Lecture 9/29/03
Why do we study class, race and gender when we are studying families?
Class, race, and gender are macro structures that stratify society and make different opportunities available to individuals and families.
Class, Race, and Gender as Structured Inequalities or social stratification
Class, race, and gender organize society as a whole and create a variety of contexts for family living through their unequal distribution of social opportunities. The following four points are crucial to our understanding of these systems:
They are hierarchies of stratification
They distribute social rewards and opportunities differently.
They are relational systems of power and subordination.
They are interrelated systems of inequality, example ethnicity and class..
Definitions of social class:
As a person’s relationship to the means of production. The latter term refers to the things necessary to produce goods and services. Marx called those who owned the means of production the capitalist class and those who traded their labor for wages paid by the capitalists the working class. It is an inadequate model for today's world.
A modification of this model focuses not on occupations but on relationships of power between class groups. The key then is not the occupation itself but the control one has over one’s work, the work of others, decision-making and investments which is why some sociologists differentiate between a middle class and a professional class.
One part of the definition of Class would include income – persons occupying the same relative economic rank form a social class.
But the concept of class doesn't include only income. It is an ordering of persons in society according to degrees of power, prestige, and privilege, as well
Need to define power, prestige and privilege. These three kinds of rewards are not tied solely to how much money a person has. Some sociologists use the term social stratification to describe the ordering of persons based on power, prestige and privilege.
Power is the ability to force a person to do something even against his or her will (some sociologists add "and the ability to resist being forced to do something)
Prestige refers to honor and status in a society.
Privilege is a special advantage or benefit enjoyed by some individuals. It is more closely tied to income and wealth.
In practice, a person's power, prestige and privilege are heavily determined by her or his income, occupation and education.
American social classes - in real life, there is considerable overlap among these four social classes and not all families fit neatly into one category
Upper
Middle
Working
Lower
Changing conceptions of class
Because this social class structure developed in an era when most families had two parents but only the father worked outside the home, two-earner and single-parent families are particularly difficult to categorize. A family that is classified middle-class maybe only middle-class because there are two incomes. If the father was the sole worker, a particular family would be classified as working class.
Why are we interested in studying class when we are studying families? We are going to say that the structure of the family differences among classes and how these families interact with the rest of society differs as a result of class.
Cultural explanations are often embraced to explain differences in family living in terms of unique values, morals, and cultural preferences. But cultural explanations overlook the structural conditions that shape opportunities and in turn shape family arrangements.
Structural Explanations looks outside of the family to determine what structural factors shape family.
Structural Approach -
How the economy has affected family - Changes in the structure of the economy has impacted on families.
The restructuring of the U.S. economy has caused a shortage of well-aid semiskilled and skilled jobs that do not require a college education - the kind of jobs less-educated young men used to rely on to support their wives and children.
Effects of current economic restructuring on family
Technological changes
Loss of semiskilled and skilled manufacturing jobs from U.S. to developing nations.
Movement from a manufacturing economy to a service economy
1973 - oil prices rise
Increase in nonstandard employment - part-time, per diem, contracted work, usually has no or little benefits (like health coverage, vacation, etc)
Economic prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s allowed the breadwinner/homemaker form of family to operate.
Now, both parents must work to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. For some, as Susan Sheehan explains, "There Ain't No Middle Class" - instead these families that could have made it in the 1950s and 1960s become the "working poor" in the 1980s and beyond.
Unequal distribution of income.
20% of the families share 47.3% of the income.
Income inequality among families has increased for three reasons: the growing inequality in the earnings of men.
The growth of single-parent families.
The movement of middle-class wives into the workforce.
Increasing gap between the college-educated and the non-college educated.
Persistence of poverty.
Temporarily poor
Persistently poor.
Countering effects of economy by increase in dual-earner couples.
What effects does the economy have on an individual members of the family?
Lillian Rubin _ When father loses his job, it’s likely to be a crushing blow to the family economy. And partly, also, it’s because the issues unemployment raises are different for men and form women. For most women, identity is multifaceted, which mean that the loss of a job isn’t equivalent to the loss of self.
No matter how invested a woman may be in her work, no matter how much her sense of self and competence are connected to it, work remains only part of identity
For men work is likely to be connected to the core of self.
The struggles around the division of labor shift somewhat when father loses his job. Father may help out – some relief for the working mother
For American men – men who have been nurtured and nourished in the belief that they’re masters of their fate – it’s almost impossible to bear such feelings of helplessness. His sense of his manhood, already under threat because he can’t support his family, is eroded further by his wife’s complaints
We know that the incident of physical abuse against women and children rises with unemployment of men.
We know that the incidence of divorce rises
Somatic and mental health problems increase with the rise of unemployment.
Study found that in the same year that unemployment rose from 6.5% to 9.2% there was a 30% increase in the number of couple seeking advice from marriage counselors about their waning sex lives.
When income drops 25 percent, divorce rises by more than 10%
Children suffer too. – Relative deprivation – moves to new neighborhoods, less material resources
Downwardly Mobile Families
Another group of people whose families are affected by economic insecurities have somewhat different experiences than working-class families. These are the people who have fallen out of the middle class. Once successful, financially stable models of the American dream, they have seen their jobs disappear or their salaries drastically reduced and have fallen hard.
Trends in Poverty
Poverty decreased during the 50s and 60s, then increased from the 1970s through the mid-1990s. A strong economy has reduced poverty in the late 1990s. We will see a rise again in poverty.
How is poverty measured? Established in the 1960s - based on how much it would cost to buy enough food to meet the Agriculture Department's standard for an "economy" diet and on the assumption that families spend one-third of their income on food, simply multiplied by three. In 1999, the line stood at $16,895 for a family of two adults and two children under 18.
Poverty has become increasing concentrated in the growing numbers of household headed by divorced, separated, never-married, or widowed mothers. More than half of all poor families are headed by single mothers (1998)
Most of the temporarily poor are white, but 62% of the persistently poor were black.
Poverty and Family Life –
The economic woes of working class or downwardly mobile families are difficult, but nowhere are the stresses of class stratification on family life more apparent than among the poorest of American families.
Growing up in poverty has been linked to a variety of problems in children, - such as dropping out of school, low academic achievement, teen pregnancy and childbearing, poor mental and physical health, delinquent behavior and unemployment in adolescent and early adulthood. In addition, the longer children live in poverty, the worse their cognitive, social and emotional functioning.
“Heat or eat” dilemma – Boston – 3 year study. During the coldest months of the year emergency room visits by malnourished children under the age of 6 increased 30%.
The Debate over Welfare
Two-tier system - First tier Social Security, disability insurance, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, Medicare and so on. These types of social welfare are tied to working; these types also are sensitive to inflation, i.e. the amount paid increasing as the cost of living increases
Second tier – aid to the poor. Entitlement programs for the poor constitute only about 23 percent of all federal entitlement programs but accounted for 93% of the entitlement budget cuts enacted by Congress in 1996.
Social scientific evidence does not support the conclusion that welfare causes problems. Recent research points out that higher welfare payments actually hasten the escape from poverty for some single-parent families. Even prior to recent reforms, which sharply limit the amount of time people can be on welfare, only 30% of recipients stayed on for more than 2 years and only 7% stayed on for more than 8 years.
In fact states with higher welfare benefits have lower rates of female-headed households and welfare participation.
Does drawing welfare benefits encourage single women to have more babies? Birthrate of women on welfare is actually considerably lower than that of the general population.
National Academy of Sciences found that the overwhelming majority of births to never-married women in general (70%) and to unmarried teenagers in particular (over 85%) were unintended suggesting that most welfare pregnancies are not based on conscious decisions to increase financial benefits.
The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is identifying that there are actually two groups of poor; the "temporarily poor" who fell below the poverty line only 1 or 2 years during the 10 years under study. And the persistently poor who fell below the line at least 8 of the 10 years. Regardless of family structure most of the temporarily poor were white, but 62% of the persistently poor were black. Families in which the head was both black and a single woman made up 31% of the persistently poor.
Family Life on Welfare –
Intrusion by the state
Welfare payments are not sufficient to cover ordinary family expenditures.
The irony of these practices, of course, is that contrary to popular stereotypes, women on welfare are not isolated from the world of work. They’re often already working but not earning enough to survive.
Work is often unstable
Child care limited
Welfare Reform
1996 workfare after 2 years of receiving assistance – 5year lifetime limit on benefits for nay family, a transformation of welfare from an entitlement to a “block grant”
Reduction in food stamps
Other cuts that concentrate on legal immigrants, the disable, and the elderly poor
One study found that people in workfare programs started out at very low wages and increased their salaries by only an average of 6 cents a year. More than half of the women who leave the welfare rolls when they can support themselves with jobs eventually return to welfare because their jobs end or because they aren’t earning enough to make ends meet.
