Family Sociology

The Family

Choosing Romantic Partners

·      DQ: How do we pick the people we fall in love with? How do we choose our romantic partners?

·      Choosing a romantic partner does not depend solely on attraction, how well we get along, or shared live goals.

·      Whether we realize it or not, there are social and cultural factors that affect our choice.

Endogamy and Exogamy

·      Endogamy: refers to marriage to someone within one’s social group (race, ethnicity, class, education, religion, or nationality)

·      Exogamy: refers to marriage to someone from a different social group

·      DQ: What are some reason endogamy is more common? Why do we tend to end up with people who are socially similar to ourselves?

·      DQ: Are there types of exogamous romantic relationships that are still seen (at least by some groups) as culturally problematic?

Loving v. Virginia

·      At certain points in history, certain types of exogamous relationships were illegal

·      Loving v. Virginia is the 1967 Supreme Court case that ended antimiscegenation laws (laws that said that interracial couples could not marry)

·      (Miscegenation is a term for interracial marriage, literally meaning  “a mixing of kinds” but sociologists prefer the term exogamy or outmarriage)

Types of Family Structures

·      Nuclear family: a traditional family consisting of a mother, father, and their children

·      Extended family: familial networks that extend beyond the nuclear family

·      Cohabitation: living together in an intimate relationship without formal legal or religious sanctioning

i)            Q: What proportion of never-married young adults in the U.S. do you think are cohabiting?

ii)         About 24 percent of all never-married Americans between 25 and 34 years old

iii)      Within 3 years: 58 percent of cohabiting couples will be marries, 19 percent will have broken up, and 23 percent will still be cohabiting

The Myth of the “Typical” Family

·      Nuclear family often considered the “proper” form for families

·      But it became a norm during unique social conditions of the 1950s, not a universal ideal

·      Functionalists: argued that the nuclear family was necessary in modern industrial society because it efficiently produced workers and child nurturers

·      BUT, there are many cultural variations of families that fulfill this function

·      There is no real “typical” family in Western society today

i)            Ex: multi-generational families; stepfamilies; single-parent families, unmarried couples, married couples without children

Divorce

·      Around 43-46% of marriages end in divorce

·      Divorce rates have stabilized over the last decades and declined since the highs in 1980s

·      Lots of research on effects of divorce on children

(1)     The takeaway: high levels of parental conflict—whether between married parents or divorced parents—are harmful to children

(2)     To the extent to which divorce harms children depends on a lot of context

Day 2

Keeping It In The Family: The Historical Divide between Public and Private

Premodern Families

·      “Traditional family” is a misleading term that reflects the myth rather than history

·      Even just looking as to U.S., the traditional family (nuclear) is deviant compared to 50 years before and after the 1950s

·      Preindustrial families operated like a small business:

i)            The home was a site for work and production, and the entire family was involved

·      They received help and support through kinship networks: strings of relationships between people related by blood and co-residence (marriage)

Industrial Revolution

·      Created a division between work and home

·      Men became associated with the public world of wage-earning work

·      Women associated with maintaining household, raising children, and unpaid work

Results of the Industrial Revolution

1.        A gendered division of labor arouse in the household

2.        As families moved for jobs, their kinship networks decreased

(a)     Family started depending on immediate family instead of extended families (vertical v. horizontal)

(b)    Ironic because life expectancy started increasing

(c)     Especially taxing on women (care work)

3.        The rise of the cult of domesticity: the notion that true womanhood centers on domestic responsibility and child rearing

Families After WW2

·      By the 1950s, the nuclear family model had already come to be idealized

·      It was never traditional, timeless, or universal; it was a response to the specific conditions of post WW2 economic boom in the US

i)            Conditions that allowed supporting a family on one wage

·      Even at its height, this family model was mostly attainable only by white middle- and upper-class families

ii)         Recall the racist policies in practices in the film we watched on race and housing

·      Although many look nostalgically at the decade, the 1950s were anomaly (exception)

(1)     Divorce rates had been rising since 1900s (dipped a little in 1950s)

(2)     The spike in fertility during the 1950s was an exception; fertility rates had been declining for decades

(3)     (teen marriage was high in the 1950s)

More Recent Changes in Work and Family Life

·      Changes in work and family life in the 1970s:

a)        Decreasing marriage rates; marriage postponed until later in life

b)        Decreasing fertility rates 1950s: 106.6 births/1000 women 1980: 62.9 2018: 59.1