the norm in the United States. It is no coincidence that the emergence of a new group of theories about the family coincided with the growing diversity of family life and the decline of the breadwinner-homemaker model. We turn next to these more recent developments. conflict perspective The view that opposition and conflict define a given society and are necessary for social evolution. The Family in Sociological Theory 19 Feminism Feminism is part of the conflict perspective tradition, and feminists share many views with conflict theorists, especially a critical attitude about the breadwinner-homemaker model of family life. Feminist theory in general seeks to understand and ultimately reduce inequality between men and women. When it comes to the family, in particular, feminist theory sees “male dominance within families [as] part of a wider system of male power, [which] is neither natural nor inevitable, and occurs at women’s cost” (Ferree 1990:866). The theory has a long history and many varieties; rather than explaining them all here, I will point out several recent contributions that have been most helpful to the study of the family (Baca Zinn 2000). First, beginning in the 1970s, feminist researchers demonstrated that gender inequality is central to family life (see Chapter 5). In fact, one reason many of these researchers were reluctant to speak of “the family” is because the experiences of men and women (or boys and girls) may be so different. Feminists showed that if the family arena is where boys and girls learn to be boys and girls (and men and women), it is also where those gender roles are created unequal, with men in the dominant position, through the process of socialization (see Chapter 5). However, family dynamics also are important for how gender affects other institutional arenas, and the family is only one site of gender inequality. For example, as we will see in Chapter 11, one reason women earn less at paid work (in the market arena) is because their careers are more likely to be hampered by unpaid care work obligations within the family. Second, feminist scholars have argued that family structure is socially constructed—the product of human choices rather than the inevitable outcome of natural or biological processes. Structural functionalists in particular feminist theory A theory that seeks to understand and ultimately reduce inequality between men and women. socialization The process by which individuals internalize elements of the social structure in their own personalities. Drew Skinner’s wife works long hours while he takes care of their young son. A small but increasing number of stay-at-home dads make it possible for their wives to remain in demanding jobs. 20 Chapter 1: A Sociology of the Family believed that the nuclear family is an expression of universal human tendencies; hence, nontraditional family structures are likely to be ineffective or unstable. To counter that view, feminists conducted comparative research (studying different cultures and time periods) to show the wide variety of family structures that have proved successful. Later feminist theorists added a third important contribution. Just as early research had shown that the experience of family life differs dramatically for men and women, a subsequent generation argued that those gender perspectives are themselves not uniform. In particular, race, ethnicity, and social class all affect family life and gender dynamics in unique ways (see Chapters 3 and 4). For example, early feminists criticized the breadwinner-homemaker family as a structure in which men dominate women. But some contemporary feminists believe that in poor and minority communities, traditional family arrangements may be expressions of collective strength and resilience in the face of hardship, uniting men and women with a common purpose (Hill 2005). Together, these insights and findings from feminist scholars have contributed greatly to the work of family researchers, even those who do not share feminism’s activist goal of reducing gender inequality. Exchange Conflict perspective and feminism tend to treat different roles within the family as reflecting unequal power, especially men’s domination over women. On the other hand, the consensus perspective offers a more harmonious account of why men and women stay in families together despite their differences. Similarly, exchange theory sees individuals or groups with different resources, strengths, and weaknesses entering into mutual relationships to maximize their own gains. In this view, individuals are rational; that is, they consider the costs and benefits of their actions in making their decisions. When they cannot satisfy all of their needs on their own (and they rarely can), people enter into exchange relationships with others. As long as the relationship is rewarding, both sides stay engaged. If the exchange is not rewarding, and if the cost of leaving is not too great, either party may leave (Dilworth-Anderson, Burton, and Klein 2005). This theory is part of the consensus tradition because it assumes that patterns of social behavior are mutually agreed on. These ideas are closely related to a model of the family proposed by the Nobel prize–winning economist Gary Becker, in which husbands and wives make joint decisions to maximize benefits that all family members share—for example, sending men into the paid labor force while women care for the children at home (Becker 1981). Many sociologists find that theory naive, because it seems to assume equality between men and women and harmony between their interests. Do men and women in families really make decisions and share rewards equally, and do they want the same outcomes for their families? Sociologists do not rule out the logic of exchange in family relationships. But rather than assume equality, they prefer to think of the exchange as a bargaining process in which individuals strike the best bargain they can, given the resources they have and the rules they have to play by. When the resources are unequal, as they usually are, the bargains struck reflect that inequality. In this way, exchange theory can become part of the conflict perspective—viewing exchange as a process by which people act out their competing interests. The division of housework between men and women is a common subject of research for exchange theorists. This is a classic example of bargaining relationships negotiated under conditions of inequality. Because of men’s greater earning power, they hold a stronger bargaining position at the start of the relationship. Because women usually earn less money than men, they may accept an arrangement in which they are the weaker party and so take on the more onerous and time-consuming household tasks, such as scrubbing toilets and doing laundry. Not surprisingly, we usually find that couples share housework more equally when the individual incomes of both partners are more equal (Bittman et al. 2003). Of course, economic resources are not the only subjects of the negotiation; couples may also bargain over sex, children, friends, and so on (we will discuss some of these complexities in Chapter 11). Symbolic Interaction Starting in the early twentieth century, some sociologists embraced the idea that we can understand what things mean to people only by studying their behavior. So actions, not words, provide the true basis for meaning, and meaning can only be understood by studying its relationship to action. The theory they developed, which came to be called symbolic interactionism, revolves around the ability of humans to see themselves through the eyes of others and to enact social roles based on others’ expectations. The theory gets its name from the idea that social roles are symbols, which have real meaning only when they are acted out in relation to other people (interaction). People may adopt many social roles—for example, president, nurse, football player, husband, or pedestrian. But it is the act of performing a given role in symbolic interactionism A theory concerned with the ability of humans to see themselves through the eyes of others and to enact social roles based on others’ expectations. Steph Curry inhabits multiple social roles, including husband, father, and Golden State Warrior. 22 Chapter 1: A Sociology of the Family relation to others that gives it meaning. Human self-identity is formed through that action and from the reactions to our behavior that we expect and observe in everyone else (Ritzer 2000). Defining, identifying, and acting on a social role requires a delicate give and take at the interpersonal level as people assess the effects of their actions on others and the expectations that others have. The intimate nature of this process makes the family an ideal setting for developing this theory. Because social roles do not exist in isolation, but rather only in interaction, we need to observe behavior within the family to see how family roles are defined and what they mean (Stryker 1968). This theory has been especially useful for studying social change, when roles and the informal rules that govern behavior are not clearly defined. For example, being a parent means different things for people who are married versus those who are single, and the role of husband or wife comes with different expectations for men and women who are employed versus those who are not (Macmillan and Copher 2005). As single parenthood and dual-earner couples have become more common, we can see the new meanings assigned to the roles of parent and spouse only by observing how they are acted out in the daily lives of the people who occupy them. Modernity People often use the word modern to mean “contemporary,” but in this book we will use it to refer to a specific period in history, from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the present. Modernity theory is very broad, but with regard to the family, it concerns the emergence of the individual as an actor in society and how individuality changed personal and institutional relations. Consider the scheme in Table 1.1 as a modern phenomenon. In the state arena, the individual emerged as a citizen, with the right to vote defining that role. In the market arena, the individual emerged as a worker, earning a cash wage to be spent on anything he or she chooses. What about the family arena? Here the individual emerged as an independent actor making choices about family relations freely, based on personal tastes and interests. Individual choice in the family had existed before modernity (more for some than for others), but only in this era did it become institutionalized, or expected of everyone (Beck and Lau 2005). Modernity theorists break the modern era into two periods. In first modernity, up until the 1960s or so, there was gradual change in family behavior—for example, more divorce, a gradually increasing age at first marriage, fewer children in families, fewer people living in extended families (see Chapter 2), and more choice in spouse selection. These were only incremental changes, however. Even though people exercised free choice, the concept of a “normal” family remained intact as a social standard. Different family types or pathways—such as marriage much later in life, having children outside of marriage, remarrying after divorce, or marrying outside your race—existed, but they were on the margins of acceptability. In second modernity, since the 1970s, the chickens have come home to roost. Diversity and individuality are the new norm, and it’s up to each person to pick a family type and identify with it. Thus, freedom from traditional restraints “brings historically new free spaces and options: he can and should, she may modernity theory A theory of the historical emergence of the individual as an actor in society and how individuality changed personal and institutional relations. The Family in Sociological Theory 23 and must, now decide how to shape their own life” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2004:502). The growth of family diversity is a major theme of this book. Acting individually is supported (or even required) by other institutions, especially the state and the market, which increasingly have treated people as