Between Sex and Power

Family in the World 1900-2000

Göran Therborn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134494583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The institution of the family changed hugely during the course of the twentieth century. In this major new work, Göran Therborn provides a global history and sociology of the family as an institution and of politics within the family, focusing on three dimensions of family relations: on the rights and powers of fathers and husbands; on marriage, cohabitation and extra-marital sexuality; and on population policy. Therborn's empirical analysis uses a multi-disciplinary approach to show how the major family systems of the world have been formed and developed. Therborn concludes by assessing what changes the family might see during the next century.This book will be essential reading for anybody with an interest in either the sociology or the history of the family.

Part I
Patriarchy: its exits and closures

Our Father, who art in Heaven . . .

(Matthew 6: 7–15)

. . . paternal authority is the most necessary, the most legitimate of all social powers.

(Le Play 1866: 189)

Patriarchy has two basic intrinsic dimensions. The rule of the father and the rule of the husband, in that order. In other words, patriarchy refers to generational and to conjugal family relations or, more clearly, to generational and to gender relations. Although patriarchy shaped father–son relationships in asymmetric ways, as well as those of mother-in-law versus daughter-in-law, the core of patriarchal power was, above all, that of father to daughter and of husband to wife. The power of the father over his son was usually a mitigated version of his power over his daughter, and the power of the mother-in-law was delegated, by the father-in-law and/or by the husband.

The analysis here will be deployed in a narrative, a story about the world situation in 1900 and its change, and non-change, over the course of a century. But underlying it is a conception of patriarchy as a cluster of variables. The Family Father of Roman law had three basic powers: potestas, including the ‘right of life and death’, over his children as long as he lived; manus over his wife; and dominium over his property. When manus was becoming obsolete by the beginning of the imperial, or what is today called the Christian, era, the wife remained under the potestas of her father (Evans Grubbs 2002: 20ff).

The cluster used here, inspired by modern feminism and by comparative history and anthropology, covers patriarchy in a more specific manner. With regard to paternal/parent–child relations we shall take notice of formalized rules of child obedience and deference, and we shall look at genealogical and basic inheritance rules, i.e. whether there is a paternal bloodline only (patriliny); whether adult children are allowed to make their own marriages; and whether upon marriage they are expected to remain in the paternal household. The power of (prospective) mothers-in-law will here largely be subsumed under parental patriarchy.

Regarding husband–wife relations, the main aspects are: the presence or absence of institutionalized sexual asymmetry, such as polygyny and different adultery rules; of marital power hierarchy, in norms of husband headship and family representation; and of heteronomy, i.e. of the wife’s duty to obey, and the husband’s control over his wife’s mobility, decisions and labour. West African evidence, in particular, has shown that hierarchy and heteronomy may vary independently of each other. Historically we shall have to rely mainly on evidence of institutionalization, on legal and social norms, and on observed patterns of behaviour. Recent survey research has made possible more specific insights into patriarchal marriage forms, collecting from large samples answers to questions about beating; visits to friends, neighbours and relatives; decisions on large daily purchases, on food to cook, on contraception, etc.; and on household divisions of labour. The main push of this analysis comes from Third World research (cf. Oheneba-Sakyi 1999; Blanc 2001; Jejeebhoy 2001).

Further attention will be paid to the possibility of discrimination against daughters by infanticide, maltreatment, neglect and inheritance systems, and to special physical sacrifice demanded of girls and women, such as infibulation or cliterodectomy, foot-crushing or foot-binding, and sati (widow immolation).

Patriarchy in this general sense of asymmetric male power of kinship has several variants of organization – of descent, of matrimonial patterns, of kinship nomenclature; these are central foci of classical mid-twentieth-century anthropology, a terrain which will here largely be left unexplored. Let it be mentioned only that in matrilineal kinship systems – where ancestry and inheritance run from mothers to children – patriarchal-equivalent power is usually invested in the maternal uncle. Patriarchy in the sense used here is de facto frequently accompanied by another principle of hierarchy – seniority – then institutionalized in the superiority of the older brother over the younger, and, generally, of the older over the younger incumbent of the same position in the generation-cum-gender system. The classical Chinese rites of mourning and the imperial Chinese penal codes provided highly elaborate illustrations of the institutional complex of patriarchy-cum-seniority.

