Feminist Views on Family (AQA GCSE Sociology)

Feminist views of the family

• As a conflict approach, feminists are critical of the family as an institution and its role in society

  • They see families as having a negative impact on the lives of women

• Feminists believe that families contribute to the social construction of gender roles through primary socialisation and canalisation

  • For example, dressing girls in pink and boys in blue or giving girls dolls and boys toy cars to play with

• Within families, children learn the norms and values expected of males and females

  • Children that see their mother cleaning and cooking may assume that domestic tasks are part of a woman's role

• Families therefore prepare children for their gender roles in a patriarchal society and they reproduce gender inequalities over time

Key thinkers: Delphy and Leonard (1992)

• Delphy & Leonard are radical feminists who used qualitative research methods to investigate the idea of the symmetrical family

  • They used unstructured or in-depth interviews

  • They observed how individuals interacted with one another in their homes using non-participant observations

  • They used information from existing research on families

• They view the family as a patriarchal institution that men benefit from, as women are expected to do unpaid work inside the home

  • Unpaid work includes cooking, cleaning, shopping and less obvious tasks (such as booking medical appointments and sending birthday cards)

  • Wives are exploited as their work is undervalued, their husbands profit from their labour, and they remain financially dependent on them

• The family is based on a hierarchy:

  • Other family members occupy lower positions, with the husband at the top

  • The husband provides for his wife's upkeep and controls her labour for his own use

  • She has no money of her own

  • Even when women have well-paid, full time employment, they still have the dual burden of doing most of the domestic work and childcare

  • Time at home for men is leisure time, whereas for women it is also work time

• The patriarchal family upholds men's dominance over women and children, which in turn upholds societies' patriarchal structure

Criticisms of Delphy and Leonard and the feminist perspective

• Delphy and Leonard do not consider egalitarian families that share power between their members

• Marxist approaches argue that inequalities within families is linked to capitalism rather than patriarchy

• Functionalists see the structure of the family as meeting the needs of individuals (including females) and society

Criticisms of families

• Additional criticisms of the family include:

  • Concern regarding the decline in traditional family values

    • The idea that a normal family type is made up of a married couple bringing up their biological children

  • Social changes such as the increase in marital breakdown, divorce and lone-parent families

    • These changes undermine the functions of the family, according to functionalists, and threaten the stability of society as a whole if the family can't fulfil its functions

  • The isolation of the nuclear family from the wider kinship networks and its loss of contact with the wider family

  • The loss of traditional functions (such as education, economic production) that families once carried out, which have now been transferred to other agencies like the education system

  • The functionalist perspective's unrealistic idealisation of the nuclear family

    • It ignores dysfunctional families in which domestic violence and abuse occur