ELEMENTS OF A CRITICAL
THEORY OF THE FAMILY
THE CRITICAL THEORY of the family begins with self-reflection, grounding the construction of theory in the context of the contemporary situation of the family. The sense of uncertainty and malaise that surround the family today informs the theoretical project. In advanced capitalist society, the fate of the nuclear (or bourgeois) family is in doubt. Commentators ask if the family is falling apart or merely evolving into a new form. Amitai Etzioni asks if the family is worth saving in any case.[1] Challenged by feminists, child liberationists, advocates of sexual freedom, libertarian socialists, humanistic psychologists and radical therapists, the family is indeed losing its long-standing sanctity. Indicators of family disequilibrium are rising alarmingly: divorces, child abuse, alcoholism, single-parent families, single-person households and mental illness. Many family analysts conclude that the family no longer provides the context of emotional support it once did.
Compelling questions intrude upon the social scientist. How can the family be defined so that the validity of the criticisms and the indicators can be tested and evaluated? Does the family contribute to the oppression of women and children to sex-
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ual repression, to capitalist exploitation and to psychic ailments? Are the values of monogamous love, privacy, individualism, domesticity, maternal child care and emotional fulfillment realized in or corrupted by the family? Are these values themselves in doubt?
The critical theory of the family cannot avoid these issues. Instead, theory must be constructed so that it contributes to research that can clarify them. Theory will need to define the family in a manner that will face squarely the possibility that alternative family structures may be desirable.
Epistemologically, a critical theory of the family must constitute the family as an object for research. It must provide a set of categories that point to the kinds of data needed for the comprehension of the family in a given society. And it must indicate the parameters of meaning of the possible findings. The role of theory is that of midwife for the birth of empirical studies. Theory does not produce a closed set of concepts that exhausts the meaning of its object, but provides a set of categorical guidelines enabling researchers to discover the concrete configurations of the object in question.
The tasks for theory at the level of the development of categories is distinct, at least partially, from what is normally called explanation. There are two levels of theoretical elaboration: the synchronic and the diachronic. At the synchronic level the object is determined structurally by a set of categories which outline how the object operates at a given time. At the diachronic level, changes in the structural form of the object are explained. The example of Marx's concept of the mode of production illustrates this distinction. The concept of the mode of production, consisting of forces and relations of production defines the structure of the economy at any given time. The notions of contradiction and class struggle explain how one mode of production changes into another. Research on the mode of production often proceeds simultaneously at the synchronic and diachronic levels, indicating both the state of development of a given mode of production and how it is changing. With regard to the study of the family, however, the existing state of research is so sparse and so conceptually unclear that it is
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not possible at this time to offer a theory of how one family structure changes into another.
The reasons for the difficulties with a diachronic theory of the family may not relate to the body of research but to the object itself. It may be that the family is so dependent on other levels of society (the state or the economy) that changes in its -structure cannot be understood by reference to aspects of the family itself. It may be that the structure of the family is determined almost wholly by the economy or by politics. However, there are important theoretical reasons for doubting this conclusion. Just as political forms do not emerge in lock step with economic forms, so family forms are not perfectly contemporaneous with other levels of society. Industrial capitalism and representative democracy, for example, do not emerge at the same time as modern family forms. Therefore family forms enjoy at least a partial autonomy from the state and the economy. Since the family enjoys partial autonomy, changes in its structure will ultimately need to be explained separately from explanations of the birth of industrial capitalism or democracy.
For the present, then the theoretical task can be restricted to the synchronic level, to the precise determination of family structure by a set of categories. There are, in fact, enough difficulties in defining family structure to keep the theorist busy. Before a theoretical strategy can be developed, the theorist must confront a thorny problem: the family is defined by different societies in greatly divergent ways and it is given greatly divergent degrees of importance. In pre-industrial Europe the family denotes either household or lineage and even then is relatively indistinct as a social category. In the modern period the family is defined as a prominent unit of society but it tends increasingly to be limited to the conjugal unit of parents and children. In "primitive" societies kinship seems to dominate family almost completely. Hence different societies do not have comparable definitions of the family. Historians cannot, therefore, trace the history of the family by relying upon the meanings provided by the societies themselves.
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The variation in the social definition of the family accentuates the problem for the theorist. The theorist must provide a categorical definition of the family which is broad and loose enough to encompass the varying family configurations of the pre-industrial and industrial periods. The mistake made by Parsonians and Freudians has been to take the modern family configuration as the norm and project it backward or, more precisely, to derive categories that fit neatly With modern family structure but fail to permit important differences in earlier forms to emerge with equal validity. The theorist must avoid stacking the conceptual deck against pre-modern family structure. The family must be theorized in such a way that a priori pre-modern forms are neither less intelligible nor less viable than modern forms. In fact, the theory must allow for future forms and avoid any implication that the present family is unchangeable.
