Couples Flashcards
What roles are in the traditional nuclear family?
- Parsons argues that the husband has an instrumental role and the women has an expressive role
- An instrumental role is to achieve success at work and is the breadwinner of the family
- An expressive role is to care for the socialisation of the children and meet the families emotional and physical needs
What is a criticism of gender roles?
- Young and Wilmott argue men are now taking a greater share of domestic tasks and wives are becoming wage earners
- Feminists argue the division of labour is not biological but socially constructed to benefit men
What are joint and segregated conjugal roles?
- Elizabeth Bott distinguishes two types of conjugal roles
Joint conjugal roles = When a couple shares household duties and responsibilities also spending leisure time together
Segregated conjugal roles = A traditional division of labour and social activities with a clear divide between these activities of partners
- Bott argued friendship networks is what determined role. A close knit network is more likely to have segregated conjugal roles
What do feminists argue about the symmetrical family?
- Feminists reject this symmetrical family as women are still unequal in the family home and do the majority of housework
- Ann Oakley’s conducted interviews to find that husbands only did pleasurable childcare activities and did not often do household chores
- Boulton found less than 20% of husbands have major roles in childcare
- Warde and Hetherington found that sex-typing of domestic chores is prominent in society, men only do female tasks when women are not there. However there has been a slight attitude change in younger men
What is the symmetrical family?
- Young and Wilmott argue a march of progress view of family is gradually improving and becoming more equal
- They argue the majority of families are focussed on joint conjugal roles and the family is becoming more symmetrical
- Women now go to work so men help out with housework and childcare
What are the four reasons for the symmetrical family?
- Changes in women’s positions
- Geographical mobility (Moving away from communities)
- New technology such as labour saving devices
- Higher standards of living
What are the three areas where couples may be becoming more equal?
- Impact of paid work
- Responsibility of children
- Responsibility of quality time
Has paid work led to a more equal division of labour?
- March of progress sociologists believe that it has led to a more equal division of domestic task because of the new man responsibility
- Feminist sociologists reject this as it leads to women carrying a dual burden
What is the emotion work and triple shift?
Emotion Work (Hoschild) = Women have to manage the emotions and feelings of family members whilst subsequently supressing their own emotions
Triple Shift (Duncombe and Marsden) = Women have to perform a triple shift of housework, paid work and emotion work
What do the March of progress argue about the division of labour?
- Young and Wilmott argue that women going to work is leading to a more equal division of labour
- Men are becoming more involved in housework and childcare as women are more involved in paid work
- Men have a new man responsibility for housework and childcare
What do feminists argue about the division of labour?
- Women going into paid work has not led to greater equality but resulted in a dual burden
- Allan found that families who believe they have a more equal divide is still unequal as women do less satisfying everyday tasks
- Ann Oakley believes women suffer from a dual burden doing paid work, housework and childcare
- Pahl found unemployed men did more housework than employed men but wives still did more
- Gershuny found that the longer a women has been in paid employment, the more her husband tended to do
What are examples of mothers taking responsibility for the quality time?
- Southerton found men usually had blocks of free leisure time yet women’s leisure time was interrupted by children
What are examples of mothers taking responsibility for the children?
- Boulton believes that fathers do perform some tasks however the mother are in charge of wellbeing and security
- Ferri and Smith prove that fathers take responsibility for childcare in less than 4% families
- Dex and Ward found that often fathers would play but 1% would care for them when sick
- Braun, Vincent and Ball found that 3/70 families have the father as the main care. Most were background fathers which means they only did it to please their partner. Mothers saw themselves as primary carers due to intensive mothering media messages
What is proven in Dunne’s study of Lesbian couples and gender scripts?
- Same sex couples are more likely to describe their relationship as equal as the typical domestic division of labour does not appear in lesbian families
What are the two explanations for the unequal division of labour?
- Cultural explanation
- Material explanation
What is the cultural explanation of division of labour?
- Patriarchal norms and values shape gender roles so women are expected to do more domestic labour as they have been socialised to do so
What is the material explanation of division of labour?
- Women often earn less so it makes more financial sense for them to do more housework while men spend time earning money
Is there in inequality in control?
- This links to who controls the families income and who has the power to make decisions about where it is spent
What does Barrett and McIntosh argue?
- Men are usually the ones in charge of making decisions about spending and important items
- Men gain far more from women’s domestic work than they receive in financial support
- The financial support that husbands give wives has strings attached
What does Kempson argue?
