exploring how social divisions arise through the family, Engels identified both production and reproduction as the material bases of society. This approach has been a key resource for subsequent sociologists in theorizing the intersection of class and gender. Engels made a significant contribution to feminism and the study of inequalities from a conflict-based approach. By contrast, the emergence of American sociological studies in the early twentieth century, addressed below, was concerned with explaining a systematic connection between the structures of capitalism and the composition of the family by using a consensus-based approach.
The twentieth-century functional family
Sociologists of the twentieth century continued to focus on the relationship between the family unit and economic organization as a major theme. However, this was set against the backdrop of concerns about the idea of a loss of community and the impact on ‘family’. For example, Ferdinand Tonnies (1955 [1887]) argued that, before industrialization, people lived in relatively small communities and knew one another well, were highly interdependent and generated high levels of informal checks and controls on people. Later, with the rise of individual wage labour, these dependencies that bound the family together were weakened. Ties dependent on common property and inheritance among farming families were eroded with the rise of wage labour under industrialization.
Talcott Parsons, who outlined the basic principles of modern structural functionalism, viewed society as a social system defined in terms of ‘needs’ or ‘functions’. For Parsons, the various parts of each society contribute positively to the operation or functioning of the system as a whole. In this respect, he regarded the institution of the nuclear family as functional for the operation of industrial society as a system. He argued that the extended family of pre-industrial society was no longer viable. The family was necessarily transformed by industrialization from an extended, economic unit of production in rural societies into a small, mobile nuclear unit of consumption in urban society (Parsons 1956; Parsons and Bales 1956). Industrialization demands greater geographical and social mobility from its workforces. The family unit shrank in size to adapt to this new economy. The large, extended family of former times typically housed three generations of relatives under one roof, with several children, and was characterized by wide but durable kinship ties. By contrast, the new, lean, nuclear family of the 1950s comprised two parents and two children who lived independently from grandparents or other relatives.
Industrialization implied that tasks once performed by the family (such as food production and the education of children) were now taken over by the state or outside institutions. Although the nuclear family lost certain roles, it became a more specialized unit that provides for socialization, emotional needs and the mutual support of its members. Duties that the family provided in the way of care or financial support for extended kin became ‘optional’ since these services had been taken over in industrial societies by specialist institutions such as social services and hospitals. The nuclear family adapted efficiently to supply certain fundamental needs of modern society through the rearing and socialization of children as the next generation of workers. So, for Parsons, the two key functions of the family were primary socialization and the stabilization of adult personalities (Parsons and Bales 1956). Primary socialization is the practice of teaching children the cultural norms and values of the society. The family was viewed by Parsons as the essential context for children’s development of human personality. Personality stabilization concerns the role played by the family in supporting the emotional needs of adults as well as children. Parsons argued that healthy, stable adult personalities are maintained through marriage. In pre-industrial societies this stabilizing function was said to be performed by extended kin. An essential role of the family in industrialized society, then, was the creation of a stable context for the socialization of its members.
The nuclear family was viewed by Parsons as the most efficient unit for dealing with the challenges of modern society, through a specialization of roles between husband and wife. This new kind of family relied on the allocation of ‘instrumental’ and ‘affective’ roles between the married couple. The husband was expected to adopt the instrumental role of breadwinner and work outside the home, while the wife was expected to adopt the affective role of attending to the emotional and domestic needs of the family. Men’s instrumental role allowed them to adapt to paid employment outside the home. Women’s expressive role was tailored to childcare and domestic work. Through these family roles, this small nuclear family was defined as one that specializes in serving the emotional needs of adults and children to facilitate the adaptation of family members for a competitive and impersonal world beyond the home. Within the scope of structural functionalism, the shift to a nuclear family structure was explained by the functional needs of a capitalist economy. This new, smaller and more geographically mobile unit was viewed as morally superior and more efficient than that of the former extended family. Capitalism demanded small families as units of consumption capable of adjusting themselves to fit in with a new kind of employment market based on a particular gendered division of labour. This weakening of pre-industrial extended family ties was viewed as a progressive trend. It coincided with an erosion of traditional modes of nepotism in favour of meritocracy.
The functionalist explanation of change in family structures and roles was criticized by social historians and sociologists in several ways, and eventually discredited. First, the theory was criticized for advancing an abstract version of ‘family’ which relied on an abstract version of ‘society’ that required the reproduction of particular social forms. Second, it neglected the role played by other institutions outside the family in socializing children, such as government, education and the media. Third, functionalism was criticized by feminist scholars for naturalizing and justifying the unequal domestic division of labour between women and men. This ‘modern functional family’ legitimated the male ‘breadwinner’ model within an asymmetrical patriarchal structure. Fourth, functionalism privileged continuity to such an extent that any social change was perceived negatively as a failure of the system. The approach was unable to explain many social problems in American society, including poverty, social conflict and class struggle. Finally, the approach neglected and was unable to explain family forms that deviated from the nuclear model, such as ethnic variations and single-parent households. Research by anthropologists, historians and feminist scholars emphasizes the diversity of families not only across cultures and historical periods, but also within cultures and periods. Functionalism ignored evidence of the persistence of extended kinship networks in certain locations and among certain social classes, and among certain non-white and minority ethnic groups (Davidoff et al. 1999; Laslett 2005 [1965]; Macfarlane 1979). The model was criticized for privileging a white, suburban and middle-class ‘ideal’. Families that did not conform to this model were viewed as deviant.
Despite the theoretical deficiencies of functionalism, this perspective prevailed as the theoretical standard for most family sociology from the 1950s to the 1970s. Indeed, mid-twentieth-century research on the ‘modern family’ and families of the past was framed by the functional model, which reinforced the idea that family structure naturally graduated from an extended to a nuclear form. Selective research tended to refer to white families and western developments to confirm a particular social pattern. An extensive re-examination of this ‘Golden Age’ of the 1950s American family has since been prompted by a range of research that disputes these earlier historical assumptions.
The misleading conclusions of many earlier historical studies triggered an academic reconsideration of the notion of a past ‘ideal family’. Historians and sociologists discovered that family life was much more complex and diverse than previously assumed. For example, before the twentieth century, the adoption of relatives’ children was common; a high level of cohabitation without marriage occurred; and men often left former partners to form new intimate relationships and households with other women without supporting first wives and children (Bailey 2003; Davidoff et al. 1999; Klein 2005). By the 1970s, feminist critiques were challenging many of the assumptions associated with the functional approach that had elevated a particular model of ‘family’ as standard. However, since the functionalist approach was highly influential in its time, it had an enduring negative effect not only on the way that gender relations were studied, but also on the
