The stem family can provide a source of cohesion which is inimical to state control for it is immovable, and its strongest loyalty is to itself. When the principle is exerted in defiance of instituted authority it can become the infamous famiglia of the Mafia. The rituals of family honour have involved the anti-social manifestations of vendetta and omertà but these are not significant until the familial, regional community is threatened by political authority. The American liberators were quick to see the organizational importance of the Mafia in Sicily; what they did not see was that the kind of cohesion they sought to exploit was already anachronistic and economically non-viable.
The effects of industrialization and urbanization in changing the pattern of settlement and requiring the mobility of labour have hastened the decay of the stem family, which declined in western Europe some time before the sixteenth century. The changes in tenure of land, the decay of regional authority, the centralization of government, enclosures and development of money rents and absentee landlordism all played a part in the development of the nuclear family, and yet it is only recently that the nuclear family has dwindled to the stump of community living that it now is. When the largest proportion of the working community was in service in large households, when spinsters and unmarried sons lived in the household, when sons and daughters were most often sent away to work in other households, the family remained organic and open to external influences. Husbands and wives could not indulge in excessive introversion about their relationship which was buttressed firmly by the laws against divorce, public opinion, and the uncontrolled size of families. Aging parents were kept and cared for in the household. But there was no longer a family business, no longer a heritage to be developed and served. The denseness of the urban community entailed estrangement from immediate neighbours, and the necessity of finding work led sons outside the immediate purview of the family. The effect of education estranged families even more especially when compulsory education created a generation more literate than their parents. The gradual expansion of education generation by generation is prolonging this effect. By the time Ibsen and Strindberg were writing their domestic tragedies the family had become a prison where the young struggled to escape the dead hand of the old, where the outside community was only represented by the policeman, the doctor and the parson, where the servants were strangers and class enemies. Puritan morality had resulted in hypocrisy, frustration and pornography. Husband and wife danced a dance of diurnal murder. The father-protector, unable to assume any other field of superiority or prowess, was principally moral arbiter although unfitted for the role: the wife was a designing doll, disillusioned about her husband, confused and embittered by her own idleness and insignificance. The syndrome of vicarious leisure, which Veblen describes, had come full circle. Female occupations were more conspicuously meaningless than ever. The embitterment of marriage partners had become so evidently destructive that laws to facilitate divorce began to be promulgated in most western countries. Women began to clamour for the right to work outside domestic service, and expanding industry came to need them, especially with the depredations of the First World War upon manpower. The number of unmarried women became greater, aggravating a problem which had existed since the turn of the century. Gradually the big Victorian-built houses were subdivided into smaller units. In response to requirements for higher density housing the flat proliferated. More and more of the functions of the large household devolved upon the state: the care of the old, of the sick, of the mentally infirm and backward.
If strict monogamy is the height of all virtue then the palm goes to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female sexual organs in each of its 50—200 proglottides or sections and spends its whole life copulating in all its sections with itself.
Friedrich Engels,
‘The Origin of the Family’, 1943, p.31
The family of the sixties is small, self-contained, self-centred and short-lived. The young man moves away from his parents as soon as he can, following opportunities for training and employment. Children live their lives most fully at school, fathers at work. Mother is the dead heart of the family, spending father’s earnings on consumer goods to enhance the environment in which he eats, sleeps and watches television. Children tend more and more since the war to create more vital groups of their own, assuming tribal characteristics of dress and ritual behaviour. Even the girls tend to go to work and set up house with other girls in the enormous bed-sitter belts of major cities. The wife is only significant qua wife when she is bearing and raising small children, but the conditions under which she carries out this important work and the confusion which exists about the proper way to perform it increase her isolation from her community and intensify the parental relationship in these earliest years.
The complex known to the Freudian school, and assumed by them to be universal, I mean, the Oedipus complex, corresponds essentially to our patrilineal Aryan family with the developed ‘patria potestas’, buttressed by Roman law and Christian morals, and accentuated by the modern economic conditions of the well-to-do bourgeoisie.
