Family Structure (Topic 3)

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  • Created by: lou9119
  • Created on: 20-05-17 12:04
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  • Family structure
    • Young & Willmott: modern family sis a 'symmetrical family'. Sharing chores, childcare and decision-making. Assumption that there has been a change in the domestic division of labour from segregaed conjugal roles to joint conjugal role.
      • Conjugal roles: roles played by a male and female in a relationship.
      • New Man emergence: caring, sharing and gentle, emotional and sensitive in his attitudes toward women, children and himself.
    • Reason for change?
      • Improved living standards
        • Encouraged men and women to become home-centered as there is a greater importanace.
      • Decline of extended family, greater geographical and social mobility.
        • Less pressure from kin to retain traditional roles. More need to divide roles equally.
      • Improved rights of women.
        • Women have become more assertive in the home.
      • Women in paid employmenet.
        • Increased independence , reduced time on housework means roles must be shared.
      • Commercialisation of housework.
        • Consumer goods to reduce housework. Silver and Schor suggest this has aken away tiime-consuming aspects of housework and my have caused men to feel more comfortable taking on these tasks.
      • Weaker gender identities.
        • Postmodernist idea that men and women can 'pick'n'mix' roles based on personal choice, less constrained by feminine and masculine ideology.
    • Criticisms for equality:
      • Routine jobs are still predominately done by women.
        • The Guardian suggested women effectively have the status of 'married lone parents'.
      • The Office for National Statistics found women spent nearly twice as long on cooking, cleaning, shopping, washing and looking after the children..
      • Rapoport and Rapoport suggest professional wives are still expected to  take major responsibility for housework.
      • Oakley: 72% of men claim to help their partners at least once a week. Y and W have an unconvincing argument..
        • Young & Willmott: modern family sis a 'symmetrical family'. Sharing chores, childcare and decision-making. Assumption that there has been a change in the domestic division of labour from segregaed conjugal roles to joint conjugal role.
          • Conjugal roles: roles played by a male and female in a relationship.
          • New Man emergence: caring, sharing and gentle, emotional and sensitive in his attitudes toward women, children and himself.
      • TRIPLE SHIFT
        • Paid work, domestic labour and emotional work .
    • Nature and Value of Domestic Labour
      • Women's unpaid work values at £30.000 a year
      • Radical feminists believe men are the main winners from domestic labour, this is a problem of patriarchy.
      • Marxist feminists believe unpaid domestic labour reproduces labour power and benefits capitalism. The family is a 'social factory' producing labour.
    • Inequalities in the family
      • Decision making
        • Edgell found that women's decision were made for unimportant areas.
        • 44% of working women were mainly responsible for financial decisions.
      • Emplyment
        • Women's career's suffer from the Triple-Shift. Limited due to hours . Little opportunity to progress their career.
        • Women with children are seen as unreliable.
        • Believe hat investing in women is costly as they will eventually leave to reproduce.
        • Women give up obs to look after sick children or parents.
      • Darker Side of the Family
        • Domesitc Violence
          • Feminist explanation:
            • Radical feminists explain this as a means for men to exercise patriarchal power, to control and intimidate women, and to keep hem in a state of submission.
            • Marxist feminists emphasise structural factors, social deprivation, a culture of violence in the working class and lower status of women in society.
            • Dobash and Dobash: male violence against women in the family is an enforcement of women's subordinate role and unequal power.
          • 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men will suffer. 89% committed by men against female partners.  Much of it goes unreported.
          • 3/4 of rapes (Crim survey for England and Wales) take place in the home of the victim or offender. Only made illegal in marriage in 1991.
        • Feminists challenge the New right and Functionalist view of  the cereal packer family.
        • Privatisation of the family has caused  information of the darker side of the family to be hard to grasp.

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