How does feminism effect family

Finally, given the existence of two complementary but diverse perspectives, there is no reason to think that citizens will seek to apply principles of justice to dishwashing. Justice, however, must govern families not only because real families are far from ideal. The state also has an interest in promoting and maintaining just families because of the effects of families on future citizens and on women's opportunities and real freedoms. Almost every person in our society starts life in a family of some kind.

The kind of family one has influences the kind of person one grows up to be. In families, children first encounter concepts of right and wrong, as well as role models who shape their sense of what it is possible for them to do and be. Families are an important school of moral learning, but too many families teach inequality and subordination, not principles of justice. Following Mill, feminist scholars question how children whose first experiences of adult interaction are unequal altruism, domination and manipulation can learn and accept the principles of justice they need to be citizens in a democracy committed to the equal worth of all Okin Plato also recognized the importance of the family for the moral development of individuals.

Families inhibit or promote children's talents and abilities. In Book V of the Republic, Socrates discovers that when theorists of justice take into account the profound and often unfair effects of the family on the development of children's potentials , they will be forced to the conclusion that the family must be abolished.

While few feminists follow Plato in proposing to abolish the family, almost all see the family as in need of reform. Families are schools of moral learning, but they are more than that. Parents play an extremely large role in the lives of their dependent children. States need to regulate families to insure that all children are educated, are inoculated against contagious diseases and have their basic needs met. No state can be indifferent to whether or not children grow up to be literate, functioning members of its economy.

For this reason, all societies provide some degree of publicly financed education for children. All states also depend, at least in part, on the labor of caretaking and childrearing, work that is today overwhelmingly done by women.

Given its evident importance, why is domestic labor not given greater public recognition? Feminists have made a strong case for taking such care-giving within the family seriously, and for the state to attend to the justice issues involved in care provision Kittay Feminists have also argued that just states must provide care in a way that ensures that all children — boys and girls, rich and poor — have equal opportunities to grow up able to take part in their society.

Despite the advances prompted by the feminist movement during the last quarter of the twentieth century, most families are based on an unequal division of labor. Around the globe, women still do the vast majority of domestic labor — not only tending the house, but also raising and caring for children. Feminist scholars have attacked traditional approaches to the family that obscure this inequality.

For example, they have criticized the dominant economic approaches to the family that regard the head of the household as an altruistic agent of the interests of all the family's members See Becker for such an approach. They have shown that, in poor countries, when development aid is given to male rather than female heads of household, less of it goes to care for children Haddad et al.

Feminist economists and sociologists have also shown how women's role in parenting constrains their ability to pursue careers and compete for demanding jobs Bergmann , Folbre Many women therefore remain economically dependent on their male partners, and vulnerable to poverty in the event of divorce.

This huge discrepancy in income and wealth results from a number of factors, including the fact that women who have devoted themselves to raising children usually have lower job qualifications than their husbands and less work experience. Women's economic dependency in turn allows them to be subject to physical, sexual or psychological abuse by their husbands or other male partners Gordon, ; Global Fund for Women Report, Defenders of the status quo often argue that if women have less opportunity than men, this is largely due to their own choices.

Feminists have countered this claim by showing the ways that such choices are shaped and constrained by forces that are themselves objectionable and not freely chosen. Some feminists follow Nancy Chodorow's argument that the fact that children's primary nurturers are mothers leads to a sexually differentiated developmental path for boys and girls.

Chodorow argues that mothering is thereby reproduced across generations by a largely unconscious mechanism that, in turn, perpetuates the inequality of women at home and at work. Chodorow's work is controversial, but it is undeniable that girls and boys grow up facing different expectations of how they will behave.

Children receive strong cultural messages — from parents, teachers, peers and the media — about sex-appropriate traits and behaviors. These traits traditionally contribute to women's inequality: nurturers are not seen as good leaders. There are few women CEOs, generals, or political leaders.

Given women's lower wages, it is rational for families who must provide their own childcare to choose to withdraw women from the workforce. Once women withdraw, they find themselves falling further behind their male counterparts in skill development and earning power.

Child care is an immensely time consuming activity and those who do it single-handedly are unlikely to be able to pursue other goods such as education, political office or demanding careers. Statistical analysis shows that motherhood tends to lower a woman's earnings, even if she does not take any time off from paid work Folbre And although women have made progress in entering elite positions in the economy and government, there is evidence that such progress has now stalled Correll Feminists share the view that contemporary families are not only realms of choice but also realms of constraint.