individuals rather than as family members. This is only natural once family ties such as marriage are considered voluntary, subject to divorce by either individual. For example, some welfare and health care benefits and taxation involve transactions between individuals and the government (although some programs are still geared toward families). And most employers don’t consider it necessary to pay a family wage to male workers with stay-at-home wives, as they did in the past (see Chapter 2). Compared with the premodern past, this “institutionalized individualization” leads to a tremendous fragmentation of family identities and puts a big psychological burden on people. As a result, a sense of insecurity spreads through the population, driving people into the arms of expert identity fixers, especially therapists and self-help gurus. If all of this freedom implies individual isolation and lack of direction, it also stands to revolutionize the nature of intimacy and family relationships, at least according to modernity theorist Anthony Giddens. In his view, relationships now may be truly based on personal choice and individual fulfillment. Free from the constraints of traditional rules, free from the need to reproduce biologically, and free to negotiate economic survival as individuals, people may now enter into the ideal “pure relationship”—and leave when it suits them—for the first time in history (Giddens 1992). Demography and the Life Course Two additional perspectives warrant attention here, which supplement rather than compete with the theoretical views already presented. Many family researchers study the family in relation to larger population processes. If a population is the number of people in a certain area or place, it may be seen as (a) the number of children who have been born, (b) minus the number of people who have died, plus (c) the number of people who have arrived in the past (minus those who moved away). Demography—the study of populations—therefore focuses on birth, death, and migration. Family researchers who take a demographic perspective study family behavior and household structures that contribute to larger population processes. They are especially interested in childbirth, but to understand that, they must study the timing and frequency of cohabitation, marriage, and divorce, as well as living arrangements in general (who lives with whom at different stages in their lives). The demographic emphasis on timing contributes to an interest in the sequencing of events for individuals and groups in the population. The “normal” family structure of the past included a progression from childhood to adulthood that included marriage and then parenthood. As family life has become more diverse, the common sequences of family events, or family trajectories, have become much more complicated. Researchers using the life course perspective study the family trajectories of individuals and groups as they progress through their lives. One important goal of this research is to place family events in their historical context (Elder 1975). For example, if you want to understand attitudes toward family life among Americans who were in their 50s in 2010, you might consider their history as a cohort—a group of people who experience an event together at the same point in time (such as being born in the same period). These people were born in the 1950s, when birth rates were very high, so they grew up in a youth-dominated culture. They were in their teens in the late 1960s, when much of the popular culture first embraced ideas of free love and uncommitted romantic relationships. Divorce rates shot up when they were young adults in the 1970s, which had immediate and long-lasting effects on their attitudes toward cohabitation and divorce. Rather than examining individuals at fixed points in time, life course researchers seek to gain a deeper understanding by considering life stories in their social and historical context. Studying Families We have seen how sociologists use theories to make sense of the facts they discover. But where do these facts come from? More important, how can we build a knowledge base to help us understand the reasons behind the facts? In principle, sociologists may gain information from any source at all. However, there are common methods of gathering information that have proved successful. Before examining these sources of data, I need to briefly describe a few of the challenges encountered in studying families. To develop deeper knowledge often requires using more information than we started out looking for. For example, we know that African Americans on cohort A group of people who experience an event together at the same point in time. The decennial census in the United States is a massive project that requires more than a million people to complete. Many are census takers, or enumerators, who visit households that have not submitted a completed Census questionnaire. Studying Families 25 average are less likely to marry than Whites. However, to understand the reasons for that gap, we must look at a variety of factors, including not just individual preferences but also poverty and college attendance rates, income differences between men and women, and even incarceration and mortality rates. In other words, to understand the core facts requires knowledge of the context in which those facts occur. Another issue we must contend with in research on families is the problem of telling the difference between correlation and cause. Many things are observed occurring together (correlation) without one causing the other. For example, a study of young children’s vision found that those who had slept with the light on in their nurseries were more likely to be nearsighted. That is, light at night and nearsightedness appeared to be correlated (Quinn et al. 1999). The researchers suspected that light penetrating the eyelids during sleep harmed children’s vision—that is, that light caused nearsightedness. However, a follow-up study determined that parents who are themselves nearsighted are more likely to leave a light on in their children’s nurseries; it makes it easier for the parents to see. And since nearsightedness is partly genetic, it is possible that the nearsightedness of children who sleep with the light on results not from the light, but from the parents’ nearsightedness being passed on to their children genetically (Zadnik 2000). In this case, despite the correlation of two facts, one did not cause the other. Researchers could only determine this by gathering contextual information about children’s families. Finally, although there are many sources of information, there are almost as many sources of bias—the tendency to impose previously held views on the collection and interpretation of facts. Consider an example: During the fall of 2016, the news for presidential candidate Donald Trump was not good: Polls from around the country showed he was very likely to lose the November election. One night the Fox News Network conducted an online poll of its viewers, asking them, “If the presidential election were held this week, who would win?” Despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, the results showed that 86 percent of participants believed Trump would win. Because Fox favored Trump, and so did their loyal viewers, the poll produced a biased result—like an ice cream company asking children waiting in line at the ice cream truck what their favorite dessert is. Though that might be a good way to see how Trump supporters feel, it’s not a good way to predict the winner of an election (even though it worked this time!). We can’t always eliminate bias, but we can increase accountability and transparency. That is why most sociologists prefer publicly funded studies, which make their data freely available and which in principle are repeatable by other researchers. That is, nothing is hidden about the way the information is collected and analyzed. And before results are accepted as reliable, a system of peer review is employed in which other scholars review the work anonymously, checking for any sources of error, including bias, logical flaws, or simple mistakes in the analysis. Sample Surveys The most common method of gathering data for sociological studies is the sample survey, in which identical questions are asked of many different people and their answers gathered into one large data file. By examining patterns among the responses to the questions we ask, we can find associations that help us understand family life. For example, if we ask people to tell us their gender and how often they do the dishes, we might find out if women do dishes more often than men. Asking people for information about their lives and opinions is time-consuming and expensive, so we cannot study everyone. We need to find a method of choosing our study subjects. Consider a “quick vote” conducted by the CNN news channel, which asked the simple question, “Who does most of the chores in your household?” More than 30,000 people responded, and 60 percent of them chose “Mom keeps it all tidy,” while 27 percent chose “Mom and dad split the work.” (The rest were sprinkled across other categories.) (CNN 2008a). That is a big group of people, but how were they selected? Anyone who came to the CNN website was allowed to respond. We don’t know who they were, but we might imagine some ways in which they were not representative of the general population—Internet users, people interested in reading websites about housework, people who like to click on website polls, and so on. We simply don’t know from that survey if those responses represent the population as a whole. Ideally, we would choose people by random selection, ensuring that each person in the group we want to study has the same likelihood of being interviewed in the survey. That is the best way to ensure that our results are not skewed by who is included or excluded. Students are sometimes skeptical about the principle of random selection. Is it really possible, for example, that the opinions of 500 people can accurately reflect those of 245 million American adults? If it’s done right, the short answer is yes; the long answer has to do with probability theory. (If you don’t believe me, consider this: When I have my cholesterol checked, why don’t I have all of my blood removed instead of just a few ounces?) We find the clearest evidence of the effectiveness of sample surveys when we can successfully use them to predict people’s behavior, as has been done with many political elections. In the 2012 presidential election, for example, a careful analysis of the preelection polls allowed statistician Nate Silver to accurately predict for every single state whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney would win in the actual election-day voting (M. Cooper 2012). On the other hand, in the 2016 election, although most analysts correctly predicted that Hillary Clinton would get more votes than Donald Trump overall, they were wrong about the vote in several key states that were decisive in the Electoral College. The sample surveys used in that election apparently did not successfully select voters at random (for example, Trump voters may have been more likely to hang up on the survey sample survey A research method in which identical questions are asked of many different people and their answers gathered into one large data file. Studying Families 27 takers), or perhaps some voters didn’t accurately report their voting intentions (maybe they were embarrassed to say they would vote for Trump). Although there are many ways that surveys can produce errors or lead to ambiguous results, the principle of random selection helps to ensure that we are not misled by research results from relatively small numbers of people. In addition to random selection, we also make an important distinction between different kinds of surveys. As we have seen, the questions that concern us may involve interrelated sequences of events, such as the connection between nursery room lighting in infancy and nearsightedness years later. Still, although we are interested in events that occur years apart, most surveys are administered only once to each person. Others, known as longitudinal surveys, interview the same people repeatedly over a period of time. Tracking people over time is essential for answering questions about sequences of events. For example, researchers have long wondered whether the increase in divorce is the result of women gaining economic independence, so they don’t “need” to be married. Or maybe it is the other way around, and women get jobs because they are afraid that a divorce will leave them out on a limb with little work experience (see Chapter 10). Only by carefully following families over time could researchers find that couples do divorce more often when women earn their own income, but marriage quality and satisfaction are even more important (Sayer and Bianchi 2000). Such surveys are time-consuming and expensive, since interviewees have to be tracked down again and again over a period of years, which is why the major longitudinal surveys are at least partly funded by the government, with many researchers sharing access to the data. Even surveys in which each person is interviewed only once may be repeated at regular intervals, which allows us to track trends in people’s answers over time. For example, the federal government has for decades conducted the Current Population Survey (CPS) every month, interviewing representatives from thousands longitudinal surveys A research method in which the same people are interviewed repeatedly over a period of time. Jackie, Sue, and Lynn are three of the subjects in 49 Up, a 2005 documentary in the Up series that began in 1964 when they were seven years old. The series has revisited most of them every seven years since. 