Marriage, Mates, Sex & Roles

Marriage, Mates, Sex & Roles
The Family Marriage, Mates, Sex & Roles

Family & Marriage Across Cultures

Defining the Family Legally, the word family is used to describe many relationships (parents and children, people related by blood, marriage or adoption, a group of people living together in a single household For Sociologists, family – a group of people related by marriage, blood or adoption Of all the social institutions, the family has the greatest impact on individual behavior

Family of… ORIENTATION PROCREATION Family at birth
Provides you with a name, identity and heritage Orients the child to their neighborhood, community and society Family upon marriage Marriage ceremony signifies that it is legal for a couple to have offspring and pass on the family name

Two Basic Types Nuclear Family – family structure composed of one or both parents and children Smallest group of individuals that can be considered a family Composed of a parent(s) and any children Extended Family – two or more adult generations of the same family whose members share economic resources and a common household May also contain close relatives (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.)

How Do They Develop? Let’s think back to Chapter 5 and the different social structures… Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the family was incredibly important – you hunted and gathered together, you lived around each other from birth to death, etc. Agricultural societies – you don’t need to be mobile anymore so you began to settle down and farm Who’s going to work that farm? Children! We see a growth in size of the families, but those relationships are still vitally important as they were in the Hunter & Gather, and Horticultural societies In Industrial societies, the extended family replaces the nuclear family because you don’t need large families and we actually see Industrial & Post-Industrial societies favor the smaller nuclear family because you have fewer mouths to feed

Families Across Cultures
What’s interesting is whether nuclear or extended, families behave similarly in 3 main areas: INHERITANCE AUTHORITY PLACE OF RESIDENCE

1. INHERITANCE Patrilineal Matrilineal Bilateral
(Tikopia people in the Solomon Islands) 1. INHERITANCE Who inherits? Depends on who is the head of the household… Patrilineal – descent and inheritance are passed from the father to the male descendants Matrilineal – descent and inheritance are passed from the mother to the female descendants Bilateral – Passed equally through both parents to all children (male AND female) Matrilineal (Pueblo Indians) Bilateral (Most families in the United States)

2. AUTHORITY Patriarchy Matriarchy Equalitarian
(China and Iraq are most notable) 2. AUTHORITY Who holds the authority in the family? Patriarchy – the oldest man living in the household has authority over the rest of the family…in purest form, the father is the absolute ruler Matriarchy – the oldest women living in the household holds the authority…very rare Equalitarian – authority is split evenly between the husband and wife Matriarchy (Akan in Ghana and Côte d’Ivorie) Equalitarian (Most families in Scandinavia and the United States)

3. RESIDENCE Patrilocal Matrilocal Neolocal
(premodern China and the Kazahks in Khazakstan, Mongolia, etc.) 3. RESIDENCE Where newly married couples set up their households also varies Patrilocal – the pattern in which married couples live with/near the husbands’ parents Matrilocal – the pattern in which married couples live with/near the wifes’ parents Neolocal – the pattern in which newly married couples set up their own households (if finances allow) Matrilocal (Nayar caste in Southern India and Sri Lanka) Neolocal (Euro-American model…Europe varies greatly, but the descendants who came to North America practice this)

I Hear Wedding Bells! As Americans, we have a certain idea of what a wedding looks like (white dress, bride and groom take vows, walking down the aisles, bridesmaids and groomsmen, etc.) but it varies quite a lot from culture to culture No matter what form they take, the marriage ceremony is an important ritual announcing that a man and woman have become husband and wife, that a new family is starting AND that any children born to that couple are legitimate and can legitimately inherit the family name and property Four different forms that marriage takes: Monogamy Polygamy Polygyny Polyandry

1. MONOGAMY Traditionally marriage between one man and one woman
With gay marriage now it can pertain to one man and one man or one woman and one woman May also practice serial monogamy – having several husband or wives but being married to only one at a time i.e. widowed or divorced

2. POLYGAMY Polygamy involved the marriage of a male or female to more than one person Polygyny – marriage of one male to 2+ females More common in earlier societies, but still legal in India, parts of Africa and much of the Middle East Polyandry – marriage of one female to 2+ males 3 societies: Tibet, Polynesia and the Todas of India

POLYGYN POLYANDRY (Middle East, Africa, FLDS, India)
(Tibet, Polynesia and the Todas in India)

I Hear Wedding Bells! So exactly is that other person in the marriage ceremony? Just as ceremonies vary from culture to culture, so does the process of choosing a mate EVERY culture and society (including the United States) has norms and laws about who may marry whom Four different forms or practices of selecting a mate: Exogamy Endogamy Homogamy Heterogamy

1. EXOGAMY Exogamy Incest Taboos
Practice of marrying outside one’s group Most important norms related to exogamy are called incest taboos – norms forbidding marriage between close relatives Marrying father/mother, niece/nephews, son/daughter 29 states prohibit the marriage of first cousins Incest is almost universally prohibited with exceptions common in Royalty (Europe, Egypt, Hawai’i and Peru) Exogamy Incest Taboos

2. ENDOGAMY Marriage within one’s own group as required by social norms In the U.S. norms required you marry someone of your same race Not so much the case anymore Mixed marriages have quadrupled since 1980 Class lines (or the lack of strong class divisions) have crossed with more frequency because people of all social classes are attending college Norms separating age groups have weakened

Similar age & profession Met at university & similar age
3. HOMOGAMY Tendency to marry someone similar to oneself People tend to marry those with social characteristics similar to their own Think back to Wealth & Income! No Disney fairytales – tend to marry someone of your same social class Tend to marry someone of the same age (or within a few years) Divorced tend to marry divorced and single tend to marry single Similar age & profession Met at university & similar age

4. HETEROGAMY Marriage between people with differing social characteristics Still the exception in the U.S., but the practice is rising Cross traditional age barriers Cross traditional social class barriers Cross traditional racial barriers Film and TV has helped

Theoretical Perspectives
& The Role of the Family

FUNCTIONALISM The family plays many roles including socializing the young, providing social and emotional support, managing reproduction, regulating sexual activity, transmitting social status and serving as an economic center SOCIALIZATION As we remember from our study of Socialization, the family is vitally important because they meet not only the basic needs for the children, but also how to participate in society When children are infants they mimic words and later sentences Parents also teach the child values, norms and behaviors and will eventually serve as role models for the children

FUNCTIONALISM The family plays many roles including socializing the young, providing social and emotional support, managing reproduction, regulating sexual activity, transmitting social status and serving as an economic center SOCIOEMOTIONAL Socioemotional maintenance – provision of acceptance and support The family is supposed to be where an individual is unconditionally accepted and loved; family members accept one another as they are and see each as special and unique Without this, children may have low self-esteem, fear rejection, feel insecure and eventually find it hard to adjust to marriage or to express emotion to their own children (think back to the Harlow Monkey Experiment)

FUNCTIONALISM The family plays many roles including socializing the young, providing social and emotional support, managing reproduction, regulating sexual activity, transmitting social status and serving as an economic center MANAGING REPRODUCTION Society can’t survive without new members and the family provides an orderly way for producing new members This function is so important that for many cultures and religions it is the primary purpose for sexual relations In some developing nations, the failure of a wife to bear children can lead to a divorce Significance of having children is seen throughout different rituals, customs, and traditions that are associated with pregnancy and births

FUNCTIONALISM The family plays many roles including socializing the young, providing social and emotional support, managing reproduction, regulating sexual activity, transmitting social status and serving as an economic center REGULATING SEXUAL BEHAVIOR In no society are people granted total sexual freedom; even in sexually permissive societies (Hopi) there are rules about mating and marrying Extremes: Trobriand Islands encourage premarital sex, Afghanistan goes to great lengths to prevent any contact between nonrelated single males and females The U.S. falls somewhere in between, but this can be very confusing for youth – in ideal culture, adolescents would abstain until marriage; in reality the abundance of sexual references directed at teens through advertising and entertainment incredibly difficult and at times may make abstinence seem undesirable and even embarrassing Consequences? Our high teen pregnancy rate and teenage abortion rates

