Personal Life

Carol Smart

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745645643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

For more than a decade, Carol Smart has been at the forefront of debates about the sociology of the family. Yet she has become frustrated by the fixation of many commentators with the supposed decline of commitment, and even the decline of the possibility of family life. In this exciting new book, she puts forward a new way of understanding families and relationships.

Breaking with conventional wisdom, her book offers a fresh conceptual approach to understanding personal life, which realigns empirical research with theoretical analysis. She gives emphasis to ideas of connectedness, relationality and embeddedness, rejecting many of the assumptions found in theories of individualisation and de-traditionalisation by authors such as Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Bauman and Giddens.

Instead, her approach prioritises the bonds between people, the importance of memory and cultural heritage, the significance of emotions (both positive and negative), how family secrets work and change over time, and the underestimated importance of things such as shared possessions or homes in the maintenance and memory of relationships.

This ground-breaking text will be essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of families and personal relationships, and who wants to understand this most intimate area of social life.

1

A Sociology of Personal Life

In this chapter I formulate an argument for developing a sociology of personal life which can embrace what has traditionally been known as the sociology of the family and the sociology of kinship but also more recent fields such as friendship, same-sex intimacies, acquaintanceship, relationships across households, and cross-cultural relationships. I suggest that this field is not simply a convenient ‘holdall’ for old and new empirical areas of study, but also a way of bringing together conceptual and theoretical developments which now seem too uncomfortable when squeezed into the existing terminologies of families or partnering or parenting. Sociology has periodically tried to rid itself of the conceptual and political straitjacket that the concept of ‘the family’ imposes, either by talking instead of ‘households’, or by introducing ‘families of choice’, by preferring the term ‘kinship’, or by conceptualizing relationships more in terms of practices than institutions or structures. These shifts in terminology and the conceptualizations that accompany them have loosened the constraints and have allowed the old terminology of family to become less rigidly identified with the idealized white, nuclear heterosexual families of Western cultures in the 1950s. However, it seems clear that in spite of these advances, the terminology of family (whether plural or not, chosen or not), and the other specifications of kinship or household, still prioritize biological connectedness and/or physical place. The term ‘family’ generally conjures up an image of degrees of biological relatedness combined with degrees of co-residence. Yet we know that people relate meaningfully and significantly to one another across distances, in different places and also when there is no pre-given genetic or even legal bond. These relationships may be described as ‘networks’ because this term is not evocative of a particular place and it also allows for fluidity in membership. But that term robs the concept of relationships of much of its emotional content and certainly does not invoke the special importance of connectedness, biography and memory in how people relate to one another. So it seems to me important to start to conceptualize a different field of vision in which families appear, but where ‘the family’ is not automatically the centrepiece against which other forms of relationship must be measured, or in whose long shadow all research is carried out. In sketching out this field of vision I neither fill in every contour, nor make every conceivable connection. Rather I aim to illuminate spheres and issues which make up the most significant elements of a newly conceived field of personal life. As I say in my introduction, this is not a finished project but a starting point. However, before arriving at my discussion of the ideas that constitute this field, I feel it is necessary to sketch the intellectual terrain covered thus far and, in particular, to explore the theoretical stresses and strains that have been part of long-term academic (and political) discussions of family life, and most especially since Anthony Giddens published his Transformation of Intimacy in 1992 and Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim their Normal Chaos of Love in 1995.

