Chapter 11 - Understanding Institutions: Family Flashcards
Family
A group of people who take responsibility for meeting one another’s needs.
Whom we consider family, the basis for our bonds, and the needs families meet, however, change over time in response to the social environment.
Nuclear family
Parents and their children
Family: own. According to the U.S. Census Bureau,
A family consists of a householder and one or more other people living in the same household who are related to the householder by birth, marriage or adoption
Bureau uses this definition because it assigns every person in the United States to one household to avoid counting people more than once.
Institutionalized
Encoded in laws, policies, and widely accepted practises
1996 Defense of Marriage Act
Signed by President Clinton
DOMA defined marriage as between one man and one woman
Allowed states not to recognize same-sex marriages
Obergefell v. Hodges
Overturned DOMA in 2015.
the Supreme Court ruled states must issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and recognize same-sex marriages from other states. The shift to gender-neutral marriage is the most recent in a long line of legal and moral contests over who should and should not be considered family.
Loving v. Virginia
1967, overturned bans on interracial marriages
Turner v. Safley
1987 upheld the right for inmates to marry
Marriage
A social construct which varies over time and place
Early families
hunting and gathering groups developed marriage and kinship systems as a way to forge bonds and encourage cooperation with one another.
With the development of settled agriculture about 11,000 years ago, and later as European cultural influences spread, groups became more concerned about owning land, controlling surplus goods, and maintaining their social status.
Preindustrial U.S Families
Native Americans - kindship groups administered justice and organized recourse gathered by the group to be shared.
Europeans in the colonial US there was a “family economy.” Families created the goods they consumed (Cherlin 1983), such as food and clothing, rather than buying them at a supermarket or retail store. In a time of short life spans, families also provided ways of passing along land and status to the next generation and forging connections to others. Although there was much religious diversity within the American colonies, most fell under the Calvinist Protestant umbrella, which emphasized individualism, the importance of marriage, and male headship of families.
Coverture
the legal doctrine in which wives’ standing was subsumed into their husbands’. Only men could own property and sign contracts
Slavery and Families
Families were of central importance to slaves, who established and maintained kinship ties, even as slave owners intervened in them. Slaves could not enter legally binding contracts, and slave owners could allow or disrupt informal marriages at their whim. The sale of children and other loved ones regularly ripped apart families
whether a child was free or a slave depended on whether his or her mother was free or a slave.
Industrial US Families
site of reproduction, whereby people create and raise members of the next generation.
Families increasingly moved off farms and into cities where they worked, outside the home, in factories
Mid-1800s - Women
activists for women’s rights gained victories, new laws allowed married women to own property, take legal action, and gain custody of children following divorce
The 1900s and Emotion-Based US Families
Emotion-based marriage dominated the 1900s. New technologies, such as the automobile and later the birth control pill, brought couples freedom to date outside of the home and experience sexuality for the sake of intimacy and enjoyment without fear of pregnancy.
Family wage
Post WWII economic boom allowed many men (particularly white men un unions) to earn enough to support an entire family permitting wives to remain at home.
Americans idealized
the traditional 1950s nuclear family with a breadwinning husband and homemaking wife
1960s and 1970s
were times of social upheaval and rapid change. The feminist, civil rights, and sexual revolution movements drove ideological change, affirming the values, rights, and independence of women, people of color, and gay and lesbian individuals. A wave of civil rights legislation prohibited workplace and housing discrimination on the basis of sex and race, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was created to ensure fair hiring practices. Policies, like affirmative action programs, were enacted to help more Americans of color gain a foothold in the middle class.
U.S. economy deindustrialized, destroying the family wage and pushing many more women into the paid workforce.
Stalled revolution
Couples waited to marry until they were older, and rates of premarital sex increased.
Divorce rates also rose
revolution. Women expected men to more fully share household responsibilities such as cooking and cleaning, while men valued the traditional family in which women were responsible for private life.
Structural Functionalism: The Family
Concerned with how institutions create stability
Emphasizes how families serve as a socialization agent that allows society to move, with little disruption, from one generation to the next.
Functionalists also focus on the structure of families and which types of family arrangements provide the most stability, especially for children.
Argue that families are important because they regulate sexual behavior, legitimize childbirth, and establish a division of labor.
Support nuclear families
Conflict Perpective: The Family
understanding families as a site of inequality. Conflict theorists emphasize two things in family research. First, social inequalities affect family life. For example, poor families and families of color have less access to affordable housing, creating strain on family life.
realities. Second, family life is an arena for acting out inequalities, particularly gender inequality. Conflict research also notes that marriage is declining around the globe, not just in the United States.
is part of a larger global transition toward gender equality”
Feminist Perspective
illustrate how families tend to create and reinforce gender inequality. Feminists view families as a “gender factory”
They argue that family relationships are inherently gendered because we expect individuals to learn and act out gendered expectations around caring for others and breadwinning through family life. Many families provide girls and boys with gendered toys that teach girls (through dolls, dress-up, playhouses, etc.) to care take and boys (through sports, weapons, superheroes, etc.) to dominate.
Gender attitudes have grown increasingly egalitarian with successive generations,
Despite all the social changes of the past 150 years, economic pressures, lagging social policies, traditional gender ideologies, and racial discrimination still influence families and promote gender inequality.
Intersectionality
conflict perspective that pushes sociologists to look at multiple forms of inequality, such as sexuality and class and gender, at the same time
Social Exchange Theory
Presume that they make decisions by weighing the benefits and costs of various actions and then pick the action or arrangement that brings the biggest reward
Social exchange theorists note that when contemplating divorce, each marriage partner analyzes the rewards of his or her current arrangement in relation to (1) other marriages and (2) other relationship types. If he or she views either one to be more rewarding than his or her current relationship, marriage satisfaction decreases and motivation for separation increases.
