Poorly researched claims about the history of the family but I will not be taking criticism at this time, please direct all complaints to @unaxiii_ on twitter dot com. A response to Melinda Cooper’s Family Values (2017), heavily relying on the history of patriarchal property relations from Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. I rambled but thanks for listening.
Being one of the primary means people have for organizing themselves for purposes such as child-rearing, food preparation and consumption, and rest and recuperation, the family serves as both the starting point and ending point of almost all “economic” activity. Workers are quite literally produced by the family, the goal of a large portion of “economy” in the abstract sense is the provisioning of people with food and other necessities, and families are where such consumption is done. All of society and economic activity is built on a foundation of unpaid labor performed in the household, largely by women. It would be ludicrous to try and argue that “families”—at least in some sense of the term—are not an economic institution; certainly households are without question an economic agent, and for thousands of years definitions of “family” have been tied up in land-ownership, with patriarchal land-owners at the center of it all. In patriarchal societies, the family serves as a measure of the relative power of their male head of household; how many servants they command, how many children they have, how obedient their household members are to them serve as a basis of power, and the model of the patriarchal family became a blueprint for paternalistic states, empires, corporations, and property relations over the last several thousand years. While the institutions of the patriarchal family and property existed prior to it, of note here is Roman property law and citizenship rights being the basis for modern European and Anglo-American (and of course the many places around the world colonized by Europeans) patriarchal families and ideas of the father as head of household, and its influence on the notion of citizenship and political and economic rights and freedoms. Modern cultural conceptions of what a man is allowed to do with his wife and children—whether or not he “owns” them and what that entails—go back to debates over Roman property law, as it was being interpreted by medieval European legal scholars with a renewed interest in ancient Rome. As capitalism became a dominant mode of power in the world, many people flocked to cities in search of work in the new factories, and new forms of housing and sexual division of labor created new standards for what a family was under capital.
During the Keynesian, “regulated capitalism” era “the family” changed significantly for much of the population. The rise of the welfare state, the automobile, the highway, and suburbanization in America increased the possibility for single-family home-ownership for a number of American middle and working class families. This allowed for the spread of the concept of the nuclear family (what Cooper describes as “Fordist”), a single-family household consisting of a patriarchal, breadwinner father, a mother who serves as a housekeeper, and two and a half kids. Along with those nuclear families came real estate, pensions, family-based health insurance, college funds, welfare benefits, and much more. Notably, such luxuries were almost exclusively available to white people, and of course largely only available to people who found themselves in such Fordist family units. During the neoliberal era, two divergent trends have emerged among families. The first is that the cracks in the stability of the nuclear family as a model for social organization began to show. As feminist movements advocated for the rights of women to enter the workforce, seek divorce, have more autonomy over their lives, nuclear family structures became less common. As Black liberation movements sought inclusion into civil society, welfare, and reparations it became clear that providing this middle class “American dream” to more than a select few was hardly economically or politically feasible in the eyes of the ruling classes. Over the last 50 years, fewer and fewer “true” nuclear families exist over time and family frequently has come to include single parents, divorced parents, multi-generational homes, multi-family housing, LGBTQ parents, polyamorous relationships, chosen families, and so forth. On the other hand, the second trend regarding the notion of family in the neoliberal era is that, even though the nuclear family as a concept was a relatively recent invention, was only ever available for a select few members of the population, and quickly became unsustainable after just a couple generations, propaganda revering the nuclear family as “traditional”, as the paragon of what home life should be, and what life had always been like for most people, has been a dominant force in conservative and neoliberal economic thinking around welfare, women’s rights, children’s rights, healthcare, schooling, city planning, unions, retirement, and home ownership. In the eyes of neoliberal and neoconservative thinkers, “the family” is always under attack by feminists, radicals, sexual deviants, single mothers “leeching” off of welfare, irresponsible fathers abandoning their families, and countless other boogeymen, usually with racist undertones and almost always with outright misogynist and homophobic overtones.
Melinda Cooper, in the first chapter of Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservativism, details this history of changes to the family in the neoliberal era, and describes various other authors analyses, showing that even well-meaning writers frequently fall into the traps of aggrandizing the Fordist family as a goal for modern social movements to seek to restore, and/or blaming social movements of the latter half of the 20th century (largely feminists, but also gay liberation, Black liberation, student movements, etc.) for selling out to capital simply because parts of those movements have been co-opted by capitalism for its own ends. She also notes that in the neoliberal era, the distribution of wealth and resources has far less to do with the wages people are paid (in particular the “Fordist family wage”, the wages and benefits a male head of household would be paid in the Keynesian era with the expectation that it would support his family and some degree of upward mobility), and far more to do with inheritance. And the ability of children to inherit wealth from parents being the primary factor in determining wealth and income distribution has direct implications as to the economic viability of single-parent households, same-sex couples, polyamorous relationships, chosen families, or god-forbid people simply born into poor households. The rich are born rich and stay rich, the poor are born poor and stay poor. Women are respected only insofar as they can be incorporated into the labor force and increase shareholder value. The burden of household labor still falls onto them after they finish 8 hours at their job which still pays them less than their male counterparts, and if they can’t keep up and need assistance (and especially if they’re Black) they are derided as “welfare queens”. Children are an “investment”, the elderly are a “burden”, and the machinery of capital marches onwards.
Cooper, Melinda. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. Princeton University Press, 2017.
Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, 2011.