Feminists also agree that the gender hierarchy in our society is unjust, although they differ on what they take its sources to be. All of these strands seem important contributors to gender inequality, and it is doubtful that any one can be fully reduced to the others.

It is therefore important to deepen our understanding of the interplay of these different sources of subordination. For example, because women tend to earn less than men, if someone has to take time off to raise the kids, it makes economic sense for it to be the female lower earner. Gender also undoubtedly interacts with other axes of social disadvantage, such as race and class.

Indeed, feminist work on families has increasingly recognized the diverse experiences of women in families that encompass not only heterosexual two parent families, but also single women, lesbian and gay families, and families in poverty. We need to be careful not to lump together distinct social phenomena. Whether families are the primary cause, or a contributing cause along with other social structures and culturally generated expectations, feminists point to the ways that families are part of a system that reproduces women's social and economic inequality.

Families cannot be viewed apart from that system or in isolation from it. Nor can they be assumed to be just: too many of them are not. The issue, for feminists, is not whether the state can intervene in the family and reproduction but how, and to what ends.

How should parenting and household responsibilities be distributed? Who should have a right to household earnings? Who has the right to form a family? To have a child? What defines a parent? How many parents can a child have? How many children can a parent have? Answering these already complex questions is additionally complicated by the existence of new technologies that make possible multiple ways of becoming a parent.

Below, I examine two main values that feminists have argued should guide the families we make: individual choice and equality.

The traditional family has seen many changes in the last fifty years. In the decades following WW II increasing numbers of women entered the labor force. Divorce rates increased dramatically: the divorce rate in the s was almost two and a half times what it had been in The development of the birth control pill has made it easier for women to avoid unwanted pregnancies and to plan when to have children.

There are a growing number of single parent families, gay families, and extended families. Economic, technological and social factors have together made the full time-stay at home housewife and mother with a working husband a statistical minority.

Laws governing families have also changed. Modern laws are more likely to view men and women as equals, who can be subjected to the authority of each other only with their own consent. In almost all developed nations, legal restrictions on marriage, divorce and abortion were relaxed in a relatively short time, between the mid s and the mids Glendon In Loving v Virginia , for example, the US Supreme Court struck down state laws preventing people from different races from marrying; Roe v Wade legalized abortion.

Of course, many of these changes have been contested and there remain serious constraints on women's reproductive choices. Nor can gay people usually marry, although laws and norms have been evolving in favor of gay marriage see, most recently: Hollingsworth v. Perry; United States v. The family has increasingly evolved from a hierarchical institution based on a fixed status to a set of relationships between individuals based on contract. Indeed, many people now view marriage not as an unalterable condition, but as a contract whose terms can be altered and negotiated by the parties involved.

How far should the contract idea of marriage be taken? Some feminists have proposed extending the contract model to allow any and all consenting adults to marry and to freely choose the terms of their association.

These feminists would abolish state-defined marriage altogether and replace it with individual contracts drawn up by each couple wanting to marry Fineman , Weitzman Indeed, contracts would allow not only gay couples to marry but would also allow plural marriages, as in the case of polygamy. Contract or choice based feminists would allow individuals themselves to determine what kinds of families they want to create. Thus, they would allow people to make their own agreements about procreation without state restriction.

These arrangements could include not only rights to abortion and contraception, but also rights to contract away parental bonds and to sell and buy gametes and reproductive labor. Thus, choice feminists would allow gay or infertile couples or single persons to contract for sperm or eggs or gestational services before a child is conceived on terms that they alone decide.

What is in crisis is the nuclear, heterosexual marital unit. But this unit was never good for women Coontz Advocates of contract marriage argue that extending the role of choice in reproduction and in the families we make will empower women.

For example, contracting can help spur new forms of family, enabling gay couples and single women and men to have children. Gay families have traditionally been more egalitarian in the division of domestic labor then heterosexual families, and less likely to reproduce mothering along gender lines. Others argue that allowing women to sell their reproductive services would empower women and improve their welfare by unleashing a new source of economic power Shalev In contrast to the ideal of families as having an internal nature beyond justice, some feminists have even proposed using a marriage contract to determine the domestic division of labor.

