SOC244H4: Sociology of Families
September 19 , 2012
Lecture#2:
Review Lecture #1:
• Structure Functionalist stress integration, shared values and social
stability
o Main definitions of the family which stem from this
perspective
o Change in one social institution leads to change in another
social institution
• Symbolic interactionism
o People’s subjective experience
o How people feel with they enter or exist relationships
o What motivates people to enter or exist relationships
The “Enlightenment” / “Age of Reason”
• The Enlightenment is characterized as a period of reason,
knowledge, science and freedom. A period focused on human
happiness and human self-actualization (McDonald, 1993: 9-10)
• Rational, scientific, universal civilization was at the heart of the
Enlightenment
• Women were at the center of the enlightenment- but they were
not intended to be at the center
• Challenging authority
• Major shift in how people saw themselves
• The enlightenment was also the age of colonialism- questioning
the rights of the indigenous
• Some groups of people (European) were allowed with greater
freedoms and greater authority however this was not translated to
all groups
Marxist/Conflict Perspective
• Karl Marx (1818-1883)
o Witnessed the Industrial Revolution
o Roots of human misery and suffering lay in the conflict
between two classes:
o The family is seen as the “original site for an inequitable
division of labour” (German Ideology, 1846).
o Society progresses forward through the conflict of groups
(those who control the means of production and those who
do not)
o Conflict propels society forward
o Inequitable distribution o Wives and children constitute the first property of men
• Dependency- especially on male wages
• Under capitalism, rather than consuming what they produced,
mechanization and industrial production made it easier for
families to purchase their needs for survival in the market place
(Mandell and Duffy, 2005: 9).
• “According to the materialist conception, the determining factor
in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction
of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold
character. On the one side, the production of the means of
existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and
of the tools necessary for that production; on the other
side, the production of human beings themselves
(reproduction), the propagation of the species. The social
organization under which the people of a particular historical
epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of
production: by the stage of development of labor on the on hand
and of the family on the other” (Engels, 1942: 5).
• Accumulation of private property
• From: The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State
(1942).
• According to Engels: The nuclear, patriarchal family “was the first
form of the family based not on natural but on economic
conditions, namely on the victory of private property over original
naturally developed, common ownership (Marx, Engels, 1976:
239)
• His main thesis: inequalities which exist in the modern family is a
result of the development of private property
o Women as subordinate- doing all the work (activities which
subordinate and make them the domestic servants)
The Feminist Perspective
• Varied, ambivalent, contradictory (at times)
• Mary Wollstonecraft in the Vindication of the Rights of Women
(1792) advocated for equality rights in areas such as education,
within marriage, and in the political arena (through voting).
o However she did not challenge women’s position in the
household
o **it was the second wave of feminists that challenged the
role of women in the household**
o Myth of the happy housewife • “The Enfranchisement of Women” argued for the admission of
women “in law and in fact,” to equal, political, civil and social
rights…The effects of dividing society into two castes, one ruling
and one ruled, were said to be no less than “perversion and
demoralization, both to the favoured class and those at whose
expense they are favoured”. There ought to be perfect equality
between the sexes, permitting no “power or privilege” to the one
side, or “disability” to the other (Mill, J.S. and Harriet Taylor Mill,
1851)
• “It is easy to see the concrete details that trap the suburban
housewife, the continual demands on her time. But the chains that
bind her in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit. They
are the chains made up of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted
facts, of incomplete truths and unreal choices. They are not easily
seen and not easily shaken off…we can no longer ignore that
voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my
husband and my children and my home’” (From The Feminine
Mystique, Friedan, 1963: 31-32)
Liberalism
1. All humans are inherently rational
2. Meritocracy (equal chances to achieve goals through hard
work)
3. Equal opportunity
4. Freedom of choice (men and women should have a freedom
of choice- control over their bodies- to make their decisions)
o (Calixte, 2005: 3)
• Critique of Liberal Feminism:
o Ignored the different family forms when race, class,
ethnicity, sexuality…are considered
• Challenges faced by women and groups differ across
different races, classes, status groups
• Over focus on women of the upper and middle classes
o Ignore structural and systemic inequalities within and
between different groups of men and women (Calixte, 2005:
11).
• A lot of people at the bottom- not all people have an
equal chance- but this is ignored- there are systematic
inequalities that prevent children of the same age to
gain a proper education (example)
o Lack of integration Marxist Feminism
• The origins of the nuclear family were situated with the social
relations of capitalism
• Sexual division of labour is now “deeply entrenched in the
relations of production of capitalism” (Barrett, 1988: 226).
• Exploitative position in the nuclear family
• Value of domestic work for women
• The Housewife and her Labour Unde
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