Lecture 1/22/03 – Continued our discussion regarding difficulty in studying the family. We then discussed images and myths of the family.
Myths are beliefs that are held uncritically and without examination or scrutiny.
But we will study and examine beliefs about the family.
Cherline's concept regarding the public and private family is useful in studying families
Studying families from a historical perspective - Pre-Industrial Families and the Emergence of a Modern Family Form
Family Life in Colonial America - studying the public family
Macro Structural Conditions –
Family-based economy - In the early colonial period, white families were the central units of the larger agriculturally based economic system. Each family provides the market with a commodity. The family-based economy integrated women’s, men’s and children’s productive labor. Although the family unit was patriarchal, women played an important role in the colonial economy.
No sharp distinction was made between family and society. Family life in the society of the colonial period was not sharply differentiated because the family performed the economic, political, religious, and educational functions for society: family was a church, a school, a vocational institute, a house of correction, a welfare institution, a hospital; a nursing or retirement home.
Family matters were not considered private instead; intervention by community members and the state were common. People “lived in the street”
Charivari - a noisy public demonstration intended to subject wayward individuals to ridicule and punishment.
Family Structure and Household Composition - Common wisdom once held that nuclear families emerged as a response to industrial society. In the “Golden Age” - extended families - not true.
However colonial families were typically nuclear in structure. Families tended to be larger than contemporary families, but smaller than the stereotypical portrayal. Larger because of slightly more children, servants, apprentices.
Moreover, blended or reconstituted families - husband, wife, children from each of their first marriages that ended in death and perhaps children of this new marriage.
Wives and Husbands -
The early colonists organized their families around the unquestionable principle of patriarchy.
In the earlier colonial period, marriages were arranged based on the social and economic purposes of larger kin groups. Marriages across social boundaries were not permissible.
Romantic love was not wholly absent, but marriage was more of a contractual agreement based upon a specific and sharp gender-based division of labor.
A shortage of women in this period enhanced the status of women, but despite this, wives were unquestionably subordinate to their husbands.
Work for women, whether married or single, was not only approved of; it was considered a civic duty. Women were found in many kinds of employment - they ran mills, boarding houses, printers, etc.
Children - Families of the premodern period reared large numbers of children but household size was not very large because childbearing extended over a long span of years. Children’s religious was intensive and discipline severe. The 3 Rs - repression, religion and respect.
Childhood was not recognized as a separate stage of development. Children were not sentimentalized.
Children were viewed in economic terms. Practice of “putting out” children at ten and eleven years of age.
The Emergence of Modern Family Life
After 1800, social, economic, and demographic changes produced gradual changes in family living. The transition to an industrial economy was the crucial step in transforming families from integrated work units into specialized domestic units that were separate from the surrounding communities.
The most important changes wrought by industrialization were the separation of productive labor and the transfer of functions to other institutions.
Modern family life began to emerge at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The rise of the modern family accompanied the movement of productive work from the household to other settings. Households became smaller, more private as non-kin such as apprentices left the household. Families became idealized.
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.
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 - 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. Through the family wage, i.e. The wage provided by the husband/father, the family-wage economy evolved into a family consumer economy.
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 land 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 – studied 19,000 households after emancipation, found that 70 –90% were nuclear in composition – not female-headed households).
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.
African-American slaves - the threat of disruption by sale of family accounted 32% of all marriage being dissolved.
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.
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- Mexican-Americans - 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 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 he potential for An exchange of services among poor people whose income did not provide the basis for family subsistence.
Japanese immigration began in the 1880s with arrival in Hawaii.
Importance of 1965 immigration act.
Private family, 1900-Present: seeds of contemporary phenomena
Increase in premarital sex
Drop in birth rate
New, rebellious youth culture
Rapidly rising divorce rate
Growing economic independence of women
Shift in marriage from institution and economic partnership to companionships and emotional satisfaction.
Increase in primacy among family members.
20th century marked by unique family eras
Depression generation.
Divorce rate falls because people can’t afford it.
Hob loss undermines authority and prestige of fathers.
Marriage and children postponed.
1950s generation.
Most unusual and distinctive family patterns of century
Married at youngest ages and had more children than any other twentieth century generation.
Strong economy and marriage-childbearing orientation produced high point of bread-winner/homemaker family.
1960s families and beyond
{postponed marriage and fewer children.
Increased cohabitation.
Married women work outside the home in ever-larger numbers.
Steven Mintz “From Patriarchy to Androgyny and other Myths: Placing Men’s Family roles in Historical Perspective”
Beginning in the 1870s, public anxiety over men’s roles as fathers and husbands first became recognized social problems.