If flexibility of categories is one requirement for a theory of the family, so coherence of categories is another. The definition of family structure must be tight enough to render the family intelligible as a defined pattern of human association There must be clear boundaries designed in the theory delimiting what is and what is not part of the family structure. More significantly, there must be a hierarchy of meanings about the family which define what is central to family structure and what is not. In other words, the theory must provide a strategy which unpacks and orders the levels of family experience in such a way that a final core of coherence defines a given family structure.
Many theories of the family accomplish this end by listing a set of functions specific to the family, such as reproduction, socialization, sexuality, reproduction of labor power and so forth. These functionalist theories of the family, exemplified by Parsons and Marx, tend to reduce the specificity of family experience to the operations of the social totality. They assume that the kind of reality contained in family experience is no differ-
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ent from the kind of reality contained in any other region of society or any other set of social interactions. In the Parsonian case, norms, roles and values enacted in a business transaction are no different from norms, roles and values in the family. As an agent of socialization, the family is only an aspect of the equilibrium of social values. Competition, for instance, in the one case is the same as competition in the other. But this is inadequate. The family is different from the economy not simply in the functions it performs for the society but in the quality of the relations it contains. For this reason, the theory of the family cannot be functionalist. It must develop categories that allow the regional uniqueness of family structure to be defined on its own terms.
In order, therefore, to develop categories of family structure that account for a wide diversity of social definitions and for the coherence and uniqueness of family experience, the theory of the family must turn to the psychological level and develop categories which permit the understanding of vastly divergent family structures in terms of their emotional pattern. The family is thus the place where psychic structure is formed and where experience is characterized in the first instance by emotional patterns. The function of socialization is clearly implied by this definition, but the family is being conceptualized not primarily as an institution with the function of socialization. Instead it is the social location where psychic structure is most decisively prominent.
In addition to being the locus of psychic structure, the family is a distinct social space to the extent that it generates and embodies hierarchies of age and sex. Political institutions are studied in terms of power relations; economic institutions are studied in terms of wealth or class. By the same token, differences of age and sex are specific to the family and most easily made intelligible by studying the family. The family is the social space where generations confront each other directly and where the two sexes define their differences and power relations. Age and sex are, of course, present as social markers in all institutions. Yet the family contains them, generates them and realizes
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them to an unusually deep degree. In other words, the study of the family provides an excellent place to learn about how society structures the determinations of age and sex.
Historians and social scientists have until recently not placed age and sex hierarchies high on their agenda. The dominant social theories of Tocqueville, Mill, Marx, Weber and Durkheim have focused attention on the great questions of religion, politics and the economy. The study of the family is one place where the neglected areas of age and sex domination can become incorporated into the historical picture. The patterns of age and sex domination have been as brutal as those of the other great historical questions. Generational and sexual conflict must be captured and understood in the same way as conflicts of class, race and religion. There is a rich and important history that has not yet been written of the domination of women and children which can be illuminated to a considerable extent within the history of the family.
The family has often been studied in terms of demography, economics and politics. Family size is fundamental to the problematics of demographic research. Inheritance practices are basic to the comprehension of economic mobility. Marriage patterns of elite families are at times crucial for politics. When the family is studied for these purposes its own coherence tends to be absorbed by concerns for other institutions. The family can be studied as its own center of intelligibility, generating its own problematics, when it is viewed as the place where psychic structure is internalized and becomes a mechanism for instituting hierarchies of age and sex.
Freudian psychology provides the best categories for defining family structure in terms of emotional patterns. Just a Marx, Weber and other great social theorists developed their systems in terms of the problematics of an emerging industrial world, so Freud developed psychoanalysis in close connection with the context of modernization. Even though Freud did not explicitly theorize psychic structure in relation to structure, his work is rooted in the issues of an emerging modern family form. Although psycho-
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analysis cannot be adopted without revision for the purpose of a theory of the family, it does provide foundational elements. Freud's theory of psycho-sexual development---the oral, anal and genital stages-can be set in a context of age and sex hierarchies specific to a given family structure. When this is done, the family appears as an emotional configuration which generates personality types in relative autonomy from other social levels.
More concretely, there are patterns of authority and love unique to different family types which can be interpreted in relation to the oral, anal and genital stages, and from which hierarchies of age and sex are both realized and reproduced. The combination of authority and love in relation to the three stages provides a theoretical model for discriminating family types as well as for analyzing their coherence. The oral, anal and genital stages indicate the points of emotional tension between adults and children, although this tension can concern very different matters, not just the specific problems noted by Freud. In the context of this emotional tension, the psyche becomes organized and patterned to reproduce the authority-love configuration of the older generation. At the same time the sexes are distinguished for the first time within the individual and given their social determinations.
Social psychologists, developmental psychologists and related branches of social science have studied numerous aspects of the parent-child relation. The ordinal position of children has been given much attention by Adlerians and others. Stages of moral development have been intensively examined by Piaget and his school. Cognitive development, intelligence and learning in general have been scrutinized by many schools, including behaviorists and linguists. Each of these research projects has generated a body of valuable knowledge about early childhood experience which could become a basis for family history. Yet the revised Freudian model presented here offers the most comprehensive theoretical basis for family studies. Other approaches might certainly be added to it in specific studies. But none of them offers as suggestively as
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Freud a model that points to major changes in family experience.
