Couples

Question 1

What 2 roles did Elizabeth Bott (1957) say that couples could inhabit?

Answer 1

Segregated conjugal roles - where the couple have separate roles: a male breadwinner and a female homemaker/carer (as in Parsons’ roles). Their leisure activities also tend to be separate.

Joint conjugal - where the couples share tasks such as housework and childcare and spend their time together.

Question 2

What is the symmetrical family?

Answer 2

The changing roles perspective assumes a gradual sharing of gender roles within the family. The most famous advocates are Willmott and Young (1973) who talk of movement towards the ‘symmetrical family’.

Symmetry describes a ‘sense of balance’ between the duties of the male and female. Men more domestic, women as breadwinner and couples are compassionate.

Question 3

What did Young and Willmott find about the symmetrical family?

Answer 3

Young and Willmott found that the symmetrical family was more common among younger couples who move away from extended family and friends. Symmetrical family life is more likely among those that are better off. The result of the symmetrical family are the result of changes in women’ position, geographical mobility, new technology and higher standards of living, in addition in recent years there has been an acceptance of the interchangeable ability of roles, couples spend more time together and men help with housework.

7 out of 10 women of working age now have jobs, and half of mothers with children aged under five are in work (albeit this may be part time). A surprising 36% of couples say that the main is the main carer (Equal Opportunities Commission).

Question 4

What has caused these changes of roles?

Answer 4

1. Improved living standards in the home
2. The decline of the close knit extended family and greater geographical and social mobility.
3. The improved status and rights of women
4. The commercialisation of housework
5. Weaker gender identities

Question 5

How has improved living standards in the home caused changes in roles?

Answer 5

Central heating, TV, DVDs, computers and the internet, and all the other modern consumer goods, have encouraged husbands and wives, or cohabiting couples, to become more home-centred, building the relationship and home.

Question 6

How has the decline of close knit extended family and greater geographical and social mobility led to changes in roles?

Answer 6

It means that there is less pressure from kin on newly married or cohabiting couples to retain traditional roles and it is therefore easier to adopt new roles in a relationship. There are often no longer the separate male and female networks (of friends and especially kin) for male and female partners to mix with. This increases their dependence upon each other.

Question 7

How has the improved status and rights of women changed roles?

Answer 7

Women’s status in society, with most women now in paid employment, may encourage men to accept women more as equals and not simply as housewives and mothers, while at the same time women have become more assertive in demanding that household tasks are shared.

Gershuny and Laurie and Gershuny found that as wives moved into paid employment or from part time to full time work, they did less housework, and men did a bit more. Laurie and Gershuny saw this as leading to some progress in reducing gender inequalities in the home, but they stressed this was a very slow process and was leading to only small reductions. Kan et al found that, while men have increased their contribution to domestic work, this is in what has been traditionally seen as the masculine-defined tasks, such as DIY, outside work like gardening, and general ‘fixing’. These tasks are non-routine, and do not need doing everyday, day in, day out, and Kan points out that women still do the bulk of caring activities and routine chores such as cooking, cleaning and clothes care - traditionally defined as ‘feminine’ tasks. Nonetheless, where the female partner has her own income, she is less dependent on her male partner, and she therefore has more power and authority. Decision making is thus more likely to be shared. The importance of the female partner’s earnings in maintaining the family’s standard of living may also have encouraged men to help a bit more with housework - a recognition that the women cannot be expected to do two jobs at once.

Question 8

How has the commercialisation of housework changed roles?

Answer 8

There are a whole host of consumer goods and services to help with reducing the burden of housework compared to previous generations. This includes things like freezers, fridges, automatic washing machines and dryers, vacuum cleaners, including online ordering and home delivery of groceries, and a whole host of other companies providing a wide range of domestic services to the home, like pet care and cleaning services. Silver (1987) and Schor (1992) suggested that this commercialisation has taken away some of the drudgery and time consuming aspects of housework. This means housework is now easier and less skilled, so, perhaps, enabling women to do a bit less and encouraging men to do a bit more, and if women are in paid employment this boosts the family income to pay for these things. This reducing burden of housework through commercialisation is also most available only to the well off.

Question 9

How has weaker gender identities changed roles?

Answer 9

Couples are free to ‘pick ‘n’ mix’ roles and identities based on personal choice, and are therefore less constrained by traditional masculine and feminine gender roles and identities. Postmodernists suggest this may weaken traditional gender divisions in housework and childcare, and encourage men to do more, though Kan’s research suggests this might perhaps be a hope rather than reflecting actual experience.

Question 10

Criticisms of the view that modern marriages and cohabiting relationships are really more equal

Answer 10

There is not really much evidence that the family is now typically ‘symmetrical’. Housework and childcare remain predominantly women’s work. While men are perhaps more involved in childcare than they used to be, this would appear to be in the more enjoyable activities like playing with the children and taking them out. The more routine jobs such as bathing and feeding and taking children to the doctor are still done predominantly by women, and it is still mostly women who get the blame if the house is untidy or children are dirty or badly dressed.