Bronislaw Malinowski ‘Sex and Repression in Savage Society’, 1927, p.5
The working girl who marries, works for a period after her marriage and retires to breed, is hardly equipped for the isolation of the nuclear household. Regardless of whether she enjoyed the menial work of typing or selling or waitressing or clerking, she at least had freedom of movement to a degree. Her horizon shrinks to the house, the shopping centre and the telly. Her child is too much cared for, too diligently regarded during the day and, when her husband returns from work, soon banished from the adult world to his bed, so that Daddy can relax. The Oedipal situation which is always duplicated in marriage is now intensified to a degree which Freud would have found appalling. Father is very really a rival and a stranger. During the day the child may be bullied as often as petted: what is certain is that he has too much attention from the one person who is entirely at his disposal. The intimacy between mother and child is not sustaining and healthy. The child learns to exploit his mother’s accessibility, badgering her with questions and demands which are not of any real consequence to him, embarrassing her in public, blackmailing her into buying sweets and carrying him. Dependence does not mean love. The child’s attitude towards school, which takes him away from his mother after five years of enforced intimacy, is as ambivalent as his feelings about his mother. As long as it is an escape it is welcome but when it becomes demanding the child finds that he can play mother and school off against each other. The jealousy which mothers have of school and the attempt of the school to establish a source of control over the child in opposition to the mother can result in highly fraught situations. The anti-social nature of this mother—child relationship is very evident to schoolteachers especially when it is a question of discipline or treatment of emotional disturbance.2
The unfortunate wife-mother finds herself anti-social in other ways as well. The home is her province, and she is lonely there. She wants her family to spend time with her for her only significance is in relation to that almost fictitious group. She struggles to hold her children to her, imposing restrictions, waiting up for them, prying into their affairs. They withdraw more and more into non-communication and thinly veiled contempt. She begs her husband not to go out with the boys, marvels that he can stand in the pouring rain at the football and then be too tired to mend the roof or cut the grass on the finest day. She moans more and more that he doesn’t care what the children are up to, that discipline is all left to her, that nobody talks to her, that she’s ignorant, that she had given the best years of her life to a bunch of ungrateful hooligans. Politics is a mystery and a boring one; sport is evidence of the failure of men to grow up. The best thing that can happen is that she take up again where she left off and go back to work at a job which was only a stop gap when she began it, in which she can expect no promotion, no significant remuneration, and no widening of her horizons, for the demands of
the household must still be met. Work of all kinds becomes a hypnotic. She cleans, she knits, she embroiders. And so forth.
Women trying to counteract the tendency of the nuclear household to isolate them from social contacts have peculiar difficulties. Anne Allen reported this conversation with a young married woman in the Sunday Mirror:
‘Look,’ she said. ‘We have about a dozen really good friends. People I am closer to than anyone in my family. People I like better and know better.
‘But what happens? We have to organize ourselves in order to meet. Someone has to find a baby-sitter. The other couple feel bound to make a nice supper for us.
‘Then either the baby is ill, or someone feels tired, and you wish you had not arranged it. Or we all enjoy ourselves so much that it is really sad that it all has to break up so early.
‘But just think what it would be like if a close group of friends lived in one building, or one street. It could happen.
‘There are architects working on one or two specially planned buildings where everyone has his own bit and a huge communal living area.
‘Personally I could not bear to share sexually, and I would be as bad as my mother about sharing a kitchen. I value my privacy too much.
‘But there are dozens of times when I long for someone to talk to in the daytime. Or when I am lonely if my husband works overnight. Or when he and I are arguing and I want to get away for an hour.
‘I just can’t think of any way I would rather live than with my husband and with most of my closest friends around us. After all, thousands of people become close friends with their neighbours. We would just be reversing the procedure.’3
Once upon a time everyone lived in a house full of friends with large communal areas, where the streets were full of friends because the immobility of the community meant that all its members knew one another and their family history. The system has its disadvantages: non-conformism often proved intolerable, and the constant attention of the whole community to the actions of individuals had disadvantages more striking than the advantages. In such a community an old lady could not lie for four days at the foot of her staircase with a broken hip but a woman could not conduct a forbidden love-affair either. Nowadays people live closer together than ever before but it is overcrowded isolation. Tower blocks contain dozens and dozens of little families who have a great deal in common, but they are strangers to each other. Their front doors shut in a private world which cannot communicate past the blank corridors and lifts except to complain about each other’s noise. The women watching their children play in the communal play areas only know the parents of other children when some outrage demands parental interference. Competitiveness frequently means that each family clings to a fantasy of superiority, racial, moral, religious, economic or class. Town planners lament that tower dwellers will not undertake to keep their communal areas clean and pleasant, and the victims of this rehousing complain that the towers cause special anxieties connected with height and encapsulation. Passing up and down in the lifts they never see each other, they cannot see in each other’s windows, or natter in their doorways while cleaning the stoop. Unspontaneous attempts to stimulate intimacy don’t work. Women jealously maintain the separateness of their households, fearing all kinds of imaginary corruption of their children and their way of life by the inroads of strangers. Anne Allen’s housewife rejects the possibility of sexual sharing, but at least she openly considers it. The kin-community safeguards its own sexual relationship by incest restrictions which do not have their initial justification in fears of the results of inbreeding, which were not known by the first promulgators of anti-incest laws. Women dwelling in tower blocks may not consciously fear the effects of intimacy with stranger women, but the tension is there. Perhaps the failure of such community living could be avoided by including a pub and a laundrette in each block but economically it would appear that the jobs being tirelessly duplicated in each living capsule ought to be shared if genuine organic interaction is to result.