Patriarchy has also an important extrinsic aspect: its relationship to other powers of this world. In some societies, African in particular but in principle also in imperial China, patriarchal power was supreme on earth, and religious practices are geared to veneration of and contacts with one’s ancestors and their spirits. Orthodox Confucian rules and, even more telling, the penal codes of imperial China put filial piety above loyalty to the state and its laws, explicitly endorsing or permitting, respectively, a cover-up of crimes by fathers or other higher-ranking family members. The imperial penal codes had two exceptions to this rule: treason and rebellion (Bodde and Morris 1967: 41).

In other societies, patriarchy is explicitly subordinated to the authority of the Church or to institutionalized religious rituals before God and, in addition or alternatively, to the monarch or the state. The Russian Tsar kept some patriarchal features till the end of Tsardom, but in Western Europe revolutions pushed explicit patriarchal models of monarchy out of fashion from the time of John Locke and the English ‘Glorious Revolution’. With

Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau a new political theory of the family developed in Western Europe (Abbott 1981). Louis XVI was still referred to as the ‘father of the people’, but Danton expressed the family self-portrait of the Revolution: ‘It is the people who has produced us; we are not its fathers, we are its children!’ (Delumeau and Roche 1990: 256, 335). The Victorian British cult of the family had patriarchal implications, like most family cults. But its political metaphor was one of representation, rather than a model of rule. ‘England’, Prime Minister Disraeli said in 1872, ‘is a domestic country. . . . The nation is represented by a family – the Royal Family’ (St John-Stevas 1957: 259).

1 Modernities and family systems
Patriarchy around 1900

In the beginning of our story all significant societies were clearly patriarchal. There was no single exception. Overwhelming opinion among the powers that be was well expressed by an enlightened, aristocratic Dutch Liberal, then Minister of Justice, P.W.A. Cort van der Linden, who said in parliament in 1900: ‘The character of marriage is nevertheless, in my view, incompatible with a principled equality between man and woman’ (Sevenhuisen 1987: 235).

The world was not equally patriarchal, though. The powers of fathers, brothers, husbands, and of adult sons, although virtually everywhere overwhelming, did differ across classes and cultures. Furthermore, our story does not begin ‘Once upon a time there was traditional patriarchy’. Such a notion is generally vacuous, ignoring the great variety of ‘traditions’ and their historical mutations, and it is particularly inadequate to capture the situation in 1900, when a worldwide wave of recent family change had just rolled onto the stone tablets of historical archives. Indeed, the Paris World Exhibition of 1900 was also the occasion for a (third) international congress on the conditions and the rights of women (Dhavernas 1978: 75).

Major, or at least significant, legal changes to the family institution took place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in a number of countries. Japan and Germany issued new civil codes in 1898 (Meiji Minpo) and in 1900 (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, passed in 1896). Married Women’s Property Acts had given economic legal capacity, or at least protection (cf. the critical view of Sachs and Wilson 1978: 7ff), to women in the common law world, beginning in Mississippi in 1839, scoring an important victory in New York in 1848, spreading into the settlements of Australia and New Zealand, and climaxing in the English Act of 1882. Similar acts were passed in the Nordic countries between 1874 (Sweden) and 1889 (Finland) (Blom and Tranberg 1985). More indicative of times changing was perhaps new legislation protecting the earnings of married women, such as the first English Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 (Gravesen 1957), incorporated also in the subsequent Nordic laws.

Changes of penal law could also be highly pertinent. One example is the Swedish Penal Code of 1864, which abolished the previous stipulations against violence to and insults to parents, offences that formerly could be punished by death. Breaches of the Fourth Commandment disappeared from the state’s statute book, although it was made explicit that assault of parents should be regarded as ‘aggravating’ in cases of assault (Odén 1991: 94ff). More implicit was that with the same Code, the husband’s ancient right to spank his wife ended. True, serious conjugal beatings were sanctioned with double fines, following medieval law (Hafström 1970: 52). Instead, legislation protecting children began to appear. A key European event in this respect was the British Prevention of Cruelty to, and Better Protection of Children Act of 1889; this was inspired by a notorious case of child maltreatment in New York in the early 1870s, in which the child could be legally rescued only with the help of a law against cruelty to animals (Therborn 1993: 251). Class polarization undercut patriarchal solidarity even in France, which also in 1889 passed a law making it possible for paternal power to be forfeited by maltreatment of children, having brutal and alcholic proletarian fathers in mind (Delumeau and Roche 1990: 376–77).

