I. Forms and functions of families 'and marital unions

Family and Marriage

Almost all human beings have grown up in some kind of "family," but families have varied considerably in form, not only from one era to another and from one culture to another but also within eras, within cultures. In a cul­ture the form of the family changes or disappears, giving way to others. All these many aspects of the family con­stitute an important part of social change. The first way to look at the family is as a group, a household. The article is divided into the following sections:

I. Forms and functions of families and marital unions

Household forms

Marriage forms

Functions of the family

II. Historical background

Premodern Western families

The onset of industrialization and urbanization

Modern society and family

III. Development and organization of the modern family

Mechanisms of mate selection

Preparations for marriage and the marriage ceremony

Marital and familial dynamics: the family life cycle

Roles and activities throughout the family cycle

Conflict, crisis, dissolution

Divorce

Remarriage

IV. Transition of the form and structure of the modern family

Security in society and family

The effects of technology

The drive for female equality

The role of ideology

I. Forms and functions of families 'and marital unions

Household forms

There is no one accepted method of classifying house­holds. The types discussed here are not mutually exclu­sive. (For a more extended treatment of familial and kin­ship terminology and of family and marriage in preliterate and agrarian societies)

Corporate family. The corporate family is organized around a number of important activities, such as hunting in its territory, cultivating its land, trading its products, performing important rituals and rites, and rearing its children. Though common to preliterate societies, the pattern can also be applied to Western society, for mem­bers of Western households do share shelter, food, and resources, as well as activities arising from their use. In­dustrialization tends, however, to disperse the members of the household among different employers and occupa­tions and to reduce the number and frequency of com­mon rites or activities.

Extended family. The extended family includes not only the parents and unwed children but also married children and their wives or husbands and offspring. Among the wealthy, people generally live longer, and ex­tended families of good economic standing may include as many as four generations, at least for a short period of time. Strictly speaking, a small extended family is no longer extended when one of the parents in the older gen­eration dies. An extended family should thus be seen as a stage in the family cycle and as an ideal form that is difficult to attain in such poor countries as India or Iran.

Conjugal family. A husband and a wife almost always come from different families (the incest taboo), and therefore their bond, as a conjugal family, is not consan­guine, or blood related. But the children in the conjugal family, of course, have consanguine bonds with their par­ents. This makes the concept of the conjugal family rath­er clumsy, and so it tends in modern literature to be re­placed by the concept of the nuclear family.

Nuclear family. The nuclear family consists only of parents and their children. This type of family is univer­sal; it forms the nucleus of the corporate as well as of the extended family and, of course, constitutes the first stage in both. The nuclear family is probably the oldest type of family, going back to the earliest ancestors of man, may­be half a million years ago or more. These beings lived in small bands, and their young were born at intervals of one or, at the most, two years, but it took several years before the young could manage for themselves. The mother must have had help from a husband in caring for them, and these parents and children must have formed rather stable nuclear families, although the best hunters may have taken an extra wife if, for example, a female had lost her husband.

As the cultural level of man rose and was adapted to climate and resources, the pattern of the nuclear family changed. Industrialism and geographical mobility seem to have an unfavourable effect on the formation and maintenance of large families and even on the acceptance of the extended family as an ideal. Thus modern families now tend to remain nuclear families, and family activities and solidarity are reduced not only in the nuclear family but even more between the generations, particularly be­tween young parents and their older kin.

Experimental family. Various other familial arrange­ments have sometimes been tried in new situations not suited for nuclear families. One of these is the kibbutz in Israel. There a large number of people from different countries, with different educations and backgrounds, were brought together in collectives, concentrating on the tasks of clearing land, irrigating it, and growing crops. Every member had to work for the collective; most of the women were engaged in making meals, washing and mending clothes, or caring for the children. The rather difficult circumstances in which most kibbutzim started allowed the couples only the evenings to see each other and their children in the privacy of their own room, and this evening family produced and consumed very little except emotional, sexual, and social contacts. This or a similar pattern persists in most kibbutzim. The younger members often enjoy considerable sexual freedom, but if they decide to form a family, they apply for a room of their own, and if they get it, this generally implies the official recognition of their union. Apparently the intense interaction within the kibbutz is able to compensate for the reduced interaction in the family.

