is where members of a society are reproduced and ‘equipped’ with their roles before they join the wider world and its institutions.41
Functionalist theories of family reached the height of their power during the 1940s and 1950s. During these decades the traditional family was promoted as the ideal form for social productivity, integration, maintenance, and continuity. The writings of Talcott Parsons and George P. Murdock shaped traditional family ideologies both in those and later decades to follow. Murdock defined family as including an ‘adult of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or more children, own or adopted of the sexually cohabiting adults’.42 For a unit to be called a family, according to his definition, is dependent on a sexual relationship approved by society and the existence of children. For Murdock, the family is a universal human institution and should be the same everywhere, as it meets the basic biological and societal human needs such as protection, reproduction, shelter, socialisation, economic support, and regulating relationships between the sexes. Writing in the 1950s, Parsons theorised the gender division of labour with what he termed the ‘expressive’ and ‘instrumental’ roles of women and men, respectively. Occupying the expressive role, women, according to Parsons’s theory, are placed at the centre of the family as homemakers, providing love, affection, care, and all other necessary emotional support for family members. On the other hand, men’s instrumental role as breadwinners is defined in relation to their presumed strength, leading to their occupation of political, economic, and military arenas. Men’s roles, according to Parsons’s theory, are considered to be more challenging and stressful as they require involvement in wider society, necessitating a minimal role in relation to domesticity and childcare.43
For functionalists, gender roles are ‘natural’ and ‘unchanging’ as a result of perceived biological differences between men and women. For example, women were expected to be carers because of their ability to bear children. Diverse definitions of the family as ‘nuclear’, ‘traditional’, and ‘biological’ refer to the ‘unchanging’, ‘natural’, and ‘universal’ roles women and men are supposed to ←36 | 37→perform in their families. Theories emphasising women’s role as carers also came into being during this period. In 1953, John Bowlby hypothesized the child’s tie to his mother, arguing that infant and mother biologically need to stay in contact with each other. According to his hypothesis, children’s primary attachment is to their mothers, and the former need a stable and secure relationship with the latter if they are to develop personally, emotionally, and physically. Inadequate maternal contact in early infancy, for Bowlby, would cause serious problems in future stages of development. This would mean problematic individuals threatening social stability.44 These theories illustrate that in the same way the family is situated at the centre of all other institutions for social stability, so too are women placed at the centre of the family, with its success positioned firmly on their shoulders. Therefore, from the functionalist perspective, a malfunction or a change in women’s roles would mean a dysfunction or a change in the family, which would in return threaten the entire social system.
The Family in Marxism/Communist Theory
While Marxism and communism share similarities, the former is a political theory that analyses class-driven inequalities in existing society, whereas the latter is a political system that theorises an egalitarian future society. Marxism views society and its institutions as structured by capitalism, which is established upon an uneven class conflict between a small and elite group called the bourgeoisie and a large number of working class people called the proletariat. The bourgeoisie, having the economic power, control the means of production and labour, keeping the proletariat oppressed due to the unequal distribution of economic power and labour. In Marxist/communist theory, the production of food and material objects are necessary if humans are to survive. Therefore, productive activity is key to the ways in which the ordering of a society and its institutions are created. The function of the family is to sustain the operation and reproduction of capitalism over time.45 The Marxist school of thought critiqued the modern family as a state apparatus controlling individuals in accordance with capitalist imperatives.
Communist theories of the family mainly originate from the writings of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Rather than offering a systematic critique of ←37 | 38→the family, especially in relation to gender inequalities within society, communist theory focuses more on the relation between capitalism and the family in sustaining a class-based society through production and reproduction.46 Marx and Engels write about the transformation of the economic structure, which they believe would bring a change in the elements of superstructure such as family and religion in the communist society. Therefore, it is taken for granted that economic transformation will bring a change in the function of the family. Richard Weikart summaries Engels and Marx’s critique of the family in three main points. They offer ‘a depiction of the hypocrisy and inhumanity of the contemporary bourgeois family, the historicisation of the family, i.e. historical account of the origins and development of the family in the past; and a vision of the future “family in communist society” ’.47 The bourgeois family refers to an economic unit that controls modes of production and reproduction on behalf of capitalism. It provides a ready and free labour force through unpaid housework, childbearing, and childrearing. Capitalism exploits the labour in the family as a way to benefit from the working class (mostly men) at a maximum level in the production.
In The Principles of Communism (1847), Engels presents the influence of the communist society on the family. At the very beginning of his analysis, he defines communism as ‘the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat’.48 Engels argues that in communist society, the relations between the sexes will be transformed into a purely private affair, so society would have no intervention into these relations at all. In order to achieve this, he proposes the abolishment of private property and suggests the communal education of children:
With the transfer of all means of ownership into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of the society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not.49
For Engels, private property and children are the ‘two bases of the traditional marriage’ that ensure the dependence of women on men, and children on their ←38 | 39→parents. Moreover, as private property is transmitted from one generation to another in accordance with male lineage, it reproduces the sexual division of labour in each succeeding generation. Alexandra Kollontai, a twentieth-century communist writer, identifies the establishment of communal kitchens, raising children communally, weakening the parent-child bond, and the abolishment of inheritance and private property as the characteristics of the future family in communist society.50 In particular, her reference to kitchens and children signals women’s traditional role and ongoing oppression in families. Also, the abolishment of inheritance, which is wealth passed through male generations, would mitigate the continuing transfer of male hegemony.
In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), drawn from Friedrich Engel’s and Karl Marx’s notes, the former successively analyses the evaluation of different family forms in primitive societies as identified by the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan: ‘The Consanguine, the punaluan, the pairing, the patriarchal and the monogamous families’. For Engels, the rise of capitalism in the eighteenth century elevated with it the monogamous family, which controls sexuality. In his analysis, Engels concludes that the family and labour are two different modes of production, which have a determining effect on the creation of a class society:
According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This, again, is of a twofold character: on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings
