Chris Gaffney, 1992
Source: Radio talk
First published: Labor Review, vol 36, 1992
Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter
Karl Marx once remarked that the dominant ideas of any age are those of its ruling class. Nowhere is this better seen than in the institution of the family.
Today the “normal family” is a nuclear unit: father, mother and children with the male being the breadwinner and the mother absorbed in household duties and raising children. The fact that women work in increasing numbers is seen as unwelcome stress on the “family”, which still relies on the female domestic labour confirming women’s rightful place by the double oppression of domestic work and a job.
This notion of the family is reinforced in the holy family, the three bears and a thousand TV domestic comedies. Some feminist writers have seen male power as the common denominator, but this can obscure the fact that the history of the family is one of change.
As the mode of production has changed so has the family. The history of the family begins at the same time as the emergence of class society, that is relatively late in human social evolution.
The first forms of class society were the slave societies of ancient Greece and Rome but it is usually forgotten that it was only the slave owners who had families.
Slaves were property belonging to the family and were not allowed to marry. Slave children belonged to their master, who could work them or sell them.
The family of the slave owners was strictly regulated. Wives and daughters were confined to the home and were allowed no real contact with the outside world and were excluded from a vote.
If, for example, they did other people’s washing or traded in the market their status as a citizen family would be placed in doubt.
Women outside the family were either prostitutes in state brothels or educated cultured women who even if rich and brought up children were not considered a family.
All marriages were arranged on the lines of property, slave owning and citizenship. Love, passion, and sexual attraction were seen as a threat to the family.
Official morality prescribed sex between husband and wife three times a month. If a man wanted sexual affairs he should get a slave girl, if he sought lively conversation then a courtesan, if he sought beauty and higher feeling then a boy.
The family was seen as a basic to society, not for the sake of personal relationships but for property and social relationships. The family was an extended unit including parents and in-laws. The senior male had immense power of life and death over all the members of the household.
Women had low status legally, and did not have personal names. Julia, for example, was from her father’s family name Julius. To distinguish her from other Julias she would be given a nickname from her husband or father.
She could get a divorce easily, but that was because it was her brother or father who did the divorcing, and she was still considered a member of her father’s family. Slave society collapsed in the fourth century AD as barbarians overran Rome. Over the next centuries feudalism emerged.
Noble families were those of large landowners who lived as an extended kin group. It was a unit of power and property in which all its members had a stake. Lesser noble families were linked to these major noble families by military service and protection.
Marriage and the family were a major way to accumulate property and power, of course with the right connections. War was the other way.
Marriages were alliances. Young women married soon after puberty between 12 and 18 and bore children as soon as possible. The young men had first to do training as knights.
They were allowed to take a temporary wife from a lower class. Her children were deemed bastards, but they were taken into the protection of the male household. When a proper marriage prospect appeared, the temporary wife was dumped.
Peasant families were more like the nuclear family of today in that there was one married couple and their children. They could only marry with the lord’s permission and he had the right to the first night with the peasant bride.
The lords, when they were strong, preferred small families because they were easier to control. Extended peasant families existed where the lords were weak and divided. This was true in southern and eastern Europe.
Generally, peasants got their solidarity from the village community. The women had their activities and the community would intervene into the family if there were problems such as wife beating or adultery. The women had their own solidarity.
The word gossip originally meant confidante, and it became a negative word only later on, because such a person was said not to respect the privacy of family affairs.
As the merchants began to develop within feudal society they began to use the peasant family as units of production for goods, which the merchant then sold. They were the first capitalists.
The peasant family grew to include apprentices and servants. Both men and women in the peasant family helped in production. Babies were sent out to be wet-nursed so as not to interrupt the family production.
The growth of cities meant that the peasant produced for sale in the cities rather than purely for self-sufficiency. Rich peasants evicted poor peasants, whose women were now cast out and often targeted as witches.
Peasant courtship was lengthy, and sex before marriage despite the preaching of the church was common (up to 40 per cent in some areas). So long as the child was born in wedlock it was not considered important.
The success of the marriage was tied to its success as an economic unit not on the personal relationship between the male and female.
The growth of the capitalist class continued under feudalism until it broke the feudal landowners’ control of society and seized state power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (for example, England 1649, France 1789).
Personal relationships became more important within the bourgeois, or capitalist, family. The wives had less and less to do with production and more and more to do with children, and the importance of emotional bonds grew.
Within this family the husband had the authority and the wives and the children submitted to him. The spread of factories meant the sphere of production moved out of the home.
Most producers became wage earners, as the peasants were driven from the land to make way for sheep and cash crops. They came to the cities to work in the factories. This meant major charges for the new working class.
Women and the children were first into the factories and the men were left unemployed. Frederick Engels in 1844 believed that the working class family would not survive, but eventually the men were absorbed into work and the women would leave work when they married and had children. Skilled workers began to get a family wage but most workers lived on the edge and survived by having large numbers of children who could work for the family at an early age.
This was the first time in history that the producers had large numbers of children.
Ideology rose to reflect this development. It was now considered immoral to have men working alongside women. Hot mines meant women wearing thin clothes and from the 1840s, women were increasingly banned from various industries because of health and moral concerns.
It was considered natural for men to endure these conditions just as it was natural for women to be feminine and motherly housewives.
Working class men supported this exclusion of women. Their status depended on their ability to support wives and children; besides, women workers threatened male jobs because they were paid only half the male rate.
The extended family began to disappear as state policies on housing, pensions and family allowances made the nuclear family more financially attractive.
Working class families for the first time in history began to resemble ruling class families. It became easier to see the nuclear family and the separation of home and work as natural.
About this time we see the rise of psychology and theories of human personality (Freud and Jung) based on childhood in a private, enclosed nuclear family.
These developments in the nineteenth century were historically unique and very different from earlier societies, but we should note that the family pattern under capitalism has been extremely short-lived — in the case of the working class little more than a century, and it is changing.
In the twentieth century all institutions have come under strain. Women, including married women, have entered the workforce in increasing numbers and most working class families depend on two incomes to survive. They have fewer children and divorce more readily.
And single-parent families are common partly due to the fact that we live much longer. Marriage now can last 40-50 years instead of 20-25 as it used to.
The double burden of work and domestic work places intolerable strains on women and although conservative governments’ talk about the sanctity of the family, at the same time they reduce services, childcare, health and education that support the family.
It is not feminists who are destroying the nuclear family but the workings of the capitalism. Most abuse of children and women still happens within the family, although female employment has given women enough economic power to consider a life outside marriage.
Until this happened, the women and children was totally dependent on the male.
We must point to new ways of living and new ways of raising children, which puts the focus back to the community, and away from the isolation and powerlessness of the nuclear family.
The transition to new forms is beginning before our eyes, but it will really only be able to fully emancipate humanity if society is based on human need and not capitalist profit — that is, when we have buried the capitalist system.
The family has always changed with the change in the social structure, so that peoples’ ideas of what is natural has also changed. In the past this has been based on religion and the needs of the ruling class founded on male dominance, but in the future it can be based on knowledge and human need.