Other experimental solutions are possible among mod­ern young people who often try to form small groups, as isolated as possible from society. Mutual interaction among those involved may then be so dominant that a group family seems natural to them, at least for a time.

Marriage forms

The nuclear family is monogamous by definition; that is, it has only one man with one wife. But in many cultures, the husband is allowed to take more wives in a marriage form called polygyny; and in some the wife is allowed to take more than one husband in a form called polyandry. Polygamy is a broader concept including polygyny as well as polyandry. Some anthropologists formerly be­lieved that their data from a few preliterate cultures dem­onstrated the existence of group families, which included several husbands and wives, but few still believe that this type of family existed.

Monogamy. Monogamy is the commonest form of marriage in all cultures. A monogamous culture is simply one hi which only monogamous marriages are legally ac­cepted - polygamy being a crime. The ties between husband and wife in a monogamous marriage are strong in some cultures, weak in others. Strong ties may prevent divorce and even the remarriage of widows and widow­ers; weak ties generally lead to easy and numerous di­vorces.

Polygamy. In polygyny, the husbands are allowed and encouraged to take more than one wife. The famous an­thropologist George P. Murdock classified 250 cultures according to the form of the family. Of these, 193 were classified as polygynous. It is doubtful, however, whether such Islamic countries as Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Pakistan should today be classified as polygynous; public opinion there seems now to favour monogamy.

If cultures with the usual proportions between the sexes are to practice polygyny, it is evident that they must either prevent some of the men from marrying at all or keep the marrying age low for women and high for men, especially for those marrying for the second or third time. Of course, from the economic point of view, polygyny is easier among the well-to-do.

Polyandry is rare; only two cases are cited in Murdock's sample. It seems to be associated with scarcity of women owing to the practice of infanticide of females. If a tribe is very poor and the wife herself can contribute very little, she will need several husbands to support her and the children - and may still be forced to reduce the number of children.

Functions of the family

Personal or individual functions. Psychological secu­rity. An important function of the family - especially in Western societies where there is much tension—is emo­tional or psychic security. Independent nuclear families are especially associated with intimacy and emotional in­terdependence, either because they originally had this function or because they have taken it over from ex­tended families or from other forms that have broken down. In Western culture, there is particular stress on the companionship, between husband and wife, symbolizing the modern equality of sex roles and based on a division of labour that presumes to give the same value to male and female tasks. This companionship and parenthood seem to be the most important sources of psychological security because elsewhere, at work and in other groups, more value is placed on efficiency and matter-of-fact re­lations.

Sexual satisfaction. In all cultures an important mari­tal reward, in addition to companionship and certain so­cial privileges afforded married people, is the gratifica­tion of sexual relations. Western culture stresses the im­portance of sexual satisfaction, but it also keeps sexuality under comparatively strict control. Indeed, few societies have tried, as Western society has done, to restrict sexual intercourse exclusively to married couples. Although a married man in most cultures is forbidden intercourse with a woman married to another man, he may, never­theless, have affairs with one or more of his female rela­tives. Premarital liaisons between an unrelated boy and girl are forbidden in only 54 cultures of a sample 250.

Within the family, the husband and wife are always al­lowed comparatively great sexual liberty with each other, although there may be a sexual etiquette to be followed, such as taboos on intercourse during menstruation, preg­nancy, and lactation.

Physical security. An individual feels a sense of physi­cal security because of the family's willingness or duty to protect one another, to care for the sick or injured, to provide one another with shelter, warmth, food, and clothes. With the usual distribution of tasks in the fam­ily, the husband might hunt game, tend cattle, or work in the fields or in a quarry, while the wife in most cultures remained in the vicinity of the home, carrying water, col­lecting roots and berries, making, mending, and washing clothes, tending the fire and bringing fuel for it, thus con­tributing her important share to the well-being and secu­rity of the family. Societies with a permanent place of residence as a rule pay more attention to their dwellings; families build houses or huts not Only to obtain more comfort but also to realize more security and privacy than can be found in tents or temporary shelters. Physical security also depends heavily on the mores, codes, and legal system of the society.