They argue that by moving marriage from an implicit status based, patriarchal arrangement to an explicit contract, women's freedom and equality would be enhanced Weitzman This proposal has been criticized on several grounds: as inattentive to the background inequalities would give rise to unequal bargaining power in such a contract Sen ; as potentially undermining to intimacy and commitment within marriage Anderson and as opening the door to illiberal intrusions into family life, given the need for states to enforce such contracts Elshtain Other feminist authors have criticized the very idea of choice as applied to reproduction and marriage.

They argue that practices such as prostitution, surrogacy or gendered marriages are based on objectionable views of women — as bodies, as breeders, or as domestic helpmates — and that these views in fact underlie seemingly freely choices to enter these practices.

For example, Catherine MacKinnon argues that such choices can as easily be viewed as based on subordination and domination as on free consent.

And Carole Pateman similarly questions the choices alleged to underlie women's decisions to engage in prostitution. How deep a challenge do these arguments present to the choice based view of marriage? Proponents of the choice view might plausibly claim that if men and women could explicitly define the terms of their relationships, and retain a right of exit when the terms were not fulfilled, then at least extreme forms of gender domination would be undercut.

They might also stress the ways that their view accommodates a plurality of understandings of human relationship: allowing for experimentation, diversity and exit options. It is true that contracts would allow men and women to contract for traditional gendered families, but why should we object to such families if they are freely entered into and express the values of the participants?

Behind this disagreement is an important division over the extent to which a just society must accommodate different views of family relation. Where does society draw the line on toleration of hierarchical views of men and women's roles? When should a view of family form be ruled out of bounds because it is too inegalitarian? As we shall see, not all feminists agree that it has necessarily changed for the better. Company Reg no: VAT reg no Main menu. Subjects Shop Courses Live Jobs board.

View shopping cart. View mytutor2u. Account Shopping cart Logout. Explore Sociology Sociology Search. Explore Blog Reference library Collections Shop. Share: Facebook Twitter Email Print page. Liberal feminism and family Liberal feminists focus on striving for legal equality between the sexes.

Radical feminism and family Radical feminists do not believe that changing the law will ever be enough, on its own, to end the oppression and subjugation of women. In short, Radical Feminists advocate for the abolition of the traditional, patriarchal as they see it nuclear family and the establishment of alternative family structures and sexual relations.

The various alternatives suggested by Radical Feminists include separatism — women only communes, and Matrifocal households. It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole.

Mediating between the individual and the social structure, the family effects control and conformity where political and other authorities are insufficient. As the fundamental instrument and the foundation unit of patriarchal society the family and its roles are prototypical. Serving as an agent of the larger society, the family not only encourages its own members to adjust and conform, but acts as a unit in the government of the patriarchal state which rules its citizens through its family heads.

Traditionally, patriarchy granted the father nearly total ownership over wife or wives and children, including the powers of physical abuse and often even those of murder and sale.

Classically, as head of the family the father is both begetter and owner in a system in which kinship is property. Yet in strict patriarchy, kinship is acknowledged only through association with the male line. While we may niggle over the balance of authority between the personalities of various households, one must remember that the entire culture supports masculine authority in all areas of life and — outside of the home — permits the female none at all.

Although there is no biological reason why the two central functions of the family socialisation and reproduction need be inseparable from or even take place within it, revolutionary or utopian efforts to remove these functions from the family have been so frustrated, so beset by difficulties, that most experiments so far have involved a gradual return to tradition.

This is strong evidence of how basic a form patriarchy is within all societies, and of how pervasive its effects upon family members. If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my AS Sociology Families and Households Revision Bundle which contains the following:. Few words of praise may not equalize the work you are doing ….

You sound like an overgrown child. Only their husbands are. One does not work without the other. We can be reached at flip. Thanks so much! The same capitalism that allows their husbands to go out, earn, support the family unit and progress through the ranks to earn more money.

Given I am assuming you are referring to housewives here, of course they are getting paid; they hold down the home and the husband earns the money. And what shall we replace it with, this structure of the men being the hunter-gathers whilst the women look after the family, that has existed since the dawn of mankind?

Absolute madness and failure to see the bigger picture. You could spend a lot longer picking apart this shitshow, but the result would ultimately be the same. Glad the west is waking up to this and men and women alike are rejecting it in their droves, in favour of more wholesome traditional ideology. I would like to use your information about the functions of the nuclear family.

Is there a way I can cite this?