by Anne Summers
For people to view a basic instinctual drive in this fashion – the same attitudes are not applied to eating for instance – it is evident that a process of repressing that instinct must have taken place. This process begins in early childhood and occurs within ‘the family’. Children are discouraged from touching their genitals, or from being interested in those of other children or adults. Their provocative and often perverse sexual questions and conversations invoke admonition and punishment from shocked parents whose own sexuality has been so successfully repressed that they cannot remember that they acted in exactly the same fashion. Most parents will not permit their children to see their naked bodies and they are careful lest they witness any sexual activity. Once children have reached the age of sexual curiosity they are not usually allowed to bathe with siblings of the opposite sex, nor to share bedrooms with them.
‘The family’ is obviously an ideal place to effect the repression of sexuality. It possesses natural limits of size and variability, which make strict supervision and control of children easy. Children are subjected to the control of their parents in every other respect so the repression of their sexuality can occur as just one further process of their ‘bringing up’; it fits easily and unobtrusively into the overall parent–child relationship. The small size of the Australian family reinforces parental authority as there are seldom more than two or three children, a number that can be supervised fairly rigorously. Similarly the small size generally means that there is not a great variation in the children’s ages which again makes curbing their sexuality easier. A mixture of very young and adult children tends to blur the child/parent distinction and perhaps subvert parental authority to some extent. It can also contradict the dictate which parents try to enforce that children should be asexual, since the adult ‘children’ will undoubtedly be dating and engaging in some forms of sexual activity.
A further reason for ‘the family’ being seen as a suitable place for repressing sexuality is that it is not supposed to provide opportunities for sexual contact between its members – except, of course, between husband and wife. It is not known how widely the taboo on incest is observed since this is not a subject that has attracted the interest of researchers in Australia. It is likely that it is broken far more frequently than we would expect (given the horror that this form of sexuality generally evokes) but it is also probable that most incest is in fact rape, with fathers forcing themselves on their daughters. Other forms of incest, between mothers and sons and sisters and brothers are probably far less common.
As the person who bears the major responsibility for ‘bringing up’ children, the mother is the primary agent in their sexual repression. It is she who will explicitly instruct and restrict, who will urge her children away from sexual games and punish them for ‘playing with themselves’. As part of what she sees as her maternal duties of ensuring that ‘the family’ reproduces itself, she will generally take particular care in the instruction of her daughters, leading them to believe that sexuality merely justifies its end which is motherhood and has little else to commend it. She will teach her daughters that it is their duty to curb the ‘uncontrollable passions’ of the boys she goes out with, that the woman must set the pace in any encounter since women are less troubled by such passions. In instructing her daughter thus, a mother is bequeathing to the next generation of women her own sexual miseries and fears and frustrations.
As the next chapter points out, women are the ones who have suffered most from the particular form sexual repression takes in Australia. Sex engaged in purely for procreation or for male satisfaction and seen as an illicit activity to be got over with as quickly as possible is rarely satisfactory for a woman. Small wonder, then, that many mothers are not eager for their daughters to be sexually active. Others pragmatically put their daughters on the contraceptive pill. Both responses are designed to ensure that their daughters will not bear children outside the legitimate bounds of ‘the family’, the first by trying to discourage daughters from any but marital procreational sexuality, the second by ensuring that the daughter does not get pregnant as she flails through ‘the permissive society’.
Mothers pay less attention to curbing their sons’ sexuality once the initial childhood repression is completed; they confidently rely on women continuing to fulfil the God’s Police role which, as we have seen, denies female sexuality and places women in the position of regulating the sexuality of the men with whom they live or go out. Sons who ‘sow their wild oats’ are regarded indulgently, whereas a pregnant unmarried daughter is still regarded as being immoral and casting shame on her entire family. So even though the processes of sexual repression encompass all members of Australian society, men and women are assigned different roles within that repressed State. Men are undeniably afforded more sexual freedom while women inherit the unhappy task of monitoring both their own and their men’s sexuality, and of trying to ensure that the next generation of women will perpetuate ‘the family’ by avoiding procreational sex outside marriage.
Their effectiveness can be relied upon, whereas that of more traditional agencies such as the churches cannot, because women have little option but to perpetuate and strengthen the one social arena that gives their lives some legitimacy and function – ‘the family’. If women were to refuse to be moral guardians and to be sexually circumspect, so long as the view that sexual repression is necessary to maintain civilisation were maintained, some other agent of repression would be found. But it is difficult to envisage any other agency where this repression could be effected so easily and so unobtrusively as within ‘the family’.