Residues, traces and heritage: the sociological battle over the family

‘Family research is only gradually waking up from its drowsy fixation on the nucleus of the family’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995: 147). This polemical remark is somewhat inaccurate but for our pur-poses here it captures the issues which have formed a long-standing tension in the area of the sociology of family life; namely the tension between broad, generalized theoretical statements and small-scale, detailed empirical research. The battle between these approaches, which has reintensified since the mid-1990s, has taken a number of forms, occasionally almost finding a resolution and then breaking out into a form of academic warfare again. At the risk of oversimplifying the picture, it might be possible to say that broad theories of family life have been developed in relation to the trends in mainstream sociological theorizing, hence there have been functionalist theories (Parsons and Bales, 1955), Marxist theories (from Engels to some feminist work), feminist theories, and risk and individualization theories (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). These approaches have developed as explanations of social change and social relationships rather than specifically in relation to family life, but have then been applied to explanations of the kinds of family change often ‘revealed’ in large-scale surveys and social statistics. As Brannen and Nilsen (2005) argue, these are not grounded theories because, although they may use some empirical research to supplement or support the core arguments, the driving intellectual force is deductive rather than inductive. On the other hand, empirical work on family life, especially the qualitative variety, has usually been small-scale, local, interpretive and averse to generalizations. Because such work has focused on particular groups of families in, for instance, the East End of London (Young and Willmott, 1987, orig. 1957), or Swansea (Rosser and Harris, 1983), or has selected special or minority groups such as Pakistani families (Shaw, 2000), same-sex couples (Weeks et al., 2001) or step-families (Ribbens McCarthy et al., 2003) it has rarely had an impact on sociological Thought (with a capital T). Taken together such studies have undoubtedly influenced sociological thinking and also methodology, but individually none of these appears to have set the sociological agenda or to have become the focus of intense debate.¹ Instead it is possible to see a kind of pattern developing since the 1950s in which there have been phases of grand theorizing in which understandings of family life are linked to wider social forces (industrialization, capitalism, post-war social order/functionalism, patriarchy and latterly globalization). Then, in the wake of these theories, empirical research sets about testing whether these explanations apply in specific circumstances or to particular groups. None of these studies can ever hope to ‘prove’or ‘disprove’the grand explanation, but they can either bolster or chip away at their credibility. In the main their efforts go unnoticed by the grander theoreticians. This is because general theories (and their authors) do not claim to explain ‘detail’. So to complain that they misrepresent specific families, or that they oversimplify family life and relationships, is really only to state the obvious. Yet such theorizations do have to be challenged because they are not simply free-floating ideas, they have an influence on the kinds of sociological understanding which come to predominate and on the wider political and policy processes which take such depictions and explanations as truths around which policy decisions should be framed (Brannen and Nilsen, 2005; Smart, 2005b; Lewis, 2001). It is also possible to argue that certain sociological theories enter into everyday understandings of family life and family change such that they start to frame the context in which people in general experience their families – or at least how they perceive other people’s families. As Brannen and Nilsen argue:

When theoretical concepts are not grounded in local contexts they more easily lend themselves to rhetorical purposes and can take on an ideological aspect. [. . .] When such theories chime with dominant political discourse, they feed back into that society and gain even greater ideological and rhetorical power. (2005: 426)

Of course not all sociological theories and concepts necessarily become popular and Brannen and Nilsen suggest that for this to happen there needs to be a fit between the emergent concepts and a dominant political philosophy at a given time. The focus of their criticism is individualization theory’s emphasis on the individual and on choice, which they see as chiming with neo-liberal ideologies of Western governments such as New Labour in the UK. However, before looking more closely at arguments over individualization, I endeavour to trace a longer history to the debate between broad theoretical work and smaller-scale empirical work in the area of family life. I consider early ideas and concepts and the tensions that arose as they became persuasive or dominant, as well as the ways in which concepts and ideas came to influence empirical work and also how empirical studies themselves – through the development of grounded theories – came to influence sociological thinking.

The great debates

Perhaps the most significant of these debates around family life have been those between (1) ideas of the demise of the extended family and the rise of the ‘modern’ nuclear family; (2) the decline of marriage as an economic contract and the rise of companionate relationships between spouses; (3) the changing status of childhood and the growth of child-centredness; (4) and latterly the decline of the nuclear family and the rise of fluid family practices.