A case could be made for anthropological theories. Traditionally anthropology has been sensitive to issues concerned directly with the role of the family in the formation of social solidarity. Levi-Strauss' position on this question has already been discussed and Malinowski has been mentioned in passing. The dominant school of anthropological theory has been the structural-functionalists, whose major figures (A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Raymond Firth, Edmond Leach and others) have contributed much to social science. Yet this school is not sufficiently different at the theoretical level from Parsons to warrant special consideration.[2] Within this school there have been efforts to generate theories similar to the one offered here. Francis Hsu has theorized the family by focusing on the dominant dyadic relation in each family structure.[3] But these efforts have all been directed at small-scale, pre-industrial societies which are for the most part outside the modern world system. A critical theory of the family, by contrast, must concern issues that derive from advanced industrial societies and their precursors. The type of anthropology that does relate directly to this study is that of ethnologists, who study peasant communities within the modern world system. These efforts will be discussed in the next chapter.
Objections might be raised to the choice of authority and love as indices to study in relation to the oral, anal and genital stages. Since the object of family studies is the interactions pattern at the emotional level between family members, the types and degrees of love and affection presented by the adults to the child are the best avenue to approach the question. Also, arguments for the value of the present family form center on the question of the necessity of maternal love for child development. Similarly, the category of authority was chosen because it is a major aspect of the adult presence in confrontation with children. The index of authority allows the student of the family to investigate the vital question of freedom, its and possibilities. The categories of authority and love are essential as well in drawing attention away from the individual
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psyche of the child and Freud's energy problematics. These categories help to focus empirical studies clearly on the family as an interactional unit.
There are three theoretical questions which must be clarified at this point: (1) To what extent is the domination of children a biological necessity? (2) To what extent are masculine and feminine roles biologically inevitable? (3) To what extent is the structural model of the family conscious or unconscious? The answer to all three questions is loaded with political significance and determines the extent to which an ideal family form can be based on equality. The answer to these questions defines the limits of domination necessary for the existence of society. Moreover, these questions are inherent in any treatment of the family, and they are best handled theoretically by self-consciously and explicitly articulating answers to them. The difficulty, of course, is that they cannot be answered fully because (1) biological knowledge is rudimentary, (2) the biological and social levels are inextricably mixed, and (3) self-conscious social experiments to test the extent to which domination can be eliminated have not been carried out. Furthermore, answers to these questions are often dependent on the theorist's own society, in particular on his society's norms about what women and men are and what degree and type of authority and love is necessary for children.
The case in favor of biological arguments on issues of family organization has been made recently by Alice Rossi. She contends that in certain areas, like neuro-endocrinology, science has progressed beyond its older notion of closed bio-systems, which had been the basis for arguments of biological determinism. Current research shows that biological systems and social systems mutually influence each other. The flow of hormones and the family are part of the same system. The use of biological arguments, Rossi reasons, no longer presents an alternative to social explanations; rather the two positions are complementary. After demonstrating that certain hormonal changes in the mother attendant to the birth process lead the mother to experience deep
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deep feelings of care for the infant, Rossi concludes that there is a biological imperative for "the bonding of the mother and the newborn"[4] which society ought not disrupt. She presents an auxiliary argument that, in the case of maternal care, physiological factors facilitate "species survival." With the population of the earth nearing the four billion mark, "species survival" does not seem threatened by social arrangements that minimize maternal care. Instead, survival is a question of radioactive contamination of nuclear energy. Rossi's contention that species survival is closely connected with furthering biological impulses for mothering appears far-fetched.
Rossi also argues from empirical evidence that the long evolution of the human species confirms the hormonal impulse toward mothering. In making her case, she dismisses unfavorable evidence from the European nobility and upper bourgeoisie. From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century these groups placed a low value on mothering, preferring to send infants to wet nurses for feeding. For Rossi, the elite's behavior was "an extreme aberration in human history."[5] Yet she makes no case that the women or children suffered from such treatment. In addition, Erikson and others have described the feeding practice of the Sioux, in which infants were fed by any lactating female, not just the mother. Hence social arrangements provide a variety beyond the limits imposed by biology.
For the past two centuries Western society has imposed on women an ideology of maternalism that has worked to restrict the opportunities for women to participate in the economy. After women completed their reproductive duties they were not able to compete equally with men in professional and business careers. If the revised biological argument of Rossi were accepted, the options of women in choosing or rejecting maternalism would be restricted. Rossi's general argument that society should be "more attuned to the natural environment, in touch with, and respectful of, the rhythm of our own body processes"[6] cannot be gainsaid. Nor can objections sustained against her plea for social scientists to integrate new biological research into their studies. However,
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when she makes a specific case for the biological pressures for maternalism her position supports an arbitrary restriction on women's place in society.
