by Anne Summers
This I will attempt to do by looking at the main functions performed by families in Australia, and at the nature of women’s involvement in the performance of these functions. At the same time I will analyse whether these family functions need to be performed at all and, if so, whether they must necessarily occur within families as they are presently structured, that is, families in which a sexual division of labour is the essential organising principle. In other words, must they occur within families and must they be the responsibility of women?
There are six major functions that are currently performed within families:
1 production
2 reproduction
3 consumerism
4 privatisation
5 sexual repression
6 socialisation.12
These functions are examined in detail later in this chapter.
Some of these functions must be performed within any human society while others are a product of specific historical and cultural conditions. These latter ones are closely tied to the evolution of a specific form of family structure common to Western industrialised nations – the ‘nuclear family’. It is this group of reproductive couple and their progeny that is what is usually meant when social scientists and others refer to ‘the family’. As already stated, this term has a strong prescriptive flavour to it: the ‘nuclear family’ is seen as the ideal family and it is this view of family that is used as a model in schools and other educational institutions and is employed by the media, advertising, the churches and other cultural institutions that influence people’s ideas. While I have already pointed out that this ideal does not match the reality of many people’s lives in Australia, it is also important to remember that because this ideal is propagated as the most desirable way to live, it is often striven for or emulated even by groups whose structure or composition makes such efforts futile or even ludicrous; for instance, a homosexual couple who try to reproduce male/female role stereotypes. The adoption by a non-procreative couple of roles that assume a reproductive situation is some indication of the social strength of these role prescriptions, which leads ‘deviant’ families to try to win social recognition and approval by imitating them. The ideal family is recognisable and is recognised even by people who have no wish to conform to it, so the functions performed by it are also recognisable and often even form the basis of many of the non-conformers’ objections. It is, therefore, possible to discuss ‘ideal’ functions as ‘ideally’ performed by ‘the family’ even while recognising that not all people live in this fashion.
History of the ‘nuclear family’
This entire discussion is only sensible if we realise that the ‘nuclear family’, both as an ideal and as a partially accomplished reality for large numbers of people, is of comparatively recent origin. It might seem unnecessary to suggest that family structure and functions can, and should, alter if we were dealing with an institution that had existed for many centuries. But this is not the case. ‘The family’ developed into an idealised institution less than two hundred years ago – since the white colonisation of this country – and it was evolved in order to fulfil fairly discernible social and economic functions. If these functions were no longer seen as being necessary, or as having to be performed within families, then we could expect the institution to alter and, perhaps, disappear. At present, however, a major impediment to the recognition of the social and historical nature of ‘the family’, and thus its susceptibility to change, is the idea that ‘the family’ is a private area of existence. Most people for whom ‘the family’ serves as a primary arena of self-expression believe it to be inalienable, to a large extent removed from societal interference, an arrangement freely chosen by themselves (inasmuch as they chose their marriage partners), in short, as a private realm. It is this contradiction between the existence of ‘the family’ as a social institution – serving definite, prescribed social functions – and people’s perception of it as a private world, which needs to be resolved before change is possible. This notion of privacy, and the accompanying idea of the sanctity of ‘the family’, has enabled the oppression of women within families to escape comment or condemnation and, until very recently, its consequences for women to be largely ignored.
The ‘nuclear family’ as an ideal and as an actual institution developed in Europe around the beginning of the 18th century. It was evolved by the mercantile middle class as an institution appropriate to its social and economic needs and aspirations. The ‘nuclear family’ is the creation of the bourgeoisie and its extension to other classes in society is a measure of the control of that class over the means of production and social relations; we can say that acceptance of the ideal of the ‘nuclear family’ by other groups is an indication of their perception of inclusion within the capitalist system.
Phillipe Aries, whose book Centuries of Childhood chronicles the spread and acceptance of this ideal way to live, concludes: ‘Between the eighteenth century and the present day [the family] remained as [it had developed] in the town and country middle classes of the eighteenth century [but] it extended more and more to other social strata’.13 Aries argues that two ideas were crucial in the evolution of this middle-class family: the development of privacy and the concept of childhood. Previously, sociability was literally enforced on people: home and work were not always physically separated, married couples and their children coexisted within larger households and there was little physical separation of houses into rooms with particular functions. Privacy for individuals or for families was thus impossible.
Prevailing social mores were reflected in the design of housing: rooms opened into one another, bedrooms were not seen as private sanctuaries, servants frequently slept in their masters’ bedrooms. There was no clear separation between childhood and adulthood and therefore no concept of childhood as a preparatory period for adult life in which young people are seen as inferior and denied many of the civil rights that adults possess. Children were regarded merely as small people. They worked along with everybody else, and they were granted adult rights, such as the right to marry, at what today would be regarded as the very early age of 12 years. There was no notion of children being intrinsically good (or bad) and therefore needing to be isolated from society in order to spend years being inculcated with social norms.
With the middle-class family came the desire to separate family groups from the wider society and to enshrine the nuclear group in its own private world. Thus it was seen as necessary that each family have its own house and land, that rooms be allocated for specific purposes, that they be separated from each other by corridors, that special quarters be built to accommodate servants. This retreat to privacy was motivated by economic considerations: a market in land and housing was quickly developed and became the source of great wealth to those who specialised in property. With the development of middle-class family private property – as distinct from feudal estates owned by a few noble families and common land held by whole villages or communities – came the desire to accumulate property, as a source of speculation and added wealth, to signify the owner’s affluence to the world at large.
Nineteenth-century wives of the middle class were seen as property. Women of this class were not permitted to work, even within the home, but had to spend their time entertaining or visiting, wearing as many different outfits as it was possible to display in a single day, in order to demonstrate not only their husbands’ wealth but also their generosity in spending it so freely on these idle creatures known as wives.
The notion of childhood as a period of existence separated from the adult world entailed the development of new institutions to accommodate young people during their period of transition from infancy to adulthood. Principal among these were the school and ‘the family’. The child was now seen by the middle class as a helpless and malleable creature who spent its infancy in the nursery at home, its care undertaken by servants acting under the remote supervision of her or his mother. The child was then sent to sch
ool where, under a strict disciplinary system, he (for girls were educated at home by emulating the inactivity of their mothers and acquiring, in a roundabout and haphazard fashion, the ‘feminine’ accomplishments of pianoforte and embroidery, as well as moral instruction) was inculcated with information and ideas designed to aid his moral development and equip him to take his place in the mercantile world. A necessary accompaniment to the concept of childhood was the idea that each child was unique and irreplaceable and that there should be equality between children. Infant deaths were now mourned rather than accepted as part of the scheme of things and the old custom of primogeniture, or favouring the first-born, gradually was replaced by treating all sons equally – and all daughters a little less equally. With these developments, ‘the family ceased to be simply an institution for the transmission of a name and an estate – it assumed a moral and spiritual function, it moulded bodies and souls’.14
It can readily be seen how this new institution ‘the family’ meant that women were to be confined in a way that they had not experienced before. Domestic work was now seen as a separate productive enterprise, rather than one integrated with other work, and religious and social sanctions gave it a relatively high status:
The rise of the bourgeoisie entailed a simultaneous advance and retrogression in the position of women. In the economic life of medieval England women were closer to equality with men than they later were under capitalism. For example, women participated as equals in many guilds in the fourteenth century. With the rise of capitalism they were excluded and, in general, economic opportunities for women not in families – such as spinsters and widows – declined. On the other hand women were given a much higher status within the family. For the Puritans, women’s domestic labour was a ‘calling’, a special vocation comparable to the crafts and trades of their husbands. Like their husbands, women did God’s work. As the lesser partner in a common enterprise, a woman was to be treated with respect … Wife-beating was now forbidden.15
The two key ideas of the modern family – privacy associated with separate household, and childhood as a period requiring special care and training – entailed women assuming new functions, both of which removed them from wider society and confined them within the household. The new ‘nuclear family’ strongly enjoined that married women should not work outside the home, but while this family form was still a middle-class phenomenon, it had no objection to using the labours of married women from other classes. The wife in the bourgeois family until the late 19th century was not called upon to care for her own children, nor even to supervise her household, as she had swathes of servants who assumed the tasks that were later to be taken over entirely by the wife.
The period of the formation of the middle-class family was also the era during which the industrial working class was formed. It was a period of massive human misery as the transformation from an agricultural to an industrial economy entailed the movement of people into towns; as old family-based crafts were transformed to large-scale production in factories; as the family-determined rhythm of work and sharing of tasks was changed by the division of labour and the brutalising speeding up of production in large, dehumanised factories. Initially whole families had to work in factories as a man’s wages were insufficient to support a family. Women and children of all ages, as well as men, spent long hours in factories and mills, but even the combined labour of a family did not earn sufficient to rent decent accommodation or to buy sustaining food.
