Transcript Family Problems and Problem Families – Student Presentation

By: Leslie J. Miller
Table of Contents
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Agenda
Problem Families then and Now
Problematizing the
Hidden Injustices of
Normal Family Life
Conclusions
Agenda
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Scramble Challenge
Handout Discussion
Feature PowerPoint Presentation
Movie
Wheel of Fortune Game
Discussion Questions
Goal of the Chapter
To present a discussion of family problems
that are responsive to the insights that have
emerged from two fields of scholarship:
Feminist studies and The Sociology of
Deviance and Control
Social Constructionists:
The sociology of deviance tell us that social problems are not discovered
This means that social conditions do not become social problems until some
groups make them an issue-that is targeting them, labeling them deviant, and
attempts to put them on the social agenda
The Study of Social Problems is the Study of that
Problematizing Process
By conceptualizing it as a process, we recognize that social problems is an
interaction- often of struggle-between the powerful and the powerless over
those whose ways are the right ways
Miller argues that the family problems of this century and the last can be
understood only against the backdrop of the emergence of the bourgeois
family ideal: the patriarchal cult of domesticity that had the effect of sanctifying
a single familial arrangement as the only proper and respectable one
Chapter Breakdown
Part One:
Outlines the historical process that
produced the modern ideal of the
domestic family and reviews some
attempts to enforce it by regulating
alternative or unfit forms
Though efforts to reform the unfit
family have taken various guises over
the last century, the image of the
“normal family” is still regularly invoked
to justify the social control of a whole
range of more or less discredited
alternatives
Many feminists have argued that we
should abandon the labelling of
alternative arrangements as immoral,
evil or unhealthy and except the reality
of many forms instead of just one
Part Two:
Develops the insights of feminist
scholars more directly
One consequence of the rise of the
domestic ideal was to focus on those
families that failed to measure up
The main point Miller emphasizes in
part two is that these long hidden
aspects of family life represent forms of
conduct that are currently being raised
as problems by feminists and many
others
Family realities such as the
unrecognized and unpaid labour of
housewives, the “normal” violence of
routine, the structural impoverishment
of women are presently being targeted
by various groups wanting to raise their
visibility and thus society’s recognition
of them as urgent social problems
Problem Families Then and Now
The Rise of the “Cult of
Domesticity”
•
Social historians agreed that
over the 18th and 19th
century in Northern Europe,
there arose in the
burgeoning middle class, a
cult of domesticity that made
the new form an object of
veneration
•
Until the 18th century, the
family existed as a political
and public body, with little or
no private character
• Towards the end of the 18th
Century, the “domestic” or
“intimate” modern form of the
family emerged and became
the normal standard of living
Pre-modern Family
• Was the problem, which was seen as a parasitic
institutional form, whose members were thought to be
making an insufficient contribution to the welfare of
society p. 135
• This family was large and diverse, including household
encompassing servants and kin etc.
• Most of the state’s reform policies were not intended to
replace the family but to improve it
Example: The Baby Bonus
The Baby Bonus
• Began as a state payment to
any mother who was willing to
raise illegitimate children in her
own family, became a
mechanism which allowed the
state to oversee the physical
and moral hygiene of the
bourgeoisie and later the poor,
family by measuring it against
the standard of the new ideal
p.135
• The Ethos of Domesticity had
its origin in European
societies, where privilege
accorded to the new ideal, that
worked to produce a moral
distinction between the
respectable middle-class
family and the work-class
family, who were seen as
deficient and a threat to the
public order
Rearing the Vulnerability of the Child
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The modern or domestic family is
described as “ child centred”
This family understands childhood
as a distinct social category
defined by innocence and
vulnerability, in comparison to the
past, where there was a tendency
to ignore childhood
The new understanding meant
that the child and society must be
segregated, as the child was seen
to be vulnerable to society’s
corrupting influences
This is linked to parenthood,
whereby the fit parent would
segregate their child from the
world of adults (meaning men)
who were bad influences
• Failure to meet this criterion
would produce an unruly child,
a delinquent youth and a
criminal adult
• Thus, the unfit family, which
was essentially the unfit
mother, was labelled a social
problem
• Above all, the slum and
immigrant families, alternative
family forms (divorced,
blended, gay/lesbian and lone
parent families, as well as the
employed mother) were all
defined as inadequate
environments to raise a child
p.136
Policing the “Unfit Family”
The “Slum” Family:
•
During the years of rapid immigration
between 1860 and the First World
War, critics reserved the greatest
concern for the urban slum families,
where the threat to the child was
considered the greatest
•
Middle-Class definition of a slum family
focused on the “Idle Youth” who were
marginally employed as bootblacks
and newsboys, neither going to school
or work, just roaming the streets p. 137
•
Solutions to this would become the
“problem of juvenile delinquency”, and
included some things as training
schools or orphanages, that were seen
to install the child into a better home
•
During the last half of the 19th
Century, children’s wages provided an
important part of family income
•
In comparison with the modern family,
good parenting came to imply the
complete segregation of the child from
the adult world of paid labour
•
There was a general belief that
working-class girls should be at home,
rather then at dance halls or theatres,
for example
Excursus: The Tyranny of the Experts
• Prior to the rise of the modern state, the local community
and church were the major agents of social control
• Mechanisms of control were local and informal, and
included noisy public demonstrations called “shivarees”
which were designed to humiliate the wrongdoer into
right conduct p.138
• The rise of the modern state signalled the weakening of
community authority and the social control of the family
became more standardized and formal
• The problem of slum families became in its entirety the
property of the new (male) child-care professionals
The Dionne Sisters
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Elzire and Olivia Dionne raised several children
