Families, Labour and Love

Family diversity in a changing world

Maureen Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000256291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

We think of our family life as very personal, but in fact it is shaped by influences well beyond our control. Families, Labour and Love identifies the ways in which family and personal life in three 'settler' societies - Australia, New Zealand and Canada - has been shaped by colonisation, immigration, globalisation, demographic changes, law and policy.Baker shows that these three countries, each a former colony, developed similar family trends and similar family policies. Strongly gendered patterns of paid and unpaid work played a major role in family life. The family practices of indigenous people were largely overlooked, as were those of recent immigrant groups. However local conditions also produced significant differences in family experiences among the three countries.Richly illustrated with examples, comparative data and textual sources, Families, Labour and Love provides a broad-ranging analysis of the family which will appeal to students, researchers and policy-makers. Maureen Baker outlines with great clarity the diversity of families and the way in which they are shaped by historical and cultural forces. The focus on Australia, New Zealand and Canada is not only refreshing but throws into sharp relief the impact on contemporary families of the colonial experience, industrialisation, large scale immigration and globalisation. David de Vaus, La Trobe University

1
The Personal and Social Worlds of Families

Think of the last time you watched a television documentary or read a news item in a magazine or newspaper. Many of these items now begin with a personal story designed to attract our interest. They often tell us little about how the political situation developed, instead providing explicit details of people’s daily lives, their family relationships and feelings. The media use this personal approach for good reason. They know that most viewers are fascinated by other people’s private lives and troubles, and will pay attention to intimate details before they will follow political or social issues. When the media interview public figures, such as entertainers, sports heroes or politicians, they also attempt to focus on their ambitions, family support and close relationships. This personal world is undeniably fascinating but tends to downplay the social context.

Our ‘personal’ decisions and lifestyle ‘choices’ are influenced in a myriad, often hidden, ways by what happens in the wider world. The ideas currently prevailing concerning appropriate behaviour for our gender and age, our cultural and social class positions, our experiences in paid and unpaid work, technological change, legal and policy restrictions, and popular and political discourse can all influence the course of our lives. We are by no means powerless to remake our identities and lifestyles according to our beliefs and desires, but we do so within social circumstances that offer both opportunities and constraints on our choices and actions.

When we are asked to think about family life, our initial response is usually framed by our own close relationships. For most people, these relationships help form their personal identity and continue to provide a life focus. Dwelling on our own family experiences can lead us to assume that our lives are unique. We may also think that we make our major life decisions primarily by ourselves or with the assistance of family and close friends. Yet we cannot underestimate the social and cultural context in which we live.

Studying families from a sociological perspective requires us to question our personal assumptions about what constitutes ‘normal’ behaviour. Although our own experiences may be enlightening, we need to compare them with research findings about how other people think and behave, to see if our experiences are typical or unusual. Family life often differs according to place of upbringing, cultural and religious background, family structure, social class background and a person’s gender. While some of these differences may be subtle, others are more obvious. The fact that all of us have acquired first-hand knowledge of some form of family life gives greater intensity to discussions about families than about other academic subjects.

Family life takes place within national and global culture, under the influence and regulation of laws, policies and economic change. Exploring how family life has been transformed over the past century within different nations provides us with a better understanding of current family trends. Patterns are identifiable because attitudes and behaviour are influenced by social and cultural factors, such as our family income and our parents’ education and occupation, our religious upbringing and cultural origin, and the wider values and practices of our society.

We cannot assume that all people live the same way; nor should we judge other people’s behaviour by our own standards. Our personal prejudices need to be set aside so that we can more accurately describe and explain family trends. Studying personal life from a sociological or social science perspective means that different ways of behaving and thinking can be identified, systematically compared and analysed within different cultural contexts.

Intimate relationships have always been influenced by economic, political, technological and social trends in the larger society, but social scientists have not always accurately described or explained how and why this occurs. This book discusses recent trends in family life and relates them to changes in labour markets, the economy, family-related policies, government discourse and cultural ideas. To make this broad topic more manageable, the book focuses on and compares families living in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

WHY FOCUS ON FAMILIES IN AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND AND CANADA?

The three countries are studied together because they initially shared many similarities in culture, social policy, language and laws (excepting the Canadian province of Quebec, which always used the French language and civil law). These three countries were also ‘settler societies’, originally populated by indigenous people but then settled and politically and numerically dominated by immigrants. This means that we can discuss the impact of colonial concepts of family on indigenous people, whose ideas about family structure and relationships differed from those of the colonisers in all three countries. This tripartite comparison also enables us to study the effect of large-scale immigration, industrialisation and globalisation on family life.

Historically, governments of these nations have always shared ideas about the relationship between the state and the family and continued to do so with the restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s. They all introduced unemployment benefits during or just after the Great Depression of the 1930s, and universal family allowances in the 1940s. They expanded provision for child care, maternity allowance and lone mothers in the 1960s and 1970s, and established better mechanisms to enforce child support in the late 1980s. In the 1990s, they all searched for new ways to reduce welfare expenditure and to encourage mothers on benefits to enter paid work (Baker and Tippin 1999).