The proper attitude to take in relation to these questions is a thoroughgoing agnosticism. Simply because men and women are defined and have been defined in certain ways or because children have been subject to and are subject to certain patterns of authority and love provides no certainty that things must continue that way. Anthropological evidence, indeed, suggests an enormous variability in all these questions.[7] Neither liberal nor socialist theory provides indisputable grounds for legitimating a specific pattern of domination. Technological advances tend to undercut traditional restrictive norms (such as the value of chastity related to the prevention of unwanted conceptions). What is more, modern societies of both liberal and socialist types claim to support a maximum degree of equality and undercut traditional arguments for domination. Hence the most reasonable position the theorist can take on epistemological grounds is that biological limitations do not provide a basis for justifying any particular pattern of domination of children or restrictive sex role.
To some degree--a degree which cannot be defined at this point in history---children must be subject to adult authority. This is so because (1) children are born into a world not of their choice to which they must become socialized, and (2) children cannot have the same knowledge or consciousness of this world as adults while they are interacting with adults and growing up. Neither of these limitations, however, legitimates any historical family structure. All known family types fall far short of reducing domination to the bare essentials necessary for these requirements. A third reason for adult authority over children which is normally invoked is that children are biologically dependent on adults. While this is true (adults are also dependent on other adults) dependence does not necessarily lead to domination, although it often does. To conclude this discussion, it can be posited that the construction of a theory of the family
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must not provide grounds for privileging absolutely any particular historical form of the family. Quite the contrary, the theorist must be careful to avoid elaborating categories that justify the existence of a family structure on grounds that reduce ultimately to biology.
The theoretical task of defining the family contains additional difficulties. The theorist must not pretend that his definition reveals the true essence of the family. Families vary widely in different societies and they may be approached in countless ways depending on the purposes of the investigator. Family theory is circumscribed in particular by the need to conceptualize an internal structure of the family that will allow researchers to compare various historical families, to render intelligible concrete forms of interaction among family members, and to open up for research structures by which age and sex are internalized by family members. These are the kinds of knowledge that the study of the family can bring to social science and that can constitute the family as a relatively autonomous object of study.
With these requirements in mind, theory must specify the categories which enable researchers to discover emotional patterns accompanying particular family structures. These categories will not define the only elements of family life that can be studied but they must provide a central foundation upon which other studies can build. The argument proposed here in favor of Freud's three stages in relation to patterns of authority and love must not be taken restrictively. The strength of Freud's insight and its utility for family studies rests on the ubiquity of the family's response to oral, anal and genital stages of experience. All family organizations develop strategies to feed the child, to train the child to dispose of its wastes and to cope with the child's exploration of its genitals. In so doing, families present to the child a pattern of love and authority which helps form the child's psyche. The child develops emotional patterns that are enduring and concern major questions of social life. These emotional patterns establish a general set of feelings toward the body; they internalize sexual identity; they form an
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ego defining the ways in which the self will relate to society; and they institute a pattern of responding to external authority. The understanding of these issues for a given society will tell the social scientist much about relative sexual roles, degrees of authoritarianism, degrees of individualization and, in general, psycho-social strengths. The aim of such knowledge is not, as it was for Freud, the comprehension of the individual psyche but the pattern of emotions specific to the family.
Child-rearing practices and attitudes are of central importance for this theory of the family. Child-rearing practices are an excellent highway into the dark countryside of family relations.[8] When properly theorized, they provide relatively easy access to a great field of recalcitrant materials. But these attitudes and practices must not be studied in relation to the values they leave behind in the individual psyche. Since the problem under consideration is family structure and not individual character traits, child rearing must be examined as part of an interactional process between adults and children. When the nexus of child rearing is studied in this way, each society can be seen as constituting a particular pattern of relations encompassing both the parents and the children. These relations, conceptualized at the emotional level, constitute a unique pattern which defines family life.
The degree of permissiveness in a family is an important issue but not the central one. Types of control of the child's behavior, from physical punishment to threats of withdrawal of love, are only part of the problem. Adults in a family constitute a pattern of love and authority that provides an emotional context for a child which goes beyond the direct strategies of limiting and sanctioning the child's behavior. This pattern is always there for the child, even when the parents are not involved in child care.
An important component in this matrix is the availability of adult models for the child to identify with. Freud's classic definition of identification distinguishes it from other forms of emotional attachment. In identification, the relation between the lover
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and the loved is so deep that the distinction between the two individuals is erased. The lover, in this case the child, takes the other as himself, incorporating the other into his psyche at an unconscious level. In the context of the family, the child identifies with an adult, normally one of the same sex, so that for psychological purposes he is that adult. Freud's analysis, however, does not conceptualize the process of identification in a way that can account for the variety of types of identification and for different degrees of identification. Typical of his theory in general, Freud understands identification only as a process going on in the child, leaving family structure out of the account. If one reinserts the concept of identification in the family context, the number of adults and their pattern of love and authority take on their proper significance. Where a great variety of adults appear, identification might be more diffuse; where authority figures are separate from loving figures, identification might be less ambivalent and less profound. In some cases adult figures might not be incorporated by the child as persons but only as functions. Just this result is obtained in the kibbutz, where the major adult authority figure is the nurse, who is internalized as a function or socializing agent and not as an individual personality.[9] Hence the category of identification must be studied in relation to the concrete constellation of adults in a given society so that the particular type of identification can be illuminated.
