1. Family Chapter 7 Lecture PowerPoint © W. W. Norton & Company, 2008
Lecture Summary
This chapter discusses the different forms of family. It delves into changes in the traditional family structure that have occurred mainly due to changes in the society. There have been adjustments of the roles of mothers and fathers and the division of labor in the home. Descriptions and explanations of families of divorce, integrated families, same-sex parents and multiracial families round out the coverage of this topic for this chapter. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the policies regarding gay and lesbian marriages.
Lecture Ideas
1. Give a historical overview of the evolution of the American family beginning with men leaving home to work in factories, separating them from their families (about 1890). In rural areas children were an economic asset, but after families moved to the cities they became an economic liability. Families had to be smaller because of finances, housing, and similar factors. Industrialization created a need for more education, so children spent more time in school and thus, more years at home. Vulcanized rubber that was made in the 1840s allowed couples to limit the number of children so the birthrate plummeted. America’s birthrate is at a record low. Education, recreation, and caring for the elderly shifted from family duties to institutional jobs.
Although industrialization brought greater equality to families it also increased divorce. Health care was starting to improve and grandparents were starting to be involved in the upbringing of their grandchildren’s lives. Women started leaving the home for employment, which had a major impact on the family. Since the 1980s more than half of married women have held paid employment outside the home.
2. In the past, marriage was an alliance of families and dating was controlled within the family. Movies were the catalyst for this change. Dating was now in the hands of peers. Cultures that have arranged marriages have much lower divorce rates than those that do not. One reason for this is that the expectations of marriage are already established and everyone knows their role in the relationship. Young individuals who live in cultures where their parents arrange their marriage say they prefer this system and that they couldn’t imagine leaving something so important up to fate. The United States has unrealistically high expectations regarding marriage.
Where do these expectations come from? Some of them come from our parents, peers, and the media.
Lecture PowerPoint
© W. W. Norton & Company, 2008

2. Family Forms and Changes
Our choice of a romantic or life partner doesn’t depend solely on our attraction to someone, how well we get along with him or her, or our shared life goals.
Whether we realize it or not, there are also legal and cultural factors that affect our choice.
 Lecture Outline
1. Introduction—slide 2
Describe family—what is a normal family? Do we choose our partner without outside influence? (refer to Lecture Idea 1, about love and marriage, & 2, about dating)
a. Ozzie and Harry (a transracial, transnational, cross-class, interfaith, same-sex couple) versus Ozzie and Harriet (a traditional form of family that today evokes nostalgia); which one is the real family?
b. Postwar-era traditional family was dominant, normative, and mythical.
c. In the sociological imagination the traditional family looks like an ideological construct, created ideal that never existed. 2
You May Ask Yourself
Copyright © 2008 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

3. Family Forms and Changes
Endogamy is marriage from within one’s social group.
Exogamy is marriage among different social groups.
Monogamy is when two people only partner with one another.
2. Family Forms and Changes—slides 3 & 4
a. History, culture, and law play a larger role with whom we partner with than love.
i. Endogamy is marriage from within one’s social group.
(a). Movie example: Joe Dirt
ii. Exogamy is marriage among different social groups.
iii. When two people only partner with one other it is known as monogamy.

4. Polygyny occurs when a man has several wives.
Polygamy is a system where a person has more than one spouse at a time.
Polyandry occurs when a woman has several husbands.
Polygyny occurs when a man has several wives.
iv. Polygamy is a system where a person has more than one spouse at a time.
v. Polyandry occurs when a woman has several husbands.
vi. Polygny occurs when a man has several wives.
(a). More common form of polygamy.
(b). Practiced in many contemporary Islamic and African cultures.