Some of the social policies put in place to deal with the exploitation of children dealt with compulsory education, child labor restrictions, orphanages and placing abused and neglected children with farm families in the West.
There were campaigns to reduce the grounds for divorce, for example extending waiting periods, establishment of family courts, and destruction of red-light districts.
Around the turn of the century the problem with men in families was socially and culturally reconstructed. Alongside heightened efforts to promote the male family wage, to allow a man to support his family without the contribution of wives and children, there was a growing concern about the immigrant fathers, who seemed to symbolize “Old World” values and obstruct efforts to Americanize his children. Social policies dealt with schools, settlement houses to help Americanize.
During the 1920s, public concern shifted away from working class and immigrant men to the “new middle class of salaried employees. As older sources of male identity n independent work, sex-segregated politics, and community leadership disappeared, a host of educators, psychologists, sociologists and advertisers argued that in a changing society men would find their greatest satisfaction in private life, especially relations with their wives and children, i.e. the companionate marriage and family. Now Dads needed to become involved in their children lives, primarily boys, through Boy Scouts, Little Leagues, and other sports.
The Great Depression and World War II elevated public concern about men’s familial roles and reinforced an older ideal of man as protector, provider, and disciplinarian. Many observers were convinced that the depression drastically altered family roles, with many unemployed and deserting fathers. Job programs focused largely on putting the male jobless to work.
At the end of WWII, intense emphasis on fathers playing a critically role in children’s personality develop – not so much as playmate bust as se role model and disciplinarian.
Since 1960, there has been heightened cultural and political focus on men’s familial roles, particularly related to African –American fathers.
The rapid in the divorce rate during the late 1960s and 1970s touched off a mounting anxiety about the impact of the loss of men’s economic, psychological, and emotional contributions to the family and also ignited a father’s rights movement calling for increased legal rights to custody and visitation.
There are currently several images of men in families – the “new” father and husband – involved, nurturing and emotionally sensitive.
Yet alongside the Cosby image are disturbing images of “deadbeat dads” and abusive husbands, who fail to meet the most basic responsibilities of the masculine family role” to provide their children with emotional and financial support and to treat their wives and children in a civil, if not a loving, manner.
These concerns have thrown into question the place of men in families and have become politicized. We see movements like the “Promise Keepers” and the “Million Man March” promoting family responsibility and in other movements calling for joint custody arrangements and expanded visitation rights after divorce.
The “flight from fatherhood” and the “breakdown of the family” have elicited a variety of explanations that tends to break down along political lines, with liberals emphasizing economic forces and conservatives pointing to changes in cultural and moral standards.
Men today are at once more and less involved in family life than a generation ago. On the one hand, many men are more prepared than in the past to play an active, nurturing role in the lives of their children and to participate more equally in child care and domestic chores. On the other hand, as a result of delayed marriage, unmarried cohabitation and divorce, men also spend a declining proportion of their adult lives as fathers and husbands. Since the 1950s, the share of children living in mother-only families has increased from 6% to 24%.
The authority and respect that men receive inside the home have been inextricably connected to their authority and stability outside the home. Mintz says that the both the fragility of men’s familial involvement and the indicators of greater engagement are connected to broader economic and cultural shifts.
In discussing the changes in men’s familial roles, it is possible to point to many factors, the sexual revolution, the influx of women into the workforce which diminished men’s role as sole breadwinner, the legalization of abortion, the growth in divorce and nonmarital cohabitation. Mintz points to the erosion of the family wage and its replacement by the individual wage and the increasing emphasis attached to the mother-child dyad. The effect of both trends has been to weaken the necessity of male involvement in the family, making male involvement more voluntary and elective.
We are in moving to an individual wage economy that has been accompanied by the stagnation or actual decline in real male wages and an increase in job instability. This is combined with longer work hours, increased demands for travel, and an increase in evening and night work. For some men, their sense of self-esteem which was garnered as being the “good-provider” has decreased. Some men have disengaged themselves – others find fulfillment in domestic life.
Very few men have responded by becoming co-parents and truly egalitarian husbands. Others have responded by attempting to assert a patriarchal authority grounded in religions. Still others have tried to function as noncustodial father. Most men have tried to muddle through – making greater but still modes contributions to housework and child, but remaining secondary parents and continuing to define their spousal and a parental identity largely as family breadwinner, despite the growing disjunction between this self-image and social realities. When the demands made on them become too great, many resolve their tension by disengaging or severing their family ties.
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