6 Socialisation
Socialisation is the process whereby individuals learn the norms, values and behaviour codes of society and of the particular group into which they are born or into which they come to spend their lives. As children we learn broad social conventions as well as more specific ones related to sex, class, and race and also those deriving from the region where we live, the religion to which our parents belong and the ethnic group into which we are born.*
Socialisation, as the term implies, is the imposition of society’s values and demands on to the individual. This occurs for two reasons. Even in a society such as Australia, which professes to value the freedom of the individual, social needs are seen as overriding those of the individual if there is conflict between the two, and one of the purposes of socialisation is to minimise this conflict by having the individual voluntarily conform to social dictates. Secondly, this imposition is almost inevitable when the process of teaching these values begins when the child is physically dependent and psychologically malleable and is therefore incapable of disputing what it is taught. This does not mean that individuals are incapable of later rejecting or at least questioning some or all of the content of what they are taught as children. We would have no rebels, and no possibility of widespread individual social change, if this were the case. Similarly, the content of each child’s socialisation is not identical. It is informed by the various group differences mentioned above and also by the extent to which the socialising agents concur with the broad social values. Thus some children are taught to be devoutly religious while others are taught to reject all religion; some learn that the existing class system is natural or inevitable and others learn that it is exploitative and unjust.
But despite a plethora of individual and group variations among families some common patterns emerge. Although what we can call primary socialisation occurs within families whose cultural affiliations are more or less diverse, a secondary socialisation of a far more uniform kind takes place within schools. Here the state exercises a considerable degree of control over what is taught (and over who is permitted to teach – many teachers are dismissed for stepping beyond these prescriptions) and the pressures of succeeding at school examinations and conforming to peer group norms often combine to subvert parental inclinations.
From the time of birth it is difficult to distinguish just what constitutes merely caring
for a child and what is guiding her or him into what the carer considers appropriate behaviour. As the infant grows this guidance becomes more evident, but what is important to recognise is that very little, if any, of the behaviour the child learns is culturally neutral. The child learns restraint (from aggression), control (over its bowels), moderation (in eating, playing) and, above all, obedience (to adults, mainly its parents and older relatives but also to authority figures such as policemen, teachers, clergy and any others who are selected as appropriate by its parents or placed before the child by society through one of its agencies such as the mass media).
These are all characteristics required by a society that needs to exact loyalty and conformity from its members so that they will perform the tasks that perpetuate that society in its present form. That form includes the current economic system and those institutions such as ‘the family’ and the education system that support and reinforce it. Thus socialisation is a conservative function which is directed to ensuring the perpetuation of the existing form of the society and the institutions that comprise it. Since the greater part of socialisation occurs within ‘the family’, we can say that ‘the family’ has as one of its most important jobs the maintenance of the status quo. This task is virtually identical to that described as the God’s Police role of women: the maintenance of existing authority relations. It is therefore in the processes of socialisation and sexual repression that we see most clearly the congruence of ‘the family’ and the approved female role; and the importance to the capitalist system of women performing the God’s Police role within ‘the family’.
In Australia, as in most Western nations, ‘the family’ is seen as the best place to ‘bring up’ children, and people who have children, or intend to have them, usually establish families for this reason. Couples who live together almost always marry if a child is expected. The state attempts to find foster homes for children placed under its care, and there are adoption facilities for ‘approved’ families to take over the care of children unwanted or unable to be cared for by their natural mothers. ‘The family’ is regarded as a hallowed haven, as the only suitable site for child development, and those unfortunate children who find themselves being ‘brought up’ in an institution or some other family substitute are usually made to feel aware of their deprived situation.
But this family idolatry is rather curious when we remember that the actual child carers, and those who are given the main charge of socialising children, are women. The father’s main role is seen as being provider and protector for the woman and her brood, and he is expected to be a model of masculinity which his sons can emulate. It is the mother who spends most time with her children, who nurtures them and guides their physical, spiritual and cultural development. And I have already shown that this guidance cannot be culturally neutral: the mother’s directives are always towards socially valued ends, ends that coincide with the characteristics demanded of people by the system.
Thus it would seem that it is women as mothers, rather than ‘the family’ who are the instruments of socialisation. The mother is charged with child care and it is she who is constantly present and struggling with the child. The father remains an authority figure but he is only present for a few hours a day; indeed if he works a long distance from home the children might only see him at weekends, and although he might be called upon to administer severe discipline, it is usually on the mother’s behalf and for some action that has occurred while he was not present (‘Just wait till your father gets home!’). Because the father is not continually present he is less aware of the daily battles and tends to see his children at the end of the day, after they have been bathed and fed, when they are tired and less boisterous. He can relate to them as a kind and indulgent figure, someone to play with, a contrast to their nervy and irritable mother.