28 Chapter 1: A Sociology of the Family of households to generate such important facts as the national unemployment rate. And because the CPS also includes questions on family structure, we can confidently estimate, for example, that the employment rate of unmarried mothers fell from 72 percent to 68 percent over the decade from 2005 to 2015 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016a). Similarly, the General Social Survey (GSS) has been asking questions about American attitudes since 1972. From this survey we know, for example, that 36 percent of American adults considered sex before marriage “always wrong” in 1972, but that dropped to 20 percent by 2016 (Smith et al. 2017). These repeated surveys are essential for studying social change, another central focus of this book. In-Depth Interviews and Observation Sample surveys provide much of the basic knowledge we need to understand trends and patterns in family life. However, researchers often must make assumptions or speculate about the meaning underlying the behavior and attitudes measured by sample surveys. Even when we ask people directly about their attitudes, such as whether mothers or fathers should spend more time taking care of their children, the answers may be superficial, and respondents answer only those questions we think of asking in advance. Some researchers prefer not to be limited by brief answers to questions they bring to an interview. One way to avoid this problem is to arrange much longer, in-depth interviews with a small number of people, usually those who share traits researchers want to study. For example, Sarah Damaske, for her book For the Family? How Class and Gender Shape Women’s Work (2011), interviewed 80 women for several hours each to trace their employment histories and the reasons they gave for their decisions. She found that both working-class and middle-class mothers used a language of economic need to justify their decisions to work outside their homes, even though it was better-off mothers who were more likely to work steadily throughout their careers. Working-class women, on the other hand, were more likely to face difficult work-family tradeoffs that compelled them to move in and out of the labor force over time (see Chapter 11). Even in-depth interviews, however, rely on the answers provided to the researcher. Sometimes, interpersonal dynamics and the subtleties of daily life are best studied through direct observation and interaction with the subjects of the research, known as ethnography. This was the method employed by Annette Lareau for her influential study Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (2003). Lareau and her assistants inserted themselves into the lives of 12 families for about a month each, following them from place to place and taking copious notes on how the parents arranged their children’s daily lives and interactions with the social world. Through this approach, researchers often learn things people would not reveal if asked, or may not even realize about their own lives (Jerolmack and Khan 2014). The results of Lareau’s study revealed sharp contrasts in parenting style—and the meanings parents attributed to childhood— according to the social class of the family (see Chapter 4). Theory and Evidence Different theoretical perspectives and methods of gathering information can help us translate descriptions of particular family events or situations into more general knowledge about families and society. • Brainstorm several examples of a family conflict, dramatic event, or daily occurrence. Try to think of situations that might be representative of a broader social phenomenon. For example, you might describe a family-related crime story from a TV drama, the changing family structure you or someone you know grew up in, or the real-life saga of a politician or celebrity in the news. • Choose two theories or perspectives from the chapter that interest you. Describe how a theorist from each perspective might explain the examples you came up with. These do not have to be contradictory; they might simply provide alternative ways of looking at the situations in question or generate ideas about their underlying social causes. • Select two methods of gathering data described in the chapter. Try to imagine how a researcher might use each method to gather information about the kind of situations or events you are trying to explain—for example, by collecting survey data or directly observing the behavior in question. • Choosing one of your examples, combine one method and one theory that you think would most fruitfully develop your understanding of the social dynamics in question. Explain why you suggest this approach to turn your description of this case into more general sociological knowledge. What would you hope to discover from your study? How might your study change the way others think about this question? WORKSHOP 30 Chapter 1: A Sociology of the Family diaries. Rather than asking people, for example, how many hours last week they spent watching TV or reading to their children, time diary studies ask people to record what they were doing, where they were, and who they were with for small increments of time over an entire day (Craig and Mullan 2011). Time diary studies have been especially valuable in the study of work and families, as we will see in Chapter 11. For example, a large national survey in the 1990s asked men and women to estimate how many hours per week they did various household chores and other work. However, when researchers tallied up the hours spent on all the different activities, it often came to more than the number of hours there are in a week (Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006)! In contrast, when people are asked to fill out time diaries, recording their activities over the course of the day, the time estimates are more accurate. Recent time diaries show men spending just 10 hours per week on housework and women spending 16 hours per week (Bianchi et al. 2012). This method provides a window into the minute interactions that make up family life, but permits studying larger groups of people than is possible with in-depth interviews or observation. Trend to Watch: Big Data Big data research is increasingly common. Although there is not a single definition, we may define big data as data large enough to require special computing resources, and complex enough to require customized computer applications (Lazer and Radford 2017). Unlike surveys or Census data, big data usually were not generated for research purposes, but we can use them for social science research. Most often this research involves analyzing large volumes of text from online social interaction, such as social media sites. With billions of interactions occurring online every day, many of them leaving a digital trace, the potential to understand new forms of social behavior is exciting. For example, one study examined more than four billion tweets by 63 million users to measure patterns of happiness, finding that people send happier tweets on Friday and Saturday, and least happy tweets on Monday and Tuesday (Dodds et al. 2011). In another, controversial study, researchers at Facebook manipulated the posts that users saw, demonstrating that positive and negative moods spread contagiously among users, like diseases, even when people don’t interact face-to-face (Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock 2014). In addition to social media, big data analysts have also examined data from large databases of official records, phone records, and government documents (my own analysis of names, described in Chapter 2, is an example of such big data research). For example, a study of more than 40 million tax records for families over two generations found that children whose parents weren’t married were less likely to escape lower social class positions when they grow up than were children whose parents were married (Chetty et al. 2014). The ability to mine sources of data like these, and finding new ways to analyze them, offers great potential for future studies of family life. big data Data collections large enough to require special computing resources, and complex enough to require customized computer applications. Moving On 31 Big data research requires powerful computers and advanced technical skills. It also raises questions about privacy and research ethics, since the people being studied have not consented to have their behavior examined—even though it may be in a public or semipublic space, such as Twitter or Facebook. And this research underscores the need for sociological theory to understand the patterns we see; just because we have a vast supply of data doesn’t mean we can successfully explain social behavior. There’s one big advantage, though: Big data research allows us to see people’s actual behavior, rather than what they tell us they do or think, as is the case with sample surveys. Moving On In this chapter, we have seen that there are several ways of defining families, from a personal or legal perspective and through the lens of social institutions. Equipped with a clearer idea of what we are studying, we then added to our conceptual framework a set of sociological theories and perspectives, including the opposing views of the consensus and conflict perspectives and the contemporary theories of feminism, exchange theory, symbolic interactionism, modernity theory, and the demographic and life course perspectives. Finally, theories would ring hollow were it not for the factual foundations on which they stand. Therefore, this chapter also introduced a variety of methods that sociologists use to gather information, including surveys, in-depth interviews and observation, and time use studies. Having completed our brief survey of family-related concepts, sociological theories and perspectives, and methods of collecting data, we are ready to delve deeper into the story of family diversity, inequality, and social change. The next step is to develop a common understanding of families in history and the emergence of the family as an institutional arena. We turn to that history in Chapter 2
2 The Family in History