One danger for the researcher associated with analyses such as these concerns the researcher's own family patterns. Historians have learned that child beating was common in pre-industrial Europe. Their initial response was to treat this practice with indignation as representing an inferior form of child rearing. Child beating is certainly not praiseworthy, but an attitude of moral righteousness does not help uncover emotional patterns of the past. In a middle-class family of today beating a child might mean something different from what it meant in other family forms. Studying feelings of rejection, psychologists have learned that everything depends on the established pattern of the emotions. In a contemporary middle-class family, child beating represents
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rejection by the parents and the child takes it as such. In the context of a pre-industrial European peasant family, child beating no doubt did not represent rejection. Of course the child was still beaten and the blows caused pain; at the emotional level, however, there would be a difference in the two situations. The middle-class child would experience the beating as an unusual event, signifying great hostility by the parents. For the peasant child, it would be a normal occurrence, not to be taken too seriously.[10] When the family is studied at the emotional level, an unusual sensitivity is required on the part of the scientist. Because the same behavior can mean different things in two settings, the careful elaboration of the full family pattern is all the more important.
A recent effort by a Freudian historian of childhood, Lloyd de Mause, to generate a model for the psychological history of the family is flawed by just such an insensitivity to emotional differences. De Mause conceptualized the history of childhood optimistically: in Western history parenting begins with brutal forms of child abuse which have gradually but inexorably been overcome until the present stage is reached, where children enjoy true empathy by their parents. Concerned with the history of childhood as distinct from family history, de Mause suggests that there are three ways parents can relate to children:
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There are several problems with de Mause's paradigm. First it remains an individualistic model, seeing only individual parental reactions without indicating the-general context of socializing figures or sources of identification, and accounting for variations at this level. In short, it takes the conjugal family as the norm. Second, it theorizes the "evolution of parent-child relations" outside of family history and social history. In de Mause's worthy effort to stress the independence of parent-child relations he obscures the interaction of child rearing and social structure. Third, his model is optimistic in nature viewing the history of children as an upward march toward the present. Hence de Mause's model is incapable of demonstrating the limits of parent-child interactions in the modern nuclear family. Finally, the psychic mechanisms of the model are too limited. They are not flexible enough to account for the wide variety of parental responses to children, nor for the relative intensity, as opposed to the form, of the response.
Scientists engaged in studies of the present might register some skepticism about the accessibility of the past to the kind of psychological analysis proposed here. There are good reasons for doubts. The dead do not easily reveal their feelings and their traces especially at the level of the popular classes, who are almost invisible in any case. Indeed, one cannot expect the distant past to reveal its emotional patterns with the degree of subtlety that is found since Freud's time and in particular at the present time. Nevertheless, knowledge of pre-industrial family forms is crucial for establishing a critical distance from present family forms. Even if knowledge of the past is less nuanced it is more valuable just for its differences. Also, the categories offered in these pages are designed to the inaccessibility of the past into account and establish the concept of family structure at a level for which comparable data can be obtained. Granting these difficulties, students of the family also have reasons to be optimistic. Emotional life in pre-industrial times was not shrouded in the cloak of that has covered it since the emergence of the nuclear family. There is reason to expect that, with ingenu-
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ity on the researcher's part, much information about la vie intime can become available. Sexual practices, for example, is one area often thought to be beyond the historian's grasp. Yet, Roland Mousnier has looked at reports of meetings between village priests and the church hierarchy in France, where problems of the church's stance on sexual promiscuity were discussed. The local priests revealed much about village sexual life, as well as the church's attitude toward it. Mousnier found that the priests were reluctant to enforce heavy penances for such sins as adultery and fornication because these practices were in some villages so widespread that regulation was impossible.[12]
In summary, the family is here conceptualized as an emotional structure, with relative autonomy, which constitutes hierarchies of age and sex in psychological forms. The family is conceived as a system of love objects. Child-rearing patterns are theorized as interactional processes, focusing on the first three stages of development (oral, anal and genital). In these interactions, a pattern of authority and love is instituted by the adults forming a background to the strategies for raising children. Finally, a pattern of identification can be discerned which cements the bonds between the adults and the children. When these categories are studied in detail a concrete family structure becomes intelligible.
In addition to the psychological level, the theory of the family requires two other kinds of analyses. They are the everyday life of the family and the relation of the family to society. Before the pattern of authority and love during the first three stages of development can be determined with precision, the social scientist must have a clear sense of who the family members are as characters in the social drama. Knowledge of the family's daily life and its relation to society is the background for the analysis at the psychological level.