It is mothers rather than ‘the family’ who are held to be responsible for how their children develop and even for what they do as adults. If a child becomes a delinquent, a homosexual, a sex offender or demonstrates any form of criminal or anti-social behaviour, the mother is seen to be somehow to blame. In the case of delinquency and homosexuality there are all kinds of specious psychological theories which try to ‘prove’ her complicity. If she ‘neglected’ her child – by going out to work, for instance, – then she has created a delinquent; if she smothered her (male) child – by paying him too much attention – then she has made him a homosexual. The mother too often responds to these charges with guilt-stricken agreement since she accepts her socially assigned role as childminder, but is not always fully aware of the strategic role she, as socialiser and repressor of sexuality, plays for the maintenance of the existing system.
Thus women do all the work and if the results are as the system wants them then the institution in which they work, ‘the family’, receives the credit. If they are not successful, however, it is they rather than the institution who tends to receive the blame.
‘The family’ and divorce
Rather than seeing the institution of ‘the family’ as breaking down, as many contemporary moralists bemoan, we can see that its reputation has never been higher. A distinction is now posited between the institution and the individuals within it, and this separation enables that institution to endure in the face of individual defections or disenchantment. One of the primary objects of ‘the family’ is to reproduce itself. This means more than merely producing children; it also means ensuring that they will form families themselves, and parents are starting to be as self-conscious about this responsibility as they are about their relationship with each other. A good relationship between the conjugal couple is seen as necessary to socialise the children of the marriage successfully. The idea of a couple remaining together at all costs is starting to be replaced by the search to find ‘what’s best for the children’. If the intention is to persuade the child that one’s physical and emotional wellbeing is best provided for within the closed private world of ‘the family’ then it is obviously undesirable for a child to have to witness and endure constant conflict and hostility between its parents.
The parents themselves have acquired strong expectations for a fulfilling conjugal relationship and their view of ‘the family’ is likely to be prejudiced if they do not experience this. Greater life expectancy now means that people spend a considerably longer period of time in families than they did a century ago, and fewer and fewer people are now prepared to spend what could be as long as 50 years imprisoned in an unhappy marriage. This combination of wanting self-fulfilment and feeling a responsibility to instil a favourable disposition towards marriage and family in their children may lead a couple to decide to separate and obtain a divorce.
Such a decision, in these circumstances, is likely to be encouraged by marriage guidance counsellors who are now beginning to recognise that a good conjugal relationship is ‘what’s best for the children’. Whereas divorce used to be abhorred by upholders of ‘the family’, it is increasingly being seen as integral to preserving it. This change in attitude is reflected in divorce statistics. It should be pointed out that a majority of families remain together, if not forever, at least until children reach adulthood, and the number of children involved in divorce cases remains very small. In 1973, 16 095 marriages were dissolved in Australia and nearly one-third of these, 5210, involved no children.29 The 15 584 marriages dissolved in 1972 involved 22 061 children30 while in 1973 this number had only risen slightly, to 22 952 children. At the 1971 Australian census, the total number of children aged 20 and under was 1 075 81731 so the proportion of children involved in divorce cases is very small.*
But it is also clear that the presence of children in a marriage has, in the past, deterred couples from divorce. Until 1971 most divorces were granted to couples who had been married less than five years or more than 15 years; in 1971, 9.3 per cent of divorces were to couples who had been married less than five years, while 40.7 per cent were to those married 15 years or more.32 This suggests that
half of all divorced couples either had no children, or had only one, or that they waited until their parental responsibilities were discharged before dissolving an unsatisfactory relationship. This is borne out by the 1972 divorce figures: there were only 143 children involved in the 401 divorces granted to couples married five years or less.33 Since 1971 the number of divorces granted has risen by about 30 per cent and most of that rise has occurred among couples married five to nine years34, and who are thus likely to have young children. It is clear that the relationship between the conjugal couple is being seen as extremely important and that fewer people are prepared to endure an unfulfilling marriage simply for the sake of the children. Couples now separate with less guilt as they begin to realise that their children are likely to be happier, and to have a better chance of acquiring a pro-family disposition.
Most people do not divorce because they are disenchanted with marriage and ‘the family’. Rather, they divorce because they have learned to value these relationships so highly that they are discontented if they do not match their hopes and expectations. The very closeness and intensity of the privatised world of ‘the family’ exacerbates relational tensions that perhaps would be less evident if there were continuous interaction with a wider group. Yet people have learned to expect emotional fulfilment from just such a closed and intense relationship so if one relationship is unsuccessful they will usually attempt to form another. Because they have learned to expect to find emotional sustenance in marriage and family, most people attribute an unsuccessful relationship to the individuals involved and not to the institution itself and so they are not deterred from attempting to establish another relationship. Divorced people generally seek, and a great many manage, to marry again, or to at least form a stable de facto relationship.35