Families have been a part of human existence since the dawn of our species. But how people live in families has changed dramatically. This chapter will focus on the development of the family as an institutional arena—the social space where related people interact around commonly accepted roles and rules (see Chapter 1). The changes in family life discussed here must be understood in relation to four overarching historical trends: • Most people today live much longer than in the past. In the Middle Ages, Europeans on average probably lived to about age 30, and as late as 1850 that had increased to only about 40 in the United States. At that time, an estimated 1 in 5 children died before reaching age 5 (J. R. Weeks 2011), but today more than three-quarters of Americans live to age 70 (Arias 2015). This increased longevity is the result of improvements in the standard of living, including better sanitation, medical care, and nutrition. • People have many fewer children than they used to (see Chapter 9). A typical White woman in the United States in 1800 bore about seven children during her lifetime (Haines 2006). Today that number has fallen to less than two (Hamilton, Martin, and Osterman 2015). • Family members perform fewer functional tasks at home (see Chapter 11). Such life-sustaining and nurturing activities as basic food and clothing production, education, and health care that often took place within families are now performed within newer institutional arenas, the state and the market. As work has moved out of the family, family relationships have come to rely more on emotional bonds than on economic necessity. • In recent decades, families have become more diverse (see Chapter 13). The greatest change has been the decline of the two-parent nuclear family. That family type reached the peak of its dominance in the 1950s, but is now found 36 Chapter 2: The Family in History in less than half of all American households. In its place, we have seen the rise of single-parent families, unmarried couples, and people living alone or in nonfamily group situations. Each of these trends has changed the character of family life and the place of families in the larger society. We will keep these changes in mind as we trace family history through time, beginning with a brief foray into ancient history. Early History To establish some common background understanding, we will briefly discuss the early history of families, beginning with ancient times and then reviewing some early European history. Prehistory: Cooperation and Survival The Neolithic period isn’t a big part of this chapter. But there is at least one story worth telling. It took place somewhere in central Europe about 4,600 years ago, during what is known as the New Stone Age, when disaster befell a small village. The young adults and older boys had apparently gone hunting. Someone attacked the village—we can’t know who—and massacred the defenseless elders and younger children. Their skeletal remains still contain arrowheads and evidence that their bones were broken by the weapons used to overpower them. When the other villagers returned, they buried the victims. According to their custom, they placed food, tools, and weapons in the graves to nourish and protect the dead along their eternal journey. In one grave, they buried an older man and woman, along with two young children. DNA testing of the bones shows that the children were their biological offspring, making this the oldest DNA-confirmed nuclear family (see Changing Culture, “Family Types and Terms”). The villagers buried the family members facing each other, with their hands interlinked. Another woman was buried nearby with several other children (not her offspring), this time facing away from each other (Haak et al. 2008). Why the sad tale? Besides its dramatic appeal, the story shows that the ancient villagers recognized and honored different family arrangements, not just the nuclear family. They also buried stepmothers or aunts—older family members who were not blood relatives, according to the DNA analysis—in family graves with the children they cared for, but the graves were different. This is especially poignant because chemical analysis of their teeth showed that the women had lived in another region when they were children. So these women had married into the village from another group. But their family memberships were nevertheless considered eternal. nuclear family A married couple living with their own (usually biological) children and no extended family members. Early History 37 The archaeological record tells us that such flexible family arrangements have always been a crucial element of human social life. Although some people have lived in small, biologically related groups, others mixed and matched in ways that allowed them to survive. In fact, we now understand that the human species could not have survived without a system of family support, providing care for children who couldn’t care for themselves. This isn’t true of every species. Chimpanzees, one of our closest evolutionary relatives, do not have an extended period of childhood. Their mothers wean them (stop breastfeeding) when they are more or less ready to take care of themselves, at around 5 years of age. Among early humans, however, children were weaned at 2 or 3, an age when they were not able to fend for themselves (G. Kennedy 2005). As a result, the early survival of the species depended on adults caring for children through an extended period. Moreover, human mothers bore their children relatively close together in age, which meant that they couldn’t carry them all around at once. The children could only survive with the help of additional adults beyond the mother (Gibbons 2008). These relationships, emerging at the dawn of our species, were the first human families. The formation of relatively smaller, stable families—including some nuclear families of the kind described earlier—probably occurred only in the last 10,000 years or so, with the beginning of organized food production. The invention of agriculture allowed people to settle down in what are now known as the Americas, the Middle East, and China (Shelach 2006). The domestication of plants made it possible for hunter-gatherers to become farmers. During this time, larger social groups, which had been necessary for low-tech hunting, were augmented by more independent family units. Tiny one-person huts grouped around communal storage spaces were replaced by larger houses with room for four or five people and space for individual property (Flannery 2002). It appears that parents and young children lived together in these homes, along with grandparents if they were still alive (Steadman 2004). Still, even if prehistoric human societies formed nuclear families, they would not have survived if small families were responsible for all of their own needs. Cooperation beyond the immediate family was always essential. From Europe to the United States For most of this chapter, we will focus on the European origins of American family history. That’s not because Europeans are more important than other groups, but because their traditions and practices dominated the legal, political, and cultural landscape in the early years of the country. Europeans were the most powerful group in early American society; they not only set cultural standards but also enforced them by virtue of their political and economic power. Their model of the family was not adopted by everyone, however. In this chapter we will see how the historical experience of other groups diverged from the European-American story. We will return to this theme in Chapter 3, which examines racial and ethnic diversity in contemporary American family life through the intertwined stories of American Indian, African American, Asian American, and Latino families. To help set the stage for American history, we will start with some themes pertaining to families in Europe (I have drawn from several sources, including principally historian Stephanie Coontz [2005]). The first is the important role played by the Christian (Catholic and Protestant) churches. Religious regulation of family life has varied considerably over the centuries, but from the time the Catholic Church consolidated its power throughout the Roman Empire in the late fourth century CE, Christianity set guideposts along the road of family life. With regard to marriage, state-established churches played the role held by government authorities today, determining the validity of marriages, presiding over marriage ceremonies, and allocating power and property among family members. The second theme we see in European families is the extreme inequality and the separate family worlds of rich and poor. While rich families had elaborate marriage schemes—complex deals that involved land, armies, unwilling princesses, and domineering kings—the poor had no such luxury. They married and reproduced as matters of economic survival, often picking spouses based on whose family had a nearby plot of land or farming tools they needed for their crops. The children of the poor were workers in a family-based economy, not innocent cherubs sheltered from the harsh realities of life. To us, their lives would have seemed hard, bitter, and short. Both rich and poor, however, shared a common third trait. Regardless of how marriage and family life were structured, family relations were not matters of personal preference or choice. Marriage was a political and economic institution that served important functions in society. For the rich it was necessary for maintaining their lineages and creating ties between powerful families. For the poor it was about arranging cooperation in labor, especially in working the land. In the countryside, survival depended on the division of labor between husband and wife. In those circumstances, marrying for love was far too risky a proposition to be practiced widely. In fact, being too passionate about one’s spouse was highly suspect, raising concerns about social stability or even idolatry. Among Christians before the 1600s, the word love was usually reserved to describe feelings toward God or one’s neighbors, not family members (Coontz 2005). Finally, a pervasive theme through European family history and family structure is patriarchy, a system of male control over the family property and fathers’ patriarchy The system of men’s control over property and fathers’ authority over all family members. Edouard Victor Durand’s Whitsunday (1888): What role (if any) does religion play in your family’s life? Origins of the American Family 41 authority over the behavior of the family’s women and children. That authority was not always absolute, but it was almost always present and acknowledged, both formally and informally. Each of these aspects of the European family system left a legacy that formed the backdrop for family life in the American colonies. Origins of the American Family To establish the background for modern American families, we set the stage with two periods: the colonial period before 1820, and the early modern period of the nineteenth century. Colonial America (before 1820) From the settlement of Europeans through the early nineteenth century, American family history was primarily the story of three interrelated groups: American Indians, White Europeans, and African Americans. In the passages that follow we will examine their stories separately, and consider how they intersected to create the complex set of family practices, dynamics, and traditions that emerged in the modern era. American Indians: The Family as Social Structure The Europeans who founded the colonies that would become the United States encountered a vast and diverse population of what we now call American Indians (or Native Americans). Through a long, painful process (which continues to this day), the descendants of those indigenous tribal groups were incorporated into the fabric of the dominant European American society. We will investigate American Indians’ contemporary family patterns in the next chapter; here we will consider their precolonial traditions. Despite the diversity among American Indian groups, some historians have attempted to make generalizations about their family traditions. These include a strong respect for elders and a reliance on extended family networks for sharing resources and meeting essential needs. In most cases, family connections were the basic building blocks of social structure. Family relations were the model for nonbiological relationships, including those between members of the larger community and people’s connections with the environment and animals (Weaver and White 1997). We know some of this from analyzing their languages. For example, Sioux Indians used family relationship terms for all members of the community, based on the nature of their cooperation. If a grown man moved into a community, he might be considered a stranger until an older woman with whom he had a relationship started referring to him as her son, at which point he would become brother to her children, uncle to her grandsons, and so on (DeMallie 1994). One common (although not universal) characteristic that set American Indians apart from Europeans was matrilineal descent, in which people were primarily considered descendants of their mothers rather than their fathers (see Changing Culture, “Family Types and Terms”). Among the Hopi Indians in the high deserts of the Southwest, families lived in clans following mothers’ descent, with the oldest daughter inheriting the family home and living there with her husband and children. Because women were the property owners in the household, and men were relative outsiders surrounded by their wives’ kin, women had greater authority within the clan.
