Families

Question 1

Family types

Nuclear

Answer 1

A traditional family with a mother and a father with children, the male is the breadwinner (earner).

Question 2

Family types

Extended

Answer 2

About 3 generations (E.g. grandparent, parent, child) along with other relatives added to the nuclear family

Question 3

Family types

Symmetrical

Answer 3

A family in which both husband and wife do paid employment and both do some housework and provide childcare.

Question 4

Family types

Reconstituted

Answer 4

Where two sets of children become one family when their divorced parents marry each other.

Question 5

Family types

Lone-parent

Answer 5

Single parent looking after children

Question 6

Family types

Beanpole

Answer 6

A family which consists of many generations with a few who keep in contact with each other.

Question 7

Functionalism

4 functions of family George Murdock (1949) found:

Answer 7

Education - children are taught the norms and values of society
Economy - the family provides an economic function to all its members by pooling resources for everyone
Sex - ensures that adults’ sexual relationships are controlled and stable.
Reproduction - produces the next generation of the society.

Question 8

Talcott Parson - primary socialisation

Answer 8

Argued that it families taught children the norms and values associated with their family and/or community, while other institutions (schools, the media, religion, etc) taught children the universal norms and values of wider society.

Question 9

Talcott Parson - stabilisation of adult personalities

Answer 9

Argued that families helped to prevent adults from behaving in disruptive or dysfunctional ways, instead encouraging them to conform to social norms, especially at times of stress. The family provides emotional support to its members (warm bath theory)

Question 10

Evaluation of functionalist perspective

Answer 10

• Makes an idealistic picture of family life when many people have negative experiences of family life, and can cause stress as well as relieve it.
• Feminists argue that families exist largely for the benefit of men.
• Outdated theories that suggest all families are all traditional nuclear families with men going to work and women in domestic roles.

Question 11

Marxist perspective on family

Answer 11

The traditional Marxist view on families is that they perform a role not for everyone in society but for capitalism and the ruling class (the bourgeoisie). They see a society based on class struggle, which works to benefit a rich minority.

Question 12

Engels’ (1884) on family (Marxist)

Answer 12

Family had an economic function for capitalism, by ensuring that wealth remained in the bourgeoisie. Family relations, based on clear legal contracts, facilitate inheritance and therefore when rich people die it is their children who keep hold of their wealth. For Engels, then, family is all about blood lines and proof of parentage.

Question 13

Zaretsky (1976)

Answer 13

Family life gave WC men something they could control as the “boss”. This provided a clear function for capitalism because it meant that workers would tolerate the powerlessness and frustration of being exploited at work because they had this private domain where they were “king of the castle” and could take out their stress and frustrations. Ties in with Fran Ansley’s Marxist-feminist perspective of women being the “takers of shit”.

Question 14

Evaluation of Engel’s perspective

Answer 14

Clearly family must be about more than what happens to your money when you die. People who do not have property also choose to live in families (although Engels would argue this is because they are influenced by bourgeois ideology).

Question 15

Evaluation of Zaretsky’s perspective

Answer 15

Clearly outdated: it assumes the worker is male and that there is only one worker in the family. It also ignores the other benefits that all family members may get from family life: the emotional support, comfort and generally the positive benefits.

Question 16

Feminists’ perspective on family

Answer 16

Agree with Marxists and functionalists that the family is essentially a conservative institution that preserves the social order. They disagree with functionalists and agree with Marxists that in doing so it benefits only a powerful group within society (men). They argue that families preserve, support and embed patriarchy.

Question 17

Liberal feminists

Answer 17

Focus on striving for legal equality between the sexes. The family has long been a clear source of inequality. Marital rape was not formally recognised as a crime in the UK until 1991. Divorce laws have been reformed on many occasions to make them more equal, but it used to be easier for a man to get a divorce than a woman. Liberal feminists argue that most of those battles for legal equality have been won, however there is clearly still inequality between the sexes (for example, in relation to domestic work). They put this down to the need to also change cultural values in society.

Question 18

Radical feminists perspective on family

Answer 18

Don’t believe that changing the law will ever be enough to end the oppression and subjugation of women. They argue that men will always oppress women and the family is a vehicle for that oppression. As such women should find alternative ways of living where they are not subject to male oppression. This has led some radical feminists to favour gender separatism.

Radical feminists argue that girls are socialised to believe that oppression and inequality are normal and therefore they accept the inequality of family life: indeed they dream of it and work for it.