The first of these, based in social history as much as sociology,² concerned the argument between two groups: those who felt that industrialization had changed the family, turning it from an economic unit of production with many children, strong kinship ties and embracing several generations into the small nuclear family of two parents and two children, cut off from kin and operating more as a unit of consumption; and those who point both to the continuation of extended kin networks in certain regions and in certain minority groups and to the lack of co-resident kinship groups before industrialization (Laslett, 2005, orig. 1965;³ Macfarlane, 1979). Both sides of this debate have deployed empirical evidence, so it is not entirely accurate to depict the conflict simply in terms of grand theorizing versus empirical research, but nonetheless the former did generalize from certain trends and ultimately did see one type of family as being inevitable under con-ditions of industrialization and capitalism. The most tenacious in this approach were Talcott Parsons and Robert Bales (1955) who, through the framework of structural functionalism, explained changes to ‘the family’ in terms of the needs of modern capitalist societies. Thus they argued that the economic order came to require small families, with a high investment in fewer children, a clear division of labour between husbands and wives giving rise to efficiency in the labour market, and with the family as a unit of consumption rather than production which in turn suited the capitalist economy. Parsons and Bales saw the decline of the influence of the extended family as a ‘good thing’ because it allowed for the rise of meritocracy in place of nepotism; in their schema the small, nuclear family was morally superior as well as more efficient than the traditional extended family. Some fifty years or so later the ‘new’ nuclear family in Parsons and Bales of course became – in contemporary collective imaginings – the traditional family. Thus when critics of contemporary family forms warn of dire consequences stemming from the demise of the traditional family, they now often mean the nuclear married family; when Parsons and Bales were referring to the traditional family, however, they meant the pre-industrial extended family. Thus the concept of the ‘traditional family’ moves and reconfigures itself depending upon which discourse is being deployed at a given time. And, as I argue below, this blurred notion of the traditional family has cropped up again in later theories of individualization.

The second debate, about the rise of the companionate marriage, is also one that moves across decades and seems to have no very precise historical location. Thus Edward Shorter (1976) sees a long history to the development away from marriage as an alliance of families and domestic economies towards marriage as a form of partnership and companionship. As Leonore Davidoff et al. suggest: ‘The popular perception is that the first to embrace the ideals of companionate marriage, separate spheres, innocent childhood and small families were the middle classes as they emerged from industrialization’ (1999: 18). Yet later they argue:

The growing belief in equality between partners, with husband and wife playing different but complementary roles, was an important element in the development of the ‘companionate marriage’ [. . .]. Promoted in the 1920s, as an argument for legalized birth control and divorce by mutual consent for childless couples, and reinforced even more strongly in the 1950s, this model was based upon the ideas of an exclusive emotionally and sexually intimate relationship between a man and a woman, satisfying to both partners. (1999: 190)

Companionate marriage (always a classed concept) therefore seems to have its genesis in the early nineteenth century, but with flashes of intensity in the 1920s and 1950s (Finch and Summerfield, 1991). A revival of a very similar idea comes with Giddens (1992) and his concept of confluent love and the pure relationship. The idea that this is something both new and caused by recent social changes and the growth of individualization is also adopted by Beck: ‘The need for a shared inner life, as expressed in the ideal of marriage and bonding, is not a primeval need. It grows with the losses that individualisation brings as the obverse of its opportunities’ (1992: 105; emphasis in original). So although social historians of the family have been dating the rise of the companionate marriage from at least the period of industrialization in England,⁴ it recurs as something fresh and rather new at regular intervals throughout the twentieth century. Of course it is also possible to see this as a trend or as something that is simply intensifying and/or expanding over time, yet it is hard to avoid the inference that it is being regularly rediscovered with new waves of theoretical enthusiasm or new empirical research.

The third debate, about the changing status of children in families and the growth (or apparent growth) of child-centredness, follows similar lines of argument. Thus Linda Pollock (1983) takes issue with Philippe Ariès (1962, French orig. 1960) and his thesis that childhood as a distinct phase in the life course did not exist in the Middle Ages; she also refutes the claim made by Shorter (1976) that mothers did not really start to love and nurture their children until modern times. Ariès in particular is seen as basing his general theorization too heavily on noble and propertied families. Pollock argues, in a vein very similar to contemporary critics of theories of individualization:

The sources upon which the received view is founded are obviously suspect and are certainly not a sound enough base to warrant the grand theories which have been derived from them. Aspects of the thesis, especially the assertion that there was no concept of childhood, have been shown by later research to be completely unjustified. (1988: 52)

Pollock also makes the point that most of the grand theorists she criticizes have tried to explain the history of childhood in relation to other trends in society, for example the growth of education, social welfare, democracy and even individualism. Thus she perceives a top-down approach in which developments in childhood are interpreted as fitting with other larger and over-determining trends. In this way family relationships are ‘read off’from other events and their course is seen to be inevitably in tune with other social forces. Such a reading is possible only if the interiority of these relationships is given cursory attention, while signs of congruence with broad theoretical explanations are treated as sufficient supporting evidence.