Not new jobs – jobs recycled at lower rates for welfare recipients
Poverty and Housing Clinton housing appropriations bill in 1996, which essentially cut off government, rent subsidies.
5 million needy families now pay more than half of their pretax income on housing
Affordable housing – if rent and utilities cost no more than 30%
Average middle-class homeowner spends only 23%
Homeless Families - Families with children, constituting about 43% of the entire homeless population, now represent the fastest-growing segment of the homeless
Homeless children suffer higher rates of depression, anxiety, behavioral problems, and academic difficulties than other children do. In a comparative study of homeless and housed children, researchers estimate that half of all homeless children demonstrate at lest one developmental problem as compared to 16% of housed children.
Classes in contemporary America
Characteristics of lower-class families
The Culture of Poverty thesis accounts for poverty using the “deficit” model. This view contends that the poor have a different way of life than the rest of society and that this cultural difference explains their continued poverty.
Shortcomings of the Cultural Approach – Cultural explanations obscure the social and material realties of class.
Panel Study of income Dynamics – Study in progress of 50,000 people since 1968. In the early years, the purpose was to find out more about the policy makers then called the “culture of poverty” Culture of poverty theorists believed that lack of motivation and other psychological factors were deeply rooted in the poor and kept many of them isolated from society’s mainstream. The panel study measures individual attitudes about achievement, personal effectiveness, and the future with a series of psychological tests.
Findings did not support theories that low motivation contributes to poverty.
What are the factors – divorce sudden unemployment or birth of a child.
This study explored a question that most work on the culture of poverty has failed to test – namely, whether the poor constitute a permanent underclass doomed to continuous poverty.
Contrary to common belief, most poor people are only poor temporarily.
The experience of long-term poverty varies among population groups – elderly, female-headed families black Latinos. Over a 20-year period, 12% of the poverty spells extended 5 or more years and only 5 percent of the poverty spells lasted 7 or more years. However, this poverty is tied to structural factors, when the economy is good and jobs are available, the poverty % goes down.
More female-centered kinship - a kinship structure in which the strongest bonds of support and care giving occur among a network of women, most of them relatives, who may live in more than one household. Mothers, grandmothers, sister, and other female kin hold most of the authority over children and provide most of the supervision.
Extended kinship ties as protection -kinship networks of the poor spread the burdens of poverty, cushioning its impact on any one household and allowing its members to get by from day to day.
Poor people cannot afford to rely solely on assigned kinship - the more restricted set of kinship ties that middle people acquire automatically at birth and when they marry: father mother, grandparents, husband, wife children. Rather they make use of Created kinship to recruit assistance wherever it can be found.
Greater compression of the generations. Grandmother-mother-child axis is the strongest alliance.
However costs of kinship network – can serve to perpetuate poverty across generations. The problem is that unless a person denies some requests, it is difficult to accumulate any savings, and without savings it is difficult to leave the network.
Characteristics of working-class families
Gender segregation - But this picture of working-class families is out of date. Gans and Rubin have observed that the strict division of roles between wife and husband has weakened, although most men do substantially less of the childcare and housework.
More segregated (though somewhat lessening) roles of husband and wife.
Changing attitudes toward women’s work outside the home. Working class women view employment as a proper activity, necessary to maintain their families' lifestyles and also a source of satisfaction and self-esteem.
Blue-collar husbands have changed their opinions more about married women working for pay than middle-class men.
Characteristics of middle-class families
Core is the conjugal family - the family of procreation, mother, father and children.
More independent of kin than working class. The family will move away from kin, if necessary, to pursue better job opportunities. More likely to spend its savings on a down payment for a house rather than doling it out to relatives who need money to pay bills.
Kinship structure with strong vertical axis of support – vertical family ties. High levels of obligation expressed toward a person's parents and to their children. Assistance to elderly parents is likely to be much more substantial and more common than assistance to elderly aunts and uncles.
Women do the “work” of kinship just as in other classes.
Characteristics of upper-class families.
Why do you think that Cherlin says that there is not much information on the upper class or elites?
Preservation and accumulation of wealth
How do they accomplish this – separate schooling, separate neighborhoods, network of elites.
Influence of marriage – more control over their children.
Women’s role still to enhance men’s careers through socializing.
In some ways they are like working class since the extended family is primary. Think for example, the Kennedy clan; the Kennedy compound.
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