The categories for the analysis of everyday life are derived from studying the routines of family activity. They are not difficult to generate and those offered below are simply suggestions. The criterion to use in selecting categories in this context is: What inform-
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ation is necessary to determine the concrete configuration of social life for the family in question? The historian and social scientist should approach the study of everyday life with an ethnographer's sense for the mundane. Without a picture of the daily life of the family the epistemological danger of myopia cannot be checked. Current psychological tendencies are too easily projected onto different family structures. By looking carefully at daily life, one can obtain a vivid sense of alien customs and practices. In this way, hopefully, the widespread tendency of attributing contemporary motives to all societies will be minimized.
The analysis of daily life must provide a rudimentary sense of what kind of group one is dealing with. It must provide a clear sense of the types of relations that exist between family members, the types of buildings the family inhabits, architecturally and in terms of design. How the edifice helps to organize the functions of everyday life needs to be learned. Other questions are: What are the typical norms and behaviors of the family members in relation to their attitude toward each other, toward the family as a whole, and toward non-family members? What is the relation between kinship and presence in the family group?
The broadest way to define the daily life of the family, one which least distorts the definition of the family by contemporary forms, is to look loosely at the households in the society under study without anticipating at all that they will be composed solely of kinship or "family" relations. If kinship is defined first, the question is loaded in favor of the definitions of the family of the present period and of "primitive" societies. It is not necessarily true that the people who live together and interact daily are tied together by blood or kin status. For this reason anthropological studies of kinship cannot be taken as models. If households consist, in a given society, of large numbers of non-kin, they must be included in the picture of the family's daily life.
The general environment of the household must be known. Where is it geographically? Does the household exist in a metropolitan area or a rural setting? Pop-
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ulation density and geographical features are geographical features are appropriate information here. Next, the composition of the household must be ascertained. Demographic studies are most helpful as a start, but they must include a sensitivity to kin and non-kin members as well as to the stability of the composition. Recent demographic work has studied the life cycle of the family to learn how the composition of the family varies over time. In some families three generations cohabit, but only for a short time due to the early average age of death. In other places, children are sent out of the family to be breast-fed and then again later to be apprenticed, so that they live with their family for short, intermittent periods only. The simple statistic of the overall average number in a family is a deceptive piece of information.
The study of the composition of the household should also include the functions, roles and hierarchies of the members. It is not enough to note that there is a wife in the house. The role of wife does not mean the same thing in a peasant family in the seventeenth century in Burgundy and in a bourgeois family in Los Angeles in 1910 or in 1970. By studying the tasks of members of a household and the relative authority of members one can see how the family operates as a system in everyday life. It might be the case that in some family structures servants are closer to the wife than is the husband. Again, there can be no presumption that an alliance between husband and wife, as Parsons and Lidz maintain , is necessary, inevitable or desirable in "normal" families.
Next, the relations among households must be studied to get a general sense of the relative isolation of each household. It might be that daily interactions concern mixtures of people from different households who are closer to each other than members of the same household. Also, relatives might live close to one another or far away, interact frequently or infrequently. In each case research must determine what obligations families can exact from relatives.
The material structure of the household is also important. How big is the structure? How close is it to the nearest neighbor? How does it design embody the social position
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of the family? How does its internal arrangement regulate or limit the interactions among family members? How are the rooms arranged, and what is the degree of functional differentiation of the rooms? What is the nature of the furniture in the residence, its degree of opulence and its functionality? Who built the structure, and out of what materials? How old is it?
The question of the establishment of the household and family can be treated by studying the nature of marriage and courtship customs. Who can marry whom? At what age is marriage appropriate? What financial and emotional obligations does it entail? Does the man or the woman determine the line of the family? Which spouse moves into the other's family? The answer to this question reveals much about the relative power of the two sexes in the society. For what reasons does one marry and who decides that the couple can marry? What is the meaning of marriage in the society-a permanent bond or a relatively unimportant and transitory alliance? What is the emotional significance of marriage? Does it provide the sole love object for the partners or no love object at all? At what age do people marry? On purely logical grounds, sexual patterns have no fixed relation to marriage or to the establishment of family and household.
Concerning sexuality, demographers provide data about the age of menarche and fertility and fecundity rates. Also important is information about contraceptive devices, abortion and infanticide practices. Does the woman give birth by herself, with the aid of a midwife or a doctor, at home, in the woods or in a hospital? What social networks are established through the regulation of sexuality? Are women bound together through knowledge of abortion and midwifery? Are young people formed into groups to control pre-marital sexuality or is this in the hands of the state? Is the society bound together through orgies or religious rituals? Is sex limited to the marriage partners? In the broadest sense sexuality concerns the bodily contacts of people, so that the physical closeness of members of the family, household and society is important. Sexuality does
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not necessarily accompany love or intimacy--witness the practices of bourgeois males in the late nineteenth century who, in many cases, loved their wives but had their sexual needs gratified with prostitutes and servants. Social and familial limits and values concerning sexual practices are germane to the study of the family. Also, one must study the life cycle of sexuality: At what ages are different forms of sexuality customary? Do old people have intercourse, are children sexually active? And how is sexual knowledge transmitted?