Despite cross-national similarities, many differences are also apparent. European settlement in Canada predates that in Australia and New Zealand, and Canada was established as a bilingual and bicultural country, leading to substantial differences in historical immigration patterns, trade union development and political structures. Unlike New Zealand, both Australia and Canada are federations; unlike Australia, the Canadian provinces retained jurisdiction over most laws and regulations related to family life. This means that there could be as many variations within Canada as between Canada and Australia. These differences need to be highlighted whenever they are relevant to a cross-national study of families. Although this book focuses on national trends, certain topics require the investigation of specific provincial, regional or cultural cases.

Students are often curious about but not always aware of similar socioeconomic trends in these three industrialised countries, or when and why these trends diverge. Furthermore, policy-makers and their advisors within the three nations continue to monitor the policies of other jurisdictions for alternative ways of dealing with similar policy concerns. In order to prepare this book, it was necessary to collate statistics and research from many sources, and to make some educated guesses about national similarities or differences when information was unavailable. Whenever possible, comparable statistics have been used from international databases (such as United Nations statistics and the Luxembourg Income Study).

The three countries differ considerably in terms of population: Canada contains about 30 million people, Australia nearly 20 million and New Zealand less than 4 million. Nevertheless, over the past three decades, they have experienced similar demographic trends, including a decline in fertility, an ageing of the population, a decline in legal marriage, a rise in divorce rates and an increase in mother-led families. Divorce rates are similar and all three countries have about 12 per cent of the population aged 65 and over (Australian Bureau of Statistics [hereafter ABS] 1999b, p. 197). Yet substantial demographic differences continue to exist. Most noticeably, New Zealand has the highest percentage of one-parent families, the highest birth rate (especially among Maori and Pacific Island women) and the highest rates of teenage births and births outside marriage (Bélanger 1999, p. 26; Statistics New Zealand [hereafter Statistics NZ] 1998d).

National statistics are influenced by the cultural composition of the population and the socioeconomic characteristics of each cultural group. For example, 14.5 per cent of the New Zealand population is comprised of Maori, and about 20 per cent of both Maori and Pacific Island peoples combined (Statistics NZ 1997b). In contrast, the indigenous population forms only 2 per cent of the population of Australia and 2.8 per cent of Canada’s (ABS 1999b, p. 103). Generally, family-related statistics differ for indigenous and non-indigenous people in the three countries (as do socioeconomic statistics).

Cross-national research into family trends and policies is difficult because trends and social policies are always in a state of transition and reform. Furthermore, equivalent statistics and comparable qualitative studies are difficult to find. Although some comparative research has been done on demographic and policy variables, researchers have not studied family and personal life across these three nations’ boundaries in a systematic way. One reason for this is that national statistics are sometimes calculated in different ways and definitions occasionally vary. In addition, some of the parameters of law and social programs differ. Despite these concerns, cross-national research is important because it allows us to look beyond state or national borders to see if our local trends are similar to those in other industrialised nations. If they are, we can create explanations of family trends and policies that draw on global conditions and broad political, legal and cultural influences.

Before we proceed with a discussion of definitions of ‘family’ and recent family trends, we need a brief overview of the origin of family studies as it is taught in the three countries to provide the context for the discussion of definitions.

THE ORIGINS OF FAMILY STUDIES

Family studies as an academic discipline in western universities began in Europe and North America. Most of the founders of sociology, as well as family studies, have been educated males of European origin, who created generalised theories to explain how the larger society and culture influenced family life and to identify those aspects of human behaviour that are universal. They tried to identify the origins of the modern family and whether human nature or social conditions determined the structure of people’s personal and family lives. More recently, social scientists have realised that some of these ideas were based too much on gendered experience as well as on their own national, cultural and class backgrounds. Feminists sometimes speak disparagingly of these theorists as ‘dead white males’ (Gilding 1997, p. 46).

Historically, family sociology has three broad beginnings. The first involved Europeans who empirically studied or theorised about European families. The pioneer of empirical family research is usually identified as Frederic Le Play (1806–82), who studied the rural European ‘stem family’, or extended family, consisting of parents and one married child who would eventually inherit the family property. Le Play, who could be considered a dead white male, began family sociology by lamenting the rise of the nuclear family (which he called the ‘unstable family’), the demise of patriarchal authority and the decline of hierarchy. Nevertheless, he helped grant legitimacy to the study of family structure and social history (Gilding 1997, p. 46).

Friedrich Engels (1820–95) was one of the first European intellectuals to document British family life. He also theorised about how transformations in the economy and production impacted on family life, including relations between husbands and wives. He was especially concerned with how changes in the economic basis of society from feudalism to capitalism moved production outside the household and into the factory. He argued that the movement of production outside the home encouraged a patriarchal family structure with husbands as wage earners and wives as care providers.

The second stream of family studies began with European anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), who studied family life and culture by travelling to various parts of the world, including South Pacific islands and Australia. They tried to identify universal behaviours and social structures, and to explain how specific practices were integrated into the entire culture. Later, the American Margaret Mead (1901–78) was one of the first female anthropologists to carry out field research among South Pacific cultures and to focus primarily on gender, family and sexuality. The ideas of these researchers were widely debated among educated citizens as well as academics at the time.

The third stream in the origin of family sociology came from American studies of social interaction, of small groups and of the family as a ‘social institution’. These researchers gathered material on dating, courtsh...