|
|
|
|
|
|
SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
by
No. 24 in a Series of Mini-Lectures written for Graduate Students in American Sociology by T.R. Young. Sponsored in part by the Red Feather Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology and by the Sociology Department at Texas Woman's University, Denton, Texas.
This is the third last piece in the set about postmodernity. Next I will give you some ideas about postmodern criminology and wind up the mini-series with some stuff on postmodern philosophy of science...informed by the new sciences of Chaos and Complexity. In this mini-lecture, I want to help you trace the changing shape of the family as it threads through human history. One does great harm to the actual events which constitute something called the family but still there is an overview which serves one well in trying to understand the great changes which we see in both family structure and in gender relations. Bear with me while I try to work through this topic.
A. A BRIEF HISTORY. Primate families became human families when proto-humans had enough cerebral capacity to form and to use symbol sets and thus create rules and practices not encoded in the depths of genes or body chemistry. Some what more than 400,000 years ago, the first vestiges of this remarkable capacity to think, to imagine, to believe and to reshape gender relations into an infinitely huge number of patterns...appeared. Scratchings on bones and stones in the Dragon bone caves near Peking testify to the emergence of such capacities...out of these capacities was born the beginning of hominid family structure. Mother-child bonding was, arguably, the beginning of family structure and, less arguably, remains so today. But there are bonds between people of a sort which cannot be explained by bonding or by body chemistry.
Family forms, in their pre-modern form for many millennia centered around the mother/sister set as long as humans engaged in hunting, gathering, and simple horticulture. Sometime, in the lost history of humanity, a woman or a group of women began to sow the seeds, weave the baskets, store the grains and feed their close kin through the long cold, dry months of the winter. Water was essential to the effort to feed those bonded to each other by touch, taste, smell, voice and by watchful eyes that follow the activity of those they love.
Some 4000 years or more, several great hydraulic societies developed, the first in what is now called Iran along the Tigris/Euphrates watershed. Others developed along the great river systems in Egypt, India, China, West Africa and later, in Mexico and Peru. Profound changes occurred in religion, economics, politics and family. Science itself developed out of the need to measure, weigh, re-draw boundaries and to gather taxes and tithes to support an ever growing super-structure of artists, writers, scholars, priests, armies, and royal courts.
With the advent of settled agriculture in both dry and wet-land farming, came the notion of property...claims of the right to use and to inherit given acres of land emerged as human families became ever more dependent upon what food and textiles from planting, cultivating, harvesting and storing of crops. The very welfare of the extended family depended upon the legality and the morality of such claims. Out of the many disputes to land and to crops, came the kind of family law found in Deuteronomy...patriarchy and the transfer of property through the male line...often the eldest male.
B. Patriarchy. This family form replaced, in all probability, a matriarchy in which males had limited contact and limited claims to the children of the mother. Lots of dispute about this in the literature but, by and large, it seems to fit what little we know of pre-history.
The rules of patriarchy altered, for centuries, gender relations and sexual norms. First gender relations: there are four rules of courtship and marriage which give power to males to dominate women.
In all new marriages, these rules render females at a great disadvantage. Add to this rules of patrilocality and the woman finds herself surrounded by people with whom the male has been bonded for 12, 15, or with late marriages, 17 years.
The great concern for property rights and undisputable claims by the extended family to given tracts of farmland, water rights, herds and farming equipment meant that the sexuality of the female was squeezed into the smallest possible dimensions...the case is simple...if the eldest son is to inherit, it is absolutely essential that the first male born to a woman be that of the patriarch. If males from other families could make claims on the land by virtue of claims on the first son, then a large extended family would be left destitute. It is important to note that, for most of human history, female sexuality was her own; to vest in whatever male happened to be at hand and adequate to the task...apart from the rules of incest and exogamy.
There are two things to keep in mind in considering the narrow limits placed upon the sexuality of women...first, the sexuality of men was not so confined. In Deut., males are to stay chaste and faithful to the marriage but in practice, male sexuality roamed far wider than did female sexuality. Second, in other political economies, sexual norms were very different, In Africa and in the Americas, young people were encouraged/permitted to act upon their sexuality...until the first child was born. In Hawaii, I am told, there are 26 sexual relationships permitted....very different concepts of property. Then too, the very concept of the 'bastard' is unknown to other political economies. We accept, love and sustain whatever children are born into the family. Much of the blind ire and anger in America about 'unwed' mothers stems from the ideas and idealogies of patriarchy.