FUNCTIONALISM The family plays many roles including socializing the young, providing social and emotional support, managing reproduction, regulating sexual activity, transmitting social status and serving as an economic center SOCIAL STATUS Families provide economic resources that open and close occupational doors Sons and daughters of high-income professionals are more likely to attend college and graduate school than children of blue-collar workers Pass values that affect social status Children of professionals tend to feel a greater need to pursue a college degree than their counterparts from blue-collar families

FUNCTIONALISM The family plays many roles including socializing the young, providing social and emotional support, managing reproduction, regulating sexual activity, transmitting social status and serving as an economic center ECONOMIC FUNTION At one time families were the economic centers with every member serving a function to ensure that all survived and prospered Modern American family is a unit of consumption rather than production Adults (increasingly including working mothers) are employed outside the home and pool their collective resources to buy what they need and want

CONFLICT THEORY Focus on the way family members compete and cooperate and as we’ve seen for most of history in most of the world, the practice has been patriarchal and patrilineal – thus, most family systems have built-in gender inequality GENDER RELAIONSHIPS (Think back to MAKERS!) Males are dominant and in control with females being EXPECTED to be submissive helpers Traditionally labor required men to be the breadwinners and work outside the home with women raising the children and staying inside the home With men having control over the money, the wives and mothers are kept in a dependent and powerless state

CONFLICT THEORY Focus on the way family members compete and cooperate and as we’ve seen for most of history in most of the world, the practice has been patriarchal and patrilineal – thus, most family systems have built-in gender inequality FEMINIST WRITERS (Think back to MAKERS!) Many feminists today view the family from the conflict perspective believing that the family structure is the source of the inequality between men and women in society Point out that men have had control over women since before private property and capitalism even existed Women’s contribution in the home are not paid and therefore undervalued in a capitalist society

SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM
The key to understanding behavior within the family lies in the interactions among family members and the meanings that members assign to these interactions DEVELOPING SELF-CONCEPTS Goes back to Socialization – as family members share meanings and feelings, children develop self-concepts and learn to put themselves mentally in a place of others Relationships within the family are constantly changing – a newly married couple will spend months or years testing their new relationship and as time passes the initial relationship changes along with some aspects of the partners’ personalities including self-concepts Changes occur as the partners struggle with such problems as chores, responsibilities, in-laws, even child-rearing

Family & Marriage In the United States

Just Your “Typical” American Family
With the U.S. being so diverse, it may be hard to really define what a “typical” family is or looks like; however there are more similarities than differences and tend to follow the following patter: Families are nuclear Families are bilateral Families are democratic Families are neolocal Families are monogamous

Just Your “Typical” American Family: Love & Marriage
In a recent pool, 83% of both men and women rated “being in love” as the most vital reason to marry, but that isn’t always the case Among the British feudal aristocracy, romantic love was something that was pursued outside of marriage because it was a matter of keeping family lineage and property Among Hindus in India, parents or other relatives look more to caste, wealth, family reputation and appearance; love is not always absent, but usually develops later While romantic love is almost always stated as a condition, it is not the ONLY reason because most Americans believe that marriage based on love alone can’t last People may marry to advance in a career, to conform (after a certain point your family “expects” you to be married so you may feel pressured to marry or be married by a certain age or even to a certain person) *For a marriage to last, a couple must build a relationship that goes beyond love*

Just Your “Typical” American Family: Divorce
What are the causes of divorce? Age of the people when they married (the later the age upon marriage, the lower the chance of divorce) How long they partners have been married (the longer the marriage, the lower the chance of divorce) The nature and quality of the relationship (the more respect and flexibility exists between the partners, the lower the chance of divorce What are the larger forces that affect marriages? Four main factors…

1. ECONOMICS Divorce rates increase during economic prosperity and decrease when times are tough Prosperity Tough Times

2. BABY BOOMERS After the 1960s, baby boomers didn’t attach a stigma to divorce as did previous generations did so there were more likely to leave an unhappy marriage

3. INEPENDENT WOMEN Women are becoming increasingly more financially independent and therefore more willing to end a bad marriage

4. ATTITUDES & VALUES Society today is more forgiving of divorce and remarriage Women aren’t “punished” for leaving a marriage

Just Your “Typical” American Family: Family Violence
Americans have traditionally denied the existence of widespread violence and in the past had mostly been associated with lower-class families Main reason is because when the first research in this area was done, they used law enforcement and medical records…and at that time the police and the hospitals dealt with the lower-classes because the middle and upper classes had their own private doctors Is family violence common? Domestic abuse affects every member of the family – spouses, children and older people

Is family violence common? Celebrated trials of the 1990s brought increased public attention (i.e. OJ Simpson and the Mendez brothers) According to a national survey, close to ¼ of adults report having been physically abused as children Slap, shove, or severe spanking; biting, kicking, punching, beating or threatening with a weapon 1 in every 4 girls and 1 in every 10 boys are victims of sexual aggression either inside or outside the home Reported child abuse has skyrocketed – reported cases rose from 662,000 to 3 MILLION When talking about sexual abuse, it goes way beyond physical touch – being forced into pornography or watch it

At least 4 MILLION women are battered by their husbands every year Just reported cases Over 4 THOUSAND women are beaten to death

Is abuse always directed against women? ABSOLUTELY NOT! One set of researchers found that close to 1/3 of the husbands in their survey had acted violently against their wives and that wives were almost as likely to have used physical violence against their husbands Other studies show that husbands and wives assault each other at about the same rate Much of the violence committed by women involves self-protection or retaliation and as a category, females are NOT as violent as males

Is abuse always physical? ABSOLUTELY NOT! Verbal and psychological abuse are also part of many families The feelings of self-hate and worthlessness are often the effects of abuse AND can be just as damaging as physical abuse Child neglect As many as 9 MILLION cases of child neglect in the U.S. having similar effects of the verbal and psychological abuse

Changes In Family & Marriage

Blended Families Blended family – a family formed when at least one of the partners in a marriage has been married before and has a child(ren) from a previous marriage Blended families create a new type of extended family – you can have 8 grandparents for example (mom and dad’s parents; step-mom and step-dad’s parents) Many blended families are successful, especially if they make adjustments during the first few years of marriage

Blended Families MONEY DIFFICULTIES – financial demands from both former and present families generally result in lower incomes in stepfamilies Remarried husbands are often legally obligated to pay alimony and/or child support STEPCHILDREN’S ANTAGONISM – hoping for a reunion of their biological parents may lead children to attempt to derail the new marriage Even years after divorce, about 1/3 of stepchildren continue to strongly disapprove of their biological parent’s divorce UNCLEAR ROLES A stepchild often doesn’t consider a step-parent to be their “real” father or mother Often confusion on control and discipline and takes both sets of parents to work together (rare)

BLENDED FAMILY

Single-Parent Families
Single-parent families make up over 1 out of every 4 families in America…and by far the greatest proportion of these households are female-headed Why do women head the vast majority of single-parent households? Courts today are more sensitive to fathers’ claims, women are more likely to win custody in cases of separation and divorce Unwed mothers or women abandoned by their husbands and/or the fathers of their children make up a large part of the poor single-parent households…not to mention poorer women tend to marry at a very low rate Significantly fewer there is an increasing number of well-educated, professional women who head single-parent households The stigma of unwed motherhood declining, more affluent women are choosing to have children and care for them alone