At the same time as the bourgeoisie was extolling the family of its creation as a moral imperative for all classes, its other creation – the capitalist system – made the idealised family institution an impossible attainment for the labouring class. Engels noted in his study of the English working class in the 1840s that:
[T]he social order makes family life almost impossible for the worker. In a comfortless, filthy house, hardly rain-tight nor warm, a foul atmosphere filling rooms overcrowded with human beings, no domestic comfort is possible. The husband works the whole day through, perhaps the wife also and the elder children, all in different places; they meet at night and morning only, all under perpetual temptation to drink; what family life is possible under such conditions? Yet the workingman cannot escape from the family, must live in the family, and the consequence is perpetual succession of family troubles, domestic quarrels, most demoralizing for parents and children alike. Neglect of all domestic duties, neglect of the children, especially, is only too common among the English working-people, and only too vigorously fostered by the existing institutions of society. And children growing up in this savage way, amidst these demoralizing influences, are expected to turn out goody-goody and moral in the end! Verily the requirements are naive, which the self-satisfied bourgeoisie makes upon the working man.16
EP Thompson says that there was a drastic increase in the intensity of exploitation of child labour between 1780 and 1840 and remained so until the child ‘was rescued by the school’.17 The conditions of life for the working class were reflected in their average age of death. In 1842 the average age of death for labourers in Manchester was 17 (compared with 20 for tradesmen and 38 for gentry) while in Liverpool it was 15 for labourers (22 for tradesmen and 35 for gentry).18
Thus while the bourgeoisie was urging the family institution upon the population it was simultaneously preventing the working class from adopting it. In fact the exploitation of the working class was essential to the bourgeois style of family life in the first half of the 19th century. While industry remained labour intensive, it required hordes of workers to create the profits it could then use to increase its industrial wealth and to expend in conspicuous consumption, and it also demanded the labour of servants to maintain its lavish lifestyle. Only as industry became more mechanised, and the labour of women and children was no longer essential, could the ideal of ‘the family’ begin to be adopted by the working class.
The confinement of working-class women in households thus occurred much later, and even then there have always been regional and other differences: single working-class women have almost always had to work before marriage – in contrast, until recently, to middle-class women. There have always remained class differences in family and marriage patterns, and variations in the married and single women’s working habits in different regions and different periods.*
But the main ideas of the ‘nuclear family’ – those about privacy and household, childhood and women – have been accepted, and some attempt has been made to conform to them since the late 19th century, by a substantial proportion of the populations of Western industrialised countries.
The almost simultaneous development of the ‘nuclear family’ and of capitalism was not merely fortuitous: this new family form obviously had advantages for the newly evolving economic system and the two have developed an interdependent relationship. Zaretsky points out:
The organization of production in capitalist society is predicated upon the existence of a certain form of family life. The wage labour (socialized production under capitalism) is sustained by the socially necessary but private labour of housewives and mothers. Childrearing, cleaning, laundry, the maintenance of property, the preparation of food, daily health care, reproduction, etc. constitute a perpetual cycle of labour necessary to maintain life in this society. In this sense the family is an integral part of the economy under capitalism.19
This interdependence had to be fostered – it was not a spontaneous occurrence. Many women resisted being forced into full-time domesticity, just as many men resented being forced to support a number of dependent and unproductive family members. But gradually ‘the family’ assumed its own imperatives and rationales, which encouraged people to view it as a ‘natural’ institution. The very existence of a closed, private and, as knowledge of birth control spread, smallish family group generated notions of affection and responsibility among its members. The male worker gradually incurred the notion that he was responsible for supporting his family (and this was leg
ally enforced late in the 19th century) and he was thus provided with a powerful motive to be a diligent and reliable labourer. Schooling gradually was made compulsory and education became a vehicle for inculcating masses of young children with the values required by the capitalist system. These values included the ideology of ‘the family’ as well as submission to authority and were established by the very structure of the education system as well as by the content of the syllabus.
At the same time, ‘the family’ became an authoritarian body: a system of reciprocal rights and duties evolved but these were determined by a sexual division of labour. Wives and children were dependent on the husband’s economic support and this enabled him to exert greater authority over them, an authority that was enhanced by his ability to draw on his experience in the world outside the family to justify his opinions and behaviour. Wives and children, confined to home or school, had become unfamiliar with this world and were forced to interpret it through the eyes of their husband and father. Women’s subordination was effected by their being denied equal education, so that they were even less familiar with the world outside than their male children were. Denied paid employment outside the home, and unpaid for their domestic labours, women were economically totally dependent upon their husbands who could regard wives as property – which they had bought – and demand domestic and sexual services in return for economic support. The status afforded to child care and domestic work was meagre compensation for the lack of freedom that was now women’s estate. The more ‘the family’ came to dominate personal life, the less were women’s opportunities for self-assertion and independence; they had no choice but to stay within, and make the best of, their domestic prisons.
Through ‘the family’ the capitalist system now had at its disposal a vast army of labourers who had a strong motive to earn a wage, and whose families would provide them with the necessary refurbishment and retreat from the ardours of work to enable them to turn out again each working day. Yet the physical and emotional work done by women that enabled the workforce to keep working was obtained at no extra cost to the capitalist. Ties of duty and affection obscured the fact that both sexes had been duped: the system was in effect getting two people’s full-time work for the price of the male wage.