By: Leslie J. Miller

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Family Problems and Problem Families

• By Leslie J. Miller

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Table of Contents

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Home Page
Agenda
Problem Families then and Now
Problematizing the Hidden Injustices of Normal
Family Life
Conclusions
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Agenda

1. Scramble Challenge
2. Handout Discussion
3. Feature PowerPoint Presentation
4. Movie
5. Wheel of Fortune Game
6. Discussion Questions

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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

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• 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

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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 societys recognition of them
  as urgent social problems

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Problem Families Then and Now
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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

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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 states reform policies were not
  intended to replace the family but to improve it
• Example The Baby Bonus

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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

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Rearing the Vulnerability of the Child

• 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 societys 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

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• 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

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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,
  childrens 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

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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

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The Dionne Sisters

• 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

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The Employed Mother
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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
  womans 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

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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
  1960s and the alternative family forms of the
  1980s and 1990s, including gay and lesbian, as
  well as single headed families
• Arnups 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 states role in controlling
  at least this alternative family form, as well as
  the goal of the states 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
  judges decision is not what the mothers sexual
  orientation is, but rather what she does with it

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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 womens poverty and in its invisibility
  as a social problem

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Family Violence
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The Problem of Family Violence

• 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-to-man, 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)

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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

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CONCLUSION

• 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

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Discussion Questions

• 1) State intervention continues to almost always
  be directed towards societys 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?