Evidence from a number of surveys shows that, in most cases, women still perform the majority of domestic tasks around the home, even when they have paid jobs themselves. Knudsen and Wærness (2008), in a comparative study of women’s and men’s housework in thirty four countries, found there were no modern countries in the world where men do housework more than, or as much as, women, and women perform two/thirds of all domestic work in the world.

Question 11

What did Ann Oakley say?

Answer 11

Ann Oakley (1974) was the first feminist sociologist to seriously examine housework. She found that instead of industrialisation helping women, it isolated them more as it separated paid work from the home.

Using a sample of 40 housewives with one or more children under 5 and she found they were as alienated by their work similar to factory workers. They adopted similar coping strategies as factory workers. But far from encouraging a sense of sisterhood, women competed with each other to be good housewives. ‘Helping in the home’ included doing just one domestic chore a week which Oakley concluded was hardly convincing evidence of ‘male domestication’.

Question 12

What are the reasons for a decline in the extended family?

Answer 12

1. The need for geographically mobility. Contemporary society has a specialised division of labour, with a wide range of different occupations with different incomes and lifestyles. This means that the labour force needs to be geographically mobile - to be able to move around the country to areas where their skills are required, to improve their education or gain promotion. This often involves leaving relatives behind, thus weakening and breaking up traditional extended family life. The isolated nuclear family is ideally suited to this requirement because it is small in size and it is not tied down by responsibilities for extended kin who, in earlier times, might have been living with them.
2. The highest rate of social mobility in contemporary societies.
3. The growth in people’s wealth and income as society has got richer and the welfare state has developed
4. The growth in meritocracy in contemporary societies
5. The need to avoid the possibility of economic and status differences in an extended family unit causing conflict and family instability
6. The need to protect family stability by strengthening the bonds between married or cohabiting partners

Question 13

Explanations for domestic abuse

Answer 13

1. Psychological explanations
2. Culture, history and social structure (Dobash and Dobash
3. Masculinity and violence

Question 14

How does psychological explanations explain domestic abuse?

Answer 14

Some attempts to explain domestic abuse have focused on the characteristics of the abusers assuming that they are different from other members of the population. For example, research by Beech et al (2003) for the Home Office studied records on 336 male perpetrators of various forms of domestic violence. They argued that there were two main types of offender but both had psychological problems which predisposed them to offending:

• Anti-social/narcissistic offenders had hostile attitudes towards men and tended to condone domestic violence as being acceptable in some circumstances. Emotional abuse often went hand in hand with domestic violence. These men could be very threatening in attempts to control women.
• Borderline/emotionally volatile offenders were less frequently emotionally abusive towards their partner but at the time of the physical abuse could make extreme threats. They tended to be controlling over money and to actively discourage their partner from going out to see other people.

Criticisms

Sandra Walklate argues that Beech et al are wrong. Domestic violence is not confined to a small group of men, because some studies suggest it is widespread (a quarter of women experience domestic abuse at some time in their lives). Walklate therefore believes that make perpetrators are not completely atypical of other men and the root causes can be found in the patriarchal nature of society. From her viewpoint, male physical and sexual violence is one way of ‘doing gender’ in a way that helps maintain patriarchal control.

Question 15

How does culture, history and social structure explain domestic abuse?

Answer 15

Dobash and Dobash interviewed female victims of domestic violence and police officers and examined a range of secondary sources including police statistics and statements from victims. The focus of the study was 109 wives who had been assaulted by their husbands.

According to them, domestic violence is intimately linked with the existence of patriarchy and is essentially about the exercise of power by men over women in order to maintain that dominance. Contemporary culture continues to accept that it is appropriate and reasonable for husbands to use force to control their wives. Although public punishment of wives is no longer acceptable ‘the imagery of the provoking wife’ continues and acts as ‘a powerful justification and rationalisation for the physical punishments and degradation meted out by husbands in private’. Husbands are still expected to be dominant in families, which remain patriarchal institutions. Domestic violence is used to maintain patriarchal control as men try to ensure that their wives carry out what they see as their ‘duties’ as wives and mothers. These attitudes are reinforced by a police force which is reluctant to intervene in domestic disputes and by a wider culture which tolerates domestic violence.

• Conflicts of interests between husbands and wives were very important. Violence was often precipitated by situations in which the interests of the husband and wife diverged and the men wanted to ensure that their interests prevailed. For example, men became violent when they felt that their partners weren’t ‘servicing their personal needs’ such as preparing food that they approved of at a time of their liking. Women could even be ‘punished for not anticipating, interpreting and fulfilling men’s physical, emotional and sexual needs’.
• Conflicts of interest over money could also be important when men felt that they didn’t have enough money left for their personal leisure. Possessiveness and jealousy could be an important source of violence. Many of the men in the study were particularly possessive and could become violent if their wives had contact with other men or if they believed that their partners were being unfaithful. For many men, this was part of a wider view that women should not leave the home without their approval.

