ABSTRACT
Philip Larkin, ‘This be the Verse’ The family, it seems, is here to stay. In modern times some kind of family unit remains as popular as ever, though the shape and beliefs about its purpose appear to be changing. While many families experience changes in the membership of their households, as couples they cohabit, marry, remarry and (apart from a small number of the voluntarily childless) procreate children or endeavour to do so, with apparent passion and determination. The present tendency to marry, divorce and, for one if not both the formerly married spouses, then to remarry or to cohabit, leads to a subsequent proliferation of networks of families connected through the ‘one-time married couple’, their children and subsequent children with further partners. According to Chester (1983), ‘historians, such as Shorter
(1975) and Stone (1977) describe a complex and curvilinear process which includes the dissolution of a collective way of life and the extrusion of the nuclear family’ from its previous context of kin and community. Such a process has led to the rise of privacy and domesticity, the ideologies of romantic and eroticised love and marriage and felicific parenthood. Indeed Stone’s (1977) picture of the contemporary family as ‘intensely self centred, inward turned, emotionally bonded, sexually liberated, child oriented’ also accords closely enough with that of many social scientists (Chester 1983). However, the wide-ranging and sometimes passionate arguments about the emergence of the modern nuclear family amount to what have been described as ‘the war over the family’ (Berger and Berger 1983). Some of these battles range from feminist arguments relating to the oppression of women in the family-see, for instance, Smart (1984), The Ties that Bind —and for the availability of alternative choices to the prevailing and favoured patterns of family life-Barrett and McIntosh (1982), The Antisocial Family-to those ‘for popular marriage, a relationship sealed by a vow of lifelong fidelity between adults’ evinced by Mount (1982), The Subversive Family. There are also other well-rehearsed arguments, as, for instance, that the family is a ‘haven in a heartless capitalist world’ (Lasch 1977) or that the modification of modern family law has led to the therapeutic tutelage of the family by the welfare state, which has invaded the space between the ‘intrafamilial’ and the ‘extrafamilial’ and thus undermined the autonomy of the family (Donzelot 1979). According to the Bergers’ spirited defence of the bourgeois family, the modern family is perceived with a kind of double vision. In one vision
the bourgeois family is a natural unit of parents and children, united by love, mutual respect, trust, and fidelity, based on religiously inspired values and giving a distinct moral quality to this basic unit of social life. In the other vision…[it] is a narrowly constraining cage, turning its members into mere instruments of production, profoundly destructive of the personalities of women and children (and perhaps to a lesser degree of men) and generally cutting off its members from participation in the larger concerns of society.
