Slide1 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family Family: what’s in a name? Popular sayings and popular images ‘What’s family anyway? It is the people who make you feel less lonely and really loved.’ (Mary Tyler Moore)
‘Home is where when you have to go there they have to take you in.’ (Ogden Nash)
‘All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ (Leo Tolstoy)
‘jiajia youben nannian de jing’ 家家有本難唸的經(Chinese saying)
Slide2 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family the rewarding and the frustrating side; the nurturing and the abusive
the strong emotional investment and strong appeal: natural ties, physical proximity (bodily density) and intensive interactions make for either ‘haven in a heartless world’ or ‘hellish reality’
‘it is in the family that we first experience divisions, hierarchy and differences, and in the family they are structured along age and sex.’ (Bernardes 1997:2)
Family is very much about identity, intimacy, love, commitment, and the self; and people’s experiences of family living may vary a great deal
If family is about love and acceptance, then one should know that love and marriage have not always been the universal basis of family; that e.g., romantic love is a historically-unique product of modernity Observations
Slide3 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family ‘a bounded unit, associated with property, self-sufficiency, with affect and a sphere ‘inside’ the family’
‘married spouses with a rigid gender division of labour, with the wife predominantly responsible for unpaid homemaking and caring and the husband focusing on a bread-winning role’ (Gonzalez-Lopez)
Hong Kong Census: a family nucleus consists of
More popular conceptions: a married couple without children
a married couple with one or more never married children
one parent (either father or mother) with one or more never married children
Slide4 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family the importance and satisfaction of conjugality (heterosexual pair) and parenthood constantly being conveyed, as if it is something both natural and universal
the image of a co-residing married couple responsible for rearing children
the instrumental husband and expressive wife; autonomous male and interdependent female (family as defining identities)
BUT: most families are not like that: nuclear family not as pervasive as we thought in western societies; co-residing is a fairly recent element, and is not always practiced; a great proportion of wives and mothers have always been engaged in public and paid work; many people’s experiences of family life (as husband/father, wife/mother and as children) are vastly divergent from the popular images Observations
Slide5 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family The nuclear family existed only in certain society and perhaps for a limited time
The nuclear family is cast as an ideal, the golden age of domestic living; it is said to serve specific functions (socialization, producing stabilized personalities in children…) And what about the cohabiting pair? Is theirs less of a family? And the lesbian or gay family?
Thus there is a great diversity in ‘doing family’; the popular images and definitions often suggest and focus on one particular form of family and family living; it is a social invention in modern society, and it is an ideology
Slide6 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family Thus the need to look at the historical formation of this particular form of family and its elevation into such a valued thing in itself
Thus the need to look at the diverse ways (choices and constraints) actual people (of different classes, cultures, ethnicities and sexual orientation) experience family living; how essential tasks of family (caring, sharing, intimacy, household work, coping with crises, etc.) are being carried out (or fail to be carried out), and how individual identities (as husband, wife, parent, etc.) are being constructed and negotiated through these dynamics
And the need to link up individual life course and the family life course: family is about ‘interlinked biographies’, and biographies have transitions (e.g., transition into parenthood)
Lastly, the need to see how the larger society and culture ‘respond’ to family changes (e.g., the separation of biological life cycle and social life cycle, where conventional roles of ‘breadwinner’ or ‘instrumental male’ no longer apply)
Slide7 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family What is special about family life? Why the powerful appeal of ‘the family’? Most of us born into and reared in the family; family as the great leveler (unlike ‘class’)
Family experience as first-hand, immediate, and its effects long-lasting
Four reasons for the powerful appeal of ‘the family’ beliefs in the family are often rooted in biology (‘Had God intended equality, he would not have created men and women.’): natural biological propensities and needs; female conceives, gives birth and suckles infants, while the male does the hunting; thus biological reproduction led us to focus and emphasize and even value one particular form of ‘normal’ family living (that of a monogamous pair, with distinct role, and family life centred around the rearing of children…)