Family Types and Terms The prevailing family system is an important part of any society. And the many different kinds of societies have evolved around a wide variety of family systems. Those traditions help us understand how we came to be where we are today. Today, most societies have a family system based on monogamy, the marriage of one person to one other person. Monogamous mating occurs in a few species of mammals (maybe 3 percent) but is more common among primates (10 to 15 percent [Fuentes 1998]). Because people are primates, and monogamy has been around for a long time, this has led some people to believe that monogamous marriage is the natural state of humans. But the history of human diversity suggests that it’s not that simple. For one thing, different forms of marriage have often been practiced in one society at the same time. For example, polygamy, in which one person has several spouses, has usually occurred in societies where most people practiced monogamy— as is the case in some African countries, where polygamy was pretty common into the 1970s (Welch and Glick 1981). Although less common now, polygamy was the most prevalent form of marriage throughout human history. In prehistoric times, this practice may have given groups a biological advantage, since the more successful men could produce more children if they had multiple partners, while the weaker men had fewer children or none at all. Polygamy has almost always been practiced as men having more than one wife, reflecting the power of wealthy or influential men (Coontz 2005). Not surprisingly, polygamy is found in societies marked by great power inequality between men and women. In imperial China, for example, rich men often had multiple wives, and as a result, many poor men never married (Lee and Feng 1999). When a monogamous couple live with their own biological children and no extended family members, it is known as a nuclear family. When a nuclear family is also functionally independent of extended family members, some social scientists call it a conjugal family. This is the modern ideal many people associate with the 1950s and 1960s, when new suburban homes, with trim lawns and picket fences, reinforced the image of the family as an independent (or even isolated) unit. As we will see in Chapter 4, families are instrumental in accumulating and maintaining the wealth and status of those at the top of the social hierarchy. When wealth and power are transmitted from fathers to their sons, the family system is known as patrilineal (as opposed to matrilineal, from mothers to daughters). As we will see, many American Indians had matrilineal traditions, while European Americans were more patrilineal. That’s why American wives and children usually take their surnames from the man of the family. Suburbanization encouraged young couples to move away from their parents, but Americans had been a relatively mobile population since the westward expansion of the nineteenth century. In other societies, young couples often live with or near the husband’s family home, in a living arrangement we call patrilocal, or near the wife’s family (matrilocal). Contemporary societies are not usually rigidly gendered in this way, but in some cases strong traditions remain. In rural China, for example, it is still common for young women to move into their husband’s household, where they play an important role in the family care system, especially CHANGING CULTURE Early History 39 and young children lived together in these homes, along with grandparents if they were still alive (Steadman 2004). Still, even if prehistoric human societies formed nuclear families, they would not have survived if small families were responsible for all of their own needs. Cooperation beyond the immediate family was always essential. From Europe to the United States For most of this chapter, we will focus on the European origins of American family history. That’s not because Europeans are more important than other groups, but because their traditions and practices dominated the legal, political, and cultural landscape in the early years of the country. Europeans were the in caring for the older family members. For this reason, having a son is more economically advantageous than having a daughter, because the son is likely to bring a wife/worker into the family, whereas a daughter may marry and leave her parents with no one to support them when they are old (Hvistendahl 2011). Finally, we may speak of family systems as being either patriarchal, which means that power is wielded by men within the family, or matriarchal, in which women hold power. Although there certainly have been matriarchal families, truly matriarchal societies have been very rare in history; even in matrilineal American Indian tribes, for example, men usually had more power on questions of war (Eggan 1967). As we follow the history of families up to the present, we will see how men’s power within society at large and their power within the family are mutually reinforcing. Each of these terms represents whole systems or patterns of family life, different ways of acting and thinking from the moment we wake up till our heads hit the pillow (if we have one). Looking at all the different forms of marriage and family structure throughout history, and recognizing how successful those systems have been at maintaining their respective societies, it seems unreasonable to believe that there is one normal, or natural, family form ordained by God or evolution. There is simply too much diversity in the human historical record for that to be true. As an aside, note that all of these terms have been used for families based on marriages between men and women. Now that the United States and many other countries permit marriage between couples of the same sex (see Chapter 8), we should have an appropriate adjustment of terms. Of course, marriage is marriage, and we don’t always need to discuss the sex of the people involved. But when it is important to study, I have suggested that we call marriage of man to woman heterogamy and refer to same-sex marriage as homogamy—from the Greek hetero for “different,” homo for “same,” and gamos for “marriage” (P. Cohen 2011). But it’s too early to know if this idea will catch on.
On the other hand, American Indians had some family traits in common with Europeans. Most practiced monogamous marriage—although their marriage bonds were not as strong as other relationships, and divorce was more common than among Europeans (Queen 1985). Like Europeans, American Indians also practiced a gender division of labor. For example, in groups that mixed hunting with agriculture, men did most of the hunting, while women grew and prepared food and reared young children (Gearing 1958). Even where matrilineal traditions increased women’s power in the household, men usually had more political authority in the larger group (Eggan 1967). However, the relations between American Indian men and women in general remained more equal than they were among Europeans (Coontz 2005:42–43). Colonial Americans: “So Chosen, He Is Her Lord” Coming from Europe, colonial Americans brought traditions for marriage and family life to the New World. Marriage for them was a practical arrangement that was considered necessary for civilization, not a source of love and affection. When in 1620 the English colonists in Jamestown, Virginia, showed signs of becoming undisciplined and unruly, a shipment of 90 intended brides was dispatched from the home country. The hope was to provide a stabilizing influence and encourage the male settlers to take a more mature view of the colonial enterprise. (The wives were also a valuable asset to the colonists, who were expected to trade 150 pounds of tobacco for each woman [Ransome 1991].) Even if these early “mail-order brides” felt more like indentured servants than beloved wives, the male colonists endorsed the idea of choice in principle and rejected the Old World practice of arranged marriages. Still, colonial husbands’ authority within marriage was virtually unchecked, and given the dependence of women on their husbands for survival, their choices were in fact very limited. As with the relationship between God and man under Protestant doctrine, the idea of free choice in marriage only served to reinforce the wife’s A tipi cover depicts scenes of traditional life, including hunting. Origins of the American Family 43 duty to serve her husband. “The woman’s own choice makes such a man her husband,” wrote Massachusetts governor John Winthrop in the Founders’ Constitution in 1645. “Yet being so chosen, he is her lord, and she is to be subject to him” (Winthrop 1853). In the Massachusetts Bay colony, local authorities were more likely to discipline husbands for failing to control their wives than for abusing them (Coontz 2005:141). For the common people of colonial America—woman or man, free or slave, native or European—government was mostly a distant symbol when it came to family matters (Cott 1976). The system of marriage that prevailed in colonial times was supported by the Christian Church and by the power vested in local community leaders, who imposed their interpretation of Christian doctrine on marriage and divorce. Women could not vote, hold political office, or even serve on juries, so they had little choice but to comply with the marriage system. Their status as members of the local community—and often their survival—depended on conformity to the standards of the time. Once married, any property that a woman brought to the marriage, as well as the products of her labor, became her husband’s. In fact, a wife’s legal existence disappeared when she got married: under the legal doctrine of coverture, which lasted until the late nineteenth century, wives were incorporated into their husbands’ citizenship. Children and Families: More Work and Less Play Colonial American families were large. The average woman bore about seven children in the course of her life, but one or more of them were likely to die at a young age. Children, like everyone else, played an economic role in the family, contributing to its survival and prosperity. Although this seems a shame or even a tragedy to us now—children growing up without a true childhood—the idea of childhood as a uniquely innocent stage of life was not common at that time. Most colonists held to the Calvinist view that children were guilty of original sin, and their evil impulses needed to be controlled through harsh discipline and hard work (Griswold 1993). Many families sent their children to live and work in the homes of others. Even rich parents did not spend much time interacting with their children (by today’s standards). Because the bonds between family members in general were much less sentimental than they are now, these decisions did not provoke the kind of guilt or parental anxiety they would today (Coontz 2005). Although couples had many children, most people did not live in large extended families under one roof. Households were mostly made up of nuclear families, plus any boarders or servants