Social functions. Procreation and child socialization. Societies that have paid too little attention to procreation have run the risk of extinction; and societies that are un­able to educate or socialize their children in traditional fashion undergo change, lose some cultural traits, and probably invent or borrow other traits. In other words; a society cannot be stable unless it has made acceptable provision for procreation and child socialization.

Child socialization in most cultures is not considered a task but rather part of the daily labour - a labour in which children take their allotted part and, in the process, pick up necessary knowledge and lore. The socialization period generally ends in adolescence, but in most preliterate cultures the adolescents are given the status and privileges of adults only after dramatic or painful pas­sage rites, often interpreted as the killing of the boy and his rebirth as a young man. The girls generally receive less attention and ill-treatment, although their first men­struation is sometimes considered dangerous and is there­fore associated with a period of isolation. Literate soci­eties tend to change the passage rites into festivals.

Regulation of sexual behaviour. Because the sexual drive can be very strong and disrupt the regulated behav­iour pattern in the family (because of jealousy or what­ever), all cultures have found it necessary to control sex­ual relations between men and women, whether married or not. Murdock listed seven categories of sexual rela­tions: marital sexuality, between a married couple; adul­tery, between two persons, at least one of whom is mar­ried to someone else; incest, between two persons whose bond of kinship, as defined by the culture, bars them from sexual relations; mismating, between members of different classes, castes, or ethnic, national, or religious groups that are not expected to have sexual relations; status unchastity, between two persons, at least one of whom has a social position demanding chastity; incontinence, between persons whose sexual relation contravenes taboos pertaining to menstruation, pregnancy, etc.; and finally fornication, between partners who adhere to all other rules and taboos but are themselves unmarried.

All cultures prefer to prescribe marital sexuality and forbid incest, but the regulations concerning the remain­ing five classes of sex relations vary considerably. They are forbidden, allowed, or required according to circum­stances. Western culture has prohibited even fornication, but only 3 societies in Murdock's example of 115 went as far as that, and so it must be recognized that the West­ern mode of strict sex regulation is atypical.

The sexual privileges within marriage need not exclude sexual freedom prior to marriage. Murdock found such freedom in about 70 percent of the societies about which he had information. The incest taboo is very rigorous, however - probably because it threatens the ties between husband and wife in the nuclear family and their ties to the children. Incest seems to have been allowed only among some ruling dynasties (Egypt, Hawaii, the Incas).

Contribution to social and economic life. The family is the most common economic unit, involving a relatively efficient division of labour between husband, wife, and children. Nowhere, however, do families, normally, live in isolation. They almost always form a part of a larger group, a community, in close contact with one another, probably because such a community makes it easier to produce food, to introduce a more advanced division of labour, to enjoy social intercourse, and to get help when injured, ill, or temporarily without means.

Contribution to order in society. The type of family, the social organization, and the sources of livelihood all depend on one another. Hunting, gathering, or herding creates or favours small migratory bands consisting of a few families. Agriculture tends to make the families adopt a more or less permanent place of residence and Unite either in scattered neighbourhoods or concentrated villages, such as may also develop in a fishing economy. Bands of hunters or herders generally own their land col­lectively, whereas the farmers of neighbourhoods or vil­lages with few exceptions own their fields privately, al­though pastures and woods may remain collective prop­erty. Similar communities, in communication with one another, tend to develop a culture together, to create a "we-feeling." Together they tend to develop a common kinship system, a common system of law, and eventually political unification. About half the societies in Mur­dock's sample had remained at the community level, and half consisted of several communities.

The smaller and the more isolated the community, the more important the family unit. Larger communities tend to organize collective action, to produce specialists, to in­vest authority in chieftains, and so forth, thus changing faster and often developing stronger social controls over facilities and individuals.

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