tom ford

everyone calls me Alphabet because i'm the ALPHA male and you can BET on it.

Lets face it the chicks can't resist my bangin guns. When I walk up into the club the bitches can't wait for the Alphabet to wrap his pimp mitts around their titties.

I have a .312 batting average, and can drink all of you children under the table.......... juust kidding

The Family
The nuclear family begins to come under criticism. There are 2 main types of responses, conservatism and feminism.

Families are part of social structure, made up of roles which fit into the broader roles of social

structure. It is not about choice, its about roles. The roles we have in family (mainly gender) affect our ‘life’ chances


Industrial capitalism and the decline of the ‘traditional’ family
The traditional family – before modern forms of society, NOT NUCEAR, there is a gender

division of labour,

Industrialization – is all about machinery and mass production, starts a rural to urban transition, this causes people to move to the cities to fill the jobs created by factories, our time becomes commodities

Home/work division – now we have a home, where we eat and have children, and work where we sell our time for money, and we separate these 2 things from each other, now we have
Working and bourgeois families

The bourgeois family (how marx used the term, upper class) – there is money and you are part of elite class, this creates a new form of values (what it means to be a woman/man/child) in this structure, we have the man who works and the woman stays home and takes care of kids

The working family – everyone works, there is no division of labour, the woman works just as much as the man does, child labour is needed here
Engles on capitalism and the family

Patriarchy and the traditional family – wants to suggest pre-captalist(modern) societies are much more patriartical (more male dominance) in a traditional family, men control property which gives men more power over women, the family is dependent on the man, this creates limited opportunities because the family must stay because they are not able to fend for themselves if they leave the land/man

Contradictions of capitalism – he says capitalism destroys this traditional family because it sucks everyone into the wage labour market, but this liberates women and children because they are not dependent on the man and they have their own money


Was engles right? – he is right that the traditional family is destroyed, because we must leave home to make money, but he is not right because it is not the working family who becomes dominant, it is the bourgeois family, so the very opposite of what engles ideas happened

The social construction of the nuclear family

Moving women and children into the home – we ‘save’ children from these massive factories, we force women back into the home by making it illegal to do things (gamble, vote) and giving them incentives (child tax credit), we can only force women/children back into the home if men make enough for everyone, men must make a ‘family wage’ in order to support their family, in the post war period, the family becomes associated with the nuclear family

Theorizing the nuclear family
Functionalism

Modern society –

Instrumental/affective division

Structural differentiation – modern society develops 2 institutions, the family does the affective and instrumental is the work force

Gender specialization – women work in the home, men do work in the workplace, if asked why women were in home, the answer would be that it serves the social purpose, it creates stability
Critical theory

Capitalism – a society which much engage in production and reproduction of labour
Production and reproduction of labour

Post-war capitalism – unique because of rising wages and the welfare state, universal health care and education were free, this creates great conditions great conditions for nuclear family,

The extraeconomic exploitation of women – the bourgiouise found that people must be educated in order to be useful, and women socialized the children which prepared them for society, so as women aren’t being paid for raising children this is sort of like slave labour, they get nothing from their labour

Feminism



Patriarchy – gets at the power inequalities between men and women, men having more power than women in society

The question of power – capitalist men and working class men wanted women back in the home, sending women back to the home created more jobs, which would raise the wages, this also relieves the men of domestic duties,

Site of womens oppression – the men have the power because the men get the money, the men must give money to the family, he could walk away from the family situation and still have his job,

Globalization and the nuclear family
The decline of the nuclear family
Globalization and feminism
The crisis of reproduction