they had. Even though they didn’t all live together, extended families played an important support role. Most people lived close to their siblings’ families, and they shared labor and other resources. Among extended families, a stem family was the household formed by one grown child remaining in the family home with his or her parents. The favored child— typically the oldest son—would inherit the family home or farm, while the other siblings started their own households after marriage. This arrangement was common among farm families and those wealthy enough to leave an estate to their children (Ruggles 1994). The colonial way of family life represented the first phase of a transition from the rural family, dominated by European Christian ideology, to the modern, urban, and industrial family system that was to come. As with all such transitions, the old ways were not completely left behind, but the pace of change in the nineteenth century would be so dramatic that many Americans felt powerless to understand, much less control, it. African Americans: Families Enslaved African families had gone through their own transitions, of course, of a particularly devastating nature. From the arrival of the first slaves in Jamestown in 1619 until the mid-1800s, Africans were forcibly removed from their homelands in western and central Africa and subjected to the unspeakable horrors of the Middle Passage aboard slave ships, slave auctions, and ultimately the hardships of plantation labor in the American South (as well as in the Caribbean and South America). Because they were thrown together from diverse backgrounds, and because their own languages and customs were suppressed by slavery, we do not know how much of slave family life was a reflection of African traditions and how much was an adaptation to their conditions and treatment in America (Taylor 2000). But there is no doubt that family life was one of the victims of the slave system. The histories that have come down to us feature heart-wrenching stories of family separation, including diaries that tell of children literally ripped from their mothers’ arms by slave traders, mothers taking poison to prevent themselves from being sold, and parents enduring barbaric whippings as punishment for trying to keep their families together (Lerner 1973). In fact, most slaves only had a given name with no family name, which made the formation and recognition of family lineages difficult or impossible (Frazier 1930). Slave marriage and parenthood were not legally recognized by the states, and separation was a constant threat. Any joy in having children was tempered by the recognition that those children were the property of the slave owner and could be sold or transferred away forever. Nevertheless, most slaves lived in families for some or all of their lives. Most married (if not legally) and had children in young adulthood, and most children lived with both parents. This was especially the case on larger plantations rather than small farms, because slaves could carve out some protection for community life if they were in larger groups, and husbands and wives were more likely to remain together (Coles 2006). Even if they had families, however, African Americans for the most part were excluded from the emerging modern family practices described in the next section until after slavA slave family in a Georgia cotton field, c. 1860. ery ended. Origins of the American Family 45 The Emerging Modern Family (1820–1900) During the Roman Empire (roughly 27 BCE–476 CE), the Latin word familia meant not just a man’s wives and children but also his slaves and servants, who would bear his name after they were freed (Dixon 1992). In some ways, patriarchal power has been declining ever since. But with the spread of democracy and industrial capitalism, from the time of the American Revolution into the nineteenth century, new ideas, new laws, and the growth of the market economy hastened the erosion of fathers’ absolute authority, bringing “profound changes in record time” (Coontz 2005:145). Marriage: New Ideals, New Traditions Ironically, the period of rapid change brought about by democracy and industrialism also created a family characteristic that we often think of as “traditional”: the sharply divided roles of fathers as breadwinners and mothers as homemakers. Even though most families still depended on the economic contributions of wives, the ideal of man as the economic provider became a powerful symbol in American culture. That ideal made men even more powerful and dominant within the family, even as women started embracing for themselves the growing ideology of individualism and personal freedom. The principle of autonomy for the country, as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, also applied to individual citizens. As a result, individual free choice in marriage, as in democracy, was an ideal that was widely shared in the early years of the United States. However, not everyone was happy with the idea that individuals, like colonies, had a right to independence and self-determination. A conservative backlash grew in the nineteenth century, led by those in positions of power who had used the language of independence during the American Revolution, but who grew increasingly uneasy with the spread of that idea throughout the population (even though slaves obviously were not included). These conservatives believed that women’s freedom threatened the traditional family. And they had some success. In the decades after the American Revolution, most states went out of their way to pass laws denying women’s right to vote, instead of merely assuming they were forbidden from doing so. But it was too late. Independence, once promised, proved hard to revoke. The result was what Coontz calls “a peculiar compromise between egalitarian and patriarchal views” (2005:153). Women were still considered free, and the concept of male authority began to be replaced by the idea of men as “protectors” of women, while women cared for, loved, and nurtured their husbands. These gender roles came to be known as the separate spheres. Meanwhile, with the recognition of individual rights and the spread of industrialization in the 1800s, the essential political and economic functions of marriage began to erode. That left young adults freer to consider the emotional aspects of their future marriages and to challenge parents or other authorities who tried to impose marriages on them for their own reasons. Companionship, affinity, love, and affection in marriage all began to grow more important in the minds of young adults—especially women—seeking a spouse. 46 Chapter 2: The Family in History Not surprisingly, youthful ambition for happy marriages sometimes came into conflict with parental concern for economic or social status. The practice of courtship emerged as a compromise to reconcile these competing interests. Young couples themselves initiated courtship, which normally began with supervised contact in some public or semipublic place. Among the wealthy or middle class, that might mean a formal party or private social event. Despite having a choice at the outset, young people remained under their parents’ watchful eyes. If the couple’s interest persisted, additional meetings would take place in the woman’s home, possibly leading to marriage if the parents approved. The system made it difficult for young women to act entirely against their parents’ wishes, but offered some elements of free choice. Among the poor and working class, parental control in spouse selection was less complete, but it was usually acknowledged that parents should approve their children’s choices. Life at the low end of the income scale did not permit the luxury of shaping families around individual emotional desires. But the seed of the idea was planted, and whenever the standard of living permitted it, the poor would embrace the principles of choice and independence in family life. This would emerge as an important theme in the late twentieth century. Children and Families: Fewer and More Tender One of the most monumental changes in family life in the nineteenth century was the drop in the number of children in each family. For White families, the average number was cut almost exactly in half over the century (see Figure 2.1). This was partly the result of couples learning how to prevent pregnancy. Mass production of condoms began in the mid-1800s (Gamson 1990), although most couples practiced withdrawal or limited the frequency of intercourse, as birth control information was not widely available in many places. But the declining birth rate was also the result of couples wanting fewer children. For one thing, many fewer children died after the mid-nineteenth century; the rate of infant deaths (those in the first year of life) was cut almost in half in just 50 years and has declined even more dramatically since 1900 (see Figure 2.2). The emerging modern childhood also changed the logic of child rearing. During the nineteenth century, children’s individuality emerged as a valued ideal, reinforced by the drop in the number of children and their greater likelihood of surviving. For example, children more often had their own rooms in the family home, with toys and books made especially for them. And they were less often named after their parents, helping to instill an independent identity. The prevailing view of children’s morality also changed, as a new generation of experts declared that children were a blank slate of innocence, displacing the Calvinist notion that they harbored evil spirits that needed to be crushed. That change in thinking occurred as men started to work outside the home more often. So it was mothers who embraced the new, tenderer form of parenting, replacing the harsh discipline of fathers (Griswold 1993). Gradually, the parent-child relationship became more emotionally close. Even between fathers and children—especially their sons—there were new emotional bonds. Instead of being tyrants with unchecked power, fathers took on the role of moral authorities who (ideally) led more by persuasion than by force. And children (again, especially sons) began to question fathers’ domination in the family (Mintz 1998). As the historian Robert Griswold put it, “Hierarchy and order, the watchwords of older forms of paternal dominance, gave way to a growing emphasis on mutuality, companionship, and personal happiness” (1993:11). Smaller families also meant that there were fewer adult children with whom elderly parents could live. As in colonial America, elderly parents mostly lived in their own homes with one of their grown children. However, most adults still did not live with elderly relatives, chiefly because there weren’t many old people in the population. Only 4 percent of Americans were age 60 or older in 1850, compared with 21 percent today (U.S. Census Bureau 2016b). Institutional Arenas In Chapter 1, we introduced the idea of three interrelated institutional arenas: the family, the market, and the state. These concepts help us understand the change in family form and function that has taken place over the last 200 years. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the market and state emerged as dominant features of modern society, and as a result, the family arena was transformed. I will briefly explain how the family lost its status as the center of the economy and began to be more directly regulated by the state. At the same time, the state started providing services that lightened the load on family care providers. Family and Market: Men and Women, Separate and Together In the nineteenth century, for the first time in history, “most people worked for someone else during their entire adult lives” (Katz 1986). Although that might not sound liberating, these workers were called “free labor” (as opposed to slaves) because their self-image was one of independently acting members of the new industrial economy (Foner 1995). That wage-labor relationship helped foster a sense of individual identity, reflecting American democratic ideals. Men’s new identities—and the new workers were mostly men—were reinforced outside the walls of the family home in the factories and workshops of the industrial economy, where income-generating work took place. Although there was no plan to make it happen this way, the industrial revolution also helped to reinforce the division of gender roles for men and women. Under the new doctrine of separate spheres, women were to make the home a haven, a sanctuary from the harsh realities of the industrial economy in which men worked for pay. This separation—women at home, men at work—was said separate spheres The cultural doctrine under which women were to work at home, to make it a sanctuary from the industrial world in which their husbands worked for pay. SOURCE: Carter et al. (2006), Kochanek et al. (2016). 217 120 27 5 340 170 44 11 1850 1900 1950 2014 White Black Figure 2.2 Infant mortality, 1850–2014 (deaths per 1,000 births) Origins of the American Family 49 to provide the balance necessary for social harmony (Strasser 1982). There were important exceptions, such as the hiring of young women to work in the early industrial mills of New England, but this only highlighted the rule that real workers were supposed to be men, because young women were expected to leave the workforce once they married. Not surprisingly, the ideal of separate spheres was most strongly embraced among the expanding white-collar middle class in urban areas and promoted in new magazines targeted at that audience, such as Harper’s and Ladies’ Magazine (Mintz 1998). Men from these middle-class families, working at the growing number of desk jobs—wearing shirts with white collars—could be seen commuting on streetcars from suburban homes to their jobs in the central cities as early as the middle of the nineteenth century (Griswold 1993). Although separate spheres were not attainable by the great majority of working-class families, the ideal nevertheless was shared by men and women of most racial and ethnic groups and among the poor as well. An important exception to these trends was farm families, many of whom continued to work in the older “family mode” of production. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, only 38 percent of the labor force worked in agriculture, while the proportion of the population living in urban areas (places with more than 2,500 people) climbed steadily to 40 percent (Figure 2.3). Further, the change in economic organization brought by industrialization was so pervasive that even farmwork increasingly operated along market principles, with workers leaving home to work for wages on a farm run as a business. In the end, industrialism and separate spheres increased economic inequality between husbands and wives, with men’s advantage growing. Because these new waged workers were men, the shift of economic power from the home to the workplace left men positioned to wield that power. And although women’s labor in the home remained crucial for economic survival, the fact that it did not generate as much income as men’s wage work created the impression that wives were dependent on their husbands. But if these changes strengthened husbands’ authority, they also strengthened that of wives. Although men wielded more economic power, women’s influence over the children and household was enhanced. Emboldened by their newfound status as “managers” of the home, middle-class women especially sought recognition for the work they did. When that recognition was not forthcoming, many grew frustrated, steeped as they were in the cause of individual liberty and freedom. In 1869, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe—who had published the sensational abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin almost two decades earlier—and her sister Catharine lamented men’s high status, complaining that the “honor and duties of the family state are not duly appreciated” (Beecher and Stowe 1869:221). The two women listed the vast array of responsibilities burdening the typical (wealthy) wife: She has a husband, to whose particular tastes and habits she must accommodate herself; she has children whose health she must guard, . . .whose temper and habits she must regulate. . . . She has constantly changing domestics, with all varieties of temper and habits, whom she must govern. . . . She is required to regulate the finances of the domestic state, and constantly to adapt expenditures to the means and to the relative claims of each department. She has the direction of the kitchen. . . . She has the claims of society to meet, visits to receive and return, and the duties of hospitality to sustain. She has the poor to relieve; benevolent societies to aid; the schools of her children to inquire and decide about; the care of the sick and the aged; the nursing of infancy; and the endless miscellany of odd items, constantly recurring in a large family. In the nineteenth century, the explosion of market relationships took families out of the center of economic life. However, it also reinforced the family as a separate social space, a place where a new kind of relationship developed. Less economic and more emotional, the modern family was emerging as a distinct institutional arena. Family and State: “Monogamous Morality” The family household under the principle of separate spheres was increasingly seen as a private place, caring for its members and raising its children instead of producing goods and services for public trade and consumption. In most cases, the state did not interfere with husbands’ authority. Under coverture, a wife was incorporated into her husband’s citizenship, under his name, and the husband was the family’s representative when it came to interacting with the authorities or the law. Politicians generally believed that social stability required peace within the family. In fact, President Abraham Lincoln, warning against the conflict between slave-owning states and free states that was leading to the Civil War, knew that the public would understand him when he used the family as a metaphor, saying, “a house divided against itself cannot stand” (Cott 2000:77). Peace within the family required strong male leadership, just as peace within the nation required a strong federal government. Origins of the American Family 51 But if the government didn’t interfere with male authority within the household, it nevertheless became much more assertive about regulating who was married and under what conditions. In colonial times, most marriages had been blessed by local authorities alone, if at all, and there was very little civil regulation of family life. In the industrial era, however, the state’s practical authority increased. For most people, the most powerful evidence of this authority may have been the spread of public education, which used local taxation to fund schools for most of the free population by the middle of the nineteenth century (Goldin and Katz 2003). In addition, such apparently simple functions as law enforcement agencies and the national postal service began reaching further into daily life. The federal regulation of family life revolved around marriage and citizenship. Because a married man was the real citizen in the household, representing the rest of the family in the political arena, it made sense to insist that his marriage credentials were legitimate. In the name of safeguarding the character of the nation, then, the government began enforcing a sort of national “monogamous morality” when it came to family definition (Cott 2000:136). Monogamous morality was not a new standard. It drew heavily from the Christian tradition, writing into law what had previously been religious or local custom. Rules for marriage included monogamy and a moral standard that required women to be faithful to their husbands (though not necessarily the other way around), while husbands supported their wives and children economically. For example, when the government supported Civil War soldiers’ widows, officials made sure they had not remarried, in which case the burden of support would pass to their new husbands (Cott 2000). The reach of moral enforcement can also be seen in the Comstock Act of 1873, which banned shipment of “obscene” material in the U.S. mail. That meant not just pornography but also literature promoting birth control and even nonmonogamous relationships such as those advocated by some “free love” communes at the time. But monogamy itself was a key target of federal policy. Under the Dawes Act of 1887, a federal statute that granted individual landholding rights only to those male American Indians who were legally and monogamously married, Christian standards were effectively imposed over Indian family traditions (see Chapter 3). The enforcement of monogamy led to a long-running legal and political feud with the new Mormon Church, a feud that ended only after the Mormons officially renounced polygamy and Utah was permitted to become a state in 1896 (Cherlin and Furstenberg 1986). This burst of federal family regulation in the second half of the nineteenth century was mirrored by state laws and decisions at lower levels of government—for example, prosecuting and even jailing men who remarried after deserting their wives. In many ways, then, at the end of the nineteenth century, the government at all levels laid a much heavier hand on the family lives of its citizens than it had a century before. No Families: Widows and Orphans Families had become less central as sites of economic activity, but they remained an essential source of economic support for most Americans: Despite their inequality in the marketplace, husbands and wives were in fact dependent on each other, just as children were monogamy A family system in which each person has only one spouse. polygamy A family system in which one person has more than one spouse, usually one man and multiple women. 52 Chapter 2: The Family in History dependent on their parents. Yet in the new male-centered wage economy, many widows and orphans had no one to provide monetary support and joined the ranks of the chronically impoverished or the mentally or physically disabled. In this period, being short on family members often went along with being short on necessities. In the past, people in these predicaments had been cared for by their extended families (if they got any care at all). But starting in the mid-nineteenth century, a new set of specialized institutions arose to provide for, or at least supervise, those who could not earn their keep in the industrial economy. This was a weak, disorganized patchwork of poorhouses, orphanages, penitentiaries, and almshouses, which often started out as charitable institutions before being taken over by local or state governments. There were two common features of this emerging welfare system. First, it isolated those in need of assistance from the rest of the population in residential institutions, sometimes for their entire lives. Second, the care provided was usually inadequate, since a lack of resources and ineffective or nonexistent government regulation made it impossible for institutions to provide a decent life for their wards (Katz 1986). The plight of widows in particular was widely known. In fact, the federal government’s ability to recruit soldiers for its army in the Civil War relied on the promise of widows’ pensions, without which many soldiers would not have volunteered, for fear of leaving their wives and children destitute. The resulting bureaucracy was the precursor to our modern welfare system, providing federal support for hundreds of thousands of veterans and their widows (Skocpol 1992). This breakthrough made it possible for Americans without the means to support themselves—and without the support of employed family members—to survive under the care of the state. That made living without a family possible, a rare feat in the history of our species, although in the century to follow it would become increasingly common (Klinenberg 2012). Not everyone in need was able to benefit from early pension and welfare programs, which were selective in whom they assisted, but the modern state increasingly stepped in when people could not draw sustenance from the market or the family (Gordon 1994). African, Asian, and Mexican Americans: Families Apart Being without a family was one of many problems that confronted members of America’s