Similar issues of control were evident in disputes over sex, often involving men who believed that they should have control over the extent and nature of sexual activity. Furthermore, many of the men were so insistent upon the maintenance if their power and authority that they felt the women should not challenge this by disagreeing with them or arguing. Violence was often used to stop ‘nagging’ or to stop women ‘going on and on’.

Question 16

How does masculinity and violence explain domestic abuse?

Answer 16

The Dobashes accept that some women are violent, but argue that domestic violence is far from commonly used by men against their partners than by women against men. They see this as being part of masculine identity in which the use of force and intimidation are important signs of masculine worth. In violent encounters with other men, the willingness to use violence to defend yourself brings status regardless of whether you win a fight or not. In violent encounters against women, though, it is more important that men successfully assert their authority and control and do not allow themselves to be pushed around by a women. This would challenge a man’s sense of masculine identity. For these reasons, most male domestic abusers are not ashamed of their actions but rather they feel they were pushed into it and have no choice but to respond forcefully to challenges to their authority by women.

Question 17

Evaluation of the Dobashes

Answer 17

• Police forces make more effort to deal sympathetically with victims of domestic abuse and government campaigns encourage the reporting of this type of offence. In part, these changes have taken place because the Dobashes and other researchers have brought the issue to public attention. Nevertheless, more recent research by Dobash and Dobash into men who murdered their intimate partners has found that the assertion of male control continues to be important in male violence.
• Research is not always clear about why some resort to violence and others do not. It has been argued that their research is not particularly sensitive to differences between groups of men and the different ways masculinity can be expressed. Connell argues that masculinity can take different forms and the dominant of professional and managerial men is less dependent on the use of violence than other forms of masculinity. The emphasis on masculinity does not explain the existence of domestic violence committed by women in heterosexual relationships or by women in lesbian relationships. The Dobashes have researched female domestic abuse against men but conclude that most such violence tends to be much less harmful and less persistent than violence by men and, in any case, it is often a response to make violence and a form of self defence. Nevertheless, they accept that there are a small number of serious, persistent female offenders who are not responding to violence or excessive control by men, but they don’t offer a clear explanation for their behaviour.
• The Dobashes also pay less attention than some theorists to material factors. The psychiatrist James Gilligan argues that much violence results from feelings of shame which often stem from material deprivation. In capitalist societies, material success is important for producing a sense of self-worth, and when inequality leaves many working class and minority ethnic men impoverished, it can lead to violence against their partners. Gilligan argues that there is strong correlation between rates of inequality and rates of violence in the UK.

Question 18

What are the four main patterns of money management in the family according Jan Pahl?

Answer 18

• Husband-controlled pooling: was the most common pattern. In this system money was shared but the husband had the dominant role in deciding how the money was spent. This system was commonly found in high income households, or where the women worked part time.
• Wife-controlled pooling: was the second most common. This was most commonly found where both couples were working and where they wife was better educated and earning more money. This tended to be the most egalitarian system of control.
• Husband control: Among these couples the husband was usually the one the main or only wage, and often he gave his-wife housekeeping money. Some of these families were too poor to have a joint bank account, with the husband only having a bank account. This system tended to lead to male dominance.
• Wife control - Most commonly found in low income households. In a number of these households both partners were on benefits, and so money management tended to be a burden rather than a privilege.

Question 19

What did Pahl say about his research?

Answer 19

According to Pahl, the most egalitarian type of control is wife-controlled pooling. In households with this system the male and female partners tend to have similar amounts of power in terms of decision-making, and they are likely to have equal amounts of money to spend on themselves.

Wife-controlled systems may appear to give women more power over men, but in reality women decided to go short themselves in order to provide for their male partner or children.

In both husband controlled systems, men tended to spend more than their wives.

The findings led Pahl to conclude that there is only gender equality in 25% of households where control over income is concerned.

Question 20

What did Hardill et al in his study of 30 dual earned households find?

Answer 20

This more in depth study found that in 19 households, the husband’s career came first, in five, the woman’s career came first, and in 6 households, neither was given precedence.

It was most likely to be the man who decided where to live, and men tended to make decisions about cars. However, husband and wife usually made joint decision about buying or renting a house. This study found that in terms of decision making, men dominated households.

Question 21

What did Volger et al find?

Answer 21

Volger eg al notes that there is a lot more equality - They distinguished between five money management systems -

1. The female whole wage system
2. The male whole wage system
3. The joint pooling system
4. The partial pooling system
5. The independent management system

They noted that 54% of couples used joint-pooling, and only 7% used the male household allowance system, suggesting that 40% of households used financial systems which offered women a greater deal of freedom than suggested by Jan Pahl’s research.