Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Families and
Households
- Conflict/Criticisms
- Marxists
believe that the
family provides
important
functions for
capitalism.
- Engels
- Need for family arose
when private property
started to have value
- Organised inheritance
system was needed
- Fathers needed to
pass down property
- Ownership of property subjected
women to unequal power
relations in the home
- Zaretsky
- Family serves capitalism
offering emotional security
from the oppressive world of
work
- Only provides emotional
warmth to encourage members
to continue living another day
under harsh realities of
capitalism
- Althusser and Poulantzas
- Family seen as
serving functions of
an ideological state
apparatus
- Socialising both
pro-capitalist ideology and
its own familiar ideology in
order to maintain such
family patterns over time
- Socialising members to
accept gender roles and
into accepting the
separate roles and jobs in
the home
- Feminists believe
that the family
reinforces gender
inequality and
patriarchy
- Marxist feminists
- Family meets the needs of
campitalism, maintenence of
class and patriarchal
inequality
- Margaret Benston (1972)
- nuclear family provides
basic commodity required by
capitalism
- Labour power by
reproducing
- Rearing the future
workforce at little
cost to the capitalist
class
- Women are a reserved army of
labour and used in time of
economic growth and pushed
back into the home in times of
economic slow-down
- Radical feminists
- Kate Millet (1970)
- Modern societies and
families characterised
by patriarchy
- Family is the root to all
of womens oppression
and should be abolished
- Can only be done by seperatism
- Consensus/Positives
- Functionalists see the
importance of the nuclear family,
universality, changing functions
and how the nuclear family fits
modern society
- GP Murdock
- Family is universal and performs 4 major functions
- Socialisation
of the young
- Economic support
- Reproduction of
the next
generation
- Stable
satisfaction of
the sex drive
- Talcott Parsons
- 2 basic and irreducible functions
- Stabilisation of
adult
personalities
- Primary
socialisation
- New Right theorists belueve hat the family is the
cornerstone of society but is under threat