minority groups in the nineteenth century, whether African Americans emerging from slavery, Asian American immigrant communities, or Mexicans who found their lands annexed within growing U.S. boundaries. Each group developed its own family arrangements and practices in ways that were related to, but distinct from, those of Whites. For African American families, the Civil War marked a decisive turning point. The abolition of slavery in 1865 did not mean their liberation from racial oppression; many African Americans entered into a new agricultural system of sharecropping in which they worked on land owned by Whites in conditions of desperate poverty, albeit not formal slavery. And in the South their very citizenship was far from guaranteed. But slavery’s demise did make possible a family revival, allowing some former slaves to reunite with long-lost spouses and children and allowing many others to marry, have children, and live together in the manner of their choosing for the first time in America (Gutman 1976). For the first time, also, African American families could be legally recognized. In fact, the federal government, under monogamous morality principles, required legal marriages among those who qualified for federal relief provided to former slaves (Cott 2000). The African American families that emerged in the late nineteenth century exhibited more gender equality, based on the greater economic role of women, than White families did. But their marriages also were more fragile, partly as a result of the persistent poverty and hardship they suffered, and ended more often in divorce or widowhood. On the other hand, African Americans developed stronger extended family networks of caring and cooperation. This was especially necessary for children, who were frequently cared for by extended family members and foster or adoptive parents (Furstenberg 2007). The first large Asian group in the United States was the Chinese. These immigrants began arriving in significant numbers during the gold-rush years in the West, starting in 1852. Over the next few decades, several hundred thousand An 1857 wood engraving that depicts Chinese miners living and working in California during the Gold Rush. 54 Chapter 2: The Family in History Chinese came to work in the mines and build the railroads of the growing western states, making up a substantial part of the manual labor force (Fong 2008). Almost all of them were men, most of whom had wives and children in China, where they eventually returned (Chew and Liu 2004). This arrangement— married workers spending years separated from their spouses—has been called the split-household family (Glenn and Yap 2002). In response to anti-Chinese racism in the West, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which cut off most new immigration. As a result, few Chinese women could join the single men who remained. And because Chinese men were forbidden from marrying Whites (at least in California, where most of them lived), these men remained unmarried and childless. In the next chapter, we will see how the Chinese community—along with other groups from Asia—eventually flourished in the twentieth century. Unlike the Chinese, who migrated to the United States in search of jobs, the first major group of Latinos in the United States were not immigrants. They were the descendants of Spanish colonists and Aztecs, and they became Americans when the United States won the Mexican-American War in 1848, laying claim to more than half of Mexico in what is now the American Southwest (Nostrand 1975). The new Mexican Americans were mostly poor farmers, but as large commercial farms began taking over their land, and as new railroads reached the territory, many traveled around the country for work. Like the Chinese and African Americans, then, family life for Latinos in early America often included long periods of separation, which required strong family bonds and extended family care relationships (Baca Zinn and Pok 2002). This experience contributed to Mexican Americans’ familism (see Chapter 3), a strong orientation toward family needs and obligations that persists today (Landale and Oropesa 2007). The Modern Family (1900–1960s) During the nineteenth century, a number of forces had pulled men and women toward a nuclear family arrangement in which one employed man was stably married to, and economically supporting, one homemaking woman and their children. These included the cultural ideal of separate spheres, economic forces pushing men toward paid labor outside the home, and government attempts to enforce “moral” marriage. But most Americans couldn’t live that way even if they wanted to. Most men didn’t make enough money to “keep” a woman at home, and most families couldn’t afford a home that provided the kind of privacy the ideal demanded. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the goal of the male breadwinner–female homemaker household was for the first time within the reach of most American families. Those who achieved that goal attempted to The Modern Family (1900–1960s) 55 create a new kind of marriage, in which men and women were friends and companions as well as romantic partners. On the surface, by the 1950s the dream of the companionship family appeared to have become a reality. Beneath the surface, however, the foundation was decidedly shaky. Marriage: Unequal Companions Around the turn of the twentieth century, many young men lived independently, and many others lived with their parents or as boarders until they married in their late 20s. Women usually stayed in the family home until they married. In 1900, the typical man married at about age 26, the typical woman at 22 (see Figure 2.4). Marriage was becoming more attractive to young people for cultural, economic, and political reasons. First, the nature of marriage—and the ideal of marriage—was undergoing a cultural shift that has been described as “institution to companionship.” That was the subtitle of a textbook you might have companionship family An ideal type of family characterized by the mutual affection, equality, and comradeship of its members. SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau (2016c). 29.2 27.1 Men Women 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2015 Percent 29 30 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 Figure 2.4 Median age at first marriage, 1890–2015 56 Chapter 2: The Family in History read if you took this course in the 1940s. The author, Ernest Burgess, saw a new, modern family type, which he described as “the companionship family, characterized by the mutual affection, sympathetic understanding, and comradeship of its members” (Burgess 1963:vii). I summarize the ideal of the companionship family and how it differed from the patriarchal family of the past in Table 2.1. The companionship family ideal was just that—an ideal, not a reality. But the description Burgess offered shows the direction in which many people thought families were headed: smaller families, freely chosen, that make decisions based on mutual interests, in the service of the individual happiness and personal growth of husband and wife. It was an ideal shared by many Americans, especially (but not exclusively) the White, middle-class families that dominated popular culture, politics, and the business world in the mid-twentieth century (May 1988). The core relationship of the new model family was the companionate marriage, which was a companionship, a friendship, and a romance, rather than being a practical platform for cooperation and survival, as marriage seemed to have been in the past (Cherlin 2009). The companionate ideal was especially attractive to men working in the growing sector of white-collar corporate jobs, many of whom, even if well paid, felt alienated and frustrated by their impersonal bureaucratic work (Mintz 1998). The promise of companionate marriage also contributed to the breakdown of the courtship system—the old compromise between free choice and parental supervision in choosing a spouse. The independence of young people was no longer so easily controlled. In the growing urban areas, there was plentiful opportunity for unsupervised interaction, fueled by cash in the pockets of employed young men, and driven—at least in part—by cars. In this way, courtship was replaced by the freewheeling system of dating, , in which young adults spent time with a variety of partners, before making companionate marriage A view of marriage as a companionship, a friendship, and a romance, rather than as a practical platform for cooperation and survival. dating The mate selection process in which young adults spend time with a variety of partners before making a long-term commitment. Table 2.1 The companionship family ideal PATRIARCHAL FAMILY COMPANIONSHIP FAMILY BASIS FOR CHOOSING A SPOUSE Parental influence, social status, and economic needs Self-directed motivation based on affection and personality HUSBAND-WIFE RELATIONSHIP Subordination of wife to husband Equality based on consensus BONDS HOLDING FAMILIES TOGETHER Father’s authority Mutual affection and common interests FAMILY SIZE Extended Nuclear FAMILY GOALS Duty and tradition Happiness and personal growth The Modern Family (1900–1960s) 57 long-term commitments (see Chapter 7). The authority of parents was severely compromised in the process, replaced by the authority of young men, who now initiated and paid for dates. The companionate marriages that resulted from dating—despite their ideology of sharing—thus started off with a man in the driver’s seat. Beyond the symbolic importance of independence, however, the economic opportunity necessary for achieving the ideal—an employed man supporting a homemaking wife in their own home—became more accessible. For many years, American workers (and their unions) had demanded from their employers a family wage, the amount necessary for a male earner to provide subsistence for his wife and children without their having to work for pay. As American industry grew and the threat of labor unrest became more unsettling to employers, more companies started paying their workers enough to support a whole family. Ford Motor Company crossed a symbolic threshold when it dramatically increased pay, introducing the “Five Dollar Day” in 1914. That wage was intended to promote workforce stability, home ownership (and car buying), as well as worker loyalty (May 1982). And it succeeded. The federal government also gave marriage a political boost in the early twentieth century, replacing the stick with a carrot. The strict moral tone of marital regulation of the nineteenth century gave way to a pattern of economic incentives for marriage (Cott 2000), including Social Security and Aid to Dependent Children (discussed shortly). These programs indirectly promoted marriage because women who never married or who got divorced were not eligible at first to receive their support. After World War II, the government provided extensive benefits to male veterans, especially low-interest loans to buy homes, which also had the effect of encouraging marriage (Cherlin 2009). Taken together, all of these factors—the cultural shift toward the companionate marriage and away from parental authority, the economic opportunities for independence provided to men through industrial development, and the political incentives to marry offered by the government— increased the motivation and ability of young people to marry in the first half of the twentieth century. Because most married couples conformed to the separate spheres ideal, or tried to, some observers assumed that the family as an institution was stable and secure. Talcott Parsons, the sociologist most identified with the theory of structural functionalism (see Chapter 1), was one such naive observer, writing in 1955: “It seems quite safe in general to say that the adult feminine role has not ceased to be anchored primarily in the internal affairs of the family, as wife, mother and manager of the household, while the role of the adult male is primarily anchored in the occupational world” (Parsons and Bales 1955:12–14). That image might have applied to the 1950s, but it would not last much longer.
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