Social policies
- Created by: BenjaminMullins
- Created on: 11-05-15 16:03
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- Families and social policy
- A comparative view of family policy
- Abolishing the family
- One particular striking attempt by the state to shape family life was policy followed after the Russian Revolution of 1917.
- The government of the newly formed Soviet Union sought to destroy the old pre-revoluntionary patriarchal family structure.
- This regarded as an obstacle to the creation of a socialist society based on equality.
- Consequently, the Soviet government in the 1920's changed the laws to make divorce and abortion easy to obtain.
- The constitution guaranteed equality between sexes, women entered paid employment on a vast scale, and the state began to provide workplace and other communal nurseries.
- This regarded as an obstacle to the creation of a socialist society based on equality.
- Keeping with the Marxist perspective on the family, it was expected that the abolition of capitalist ownership of the means of production.
- This would lead to the traditional family 'withering away'
- However, the new Soviet state was beset many difficulties, including civil war, famine and, after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the threat of war with nazi germany.
- This all meant a change of policy: Divorce laws were tightened, abortion made illegal, and parents encouraged to have more children and rewarded with big family allowances.
- China's one child policy
- By contrast with the soviet union's attempts to encourage population growth through its family policies.
- China's government has discouraged couples from having more than one child.
- Adrian Wilson (1985), the policy is supervised by workplace family planning committees, women must seek their position to try to become pregnant.
- Couples who comply with the policy get extra benefits, such as free child healthcare and higher tax allowance and pay a fine.
- Couples who break their agreement to having only one child my repay the allowances and pay a fine, women may face sterilisation after their firstborn.
- By contrast with the soviet union's attempts to encourage population growth through its family policies.
- Nazi family policy
- In Nazi Germany in the 1930's, the state pursued a twofold policy.
- One the one hand, it encouraged the healthy and supposedly 'racially pure' to breed a 'master race'.
- The official policy sought to keep women out of the workforce and confine them to 'children, kitchen and church', the better to perform their biological role.
- On the other hand, the state compulsorily sterilised 375,000 disabled people that it deemed unfit to breed on grounds of 'physical malformation, mental retardation, epilepsy, imbecility, deafness or blindness'.
- The official policy sought to keep women out of the workforce and confine them to 'children, kitchen and church', the better to perform their biological role.
- Abolishing the family
- Perspectives on families and social policy
- Funtionalism
- Funtionalists see social policies as being for the good of all. They see policies as helping families to perform their functions more effectively and make life better for their members.
- Criticisms: It assumes that all members benefit from from social policies. It assumes that there is a 'march of progress', with social policies steadily making family life better.
- The new right
- Funtionalism
- A comparative view of family policy
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