Familles: la perspective de la classe sociale (document en anglais)

Families are essentially care institutions that vary across cultures and change over time. Their essential function, historically, has been to contribute to the basic economic survival of family members; thus, the structure of families often adapts to the economy, and cultural ideologies and laws are created to reinforce that adaptation. Over time, societies grow and become more complex and stratified, and the nature and quality of life among families becomes differentiated based on varying economies and the particular position of the family within the economic system. Broadly speaking, social scientists have identified four major economies that have existed across the span of human history: hunting and gathering (or foraging), agrarian/agricultural, modern/industrial, and service/knowledge-based economies. All these economies still exist in various parts of the world, and nations often have mixed economies. Families of some sort existed and continue to exist in all of these economies and, as social institutions, are perhaps as old as humankind. Marriage, on the other hand, is a more recent institution. Because hunting and gathering societies existed for millennia, it is quite likely that some form of marriage, or at least temporary partnering between women and men, emerged in the early versions of these societies. In foraging societies, however, marriage as a stable partnership between men and women probably took a backseat to family ties. Indeed, it was membership in the family that best ensured physical and economic survival.

This chapter has several purposes. The first is to briefly define the family and marriage, discuss their origins, and explain how they evolved in tandem

2——Families: A Social Class Perspective

with economic development. In this book, I foreground economic forces as transforming families and ultimately shaping the nature and quality of family life, as a prelude to chapters that look at families from a social class perspective. However, it is important to keep in mind that, as pointed out above, other social structural forces (e.g., ideologies, politics) also shape families. Thus, there is no rigid, universal, or inevitable link between family structure, economy, and ideology; instead, people are active, cognitive beings who may respond to structural forces in a variety of ways (Jayakody, Thornton, and Axinn 2008). In fact, as social institutions, the family and economy are mutually interactive and influential, so families may also shape aspects of the economy. As historian Tamara Hareven (1991) explains, families are not separate entities but are intricately connected to other social institutions, such as religion and work; thus, they do not merely react to economic and ideological changes, but they can initiate or resist such changes (p. 96). Families may mediate the demands of the economy by deciding which family members will be involved in productive labor or by embracing values that emphasize achievement and success (Furstenberg 1966).

This chapter also explores the early origins of the major types of social inequality discussed in this book—inequalities based on social class, race/ethnicity, and gender. Scholars agree that although some forms of social inequality probably existed in the earliest societies, perhaps based on the differing talents and abilities of people, such inequalities were not particularly rigid or consequential. People in early foraging societies were often nomadic and lacked surplus wealth or even the concept of property ownership, and thus they had little basis for creating a significant stratification system. The emergence of settled societies, however, was marked by the discovery of agriculture and the domestication of animals and fostered the rise of institutionalized inequalities based on social class, ethnicity, race, and gender. These social inequalities reflect differences in economic development, wealth, and power, and, as societies advance, they are rationalized based on religious teachings, ethnocentric attitudes, and cultural ideologies.

The emergence and expansion of capitalist markets in Europe during the 1500s offers one example of the interaction between economic and ideological forces and the impact they can have on notions of family. The growth of capitalism during this era led to an expansion of wealth, the growth of the middle class, and the rise of Enlightenment thinkers who challenged the power of monarchs and championed the virtues of the free market, individualism, freedom, and human rights. These ideals also led to new thinking about marriage, such as the contention that it should be based on free choice and romantic love. Although Enlightenment ideals were rarely expanded to include equality for women, they did arguably elevate the status of women

CHAPTER 1 The Evolution of Families and Marriages——3

by suggesting that marriages should be entered into by mutual consent and that women were partners in marriage rather than a form of property.

Such ideals influenced the Europeans who migrated to the New World to expand the British Empire. The chapter concludes by looking at the gender and racial order they created in the New World and how the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy affected families. During the early decades of the twentieth century, America struggled to create breadwinner-homemaker families and, by the mid-1940s, had succeeded in promoting itself as a middle class society. Such illusion, however, proved short-lived, and by the 1970s social inequality was again on the national agenda. In the ensuing decades, social class inequality among Americans spiraled, creating a pattern of social class polarization that included greater wealth for the wealthy, deeper poverty and economic hardship for the working class and poor, and a notable decline in the middle class.

Families and Marriage: A Brief History

Sociologists understand families to be social institutions that perform vital functions for their members and societies: They produce, nurture, and socialize children; care for frail and elderly family members; provide the laborers needed for the economy; and meet the emotional needs of family members. To describe families as social entities recognizes the fact that they are socially created and defined and vary across cultures; to refer to them as institutions means that they embody a set of interrelated roles and responsibilities. Cross-cultural differences, the changing nature of families, and political forces often have made defining the family a matter of some contention. By the mid-twentieth century, social scientists had developed definitions of the family that seemed broadly inclusive in terms of capturing the essence of family life across cultures. For example, one family

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