The architectural results of the nuclear family are universally deemed disastrous: the ungainly spread of ribbon developments, of acres of little boxes, has ruined the appearance of all of our cities. Upkeep of such areas is prohibitively expensive, access to services is difficult to arrange. The defenders of high density housing have practicality and comfort on their side. What they do not realize is that the nuclear family is pulling against them; no amount of anthropometric investigation, no clever orientation of clean and efficient housing units towards light and warmth and open views can break down the suspicion that the Oedipal unit feels towards others of its kind. The stresses and strains of conjugal introspection cannot tolerate a wider horizon. One alternative is the takeover by the employer as father, as happens in specially constructed villages in America where the firms’ employees are housed according to income and position and encouraged to get together. Wives become faculty wives and corporation wives. Togetherness is rampant. The long-term results are, to me at least, unimaginable. Every aspect of family life comes to be dominated by the firm; just as the unfortunate man gets his job on a personality assessment relating to his whole family, he must carry out the firm’s role in every aspect of his personal life. Even his sexual performance may become a business matter: Masters and Johnson have delineated the hedonistic norm. No serf, writhing under the law of jus primae noctis, handing over his sons to the service of his liege lord, ever had it worse. As securely as any gold-rush miner or freed slave, he owes his soul to the company store. The logical outcome of the control of employment over the movement of labour has come about. His continued security is dependent upon the behaviour of his whole family; the desired result is complete immobility and predictability. This is why faculty husbands have a lower libido rating than others because they have become fat white mice in a hygienic laboratory, not because of the proximity of their women, as Lionel Tiger claimed.4 Big Daddy the employer, the spectre that looms over Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, has castrated his sons. The human soul is indestructible however, and if the group is to form the special conscience, then the sin which can incapacitate it must be a group sin, so that no one can split to Big Daddy. The pattern of American decadence is communal drunkenness, first of all, which is the only way into uncensored behaviour, and, ultimately, wife-swapping, the twentieth-century form of incest:
The autumn of 1962, the two couples were ecstatically, scandalously close. Frank and Marcia were delighted to be thrown together so often without seeking it. Janet and Harold in private joked about the now transparent strategems of the other two lovers. These jokes began to leak out into their four-sided conversations…
The other couples began to call them the Applesmiths…‘Don’t you feel it? It’s so wrong. Now we’re really corrupt. All of us.’5
Wife-swapping is seriously advocated by writers in ‘journals of human relations’, like Forum, as a method of revitalizing marriages which have gone stale. Shared but secret behaviour will cement any group into a conspiracy, but the results can be hard to live with. Changing partners is such a thoroughly unspontaneous activity, so divorced from the vagaries of genuine sexual desire—no more than a variant on the square dance. In such a transaction sex is the sufferer: passion becomes lechery. Ringing the changes on modes of getting pleasure disguises boredom, but it does not restore life. Sex in such circumstances is less and less a form of communication and more and more a diversion. Like bingo, slot-machines, hula-hoops, and yo-yos, it is fun. Manageable, homely amusement. Not innocent, but calculated; not dynamic, but contained. When Big Daddy countenances such naughtiness even sex will have come under his benign aegis. The overfed, undersexed white mouse is allowed a brief spell in another’s cage to perk him up. Sexual uniformity could be enforced this way: Mr Jones can apply to Mrs Jones what he learnt from Mrs Smith and so on. Universal domesticity buries all.
Anne Allen is a sensible, middling-liberal English housewife. With a matronizing glance at her young interlocutor she continues:
I find it a rather attractive idea in theory. But in practice I can’t think of a dozen, or even half a dozen couples I would like to be that close to. Or who would like to live that way with us…
I don’t like the way they bring up their children. I give my children less, or more pocket money, which could lead to fights.
I hate the way they fill their kitchen with strange cooking smells or squalor. Or I feel their beady eyes on my rather wobbly housekeeping.
But most of all, I am helplessly, hopelessly, possessive, and if my husband went off with some nearby dishy wife whenever I shouted at him, there could be murder done.’6
As a social unit the family means the individual actuated by his most aggressively individualistic instincts; it is not the foundation, but the negation of society. Out of an aggregate of conflicting individualistic interests, human society emphatically has not and could never have arisen. It owed its rise to instincts that obliterated individualistic instincts, that moulded by binding sentiments of inter-dependency, loyalty, solidarity, devotion, a group larger than the patriarchal family and from its nature capable of indefinite expansion.
Robert Briffault, ‘The Mothers’, 1931, p.509
The Female Eunuch Page 24