Colonial family legislation had started, although more by providing options and by attempts at stigmatization than by effective interference, in spite of pressure from zealous Christian missionaries. British India had by 1900 seen a series of such largely symbolic acts, prohibiting sati (the immolation of widows) in 1829, and infanticide (in 1870), allowing widows to remarry (1856), allowing inter-caste marriages (1872), and trying to raise the marriage age (1891) (Lardinois 1986b: 354ff). In British Africa English marriages were offered, without much success, since the Gold Coast Marriage Ordinance of 1884 (H.F. Morris 1968: 35ff) However, nineteenth-century challenges to established patriarchy outside Europe and European settlements arose also in pre-colonial societies. Siamese (today we would say Thai) women were given increased freedom to marry in the 1860s (Hahang 1992: 58). In 1884 Choson Korea decreed a limitation of early marriage and gave permission for women to re-marry (Kwon 1999: 45). In late Qing China – during the Hundred Days of Reform under Emperor Guangxu in 1898, after the disaster of the Sino-Japanese war of 1895 and before the return of the conservative Empress Dowager Cixi and the disastrous Boxer Rebellion – the leading reformist intellectual of a dying empire, Kang You-wei, presented the emperor with a ‘Memorial with a request for a ban on the binding of women’s feet’, with the conjunctural argument that foot-binding ‘weakened the race hereditarily’ and stood in the way of an ‘increase of military strength’ (Dikötter 1995: 18).

Most legal and social changes went in a de-patriarchalizing direction, but not all. The Meiji Minpo was rather a generalization of samurai patriarchy to all commoners, and the Egyptian 1875 codification of Hanafi (one of the four major schools of jurisprudence in Sunni Islam, predominant in the Ottoman Empire) family norms – an enterprise which introduced the modern Arab concept of family law, ‘Personal Statute’ (al-ahwal al shakhsiyya) – seems to have meant a rigidification of Muslim patriarchy (Botiveau 1993: 17, 194). The Napoleonic Civil Codes adopted in Hispanic South America (and in Spain in 1884), hardly contained any emancipation from patriarchy, and the assertion of civil (over ecclesiastical) marriage in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay in the 1880s had no feminist implications. In 1891, the Argentine Supreme Court stated: ‘As long as marriage lasts, women in general lack civil capacity and are under the tutelage and the power of their husbands’ (Lavrín 1995: 195–96).

Social stabilization in late Victorian Britain, after the convulsions of the industrial revolution, meant a strengthening of the patriarchal institution of marriage – if not of patriarchal power within marriage – and family. ‘By the turn of the century’, historian John Gillis writes in a major work, ‘the clergy could congratulate themselves on the return of the people to their altars. . . . People were not only marrying more conventionally, but earlier and more often.’ Female labour market participation had started to fall after 1870. ‘Young people were once again subject to adult authority both in and outside the family . . . teenagers stayed at home longer, leaving it only to be married’ (Gillis 1985: 232, 245, 261, respectively).

Feminist movements, often supported by male socialists and radicals, had arisen in the Americas, in Oceania and in Europe, pioneered there by Britain and growing most strongly in Scandinavia. An International Council of Women had been launched in Washington DC in 1888, which by 1900 had spawned eleven national councils, from Norway to New Zealand and from Canada to Argentina. More powerful were the new inter-continental female moral crusades: the World’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union, of US origin (1884) and a formidable force in North American and, even more, in Australasian politics and social life; and the orginally British Federation for the Abolition of State Regulation of Vice (from 1875), directed against regulated/tolerated prostitution (R. Evans 1979: 249ff). Women’s issues were high on the agenda of Indian modernists, and in 1893 Annie Besant moved to India: a British convict with ideas about contraception, a future leader of theosophy from a base in Madras, and a future annual President of the Indian Congress Party. Political rights had been won by women in New Zealand, in outback Australia, and in patches of the USA west of the Missisippi, i.e. in peripheries of the Anglo-Saxon overseas settlements.

