by Anne Summers
Extra-marital reproduction could also undermine ‘the family’. Whether or not this is a real possibility could only be gauged by considering several variables over a lengthy period of time. The statistics on extra-marital births do not, in themselves, indicate whether or not ‘the family’ is being threatened by recalcitrant women, even though their number has increased quite markedly in recent years. Until the late 1950s extra-marital births in Australia amounted to about 4 per cent of annual births; between 1966 and 1970, 7.88 per cent of births were ‘illegitimate’ and they have increased slowly every year since, from 8.30 per cent in 1970 to 9.77 per cent in 1973.26 But the figures alone provide no guide to whether this trend threatens ‘the family’. We would need to know what percentage of women kept their children – or had them adopted by families – as well as those who subsequently legitimised them by forming legally recognised families. At present some 90 per cent of child-bearing women are preferring to have legitimate babies, and a substantial proportion of those babies born outside marriage are adopted. Women themselves, therefore, are perpetuating the convention that reproduction should occur within marriage and as children are the starting point of ‘the family’, we can say that women are choosing to perpetuate the institution.
3 Consumerism
Consumerism is the regular and almost compulsive purchasing of goods or services that are not essential to human survival. This is a function that is quite specific to societies that produce a surplus of commodities apart from foodstuffs and the basic requirements of clothing and shelter. It assumes that basic scarcity has been overcome, for at least a large proportion of the population, and that people can be induced to buy non-essential goods. In a society where families constitute the dominant form of social organisation and where an expanding capitalism seeks to increase its profits by increasing markets for its products, it is obvious that families are going to be encouraged to consume as families. The association of private space (the family home) with family life has meant that each family buys a large number of essential goods that could easily be shared among larger groups of people. Such things as cars, washing machines, lawnmowers, books etc., which are purchased by each family unit, could be shared between several households.
But in a competitive society, where people compete against each other for status as well as money, the family home becomes more than a retreat from the outside world. It assumes a demonstrative function whereby people can display their wealth by adorning their houses and gardens with every conceivable appliance, gadget, piece of furniture and arrangement of artistry that the market allows and their incomes can afford. In a society where the overproduction of non-essential goods occupies a vital part of the economy and where time payment enables instant possession if not ownership, great effort is expended by producers to encourage families to consume. The advertising industry encourages and reinforces excessive buying, especially status consumption, as well as trying to induce people to accept advertisers’ definitions of which goods and services are essential to family wellbeing.
Consumerism is a function that involves mainly women. Men probably decide when a new car is necessary and choose the make, but women are reputed to have a decisive say in spending up to 90 per cent of the family budget. A bored housewife is a very susceptible target in a consumer society, which tries to equate happiness with purchasing. (See Chapter Thirteen.)
Consumerism is not a function that is essential to family survival, even if this is how advertisements often portray the products they brandish. Poor families obviously consume much less than rich ones and this does not necessarily impede their performance of other family functions. It can be expected, as inflation reduces the spending power of low- and fixed-income earners, that there will be a growth in cooperative buying among some family groups. This already occurs with foodstuffs and could easily be extended to cover some consumer durables. Although our present economy is very dependent on multiple family consumption, this is not essential to the survival of the capitalist system. Were new forms of families to develop, we would expect a rapid adjustment by manufacturers to cater for new needs. Obviously the trend of many young people leaving the family home and sharing flats or houses with others of their age has led to an increase in consumption of many essential household items by people who are not setting up new nuclear families.
The only real challenge to the consumerism ethic comes from groups who deliberately set out to exist on as few material possessions as possible: some communes, especially rural ones, operate in this fashion and they obviously contribute little to the creation of surplus value and the profits accrued by manufacturers of household and other goods. Were such non-consumption to become widespread, the capitalist system would be under some threat, but such an occurrence appears highly unlikely at present since most people cherish the comforts of their abundantly stocked houses and see no reason beyond the limits of their incomes to curtail their consumerism.
This is a highly specific function of families, one that is totally contingent on historical and economic circumstances. It is, in a sense, an excrescence on ‘the family’ since it serves no essential function for the institution. The values that have become attached to family consumerism – and that are manifested in such things as family shopping outings and the deliberate commercialisation of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day – are cultivated ones. Their existence reminds us of the strength of family ideology, but families would not collapse if they ceased to consume. However, if this function ceased to exist, women within families would discover how great a proportion of their time was devoted either to consuming, or to planning to consume, and many women could find that the paid employment they now take for ‘economic reasons’ is perhaps not essential to maintaining (i.e. feeding, clothing, educating etc.) their families.