Slide8 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family Reasons, cont’d At the experiential level: family ‘offers a security not found in other relationships’ (the other side: ‘you may easily ignore relatives that you don’t like, but they cannot be disposed of completely’); this is emotional dependence which persisted in our adult years; and family is about the familiar (one knows too well other members’ idiosyncrasies’) and the similar (‘the son has inherited the father’s nose, mother’s eyes; while the sister….); and family is about acceptance of one’s self, warts and all --- this makes for powerful belonging in our lived experiences
Familialization of society: children in institutions given surrogate father and mother for them to identify with; job segregation in the labour market mirrors division of labour at home; such correspondence between private and public means the natural/rational arrangements of ‘the family’ are diffused throughout society, and we often take them for granted; the larger society is involved in reinforcing the popular appeal of family
Slide9 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family Reasons, cont’d History: the belief that industrial society requires a different kind of family (mobile, specialized functions, internal organization as mirroring the larger differentiation in the society); that the modern nuclear family has the ‘right’ fit with the larger society; but it is mainly history of the industrial advanced societies; cultural diversities and different trajectories are evident Because of these four reasons, we often inevitably operate with some notion of ‘the family’, which is mostly the modern nuclear form; there’s no ‘the family’; it is socially constructed and often historically/culturally specific
But this should not blind us to the great diversities of family life and family experiences; the ‘traditional nuclear family’ is said to be vanishing, with new forms of family and living arrangements emerging
Slide10 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family ‘The important thing about families is how different they all are, not how they all match a model of ‘the family’. (Bernardes 1997:13) About diversities Organizational: internal division of domestic labour; how unpaid work in the family is negotiated;
Cultural: both within western societies and between societies of different cultural or religious background
Class: different classes have different parental values and arrangements for rearing of children
Cohort: different cohorts have different experiences, and such experiences; families with old cohort members might differ from families with more homogeneous cohorts
Family life course: families devastated by a series of unfortunate events (death, unemployment, divorce, illness..) would have very different life course, and impact on members
Slide11 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family Reminders: as we begin our study of family living and experiences Do not believe that we know very much about family simply because we are so close to the topic; our personal intuition and everyday experiences of family provide us with some notion of what family is all about, but we should be aware that people may ‘do family’ in vastly different ways, and that family is as much a personal experience as an ideology
Do not focus only on the ‘normal’ side; abuse and unhappiness are inherent parts of family life; some scholar see family as ‘anti-social family’
The ‘negative’ side need not be problems: divorce and single parenthood might be solutions to intolerable situations
Slide12 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family Reminders, concluded Instead of taking one particular form of family as typical or ideal, one should look at how relationships (among interlinked biographies) are built up and change; how meanings and practices of fatherhood, motherhood and childhood differ among groups and over time
Instead of relying on people’s preferences or (socially desirable/politically correct) opinions, one should focus on whether people act on their beliefs in their daily life
Slide13 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family References:
J. Bernardes, Family Studies: an Introduction. London: Routledge 1997. ch.1.
D. Morgan, ‘Sociological Perspectives on the Family’, in A. Carling et.al. (eds.), Analyzing Families: Morality and Rationality in Policy and Practice. Routledge 2002.
B. Ehrenreich, ‘Burt, Loni, and Our Way of Life’, ‘Oh, Those Family Values’, in The Snarling Citizen. HarperPerennial. 1996.
M. Barrett & M. McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family. Verso/NLB. 1982. Ch.1.
Slide14 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family Relationships; self, role, negotiate sacrifice…
Diversity: LAT, etc.; living arrangements, alternative lifestyles, and different ways of negotiating identity, carrying out tasks, etc.
Antisocial family: the dark side
The origin of the powerful appeal of ‘the family’
Family and life course transition
Experiences and practices
Historical making of modern family
Slide15 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family
Slide16 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family
Slide17 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family
Slide18 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family
Slide19 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family
Slide20 : SOCI0021 Marriage and the Family