Death of the Traditional Family
Perhaps nothing so captures the paradoxes which abound in our time as the debates about the family that erupt, it seems, almost every week. ... The charges related to unlawful access to the IVF program which had seen Haley fall pregnant to the semen provided by her donor friend That sperm donor was a gay police Sergeant, Mark Keen, but the traditional techniques for conceiving appeared not to be working. ... Equally Catholic and/or conservative groups like Bill Muehlenberg’s Australian Family Association argued that the prohibition on lesbians and single women accessing IVF and or having babies was right. ... In effect gay parents were not a good idea -just like working wives and mothers, single mothers … The ironies in this case are pretty striking and point to the way some odd positions are now being taken on this modern debate about ‘the family’. Recall firstly that lesbian feminists in the 1970s were busily attacking ‘marriage’ and ‘the family’ as a patriarchal instrument of oppression of women and a source of pain and deformation for children. ... That last observation should reminds us about what is at stake in the current debate about families and the very popular, even widespread view that the traditional family is dead or dying and/or that traditional family values are no longer widely adhered to today. Much of this idea that the ‘traditional family’ is dead or dying is connected to fears about historical change which is often, for convenience’s sake, referred to as ‘globalisation’ Such a story points to: · · radical changes in the labour market like unemployment, precarious employment and ‘working wives’; · · rising standards of living and expectations around consumption force women to stay at work and not look after their children -and their husbands- as they once did and was once ‘traditional’; · · the spread of imported ideas like the belief that women, gays and lesbians should be free to challenge the traditional ways families and relationships were constructed; · · the attack on religion and conservative or traditional values by subversives/ media culture and other elements of a secular and modernizing culture A word on assumptions Several assumptions underpin this idea-cum-argument that the traditional family is dead or dying and/or that traditional family values are defunct. They are not all that hard to work out especially when we hear a leading Australian sociologist like Kevin McDonald waxing nostalgic about the 1950s when the ‘traditional family’ was alive and well and ‘everyone had a place and everyone knew their place’. By this he means father sat at the head of the table as his wife served the family their food. While there are many assumptions at work several stand out: Firstly such an argument has to assume that it is possible to speak about ‘the traditional family’ as if there always has been a single form of family ie., a single formation -presumably since time immemorial- and that around that single form of family a singular set of values were attached. This idea is what lies behind the belief in the universality of something called the ‘nuclear family’. Secondly such an argument assumes that in some way or other the family form itself and the family values said to be attached to it actually worked and were by some sort of social or moral criteria actually superior to whatever we see in practice today. That is the claim that the nuclear family is dead or dying requires that those who claim this, must assume that once upon a time the nuclear family was both the normal and a thriving form of family life. ... Those who talk about the death of the family in this way misrepresent history. ... I argue firstly the claim that the nuclear family is dead or dying assumes that once upon a time the nuclear family was a widely admired and the normal form of family life either historically or more particularly in Australia. In the last part of the lecture I want to argue by way of a bridge to next week’s lecture that far more important to the belief that the ‘traditional family’ is fatally wounded is a reaction especially by men to some quite real changes. The fear that the traditional family is dead or dying is much more about fears or anxieties in the wake of quite real shifts in traditional gender identities, ie. ... But let me begin by looking at the assumption underpinning the claim that the nuclear family is dead or dying. Such an claim relies on the assumption that once upon a time the ‘nuclear family’ was the normal and thriving form of family life. ... Have traditional ie., nuclear families been the dominant family pattern in history? ... The idea of the ‘nuclear family’ is all about the idea that a family is ‘mum and dad -who are married and who married out of love and stay that way - and a few biologically related children living in the one house. ... Murdock, an American sociologist and anthropologist advanced the claim in the late 1940s that this kind of Leave it to Beaver TV show kind of caricature, was actually a universal form of family that crossed all geographic and historical boundaries Now only a sociologist or ‘theorist’ of a certain kind who loves a gross genralisation and isn’t all that fussed about obdurate, messy reality could be so thick as to make such a claim. In the book Judith Bessant and I review all of the evidence that can be brought to blow the belief in a timeless and universal ‘nuclear family’ form out of the water. (We also pay a lot of attention to the idea that the ‘nuclear family’ existed or exists to fulfill a number of social functions: this kind of Big Theoretical idea is still very much alive and well and is quite stupid but we’ll leave that discussion to another day. What is quite apparent is that all sorts of extended family forms including those in which people we would call slaves and servants were included in a working definition of family and in the ways people actually put families together across many societies and communities at least until the last few centuries. There is no evidence to support the claim that ‘nuclear families’ have provided us with a universal and timeless pattern of family formation.