The Western European pattern of post-pubertal marriage had long provided a social basis for local youth cultures, of entertainment and courtship, and also, as in the charivari, an occasional force of moral sanction and ridicule. This youthful social space was widespread all over Northern and Western Europe, more peer-controlled in Scandinavia and in Germany, less so in France (Gillis 1975; Shorter 1977: chs 4 and 6; Mitterauer 1986). In the 1830s youth emerged as a socio-political category in Europe, with Giuseppe Mazzini’s national-republican Young Italy movement, soon spawning a networked Young Europe. Around 1900 youth movements in Europe and in the European settlements overseas were generally overshadowed by class movements and actions and their political economy, but there was a very significant social presence of youth in the labour movement, and ‘youth’ and ‘young’ were about to spread as a rallying-cry outside Europe and its offshoots, to Young Ottomans, Young Turks, Young Tunisians, Young India, that is, to male youth.

Sociologically, the family institution had to adapt to the long-distance mass migration, from Europe to the Americas and to Oceania, from China across the South China Sea, but also traversing the Pacific. Indian families had moved across the Indian Ocean to East and South Africa, to the Caribbean, and to Fiji. Country-to-city migration had acquired major proportions in Europe. Massive proletarianization, whether from population increase, technical changes or from the force of superior property ownership, and the emergence of a sizeable salaried ‘service class’ had by 1900 radically changed the premises of family relations in major parts of Europe, the USA and other European settlements. The same processes were at least beginning to affect Japan, some industrial centres of India, and new mining centres, such as Southern Africa and Chile. In the Americas, the USA, Cuba and Brazil in particular, the final end of slavery set the recently emancipated black population out on a new course of, severely socio-economically constrained, family options.

In the following we shall make a brief tour of the world around 1900, looking at the main public issues of generational and gender relations, and making an assessment of the relative strength of patriarchy in different parts of the world. We shall make our stops according to our previously identified world pattern of family systems, but let us also take notice of the different roads to modernity, the layout and the effects of which are already clearly visible by 1900.

Collisions and continuities in Europe

The European family system, to different degrees in its major western, eastern and other variants, had by 1900 been put under very heavy strain by a socio-demographic revolution that began in the eighteenth century. Demographically it is recorded in a move to a sustained, long-term, higher population growth. The threatening pauperization of this new proletariat was delimited by another world-historical innovation, the Industrial Revolution, and by mass extra-continental migration. By 1900 in northwestern Europe these social convulsions had not only undermined the agrarian property context of the European family, but had also started to re-settle the latter in an urban– industrial mode.

Second, the European family was the context and the target of the worldwide powerful discourses on the family at the close of the nineteenth century, the most influential anti-patriarchal ones being John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, August Bebel’s Socialism and Woman (both of 1879), and the most powerful patriarchal tract, Rerum novarum, the 1891 Encyclica of the infallible Pope Leo XIII. ‘Like the polity, . . . the family is truly an association [veri nominis societas est], which is governed by its proper power [potestate propria], which in this case is that of the father [paterna]’, the Pope proclaimed (Rodríguez 1964: 269).

Profound, dramatic social changes and sharp, highly articulate ideological conflict affected the European family. Relatively speaking, this was, before its nineteenth-century challenges, a very moderately patriarchal system. Supreme value was invested in a transcendental God, and not in patrilineal ancestors. While parents had an important say in marriage matters in the upper classes and in the southern and, above all, eastern parts of the continent, free choice of spouse was a central religious norm of the Catholic Church since the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent. The two major Enlightenment codifications, the Prussian Code of 1794 and the French Code Napoléon of 1804 – two major countries outside the Tridentine norms, Prussia as Protestant and France as the explicit warden of Gallic patriarchy in defiance of the Church – assumed the key roles being played by the parties themselves, while providing parents with certain powers of veto. Both required parental consent to the marriage even of legally mature sons (Glendon 1977: 29, 31). The European practice of adult marriage and of a separate household gave the protagonists a social basis of autonomy. Monogamy was th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction Sex, Power and Families of the World
• Part I: Patriarchy: Its Exits and Closures
• Part II: Marriage and Mutations of the Socio-sexual Order
• Part III: Couples, Babies and States
• Appendix A Note on Primary Sources
• Notes
• Bibliography