under the rural French-Catholic tradition, until
the birth of their 5 daughters in 1934
They had met the requirements for exemplary
parenthood according to their faith and culture
(all 5 children were nourished and housed
without public assistance)
The Dionne's did not have indoor plumbing or
electricity at their farmhouse and were
considered to have lost traditional authority
after the birth of their 5 daughters
The girls were later surrender to the state,
raised in a hospital, in a scientific environment
under the supervision of Dr. William Blatz,
Psychologist
This is an example of state efforts to enforce
the ideal of the bourgeois domesticity by
influencing child-rearing practices
These sisters have paid for the uninvited
scientific and popular celebrity of their early
lives early lives with adulthoods marked by
suicide, poverty and depression
First Nations families have also experienced a
history the apprehension of their children, as
many were considered unfit parents
Overall, such unilateral acts of state
intervention continue almost always to be
directed to societies most marginalized
communities
The Employed Mother
The Employed Mother
•
The Ethos of Domesticity entails a figure of the vulnerable child together with the
mother who is expected to make the child her first concern, above herself
•
The problem with working mothers is that she should be minding her children, instead
of going out and working, which became a concern with the ethos of domesticity,
whereby the role of the mother should become the central mission in a woman’s life
•
The working mother became a focus of anxiety, as recent debates in connection with
the push for more daycare
•
Today, mothers themselves continue to show considerable ambivalence about the
appropriateness of their own paid work: they, work, or plan to while insist that their
proper place is at home, “at least while the children are young” p.143
•
For those women who work in the labour force, mothering is considered their first
commitment or primary “real” work
The New Problem: The Lesbian Family
•
Perhaps the most obvious challenges to the
bourgeoisie ideal of the heterosexual, male
dominated family are the conjugal families of
the 1960’s and the alternative family forms
of the 1980’s and 1990’s, including gay and
lesbian, as well as single headed families
•
Arnup’s study of 5 courts cases dealing with
Lesbian custody before 1984, showed that
court decisions neither repressed nor
tolerated lesbian families as such, but
distinguished between the good and bad
lesbian families p.145
•
This study showed the state’s role in
controlling at least this alternative family
form, as well as the goal of the state’s efforts
•
The state is not concerned with lesbian
families per se, but with the way such
families represent themselves publicly with
regard to the domestic standard
•
In court cases, the determining factor in a
judge’s decision is not what the mother’s
sexual orientation is, but rather what she
does with it
Problematizing the Hidden Injustices
of Normal Family Life
The Feminization of Poverty: Women face higher risks of poverty
than men, which is considered a significant long-term trend
WHY?
•
Because those women who remained housewives all their adult
years have been disadvantaged materially by their total economic
dependence on their husband, whose support might suddenly
disappear through divorce, desertion or death p. 148
•
The jobs for which women are hired are overall the worst: they
offer the lowest pay and the fewest benefits (gender segregation
of the labour force)
•
Cultural assumptions about the nature of femininity also play a
crucial role both in the causes of women’s poverty and in its
invisibility as a social problem
Family Violence
The Problem of Family Violence:
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Family violence is now seen as violence of
several different kinds- against women,
children, the old, and amongst children
(siblings)
Greater visibility is currently attached to the
abuse of women and children than to sibling
abuse and the abuse of older family
members
Domestic violence is sometimes woman-toman, but more often women and children
are the victims
A recent Canadian survey indicated that
29% of women have experience violence at
the hands of their current or previous marital
partner p. 150
Sociologist of the family warn that parental
homicide is the most common killer of
children, parents continue to fear the maniac
in the schoolyard for example
Some violent acts are also normalized and
reinterpreted as acceptable (Ex. fights
between siblings)
Social Control
• According to Miller, when we reassign severe or deviant
violence to others, we evade the recognition that our
intimates can also do us harm
p. 152
• Despite attempts to demonstrate, “scientifically” that
violence is distributed throughout the ambit of human
experience, the violent person who is also an intimate is
not yet culturally defined as a category of deviant
• The tendency to medicalize family violence by attributing
it to physical or mental illness worsens the problem, by
blinding us to the cultural roots of the way we understand
the family and the violence within it
p. 152
CONCLUSION
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The increase attention paid to social control and its historical evolution has
led to a re-evaluation of the linkage between family and state
Feminist scholars have come to recognize that the various ways in which
the state attempts to suppress or improve “problem families has gone
against the interests of women
According to Leslie Miller, state enforcement of the “domestic family” often
entails direct or indirect repression of other workable arrangements, such as
women working outside the home
On the other hand, however, many feminists recognize that women today
welcome state intervention into their homelives
This chapter raises the question of whether the state, given its subservience
to the interests of capital (patriarchy) can be expected to act against those
interests by taking the side of women in the family
At the present time, family theorists have begun to see the state as an
environment within which family members are seen to be the agents of their
own lives
Discussion Questions
1)
State intervention continues to almost always be directed
towards society’s most marginalized communities, and are
conducted in a way that often provokes humiliation,
confusion and often violence. How does the treatment of
lower-class families differ in comparison to upper-class
families, with respect to state intervention and control?
2)
Family violence is presently seen as violence of different
kinds, including violence against children, women, the
elderly and amongst children(siblings). Why do you feel that
victims of domestic violence, in particular women and
children, are reluctant to pursue justification when the
abuser is a family member, and not when the abuser is a
stranger?