With the advent of hydraulic societies and the great surpluses which ensue from competent farming, several sexual norms were imposed:
These rules are the some of the more interesting rules of marriage and family life we have inherited from the mid-east and from patriarchy. These survive the centuries until the advent of the modern era.
Modern Family Forms. The modern era began, it is said, with the work of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton on the laws of motion. By 1610, Bacon had written 'de Novum Organum,' an explanation of the new pathways to knowledge informed by Copernicus, Galileo and others. Newton published, 'Principia Mathematica' around 1680. The modern era lay there simmering and smoldering until the industrial revolution came about. It is said that the first factory appeared in an English village, Huddersfield, in the middle of the 17th century. Production left the farm and cottage to go into the shop and factory. Family structures and functions changed dramatically.
Feminist movements appear to offer ideas about how to do gender and female-ness in such social conditions:
First: never get married, drop out of school, have his children and put him through college. He'll leave....get married if you must, but ...
Second: stay in school, get a degree, find a job in the monopoly sector or in the state sector. Never let a male mediate your relationship to the means of production/distribution. [and don't work in the competitive sector; it has only low wages, little job security, no pensions, no health care or vacation benefits]
Third: learn self defense; there are words to find and to use which will dampen unwelcome attention in most public places [Do you have a venereal disease??? Answer: I do!] Learn physical forms of defense...or use some high tech stuff to discourage male aggression. Fourth: get a support group and keep it...you will need it and they will need you over the next 40 years or so.
Finally: work for social justice for all your sisters for all your life; not
just for yourself but for all the sisters and all the children.
Whatever course the women who read this or teach this take, my very best wishes go with you...socialist feminists have taught me a lot and I am greatly indebted to them. I have worked with a lot of bourgeois feminists and I respect them, their effort and sheer determination to beat men at their own game. Then too, in a violent, competitive sexist society, there is a real need for separate institutions. I have been adopted as a 'sister' by most of my colleagues at TWU and am permitted to be part of some of these separate activities...and I am told that there is a coven in Ft. Collins which protected me while I helped my Black and Chicano students confront the University with demands and supported the women's movement on campus. I am grateful...I need all the help I can get. You will probably find that some combination in some sequence makes sense in your own life...whatever; good luck to you.
C. POSTMODERN FAMILY LIFE. There are two readings which you will want to take a look at in thinking through what you want to know and teach about postmodernity and family life. There is David Cheal's article in the March, 1993 issue of the J. of Family Issues...and there is another by Jon Bernardes in the same issue. Cheal says [and I agree], that what we are seeing is not the dis-organization of the family but the emergence of new forms of intimacy which must be seen as adjustments, divergences, and different rather than pathological behavior. Postmodern family thought argues that variety and difference has always been the case in family life...that no two iterations of a marriage [or any other social form] is ever alike...it is a political act to insist that there is a 'normal' pattern to which all 'normal' people must conform. Cheal offers an agenda for research in this way of conceptualizing family. Jon Bernardes, of Wolverhampton Polytechnic, U.K., agrees that we 'must reconcile ourselves to the study [not condemnation] of postmodern family life. He notes that, in U.K., only 2% of the families fit the modern concept of 'the normal nuclear family.' Bernardes excoriates modern family theorists [by name] for the grand scale of oppression we endorse by our courses and text on family life. Bernardes offers several 'theorems' for a postmodern sociology of the family: I have shortened and simplified:
D. THE FAMILY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE. For most of human history, kinship units have been the source and solutions to problems of life...they remain central to the need for sociality, security, support in life crises, face-to-face dramas of the Holy and one's sources of social identity.
I have no idea what forms of intimacy will emerge in the future...I have a lot of confidence in the wisdom and poetic genius of men and women...I expect that for billions of people living today, the traditional family form(s) will suffice...for a billion or more, entirely new ways of doing life and love will emerge...and, as the forms of capitalism emerge, change, and are replaced, new adjustments must be made. Out of all the turmoil in Central Europe, South Africa, Pacific rim Asia, and especially in the core of global capitalism, a thousand new forms of gendering and gender relations will emerge. In all of this, an affirmative postmodern sociologists can work for social justice programs oriented to family life/foundational forms of intimacy:
E. POSTMODERN 'FAMILY' SOCIOLOGY:
Weeping in The Playtime
Do you hear the children weeping,
Oh my sister...the young children
Oh my sister, they are weeping bitterly,
They are weeping in the playtime of others.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Bless all the children, T.R. Young