5. Family Forms and Changes
A nuclear family or traditional family is a family consisting of a father and mother and their biological children.
Extended family refers to familial networks that extend beyond the nuclear family and may extend beyond the home.
b. Malinowski and the Traditional Family
i. Malinowski’s research on Australian Aboriginals showed that the notion of family was more universal than originally thought.
ii. The nuclear family—slide 5 consists of a mother and a father and their biological children. Is a nuclear family ideal, a functional necessity in modern society? It is deviant from its predecessors and its successors. Then, why do we as a society explain all social ills as caused by the breakdown of this anomaly, freak of a social institution, the nuclear family? 5
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6. Family Forms and Changes
There is no real “typical” family in Western society today.
Multiple generations can live together.
Families can consist of stepsiblings and half-siblings; there are single-parent families.
Individuals and couples can choose not to get married or not to have children.
Cohabitation is an intimate relationship with no legal or religious sanctioning.
iv. There is no real “typical” family in Western society today—slide 6
Multiple generations can live together.
Families can consist of stepsiblings and half-siblings; there are single-parent families.
Individuals and couples can choose not to get married or not to have children.
Cohabitation is an intimate relationship with no legal or religious sanctioning.
(a). Some argue that it is a functional necessity in modern industrial society. 6
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7. Keeping It in the Family: The Historical Divide Between Public and Private
The Preindustrial Family
Functioned like a miniature economy.
Everyone worked to produce the food, clothes, and other items the family needed to survive, and this work took place in or right around the home.
Depended heavily on kinship networks, which are strings of relationships between people related by blood and marriage. These networks weakened as families became more mobile.
The Preindustrial Family—slide 7
Functioned like a miniature economy, business.
Everyone worked to produce the food, clothes, and other items the family needed to survive, and this work took place in or right around the home.
Depended heavily on kinship networks, which are strings of relationships between people related by blood and marriage. These networks weakened as families became more mobile.
i. Extended family is a familial network that extends beyond the home.
(a). Recently emerged as socially acceptable.
iii. Forty percent of women born in the 1980s will not marry or bear children.
iv. Historically, single-parent families occurred because of death; today it is because of divorce.
iii. Slides 7 & 8 The Na people of southern China (children grown up with uncles as the primary male—sex takes place at night for anonymous and spontaneous encounters) and Zambian mothers are examples of alternatives to the traditional idea of hearth and home (daughters do not look to their mothers but to another older female raletive). 7
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8. Keeping It in the Family: The Historical Divide Between Public and Private
The Industrial Revolution created a division between work and home.
Men were associated with the public world of wage-earning work.
Women were relegated to the private world of managing a household and raising children, work for which they were not paid.
3. Keeping It in the Family: The Historical Divide between Public and Private
a. Traditional family is a misleading term and only characteristic of the 1950s and not inclusive.
b. Early Modern Families
i. Kinship networks are strings of relationships between people related by blood.
c. Families in the Industrial Era—slide 10
i. With industrial change and war, roles in the family change drastically, which has had an effect on the forms of families as well.
ii. Two structural changes: gendered division of labor rose and families became separated from their kinship networks.
The Industrial Revolution created a division between work and home.
Men were associated with the public world of wage-earning work.
Women were relegated to the private world of managing a household and raising children, work for which they were not paid.
(a). Grapevine forms to beanpole families. Slide 11
Family structure changed from the “grapevine” forms (horizontal-aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.) to “beanpole” families, where kinship ties are vertical (parents, grandparents and maybe, great grandparents).
Kinship networks—strings of relationships between people related by blood. 8
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9. Keeping It in the Family: The Historical Divide Between Public and Private
The traditional nuclear family is not a timeless and universal concept, but one that developed in response to conditions in a specific time and place—the post–World War II economic boom in the United States.
iii. Cult of domesticity is the notion that true womanhood centers on domestic responsibility and child rearing. This was also an outcome of the industrialization and the separation of public and private work.
d. Families after World War II—slide 12
i. Coontz found that family economic security was high but it was also a time of struggle for racial and sexual equality. It was also mostly attainable by white middle-class and upper-class families.
The traditional nuclear family is not a timeless and universal concept, but one that developed in response to conditions in a specific time and place—the post–World War II economic boom in the United States. 9
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10. The Real World
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11. Family and Work: A Not-So-Subtle Revolution
Factors have brought about significant changes in the organization of work and family life since the 1970s
Increasing divorce rates
Decreasing marriage and fertility rates
Increasing participation of women in the workforce
4. Family and Work: A Not-So-Subtle Revolution—slides 13-16
a. Gerson’s subtle revolution describes the changes that have been taking place in the roles of men and women since the 1970s.
b. The gender revolution is occurring as daughters increasingly take different paths than their mothers.
Slide 13 Factors have brought about significant changes in the organization of work and family life since the 1970s
Increasing divorce rates
Decreasing marriage and fertility rates—postponing marriage and having a baby
Slide 14 Increasing participation of women in the workforce: 30% in 1950 to 66% today 11
You May Ask Yourself
Copyright © 2008 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