- Families do not share food and resources equally as amongst WC families, women sacrifice their own needs to make ends meet
- They often felt they could not spend money on themselves
What did Pahl and Volger argue?
- They identify two main types of control over family income
The allowance system = Men give their wives an allowance out of a budget to meet their families needs and retain surplus for the husband
Pooling = Access to income with joint responsibility
- This does not always indicate equality as often men have more power in major decisions
Which research supports the inequality of pooling?
What did Laurie and Gershuny argue?
- There is some movement towards greater equality as most couples said they had an equal say in decisions however those women with higher earnings had more of a say
What do feminists argue about decision making?
- These studies suggest that the cultural definition of men as decision makers is deeply ingrained in society which is instilled through gender role socialisation
What does the PLP say about pooling?
- Pooling does not always mean equality or inequality as you must consider control, contribution and earnings
- Volger et al believed that cohabiting couples are less likely to pool but more likely to share domestic tasks
- Nyman said we must understand the meaning of money for each individual
- Smart believes that some same sex couples do not care who controls the money therefore does not define inequality
- Weeks suggests that the typical pattern was pooling some money for shared expenses which reflects a value of co-dependence
What is domestic violence?
- An incident or pattern of controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those who have been intimate partners or family members
What do perspectives ignore about families?
- They ignore the dark side of the family
What are the two main dark sides of the family?
- Child abuse
- Domestic violence
What do sociologists believe the cause of domestic violence is?
- Domestic violence is too widespread to been seen as a psychological problem therefore must be a social cause
- It does not occur randomly but follows particular patterns and causes
What are some statistics of violence against women?
- Coleman et al found that women are more likely than men to experience intimate violence
- Coleman and Osborne found that 1 in third of all female homicide victims are killed by a partner of former partner
What are some statistics for domestic violence?
- Women’s federation argued that domestic violence accounts for nearly 25% of all reported violent crimes
- Crime survey found that 2 million people reporting being a victim of domestic violence
What do official statistics show?
- Domestic violence affects 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men
- It has more repeat victims than any other crime
93% of all incidents are against women committed by men
What are issues with the official statistics of domestic violence
- Official statistics are socially constructed and and often underestimate the true extent of the problem
- This may be because victims do not report or police are reluctant to record
What is the dark figure of crime and how does it impact domestic violence?
- The dark or hidden figure of crime is a term employed by sociologists to describe the amount of unreported crime which impacts the validity of official statistics
- Domestic violence is often not reported or prosecuted
Why may police be reluctant to record or investigate?
- Family is a private sphere so access by agencies should be limited
- Family is a good thing so often the darker side is neglected
- Individuals are free agents so a woman may be free to leave (Not true due to abuse and financial dependence)
What are the two explanations for domestic violence occurring?
- The radical feminist explanation
- The materialist explanation
How do radical feminists explain domestic violence?
- This emphasises the role of patriarchal ideas and cultural values
- They explain domestic violence as society has been founded by patriarchy meaning men are the oppressors and exploiters therefore DV is inevitable (Millett and Firestone)
- Male dominant of state institutions helps to explain the reluctance of police
- eg. Illegal to rape within marriage = 1991
What is an evaluation of radical feminism?
- Elliot rejects this claim that all benefit from the violence against women because
1. Not all men are aggressive and most are opposed to DV
2. Women also commit DV therefore men can be victims too - They also wrongly assume all women are equally at risk however there is evidence that certain social groups face a greater risk of domestic violence
How does the materialist explanation explain domestic violence?
- This emphasises economic factors such as a lack of resources
- This focuses on economic factors such as inequalities in income and housing to explain why some groups are more at risk than others
- Worries about funds may turn into domestic conflict
- Lack of money also restricts the social circle and social support
- eg. Lockdown
What does Wilkinson and Pickett argue?
- They argue that DV is a result of stress on family members caused by social inequality and poverty
- The stress caused by poverty causes conflict rather than stability
- Not all people are exposed in the same amount of risk of suffering DV due to inequality of status, income and power meaning they are at greater risk
What is an evaluation of the materialist explanation?
- This explains violence in lower classes
- It does not explain why it is women rather than men such as female violence cases
- They fail to explain why not all male WC commit DV
- Marxist feminists agree that social inequality causes domestic violence
- Fran Ansley believes that male workers are exploited at work and take out frustration on their wives
