Family Lecture 9/26/01
Looking at gender and race historically
All families are shaped by specific historical, social, and material conditions. We can expand our understanding of how family was experienced differently among white women, men, and children in different social classes. We can begin to understand how immigrant families adapted to their new environment. Finally we can examine the impact of racial domination on family life - by looking at African-Americans, Latino and Asians.
The Doctrine of Two Spheres - A sharply divided gender system accompanied rising affluence and the separation of production from the household. Men occupied the public sphere of economic affairs, women became guardians of the private sphere of the home.
The Cult of True Womanhood/ Cult of domesticity ideology sharpened class distinctions among women, elevating the status of middle-class women as poor and immigrant women were becoming factory workers
The Family Wage - Only women whose husbands could support a household with a family wage could be domestic caretakers. The family wage was limited to White men. Young people, women and men of other racial groups were excluded from earning a wage sufficient to support a family.
Childhood and Adolescence - a change in attitude toward children and their needs accompanied the emergence of separate spheres. As industrialism advanced, the distinct life-cycle stages of childhood and adolescence were recognized. Parenting in middle-and upper-class families involved preparing boys for labor market success and girls for marriage. Children from poor and farm families continued to be economic assets contributing to family survival.
Immigration and Family Life.
Two massive waves of immigration have been documented in the U.S -
Between 1830 - 1882, large numbers of English, Irish, German and Scandinavian immigrants arrived;
Between 1882- 1930 southern and eastern Europeans
Immigration was primarily a response to economic expansion in the U.S. and economic dislocations in Europe. Immigrant labor was crucial to the industrialization of the U.S.
The Social Breakdown Perspective. - early studies focused on the social breakdown of traditional family life caused by migration. According to this perspective, immigrants were agrarian. When they came to the U.S, they had no values and behaviors that would help them be successful in the new industrial world. Therefore, their families became dysfunctional. Once they became assimilated and lost their “cultural baggage,” they would become useful citizens.
Revisionist Perspective - Work and Immigrant Family - The family was a vital resource in adapting to the new society. By “Chain migration”. immigrants encouraged other family members to migrate and helped them shift to industrial work. Families sometimes adapted to the new industrial setting by sending children out to work. This survival strategy, based on the family economy tradition, illustrates how families were active agents in shaping their own lives.
Racial Control and Family Life
A. Changing frameworks for thinking about minority families. - When society holds one type of family as normative, racial ethnic families who do not meet that ideal are viewed as deficient, as backward, as products of ethnic lifestyles.
B. Macro Structural Connections between Race, labor and Family Life - The presence of racial ethnic groups in the U.S. is tied to the demand for labor. Racial ethnics contributed their labor to the building of the agricultural and industrial base, but were excluded from the industrial jobs that were accessible to European immigrants. Blauner suggests an internal colonization model to explain the incorporation of racial ethnics into U.S. society. The subordinated labor status of racial ethnics cut them off from institutional and social supports provided other families. Minority families could not embrace the doctrine of two spheres because women’s productive work was necessary for family survival. Families adapted and continued, despite enormous burdens placed on families by the racial labor system.
C. Black Families in Slavery and Freedom - adaptation, resistance, and agency are key themes in recent research on Black families. Two parent households prevailed both during slavery and after emancipation. The main reason for family breakup during slavery was forced separation following sale and also death. (Herbert Gutman’s article)
Herbert Gutman’s Article – crucial study in the revisionist perspective:
The black family in particular has been equated with family instability and stereotyped as the essence of what families should not be. The social science assumption that slavery weakened kin ties and undermined family values gave way to notions of the matriarchal family, a form in which power rested in the mother figures with father largely absent from family life.
According to this thinking, family disintegration continued into the 20th century.
Moynihan report (1965) identified the family as the main problem facing blacks.
Moniyhan’s work was based largely on E. Franklin Frazier’s work of Black families in the 1930s.
Gutman decided to test the hypothesis: what was the African-American family like immediately after the civil war. Was it as E. Franklin Frazier described it: one a minority stream with two-parents and a majority stream that was matriarchal in organization?
Gutman examined a variety of records to reconstruct 19,000 African-American families in rural, urban, southern, and northern areas as well as the families of freemen and former slaves.
Gutman found that two-parent households prevailed both during slavery and after emancipation. Between 70% - 90% of household contained a husband and a wife or just a father. Only 6% fit the “classic model of grandmother-mother-child.”
The main reason for family breakup during slavery was forced separation through sale and death. Death and force broke up many slave marriages, but it does not follow that such sever disruption shattered slave consciousness of normal slave marriage relations and of the value of a two-parent household.
Part of the reason for so much physical movement after the Civil War was the reconstitution of former slave families.
What can be said about the African-American Family under slavery?
1. Work and Gender - The gender system under which slaves worked was imposed by Whites, yet different from the mainstream. Men and women were laborers; much of the plantation work was gender typed. Slave women were responsible for the domestic care of their own families and often for the owner’s families as well. Communal childcare arrangements resulted in women being accountable for one and other’s children. Male slaves were denied manhood in the public sphere but were not completely undermined. Gender relations were more egalitarian in slave families than in White families.
2. Kinship - kinship networks were crucial in retaining family integrity, and were recreated among unrelated slaves when slavery separated particular families. It was illegal for slaves to marry, but many established permanent unions. Values of marriage relations remained even after slavery destroyed marriages.