Much about family life is revealed by the diet. The kinds of food eaten, their nutritional value, the times of day meals are taken, the ordering of family members around the table, the ceremonies of the table--all these are essential for understanding the family. Scientists have determined, for example, that the contraceptive value of breast-feeding is limited to those societies with certain dietary deficiencies. For nutritional reasons, in some pre-industrial societies, lactating women were not able to ovulate. Until this was determined, medical opinion was puzzled by demographic data which confirmed the widespread belief among European peasants that conception was not possible until weaning was completed.
With an analysis of these topics the social scientist should have a good picture of the structure of the family at the level of everyday life. The nature of this knowledge will be descriptive, not explanatory. Yet the psychological analysis of the family cannot proceed very far without a firm sense of the family's daily life. One example should suffice. Until the nineteenth century, peasant women swaddled their infants, who then required only minimal care during the day. It might be assumed that swaddling was an indication of neglect for children, with deep psychological significance. A study of the mother's daily work routine indicates that she could not spend her time either changing the wrappings when they were soiled or keeping a constant eye on the baby to protect it. In this way, the comprehension of daily life guards against projection.
The analysis of the relation between society and the family is carried out for another set of reasons. The argument was made earlier that the family is relatively autonomous,
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that it must be taken as such in order to make intelligible how age and sex hierarchies are internalized. Now the other side of the question must be faced, that is, to what extent the family is not an autonomous unit. Unless the determinations of the family by society are taken into account, a false conclusion may be drawn that the family is self-contained. In other words, although every family structure contains its own psychological pattern, sociologically family structures vary in the extent to which they are integrated with larger social units. This complexity in family theory was not accounted for in the sociological traditions reviewed earlier in this book. The purpose of studying the relation of the family to society is not to reduce the intelligibility of the family as a psychological unit to some broader determination, such as modernization or the mode of production. Instead, this relation must be explored to enrich the understanding of the psychological level itself. By defining how political, economic, religious and urban institutions encroach upon family space, the degree of conflict or equilibrium between family and society can be studied empirically. Hierarchies of age and sex might be more prevalent, or less prevalent, or the same in society and in the family. These conjunctions or disjunctions will affect the stability of the pattern of authority and love within the family. As a reminder, it is worth repeating that the analysis remains at the synchronic level, not the diachronic. There is no attempt here to explain theoretically changes in family structure. Such an effort can. not be made until the history of the family is written in greater detail. Nevertheless, as this history is being written, the structural relations between the family and society need to be taken into account. In sum, while the family generates a psychological pattern of internalized age and sex hierarchies, it also participates in larger social institutions. The types of this participation must be made intelligible.
Different economic systems are based on different types of wealth (land in feudalism, money in capitalism) and different relations of people to wealth. Family structure must be understood in relation to the control of wealth: What kind of ownership does the fam-
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ily have (landed property for the aristocracy, forms of tenancy for the peasantry, ownership of labor power for workers)? Which member or members of the family maintains this control? The pattern of inheritance (primogeniture, to all sons equally, to all children) will indicate much about the underlying conditions of the family's internal relations. A good way to focus on the analysis of property is to describe the mechanisms through which those in control of property maintain that control. A peasant vintner in early modern France might pass on his land and his skills in making wine to his sons while a coal miner in early nineteenth-century England might employ his own children in his work team.
The analysis of work roles and schooling systems concentrates on a slightly different question, that is, to see how the work activity done by various members of the family fits into the general economic structure. In peasant villages families are bound to ether in work activities in numerous ways. A strong degree of collective dependence exists (at harvest time, if a barn or house has to be rebuilt, and so forth), undercutting the family's autonomy. Although the household is a productive unit, it cannot survive separate from other families. In contemporary families, on the contrary, work is separate from the household, and the family has no immediate economic dependence on neighboring households. In addition to the extent of collective dependence, family work roles are determined by the extent of the development of the market. Whereas the family once produced almost entirely for its own use, now work is done for the market, leaving housework in a secondary position as a remnant of an older system which has a low social value. Work done in the home today concerns the social status of the family and the reproduction of labor value in the children. Housework is no longer a directly economic activity. With the clear picture of family structure derived from the previous analyses, the meshing of the family and the economy can be specified. Questions of contradictions between economic structure and family structure can be analyzed with precision.
The most important index of collective dependence is the form of social authority over
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the family. Here one is dealing with a variable that has changed enormously over the past three centuries. To what extent are the daily activities of the family, from work to sex, controlled by institutions and figures outside the family? We need to have a history of the privatization of the family, noting carefully which sectors of the population, which family structures, were affected at different times. The extent of privacy of family relations is a crucial determinant of the psychological life of the family, one which Freud did not take into account. When there is little secrecy in family relations, when the larger community can intervene in what are today regarded as intimate matters, then the emotional quality of family relations will have an entirely different character from that of families where these conditions do not prevail. It is very difficult to appreciate the meaning of the recent isolation of family relations from a broader community or to appreciate a system where privacy has no value. A legend from Africa tells of a husband and wife, arriving at a village in search of a home. The couple engaged in a mock family quarrel at night to see if other villagers would intervene. They left the village in the morning because no one came to arbitrate their conflict. Such intervention would occur, they thought, in a good village.