Single-Parent Families
Effects on children? 30% of children live in households with one parent – African American and Latino children (18 and under) are more likely than white children to live with only their mothers because of high divorce and out-of-wedlock birth rates Adolescents (12-17) who live with one parent or with a stepparent have higher rates of deviant behavior including delinquency, drug and alcohol abuse, and teenage pregnancy Built-in problems with single parenting: Single working parents must struggle to provide their children with the time, attention and guidance that 2 parents can give Remember that feminization of poverty? Because the single mother typically makes little money, she has added financial problems from finding good, affordable child care to adequate housing in a safe neighborhood proves to be very difficult

SINGLE-PARENT HOUSHOLDS

Childless Families In the past, married women without children were seen as failing to fulfil their wifely “duty” and in many cultures and religions, that was an acceptable reason for divorce Why are some women choosing not to have children? Today, the reasons married women give for choosing not to have children are varied Social stigmas against childless married women are disappearing Some women have opted to make personal or career goals a bigger priority Medical issues that may run in families Some couples have issues bringing children into an “immoral and harsh” world Are marriages happier without children? Among childless couples who want children, marital happiness is generally lower than for married couples with children Couples by choice who don’t have kids appear to be happier/more satisfied than couples with children

CHILDLESS FAMILIES

Dual-Employed Families
Dual-employed marriages typical see women still being the ones expected to handle most of the household and child-care responsibilities Drawbacks? Married working women tend to work about 15 more hours a week more than men Arlie Hochschild calls this home-and-child-based work “second shift” Men are generally unwilling to assume household responsibilities Women must cope with role conflict Torn between the time requirements of their jobs and desire to spend time with their children and husbands – often times feelings of guilt arise Men who are married to a working woman who either makes more or her job is more prestigious, may struggle with playing “second fiddle” because it doesn’t fit into their image of themselves OR as the provider

Dual-Employed Families
Dual-employed marriages typical see women still being the ones expected to handle most of the household and child-care responsibilities Positives? Psychological well-being of working women tends to be better Working outside the home provides a wider set of social relationships, greater feelings of control, independence and self-esteem Provides a social and emotional cushion for women when their children grow up and leave the home Financially the whole family tends to benefit (additional income coming in) For the men, it can ease the pressure of being the sole-provider Husbands that take advantage of the opportunity can form a closer relationship with their kids by being a more active parent and “picking up the slack”

DUAL-EMPLOYED FAMILIES

Cohabitation Families
Cohabitation – a marriagelike living arrangement without the legal obligations and responsibilities of formal marriage The number is on the rise from about 500,000 in 1970 to 7 MILLION in 2000 Is Cohabitation a workable alternative to marriage? Only 25% of cohabitating couples stay together for more than 5 years which seems to indicate a lower level of certainty about commitment…which also helps to explain the lower level of satisfaction in their relationship as compared to married couples Cohabitation does not appear to improve the quality of the marriage Cohabitated couples have shown lower marital adjustment than couples who haven’t lived together Higher risk of divorce

Single Life Why are more Americans choosing to live alone?
The stigma attached with remaining single has faded over the past 30 years and more single Americans are choosing to remain unmarried, pursuing careers or raising children from a previous marriage as the focus Will the trend continue? Too soon to tell While we are seeing singlehood increasing, that doesn’t necessarily mean that people are flat out rejecting marriage entirely More realistically, we are seeing people wanting to expand the period of “freedom” and don’t want to rush into the seriousness and responsibilities of getting married and parenthood

Boomerang Kids Boomerang kids – adult children who return to the home of origin or continue to live with their parents 18-34 year-olds have a much higher chance of being boomerang kids that people 40 years ago Young adults are marrying later and therefore staying at home longer First jobs out of college are not well-paying and the high-cost of living forces kids to move back in with their parents Consequences? Put a financial strain of older parents; some complain they’re not carrying their weight Recognition that they’re giving up some freedoms Difficulties balancing work, school, dating or economically surviving is difficult

Marriage, Mates, Sex & Roles

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