So how does Gutman explain the statistics of the 20th century – he acknowledges that E. Franklin Frazier accurately described the African-American family in urban America of the 1930s. He explains it by “occupational exclusion of blacks.” This is called institutional racism. Through Jim Crow laws blacks were unable to pass along their skills, practice their trade and become politically involved.
Dill’s article “Our Mothers’ Grief”
Unlike white women, racial-ethnic women experienced the oppressions of a patriarchal society but were denied the protections and buffering of a patriarchal family.
Racial-ethnics were brought to this country to meet the need for a cheap and exploitable labor force.
African-American slaves - the threat of disruption by sale of family accounted 32% of all marriage being dissolved.
In contrast to some African traditions and the Euro-American patterns of the period, slave men were not the main provider or authority figure in the family.
Interesting dilemmas - slaveowners encourage family therefore encourage the potential of resistance.
It was within this context of surveillance, assault, and ambivalence that slave women’s reproductive labor took place. She and her menfolk had the task of preserving the human and family ties that could ultimately give them a reason for living. They had to socialize their children to believe in the possibility of a life in which they were not enslaved. The slave woman’s labor on behalf of the family was the only labor the slave engaged in that could not be directly appropriated by the slave owner for his profit.
Yet its indirect appropriation, as labor crucial to the reproduction of the slave owner’s labor force, was the source of strong ambivalence for male slave women. Some women murdered their children so that they would not live in slavery.
Chinese Sojourners - An increase in the African slave population was a desired goal. Therefore, Africans were permitted and even encouraged at times to form families subject to the authority and whim of the master.
By sharp contrast, Chinese people were explicitly denied the right to form families in the US through both law and social practice.
Working in the US was a means of gaining support for one’s family with an end of obtaining sufficient capital to return to China and purchase land.
The practice of sojourning was reinforced by laws preventing Chinese laborers from becoming citizens, and by restrictions on their entry into this country. Chinese laborers who arrived before 1882 couldn’t bring their wives and were prevented by law from marrying whites.
Thus it is likely that the number of Chinese-American families might have been negligible had it not been for two things: the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906 which destroyed all municipal records and the ingenuity and persistence of the Chinese people who used the opportunity created by the earthquake to increase their numbers in the U.S.
Since relatives of citizens were permitted entry, American-born Chinese (real and claimed) would visit China, report the birth of a son, and thus create an entry slot. Years later the slot could be used by a relative or purchased. Paper sons.
The high concentration of males in the Chinese community before 1920 resulted in a split-household form of family. In the split household family, production is separated from other functions and is carried out by a member living far from the rest of the household. The rest- consumption, reproduction and socialization - are carried out by the wife and other relatives from the home village.
The reproductive labor of Chinese women, therefore, took on two dimensions primarily because of the split-household family form.
Despite these handicaps, Chinese people collaborated to establish the opportunity to form families and settle in the US. In some cases it took as long as three generations for a child to be born on US soil.
Chicanos - Africans were uprooted from their native lands and encouraged to have families in order to increase the slave labor force. Chinese people were immigrant laborers whose “permanent” presence in the country was denied. By contrast, Mexican-Americans were colonized and their traditional family life was disrupted by war and the imposition of a new set of laws and conditions of labor.
The hardships faced by Chicano families, therefore, were the result of the US colonization of the indigenous Mexican population, accompanied by the beginnings of industrial development in the region. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed in 1848 after the Mexican-American War granted American citizenship to Mexicans living in what is now called the Southwest. The American takeover, however, resulted in the gradual displacement of Mexicans from the land and their incorporation into a colonial labor force. In addition Mexicans who immigrated into the US after 1848 were also absorbed into the labor force.
Whether natives of northern Mexico or immigrants from southern Mexico, Chicanos were a largely peasant population whose lives were defined by a feudal economy -
Land was enclosed.
The American period (post-1848) was characterized by considerable transience for the Chicano population.
Grisdwold del Castillo found a sharp increase in female-headed households in LA from a 13% in 1844 to 31% in 1880. This was a result of widowhood and temporary abandonment of the family in search of work.
Slowly entire families were encouraged to go to railroad workcamps and were eventually incorporated into the agricultural labor market.
Another key factor in conserving Chicano culture was the extended family network, particularly in the system of godparenting (comadragzo). The extended family network - which included godparents -expanded the support groups for women who were widowed or temporarily abandoned and for those who were in seasonal, part- or full-time work. It suggests, therefore, the potential for an exchange of services among poor people whose income did not provide the basis for family subsistence.
Long after industrialization had begun to reshape family roles among middle-class white families, driving white women into a cult of domesticity, women of color were coping with an extended day.
Racial-ethnic families were sustained and maintained in the face of various forms of disruption. Yet racial-ethnic women and their families paid a high price in the process. High rates of infant mortality, a shortened life span, the early onset of crippling and debilitating disease provided some insight into the costs of survival.
So what does Dill see as "our mother's grief"?
Being a racial-ethnic woman in 19th century American society meant having extra work both inside and outside the home. It meant having a contradictory relationship to the norms and values about women that were being generated in the dominant white culture.
Ideology of Separate Spheres - white women it was the basis for the confinement of women to the household and for much of the protective legislation that subsequently developed. At the same time, it sustained white families by providing social acknowledgment and support to women in the performance of their family roles.
For racial-ethnic women, however, the notion of separate spheres served to reinforce their subordinate status and became, in effect, another assault. As they increased their work outside the home they were forced into a productive labor spheres that was organized for men and “desperate” women who were so unfortunate or immoral that they could not confine their work to the domestic sphere.
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