The analysis of religion, ideology, festivals and games (leisure sports, and the entertainment media for the modern period) also helps to define the autonomy of the family. Community authority is most visible at these moments of family life. One can contrast a modern family on a weekday evening gathered around the TV with an early modern peasant family huddled together in someone's barn along with many other families. The dialogues and gestures in these two cases imply entirely different family relations. One can study the interlocking of family and society in ceremonies surrounding birth, marriage and death. Philip Slater contends, for example, do the custom of the honeymoon, normally seen as an opportunity for the newlyweds to establish their private bond, is really a means society uses to curtail this privacy and set
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up the dominance of the wider family over the couple.[13]
Conceptions of the family by religious, political and legal institutions do much to determine relations between family and society. The policy of the state toward the family is affected by the ideology of the family. Theological ideas about the family have had a deep impact in European history. Puritanism, for instance, encouraged the emerging nuclear family. Obviously, the Bible is a basic document for family history. A study of the attitudes of European communist parties toward the family would probably reveal surprisingly conservative tendencies. The history of the idea of the family largely remains to be written.
Conventional wisdom in the social sciences tends to assume that the family fits into the society like a hand in a glove. But this is not always the case. Women in the United States have been severely handicapped by economic institutions in obtaining credit and loans, in competing equally for jobs, and so forth. Patriarchal mechanisms were entrenched in many sectors of the economy. Seclusion in the home was women's fate. Family and society worked hand in hand in this case to reproduce sexual hierarchy. The women's movement has challenged economic inequality, and it began by questioning the restriction of women to the family. In this instance, an egalitarian movement was initiated within the context of the family and came to influence and reform the economy. Numerous examples to the same effect can be found. A critical theory of the family must leave open the possibility that the family may not be in tune with the society. The hierarchies generated within the family may be out of phase or in discontinuity with other social hierarchies. The impact of the psychological structure of the family may work, as Freud thought, to reproduce archaic ideologies and retard social change, or, on the contrary, to move society forward toward eliminating modes of domination. Because, at the synchronic level, the family produces its own psychological forms of hierarchy, there is no way to predict the results of the interaction between the family and society.
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This chapter has presented the outlines of a critical theory of the family in which the analysis proceeds at three levels. At the first level the family was conceived as a psychological structure. This level defined the family and indicated what contribution the study of the family can make to social science. The second and third levels, those of daily life and the relation to society, were conceptualized as supplementary to the first. They filled in and enriched the grasp of emotional structure. The theory was critical in the sense that it led to a comprehension of the limits to which any family structure reinforces or eliminates hierarchies of age and sex. Implicit in the theory was judgment that family structure should be so reformed that age and sex hierarchies are minimized if not eliminated completely.
Given the present state of research on the family, the theory could only proceed at the synchronic level. The explanation for changes in family structure must await the fuller comprehension of family history. One must know what it is that is changing before one explains the change. Although this seems elementary, historians and sociologists, as we have seen, have not hesitated to offer grand explanatory schemes to account for the total history of the family. Such schemes assume a linear continuous evolutionary quality in family history that cannot be sustained. When the theory offered in these pages is employed in empirical studies, it will become clear that there have been numerous, distinct family structures, each with its own psychological pattern. At that point it will be recognized that family history has been discontinuous. It encompasses many unique structures whose changes cannot he explained in a linear fashion. Family history cannot be conceived as an evolution toward small, conjugal units, as a increasing differentiation of instrumental and expressive functions, or as an increasing form of patriarchy tied to the mode of production. Instead, family history should be conceived is the plural, as the history of distinct structures of age and sex hierarchies. The change from one structure to another will require different explanatory strategies, each suited to its own case.
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Although the critical theory of the family is limited to the synchronic level it should not be assumed that an argument for objectivism is being made in which the goal is to discover alternate combinations of the same structure of authority and love through the oral, anal and genital stages. Family members must be studied as subjects who internalize structures, but not necessarily in a passive way. Family structures have been oppressive in varying degrees; they have always involved domination. The history of these structures must be written in a tragic mode. It has had its share of brutalities, sacrifices and repressions. But the story also has its moments of conflict. Women and children have not always internalized their inferior roles quietly and obediently. One can assume that, in dealing with human subjects, when there is domination there is also resistance. The history of family will have to include this side of the story along with that of outlining the psychological patterns.
Finally, the shape of the critical theory of the family offered in this
chapter has been influenced by the need for clarification about the condition
of the family today. Prominence has been given to the psychological
level and to age and sex hierarchies because these determinations, when
studied in a broad historical scope, can help make sense of today's concerns
with the family. The scientific study of the value of the modern
family can proceed only on a firm historical base.