4 Privatisation
Privatisation refers to the actual retreat of the marital couple from society and to the emotional processes that attend it. It has already been stated that the physical separation of ‘the family’ from society is one of the definitive characteristics of the bourgeois family. This retreat takes the form of the couple establishing a separate household, which they view as an inviolable domain. Such retreat is seen as increasingly necessary in a world that is violent, exploitative, and racked with the tensions of overcrowded cities and the nebulous fears induced by international conflicts or political or industrial unrest. Individuals seek refuge from what they fear or dislike in society within the closed world of ‘the family’, and especially in close relationships with other family members.
From early this century ‘the family’ has been increasingly seen as a sphere of self-realisation, as an autonomous realm where individuals might express themselves in ways that are usually denied to them at their place of work. As Zaretsky remarks,
[T]he contemporary family threatens to become a well of subjectivity divorced from any social meaning. Within it a world of vast psychological complexity has developed as the counterpart to the extraordinary degree of rationalization and impersonality achieved by capital in the sphere of commodity production. The individualist values generated by centuries of bourgeois development – self-consciousness, perfectionism, independence – have taken new shape through the insatiability of personal development in developed capitalist society. The internal life of the family is dominated by a search for personal fulfilment for which there seem to be no rules. Much of this search has been at the expense of women.27
I have already pointed out that the role of emotional sustenance is undertaken almost entirely by the wife/mother, and that the women’s self-maintenance is also self-abnegation since women maintain self by conforming to roles that render them subservient and secondary. The stress on self-realisation, which forms much of the current ideological rationale for ‘the family’, allows women this bounty only in their function as child-bearers. At the same time, the weight of the emotional sustenance role has increased the more the role of family in individual self-realisation is st
ressed, and so women have had to shoulder additional burdens for ever-diminishing rewards – since women now bear fewer children and, in terms of the ideology, are thus afforded fewer opportunities for their form of self-expression.
Women with paid jobs have to juggle their time and their energy between working at those jobs and continuing to be mothers, housekeepers and wives. They are in an excruciating position: since they are exposed to the outside world and the frustrations of the workplace they need to retreat to ‘the family’ in the same way as their husbands do, but they are the ones who bear the main responsibility for ensuring that ‘the family’ is a haven. Men do not learn to fulfil this role and most find it extremely difficult to adopt, particularly if they have never been called upon to perform it until comparatively late in life – which is when their wives are most likely to resume paid employment. Many men thus resent their wives taking jobs since it means that, even though the material benefits for the family group might be enhanced, their wives’ ability to give them emotional sustenance is likely to be diminished.
Marital and family relationships are now afforded a value that they have never before had to possess. Until this century it was not considered necessary to love one’s marriage partner, or to have to relate to her/him at more than a functional level. It is now considered paramount that ‘a good relationship’ form the hub of every family.
Yet the sex division of labour within ‘the family’ means that a woman’s quest for fulfilment within the conjugal relationship inevitably fails to reach her expectations. Although both sexes now desire and expect a rewarding and sustaining relationship, the structural inequalities of the marriage-family institution make this expectation difficult, if not impossible, for women to attain. Women are still taught to expect their major area of fulfilment to be through bearing and raising children, and the demands of this role are often totally at odds with having the time, energy and disposition to devote to developing and maintaining the conjugal relationship. By the time the children are old enough not to need constant care and attention it is often too late: the husband has found another partner. Secondly, while women are expected to play the role of soothers, comforters and mediators within ‘the family’ and the primary responsibility for managing personal relationships rests with them, men do not learn, or see the need to, develop any of these traits or skills themselves. They can rest secure in their legal and economic dominance of ‘the family’ and expect that their role as provider entitles them to constant cosseting and devotion.
Women have learnt to expect their familial roles to constitute their major, if not their sole, mode of self-expression and satisfaction. But women are overburdened with responsibilities within ‘the family’ (and these do not diminish, but are increased, if they have a paid job as well) and some of these responsibilities are often, in practice, mutually exclusive or contradictory. This means that women must almost always agree to settle for less: they must apportion their energies and their emotions between children and husband. Rather than this leading to a rich relationship enhanced by its involving several people, it often results in the woman feeling her loyalties to be divided and she can begin to resent the many and varied demands made upon her emotions. The husband is not similarly divided since he is not expected to have such a close relationship with his children.
The basic inequality between husband and wife is critical when it comes to the enhanced expectations each now has of the conjugal relationship because these expectations have been grafted on to a structure that cannot really accommodate them. Yet this inequality is integral to maintaining ‘the family’: if women refused to submit to their diverse familial roles it is unlikely that the institution could survive. To date there is no widely accepted alternative to the inequalities of family relationships, and so when people leave one relationship because they find it unsatisfactory and seek to establish another one, what they actually seek to reproduce is this inequality – which they equate with fulfilment. The closed private world of ‘the family’ with its ever-increasing stress that it can provide avenues for individual fulfilment and mutual happiness can in fact only provide this to the extent that women consent in relinquishing some of their expectations and then collaborate in disguising this fact. The inequalities and their consequences persist because ‘the family’ is a closed and private area of existence. If, when a relationship fails to meet people’s expectations, they began to question the structure of the institution rather than just blaming the other person, then perhaps the ideology of ‘the family’ could be challenged. But one of the primary purposes of maintaining privatisation is to avert such a challenge and, in this way, perpetuate ‘the family’.
5 The repression of sexuality
The repression of sexuality is one of the most important functions of ‘the family’ since it is one of the means by which ‘the family’ is reproduced. Sexuality in our society is controlled and managed. Until very recently, only one form of sexuality was permitted: pro-creative sexuality within marriage. Although not all sex within marriage was expressly aimed at conceiving another child, it occurred within a procreative framework. Marriage was seen as the only legitimate state in which to have a child, and ‘the family’ required marriage as a precondition for its existence. In the last decade with the development of fairly effective forms of contraception, and with an exploding world population providing a reason to restrict fertility, it has no longer been possible to confine sex to marriage or to view it as primarily procreative. So-called ‘recreational sex’ has become increasingly acceptable and this state of affairs has been labelled ‘the permissive society’. But this very phrase illustrates that limits still exist: it describes a society that permits more forms of sexual expression than was previously the case. The very words reveal the authoritarian nature of the situation: if a society can permit, it can also prohibit.
Individuals are still subject to social controls. Male homosexuality, for instance, is still outlawed as are various other forms of sexuality that are labelled as ‘perversions’: incest, sodomy, bestiality and sex between adults and children. There is an ‘age of consent’ for girls, demarcating the age at which they are legally permitted to have sexual intercourse. If a girl below this age is discovered to be having sexual relations, she is usually confined to a State institution and her male partner is charged with having carnal knowledge and often imprisoned.
All societies restrict sexuality to some degree, although there is considerable variation between different societies in what is permitted and prohibited. But some amount of control has always been seen as necessary and usually justified in terms of perpetuating that society. Freud, for instance, maintained that the very existence of civilisation depended on sexual instincts being repressed:
[S]ociety must undertake as one of its most important educative tasks to tame and restrict the sexual instinct when it breaks out as an urge to reproduction, and to subject it to an individual will which is identical with the bidding of society. It is also concerned to postpone the full development of the instinct till the child shall have reached a certain degree of intellectual maturity, for, with the complete irruption of the sexual instinct, educability is for practical purposes at an end. Otherwise, the instinct would break down every dam and wash away the laboriously erected work of civilization. Nor is the task of taming it ever an easy one; its success is sometimes too small, sometimes too great. The motive of human society is in the last resort an economic one; since it does not possess enough provisions to keep its members alive unless they work, it must restrict the number of its members and divert their energies from sexual activity to work.28
This view assumes a scarcity of resources and an inability to control population except through sexual abstinence, but it also uses an argument that is widely subscribed to in capitalist countries: that people must curb their sexuality so that they will work. Sex must be routinised and pushed into the far corners of people’s lives. It must be an activity that is totally separated from work
– which is seen as people’s main activity – and must submit to the routines imposed by that.
The sex instincts are not totally repressed, they are organised. They are channelled into genitality (in contradiction to the human potential to respond sensuously over her or his entire body) and they are subjugated under the function of procreation. All other forms of sexual expression are outlawed as ‘perversions’. In most civilisations this genital procreative sexuality is only permitted to be expressed within one institution: monogamous marriage. Moreover, the expression of even this limited form of sexuality is controlled and organised by the demands of the labour market.
Sexuality is relegated to one corner of life, while the ‘realistic’ needs of the labour market are elevated to prime importance in the individual’s life. Adults spend most of their day at work, or preparing for or recovering from work, and have only a few hours each day in which to relax. Sexuality must be confined to this small temporal space. It must take place at times when people are tired from their day’s work, or it cannot take place because they are tired or because they must be up early for work the next morning. People are excused from work if they are sick – but not if they merely feel like pursuing their sexual inclinations.
Probably the only occasion when sexual activity is regarded as totally legitimate and is ritualistically enforced on people is on a couple’s wedding night, but even here the apparent unease with which most people view sexuality is made evident by the coarse and ribald jokes and suggestions that are likely to be directed at the newly married couple. Far from being viewed as natural and enjoyable, sex is seen as a furtive, even dirty activity which, if it must take place at all, should be confined to darkened bedrooms and accomplished with a minimum of delay. The various terms Australians use for sexual intercourse – having a ‘naughty’ or a ‘poke’ – amply illustrate this.