12. Family and Work: A Not-So-Subtle Revolution
There have been numerous studies on the effects on children of having a mother who works, and the findings have varied enormously.
A new way to approach the topic is to ask how having a working mother affects children within the same family differently.
c. In The Pecking Order—slides 15 & 16, Conley found that sons and daughters outcomes may be different depending on the mother’s employment.
Working moms: sons & daughters equal wages on average
Non-working moms: females make $8,000 less on average and are less likely to graduate from college, even though more women graduate from college today than men. 12
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13. A Feminist “Rethinking” of the Family
Feminist theorists have shown how gender roles are learned in the family and how the family can be a battleground for power over decisions about household chores, where to live, raising children, spending money, and much more.
5. A Feminist “Rethinking of the Family” Slide 17
a. Berk saw the family as a “gender factory” where men and women take on roles paralleling the divide between public and private spheres.
i. The family is where we learn to “do gender.”
ii. Most people learn to expect men and women to be different at home, in the family.
iii. Feminist theorists have shown how gender roles are learned in the family (gender factory) and how the family can be a battleground for power over decisions about household chores, where to live, raising children, spending money, and much more.
b. The “cult of domesticity” has impacted women’s ideas of family even though it is a historical and cultural anomaly. Feminists have pointed out that this form of family of family is exploitative of women.
c. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had an enormous effect on women’s views of domesticity. 13
You May Ask Yourself
Copyright © 2008 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

14. The Chore Wars: Supermom Battles the Laundry
Even though many women who are married or live with a male partner work outside the home, they usually take on a disproportionate share of domestic duties.
This inequality plays out in terms of the time women spend on household tasks, the types of tasks they take on, and in the way the tasks or work is perceived.
6. The Chore Wars: Supermom Battles the Laundry—slides 19-21
a. Second shift is Arlie Hochschild’s term for women’s responsibilities after returning home from the office: cooking dinner, doing laundry, bathing children, reading bedtime stories, and sewing Halloween costumes. Men watch more TV and sleep more than women.
i. In households where men and women genuinely share the second shift, marriages are much more likely to be stable and happy ones.
ii. Most men don’t budge on the issue of sharing the second shift.
b. Division of labor within the home refers to who does what and how the chores are divided. Male chores: periodic, less time consuming and enjoyable; Female chores: daily, stressful, necessary for the daily functioning of the family, not enjoyable but mundane.
i. An egalitarian division of labor is much more likely to exist in the households of gay and lesbian couples.
c. Neoclassical economists look at a member’s power in the family as a direct expression of that member’s utility to the family unit.
d. The supermom cooks, cleans, climbs the career ladder, and is a devoted parent and partner. However, this causes frustration for women. 14
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15. The Chore Wars: Supermom Battles the Laundry
Women are more likely than men to think about divorce and to have very specific reasons for why they want to divorce, yet women may stay in an unhappy marriage longer than men because divorce often puts women in a more precarious financial position.
Studies show that a more equal distribution between men and women of the responsibility for domestic chores makes for happier and more stable marriages.
e. Slide 20 Women are more likely than men to think about divorce and to have very specific reasons for why they want to divorce, yet women may stay in an unhappy marriage longer than men because divorce often puts women in a more precarious financial position.
f. Fair families occur where husbands and wives equally split the roles of breadwinner and homemaker. 15
You May Ask Yourself
Copyright © 2008 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

16. Swimming and Sinking: Inequality and American Families
African American women have often taken a leading role in providing for their families.
In the 1960s some social scientists presented this as a negative, arguing that this strong role for women undercut the role of the father in black families and ultimately led to a host of social problems.
7. Swimming and Sinking: Inequality and American Families—slides 22-26
a. African American Families
The typical black American mother has three shifts because she is more often the primary or only breadwinner.
ii. Pathological matriarchy undercuts the role of the father in black families. 16
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17. Swimming and Sinking: Inequality and American Families
W. E. B. DuBois argued that the high rate of female-headed families in the African American community was a result of racial oppression and poverty, not a cause of it.
William Julius Wilson argued an outright shortage of employed, un-incarcerated black men with whom black women could hope to form a stable family unit, thus leaving them with little choice in terms of taking responsibility for their families.
iii. Slide 16 W. E. B DuBois argued that African American female-headed families were the outcome, rather than the cause, of racial oppression and poverty, NOT THE CAUSE OF IT.
iv. Slide 17 William Julius Wilson argued an outright shortage of employed, un-incarcerated black men with whom black women could hope to form a stable family unit, thus leaving them with little choice in terms of taking responsibility for their families. 17
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18. Swimming and Sinking: Inequality and American Families
African American communities tend to have expanded notions of kinship, which is perhaps rooted in the slave experience where biological families were often separated and people formed family bonds with nonblood relatives.
v. Slide 19 African American communities tend to have expanded notions of kinship, which is perhaps rooted in the slave experience where biological families were often separated and people formed family bonds with nonblood relatives.
vi. African American families should be judged according to their community centered families and not by the standards of the nuclear family. 18
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19. Swimming and Sinking: Inequality and American Families
It is difficult to speak of one Latino community in the United States as Latinos come from many different countries and cultural backgrounds, but some characteristics can be identified as common to Latino families, including:
Strong family and community ties
Adherence to traditional gender roles
Devout Catholicism
High marriage rates
Low divorce rates
b. Latino Families
i. Remittances are the funds sent to family members back home.
(a). Remittances are now one of the largest sources of cash to the Mexican and many other Central American economies.
It is difficult to speak of one Latino community in the United States as Latinos come from many different countries and cultural backgrounds, but some characteristics can be identified as common to Latino families, including:
Strong family and community ties
Adherence to traditional gender roles
Devout Catholicism
High marriage rates
Low divorce rates 19
You May Ask Yourself
Copyright © 2008 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

20. Swimming and Sinking: Inequality and American Families
Single, working mothers face many challenges, among them the attitude of welfare critics who think that they prefer being on welfare to working.
Most women would prefer not to be on welfare, but the system is such that often they end up with less income and fewer benefits when they move from welfare to work.
c. Flat Broke with Children—slide 19
i. Single mothers and poverty in America often go hand in hand.
ii. The 1996 Personal Work, Opportunity, and Responsibility Act was Clinton’s national welfare reform, known as the welfare to work program, forcing single mothers to leave their children unattended (no money for childcare) so that they could become “responsible workers.” What about responsible parents? Is this program helping or hurting society? Would you rather be a responsible parent or be a responsible worker?
iii. Single, working mothers face many challenges, among them the attitude of welfare critics who think that they prefer being on welfare to working.
iv. Most women would prefer not to be on welfare, but the system is such that often they end up with less income and fewer benefits when they move from welfare to work. 20
You May Ask Yourself
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21. The Pecking Order: Inequality Starts at Home
The size of a family and its resources can affect how parents relate to each of their children and can create inequalities among siblings.
Birth order and “natural” abilities also play a role, but the bottom line is that in the home a status hierarchy often fosters inequality.
8. The Pecking Order: Inequality Starts at Home—slide 20
a. A pecking order emerges during the course of childhood.
b. It both reflects and determines siblings’ positions in the overall status ordering that occurs within society.
c. The size of a family and its resources can affect how parents relate to each of their children and can create inequalities among siblings.
i. Birth order and “natural” abilities also play a role, but the bottom line is that in the home a status hierarchy often fosters inequality. 21
You May Ask Yourself
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22. The Future of Families, and There Goes the Nation!
Divorce is a constant in our society, and debates will continue about its effects on children. The only certainty may be that high levels of parental conflict—whether between married or divorced parents—are not good for children.
9. The Future of Families, and There Goes the Nation!—slides 21
a. Divorce—slide 28
Divorce is a constant in our society, and debates will continue about its effects on children. The only certainty may be that high levels of parental conflict—whether between married or divorced parents—are not good for children.
i. Everything from the timing of the divorce to a parent’s hostility can influence a child’s educational attainment, future earnings, and socioeconomic success. 22
You May Ask Yourself
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23. The Future of Families, and There Goes the Nation!
Families today come in many forms—blended families with stepsiblings or half-siblings, families headed by same-sex partners, interracial families, intergenerational families. So perhaps the optimal description of the “ideal” family is one that best serves the needs of all its members.
b. Blended Families
i. Complexities increase drastically when two family units are integrated.
ii. Slide 29 Families today come in many forms—blended families with stepsiblings or half-siblings, families headed by same-sex partners, interracial families, intergenerational families. So perhaps the optimal description of the “ideal” family is one that best serves the needs of all its members.
c. Gay and Lesbian Couples
i. Civil unions are legally recognized unions explicitly intended to offer similar state-provided legal rights and benefits as marriage.
ii. Domestic partnerships are legally recognized unions that guarantee only select rights to same-sex couples.
d. Multiracial Families
i. Miscegenation literally means “a mixing of kinds;” use of outmarriage or exogamy is preferred by sociologists.
(a). This term is politically and historically charged and should be used with a degree of caution.
ii. In 2005 about 7.5 percent of America’s 59 million couples were interracial. 23
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24. Figure 7.1 | Changing Structure of American Families

25. Figure 7.2 | Women in the Labor Force, 1970-2004

26. Figure 7.3 | Trends in Housework since 1900
The total has clearly declined since the 1960s, but women still spend more time then men cooking, cleaning, changing diapers, and running a household. Women now do only 1.8 hours of housework for every hour that a man puts in, compared to the six-fold difference that existed in the 1960s.

27. Figure 7.4 | Divorce Rate over the Past Century

28. Figure 7.5 | Marriage Laws by State