The longest-running debate over the family so far, the fourth and last under consideration here, is the contention that the family is in decline, a contention often supported by social statistics on divorce, lone motherhood and births out of wedlock (Wright and Jagger, 1999). The counter-position or rejection of this thesis is based on different readings of social trends and/or by arguments based on intensive empirical research, acknowledging that some families are changing in structure but suggesting that they still provide love and support for family members and kin (Lewis, 2001; Williams, 2004). It is clear that the decline argument has its roots in the earlier debate about the shift from extended families to nuclear families. This foundational argument sets the tone for understanding modern families, which are seen as inadequately connected with kin and thus unable or unwilling to take on the proper role of caring for kin and creating the right multi-generational context in which children can be raised. In this sense, for the pessimists at least, the modern family is always already lacking desirable qualities. But this baseline argument has been strengthened by specific interpretations of the rise in divorce rates, patterns of serial monogamy, illegitimacy rates and so on. Thus, for example, trends towards more heterosexual cohabitation are understood to signify a rejection not just of marriage but also of moral values, which involves avoiding the responsibilities that should attend creating a new family unit. High divorce rates are also interpreted as a flight from responsibility, a refusal to work sufficiently hard at relationships and a prizing of individual happiness over collective – or more specifically – children’s well-being. Such arguments have been particularly strong in the US (e.g. Popenoe, 1993; Blankenhorn et al., eds, 1990; Etzioni, 1993) but have also had a voice in the UK (e.g. Dennis and Erdos, 1993; Dench, 1997; Morgan, 1995). From time to time the feminist movement has been identified as the cause of family decline (Berger and Berger, 1983; Dench, 1997), at other times it has been men’s fecklessness (Ehrenreich, 1983; Dennis and Erdos, 1993). But the overall reason, from this viewpoint, appears to be seen as the growth of individualism and the prioritizing of the selfish self over the needs of others.

As Jane Lewis has pointed out, the interpretation in favour of decline has rested much weight on social statistics while also being politically compelling:

Much of the debate about the family in the late twentieth century has in fact been a struggle over the meaning of the statistics, with little attempt to refer to the admittedly limited research on the changes that have actually taken place inside family relationships, or to investigate them further. However, simple assertions as to the power of selfish individualism have had a significant effect on policy making on both sides of the Atlantic. (2001: 11)

Lewis’s reference to the ‘admittedly limited research’ on changes going on inside family relationships is not entirely accurate. The minimal influence of small-scale research seems to have less to do with how much of this research is available than the fact that it is perceived to be less ‘useful’ than survey-based research. Small-scale empirical projects are inevitably local and specific– indeed that is their strength, both epistemologically and analytically – but this approach is rarely seen as relevant to national policy making.

Attempts to refute the decline thesis have been around almost as long as the thesis itself. Ronald Fletcher (1966, orig. 1962), in a generally optimistic appraisal of social change in Britain after the Second World War, saw the family as becoming more democratic and felt it was increasingly founded upon good-quality intimate relationships between spouses:

In the modern marriage, both partners choose each other freely as persons. Both are of equal status and expect to have an equal share in taking decisions and in pursuing their sometimes mutual, sometimes separate and diverse, tastes and interests. They live together permanently and intimately in their own home and in relative independence of wider groups of kindred. (1966: 130)

Indeed, he argued that the rising divorce rate was indicative of people’s high expectations of marriage and their refusal to put up with the kinds of situations families had been forced to tolerate in the past. Throughout his book he strove to compare the modern family and its benefits with the deprivations and hardships of families in former times. His book is therefore on a completely different trajectory to those that focus on decline. Michael Young and Peter Willmott (1987, orig. 1957) took an equally benign view of family life and also managed to identify through e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. A Sociology of Personal Life
• 2. The Cultural Turn in the Sociology of Family Life
• 3. Emotions, Love and the Problem of Commitment
• 4. Connections, Threads and Cultures of Tradition
• 5. Secrets and Lies
• 6. Families we Live with
• 7. Possessions, Things and Relationality
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects