The ideology of the family

CHAPTER 4

Love and marriage, according to the old song, "go together like a horse and carriage".  The song was popular in the 1950s, which as we all know was the heyday of family ideology, the era of motherhood and the baby boom and all that.  Since then we have got over our infatuation with family life, and we now take a more realistic look at what goes on within families -- the power struggles, the pettinesses, the tedium, the distortion of personalities, the unequal division of labour, and much else besides.  Family issues come to public attention usually in connection with questions of domestic violence, the oppression of women, broken homes, child abuse, child sexual abuse, youth suicide and youth homelessness.  Statistics are regularly turned out to show that now only x per cent of children live with both their biological parents. ⁽¹⁾  The family, it seems, is as out of date as the horse and carriage.

Or so we are sometimes told.  Yet the family is still central to our lives and our values, and it always has been so.  Far from being (as some accounts would have it) a freakish deformation produced to satisfy the exigencies of industrial capitalism, it now appears that the "nuclear family" -- the triangle of forces binding together two parents and their children -- goes back to the origins of man, and may have played a crucial part in human evolution.  In a survey of current research evidence on this subject, the biological anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy has put forward the proposition that the nuclear family, characterised by "intensified parenting and social relationships, monogamous pair bonding [and] specialized sexual-reproductive behaviour" actually pre-dates and partly explains the advanced material culture and rapid brain development which are distinctive of our species. ⁽²⁾  The slow but profound human maturation process required its own special social arrangements, of which the family is the most important.  An institution as old and as basic as this probably has something to be said in its favour.  There is, we might suspect, no other successful way of raising children, nor perhaps are there many attractive alternative ways of sustaining close relations between men and women.  In short, in so far as any society manages to foster love and caring for others, it very likely does so in and through the family.  Not, of course, only in the family -- but without a foundation of good relations within the family it may be that the quality of relationships in the wider society tend to deteriorate.

These, at least, are beliefs that we act out in much of our lives, but for reasons difficult to understand we like to think otherwise.  It is the thinking and talking classes, the "New Class" of academics, teachers, journalists, policy-makers, activists and social reformers, who for a long time have been telling us that the ideology of the family is a form of false consciousness.  This chapter will argue that the boot is on the other foot.  The anti-family standpoint is "ideological" because it cuts itself off from common understandings and practices, rather than expanding and building upon them;  because it seeks to close off discussion, allowing only one acceptable viewpoint;  and because, often enough, it masks the class interests of those in the welfare and other professions who seek for their own purposes to minimise the importance of families in shaping the well-being of their members.  In so far as it employs reasoning it is commonly of the Queen of Hearts' "Sentence first -- verdict afterwards" kind, which Alice rightly found so objectionable.

The issue here is by no means merely academic.  In the past two decades strenuous efforts have been made to find some alternative to the nuclear family, but it now appears that these have come to almost nothing.  The general intention of these efforts was to extend the range of adults available to children beyond the constraints of the traditional two parent family.  They failed because they were unable to supply the enduring for-better-or-worse commitment that parents routinely provide.  Sadly, the one major and lasting change to family form in this period has tended to narrow rather than extend the family:  the rise of the sole parent family represents a splitting of the nucleus of the nuclear family.  Similarly, the attempt to break down rigid sex role stereotyping -- a moderately successful and benign social change -- has been accompanied by a decrease in the richness of role models available to children in their closest and most important relationships.  A third apparent contradiction occurs in the conflict between the new-found (and well-founded) emphasis on the importance for babies and young children of emotional "bonding" with their parents and the increased willingness on the part of parents to break those bonds when they seem restrictive.  In this same period much has been said about the unfortunate effects of the past practice of separating Aboriginal children from their parents;  adopted children and their natural parents have been seeking out and rediscovering each other;  and enthusiasm for family history has never been livelier -- yet in public debate and policy we seem to put almost no value on the integrity of existing intact natural families.

Those who dislike what they see as the narrowness of the nuclear family ought to be even more concerned about the deficiencies of the single parent family, but reason is sometimes the first casualty in discussions of these topics.  It is common to contrast the "deficiencies" of the nuclear family with the "richness" of the extended family, and to attribute nuclear family breakdown to the alleged decline of the extended family.  These claims are rarely supported by evidence.  This book will take the (now well-attested) view that Anglo-Saxon societies never had a tradition of co-residential extended family life;  that there is no evidence that extended family networks are in serious decline;  and that the contrast between nuclear and extended family relationships has been greatly over-stated.  Those who praise the extended family by contrasting it with the nuclear family are usually those who deplore family "authoritarianism" and "patriarchy", overlooking the fact that these characteristics have been more commonly associated with extended than with nuclear family life.

In recent years it has been feminism which has prosecuted the case against the family most zealously, and an English feminist, Wendy Clark, provides a catalogue of the many failures for which the family is ritually blamed.

The family has become a catch-all phrase for everything that we, as feminists, condemn in our society.  Family equals oppression, patriarchy, psychosis, neurosis, domestic labour, role stereotyping, gender-specific definitions, stifling relationships, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, children, financial dependence, marriage, sexual repression, sexual activity, heterosexuality, growing up, living, dying, tradition, delinquency, love, hate, incest, violence, battering and bad eating habits. ⁽³⁾

This last reference at least suggests that the author has a sense of humour, a quality often lacking in the dreadfully serious tirades which she has accurately characterised.  There is much else that is commonly said against the family, and not just by feminists.  Family life is isolated, private, secretive, inward-looking, cut off from the public world, shallow, stuffy, narcissistic, greedy, claustrophobic, over-emotional or under-emotional, manipulative, possessive, conservative, bourgeois, suburban, conformist, materialistic, and so on.

The feminist critique of the family has been usefully summarised by Ailsa Burns.  She lists nine objections:

• Marriage and family life involves women's acceptance of male authority and supremacy.
• Family life involves a sexual division of labour under which housework and child care is [sic] relegated to the wife/mother, classed as non-work, and accordingly devalued, despite the fact that it may consume 80 hours and more per week and if costed at market rates, would cost more than the husband's salary.
• Because of the above attitudes and arrangements, it continues to be the case that where a wife/mother is in the workforce (now true of almost 50 per cent of Australian married women) she will continue to perform her normal unpaid labour at home (the "double load"), whereas her husband will at most make a modest contribution to "help her out".
• Marriage and family life involves (at least in Western societies) a cultural assumption that mothers do and should carry most of the responsibility for children.
• Among the "helping" professions, there is a refinement of the above attitudes, such that mothers are scapegoated for health and adjustment problems of their children.
• Despite all of the above, the family ethos is such as to stigmatize spinsterhood as a low status, unfulfilled and unfortunate fate. ...
• In consequence of all these forces, there is an early assumption by the majority of girls growing up within families that for them too the family rather than the workforce will be their major life commitment.
• [T]he woman whose husband is violent is likely to find the community unwilling to offer her the protection and support that it would accord to anyone else that her husband attacked.
• Where the partner who specialised in "breadwinning" (i.e. the husband/father) deserts, divorces or dies, the homemaking specialist (i.e. the wife/mother) and the children suffer the consequences of her specialisation in the non-waged job -- poverty. ⁽⁴⁾

It is convenient to take Burns's objections one by one.  In doing so the purpose is not to attack one person's position but to offer an alternative to the standard feminist line.  Though she describes the feminist objections as "devastating" the remainder of Burns's essay shows that she too is moving away from some of the familiar feminist orthodoxies.  Complex arguments of this kind involve points of detail, large, difficult-to-determine questions of substance and interpretation, possible errors of omission, issues of logical consistency and matters of moral principle.  The questions are hotly contested, and no one account is likely to be very satisfying.

MALE SUPREMACY

It is certainly true that in the past the husband has been (in Burns's words) "the person to whom government, financial and commercial agencies address themselves on the assumption that he is the person 'responsible' for the family", an arrangement which caused a nineteenth century feminist wit to remark that "Under the laws of England man and wife were one person, and that person was the husband".  In other words, traditionally men have conducted the family's "foreign affairs", while women have taken charge of the internal conduct of family life.  This pattern has been for so long the norm that it was usually entered into with little thought.  But it is certainly no longer the case that women sacrifice all connection with the public world when they marry and have children.  Nor is it at all certain that such a public/private division of roles by itself constitutes proof of male supremacy.  To make good this claim it needs to be shown that the external affairs of the family are more important than the internal.

Burns goes on to contend that as well as controlling external matters, men dominate women within the family.  Wives, she says, "pay far more attention to their husbands' moods than vice versa;  do most of the conversational spadework;  [and] occupy less (or no) private space in the house".  Feminists have made much of points such as these, yet the same writers may also object that men play little or no part in the family.  The objection might be that men make all the important decisions in the family and leave to the women the drudgery required to carry them out.  However, there is good evidence that in Australian families most decision-making also falls to the mother.  A 1957-58 study by an American, Dr Dan Adler, coined the term "matriduxy" to describe the dominance that women exercise in Australian homes.  Adler's contention that the mother made most decisions in 50 per cent of homes is brought up to date up by Ronald Conway, who observes that "the urban Australian family has been shaped by the emotional pressures generated by the mother in over 75 per cent of cases". ⁽⁵⁾

Matriduxy, or male supremacy?  Burns's version seems far too simple.  Conway insists that "In the 1980s, with divorce rates, de facto mating and the new demand by women for equality in workplace and society, "headship" in most households is becoming an irrelevant concept". ⁽⁶⁾  It may or may not be true that we are moving towards the "symmetrical family" heralded by Young and Willmott in 1973, in which family decision-making is shared equally between spouses, but it is certainly not the case that the family is by and large a bastion of male power.  On this perennial subject Ambrose Bierce was certainly wittier and probably more accurate when he defined marriage as "A community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves -- making in all two".

Both liberal and socialist feminism hold that traditional male dominance of the public world is proof of male power and male oppression.  The usual fallacy at this point is to equate, without discussion, public with strong and desirable, private with weak and exploited.  It ignores the complex varieties of power that are available in varying degrees to both sexes:  emotional, intellectual, sexual, physical, financial and political.  "Private" is not synonymous with "powerless".  Some feminists (fewer now than 10 years ago) would not regard the shaping of children as a way of shaping the world, but the hand that rocks the cradle may have at least some influence in building a creative and peaceful future.  Not that all women should have children, or that all who have them should care for them full-time.  But children are the future, and caring for them well is in its own way a species of power.

THE SEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOUR

"The position of women in the family makes it possible for men to pursue careers and interests unencumbered by the need to provide care for their children", Burns complains.  The reversibility of this familiar feminist proposition often goes undiscussed, yet it is of course equally true that the position of men in the workforce makes it possible for women to pursue homemaking and childcare unencumbered by the need to earn an income to pay for their family's needs.  Or more generally, families very often employ a male/public -- female/private division of labour.  It is not clear why this should be regarded as anything more than a statement of the obvious.  If the woman in this arrangement is economically dependent on the man, the man is also dependent on the contribution of the woman, and he will often value her contribution as much as she will value his.  The feminist's real objection must be not to the division of labour as such, but to either the rigidity of male/female stereotyping or to the devaluation of work in the home -- two quite distinct complaints which should be discussed separately.

Why is it that the home role is usually allocated to women and the paid work role to the man?  Is it because men treat the paid workforce as their exclusive preserve?  Burns is correct when she remarks that "Until recently in Australia women were formally barred from entry to many ... career structures", but she also notes that "Most of these formal barriers have now been lifted. ..."  However, she adds, "the indirect and informal barriers remain enormous".  What are these barriers?  They are, very simply, children.  "Parenting responsibilities in an employee are ... defined as illegitimate, and those people bearing such responsibilities described as unreliable and lacking in commitment to the job".  But if this is so then the real issue is not essentially a male/female one.  The barriers will exist for a man who cares for children, and not for a woman who does not have childcare responsibilities.  It becomes a male/female issue only in so far as childcare is assigned on grounds of gender.

The paid work role is usually allocated to the man not because men want to keep women out of the workforce but because women usually take responsibility for the children.  But why do women do this?  There are three possible kinds of answer here:  one, they are better at it than men;  two, it is more efficient for women to combine childcare and homemaking with child-bearing and lactation than it is to divide these tasks and assign the latter to women and the former to men;  three, it is a menial and tedious job beneath the dignity of men.

Both of the first two explanations seem plausible enough.  Taken just as they are, women do seem better at caring for children than men.  (If the familiar feminist complaints against men -- laziness, insensitivity, arrogance -- were even half true, it would be a rash woman who would entrust her children to one of them.)  To say this is not to say that men cannot become as good as women at the job -- no doubt many can.  Male rhesus monkeys do not normally care for the young, but a solitary male if persistently exposed to an infant will soon learn to nurture it as a mother would. ⁽⁷⁾  Perhaps the same is broadly true in the human case.

It is certainly true that in general human males spend very much more time and energy caring for their offspring than do most other males.  As Robert Trivers has noted, the usual pattern in nature, especially strong among mammals, is that

females do all the [parental] investing, males do none of it. ... Females suffer the cost of pregnancy, the cost of nursing, and the additional responsibility of protecting the young and showing them a place in the world.  The male's contribution to this entire enterprise is the sperm cell, weighing on average one 10-trillionth of a gram. ⁽⁸⁾

The human male's active involvement with his offspring is "a surprising feature of human life, something we share with male sea spiders, butterflies, birds, and wolves but not something we share with our closest living relatives, the great apes, nor the monkeys closest to them". ⁽⁹⁾  If men are anomalous in this way it would not be wholly surprising if their attachment to their families tended to be slightly less tenacious than that of women.  Sociobiological arguments of this kind are usually dubious because they select the animal evidence to suit the preferred human conclusion.  Trivers' evidence is based on a wide range of data, and so is not selective in this biased way.  Since there is no way of testing the claim that there are biological differences of this kind between men and women, the argument may be of negligible significance, but then again it may not.  Lovejoy's thesis suggests that, from an evolutionary viewpoint, male parental investment has been crucial to the success of the human species.

From an evolutionary viewpoint it would be very surprising if women did not have some natural maternal inclinations, in the sense of a general desire to produce children, to bond with them emotionally, and to protect, nurture and educate them.  Without such inclinations it is hard to imagine how a species as defenceless and with such a slow maturation process as homo sapiens could possibly have survived.  Such tendencies need not be automatic, infallible or rigidly specific in the range of behaviour they generate.  Nor need they be confined to women or to the biological mother.  But, as Midgley and Hughes put it, "On any view, at least up to the stage where social conditioning may be supposed to take over, the survival of our ancestors depended, as much as or more than that of other mammals and birds, on strong, natural parental motivation". ⁽¹⁰⁾  The fact that women have had the primary parental role leads us to expect that these skills will have been passed on from mother to daughter across the generations.  Feminists have tended to regard this transmission as mere "conditioning", but there is no reason why it ought not to be thought of as education.  If there are such skills then they need to be preserved.  It does not follow that because girls receive such training they are therefore dissuaded from taking up other kinds of work, nor does it follow that boys ought not to be given similar training.

The efficiency explanation of sex role differences is often underrated, yet it makes considerable sense.  Both the pursuit of a career and the care of children are often demanding and complex activities.  The skills which each requires do accumulate with experience.  This need not be so in all cases:  some jobs can be dropped and taken up at will, and there is more than one way of seeing that childcare needs are met.  The desire and capacity to be flexible about these matters will vary from family to family and from time to time in each family.  However, it is absurd to suppose that many parents do not very willingly choose to specialise in the roles they adopt.

The third explanation, that childcare is regarded by men as beneath their dignity, cannot be dismissed a priori, but neither can it be demonstrated by mere assertion.  Burns maintains that homemaking is "devalued and unwaged", and that women are "relegated" to this kind of work.  Her only proof of "relegation" is from the fact that the work is low in status -- she does not show that women are forced to take this role.  There is no doubt that homemaking is now a low status occupation in our society.  The Victorian Women's Consultative Council's recent report on Woman in the Home, which obtained questionnaire responses from 1000 women, is now the best source of information on these topics.  In ranking the difficulties encountered by homemakers it found that "lack of status" was listed as the second most frequent complaint, behind "lack of personal income", and closely followed by "lack of leisure".  In ranking the main difficulty each respondent faced, "lack of status" again came second behind "lack of personal income", on a par with "family poverty". ⁽¹¹⁾

Even so, an occupation can be low in status and yet intrinsically valuable.  It needs also to be asked:  how did this come about? and what can be done to remedy it?  Has the feminist movement played no part in this devaluation?  And has it recommended anything to improve the status of homemakers?  Readers can form their own opinions about these questions.  It is far from obvious that this aspect of the feminist critique of the family does not rebound on those who are making the criticism.  The women surveyed in Women in the Home "overwhelmingly believed that attitudes to women in the home should change".  When asked to particularise about this, 62 per cent said that the community at large needed to develop a better appreciation of women at home, but only 6 per cent felt that "men, and particularly spouses and partners, should give greater respect to women in the home". ⁽¹²⁾

The issue here is one of considerable practical importance, and one which will reappear a number of times in this book.  The general notion that a society should in some way help families with dependent children commands almost universal, though often half-hearted, support.  One very basic reason why so little is done to implement policies aimed at providing such assistance is that those most interested in articulating such policies cannot agree on how to go about it.  The question of how to support families produces divisions within feminist ranks and cuts off many feminists from potential support in the wider population of women.  While the movement has been forceful in its advocacy of subsidies for work-related childcare, it has done little or nothing to promote the idea of comparable financial assistance for homemakers.  Even the obvious resolution of this dilemma, a system of general assistance which leaves families free to use it as they see best, is regarded with suspicion.  Certainly some of the issues raised by the notion of family assistance are sensitive and some are complex, but they are not made easier by the partisanship which pervades debate in this area.

Liberal, professionally-oriented feminists argue that the best solution -- the only solution, on some accounts -- to the difficulties of life in the home is to encourage women to stay in the workforce, but in promoting this viewpoint they have fostered some strange opinions about the joys of life in the paid workforce which are at odds with the viewpoint of their socialist-feminist confreres.  Burns speaks of men "pursuing their careers and interests" as if life as a bureaucrat or bus driver or boilermaker were an uninhibited pursuit of self-fulfilment.  This ignores the pressures, the monotony and the health risks which often attend both professional and non-professional work.  On almost any standard health indicator -- cardiovascular disease, arteriosclerosis, cancer, asthma, emphysema, alcoholism, cirrhosis of the liver, ulcers, accidental injury -- men suffer more than women, and live shorter lives.  By standard feminist reasoning this would have to be the result of their oppression by women, but of course the reasons for the differences are many and complex.  Not the least disadvantage, moreover, of spending most of one's life at work is that it means missing out on close daily contact with young children.  If one partner to a marriage (not necessarily the wife) is at home this experience can be enjoyed vicariously.  Again, it is not necessary to advocate this way of dealing with the issue as the "best" solution:  there is no single solution which will suit everyone.

What feminism routinely fails to notice is that this conflict -- or choice -- is nobody's fault.  It is not the work of "capitalism" or "patriarchy" or of any other bogeyperson.  It is just a natural consequence of the fact that any society has two main tasks, to reproduce the species and to maintain a reasonable standard of living.  There are dozens of ways of negotiating between the demands of domesticity and the opportunities open in the workforce, and no one of them is the right or the wrong way to manage the issue.  Solutions have to be responsive to families' particular circumstances and personal preferences, and public policy-makers have no special insight into these matters.  Feminist attempts to portray these issues as elements in a grand-scale moral drama fall down when we attend more closely to the details of the case.  Some people are sympathetic to women's choices and regard them as difficult;  others, both men and women, are relatively indifferent and think there are far worse problems in the world.

Perhaps historian Kathleen Fitzpatrick has put this whole matter as sanely as it can be expressed.  She says:

I am inclined to quarrel with the question "Why do so many [women] fall by the wayside?" because it seems to impute failure to those who undertake professional life and do not persist in it, whereas I am inclined to regard this as a choice they have made for reasons which may be perfectly valid.  There are women who combine the role of wives, mothers, housekeepers and professional women successfully:  I admire them unreservedly but regard them as super-women and therefore necessarily few.  As for the many women who would also like to combine the traditional woman's role with a professional career but lack the physical strength, iron self-discipline, cooperative husband and exceptional planning ability required, I see as yet no satisfactory solution.  There are solutions that are partly satisfactory, such as part-time work and junior appointments, but the achievement of professional excellence is a full-time job.  Most women have to make a choice and every choice involves a renunciation. ⁽¹³⁾

She goes on to add that male prejudice in the professions does persist, "based on fear that life is going to become more uncomfortable for men if the traditional pattern of family life is changed".  Prejudice of this kind, like all of the many such prejudices we carry around with us, has to be fought on a case-by-case and person-to-person basis.

The real power base of feminism is of course in the professions, not in the working class.  There is no need here to enter into the debate between liberal and socialist feminists, which is on the whole just the old debate between liberalism and socialism.  As Miriam Dixson remarks, those who have reaped the most benefit from the movement have been "women in the bureaucracy, polity, media, teaching and helping professions, and less noticeably, in management". ⁽¹⁴⁾  Not the least achievement of the movement has been the creation of a great many comfortable jobs in the Commonwealth and State public services, particularly in the welfare sector. ⁽¹⁵⁾  The attachment that some feminists have to socialism seems more tactical and self-interested than a principled commitment to the values and interests of working-class women.  And the common feminist faith that their goals can be best achieved through the state is dubious at best.  Feminists, as Dixson observes, "display few reservations in committing themselves to an unlimited growth of government and hence to an accelerated erosion of women's, as of every citizen's, autonomy.  This massive contradiction is the more powerful because it is so deeply repressed and angrily denied". ⁽¹⁶⁾  Feminist over-statement is a nice illustration of Marx's thesis that each new class seeks to "universalise" its own concerns.

Women who are serious about being entirely independent of men should be wary of exchanging dependence on a man for dependence on the state.  Most of the state's money comes from taxes paid by men.  Accepting social security payments, for instance, is just a way of becoming dependent upon a multitude of men, which may be worse than being dependent on just one of them.  Such feminists should also be wary of joining the paid workforce, for most paid employment happens to be structured and controlled by men.  Anyone really seeking independence would be best to start up their own business.  They could then choose their clientele.  If they then regarded the relation between sellers and buyers as one of exploitation they could choose to deal only with customers of the opposite sex;  if they regarded it as one of mutual support they could choose same-sex customers.  In this way capitalism is friendlier to separatist feminism than is socialism.  In a state-run system women would have no choice but to work under and alongside men.  Feminists in Russia and China commonly regard the right to have time with their children as their first priority, though they and their families also suffer from the poverty endemic in state-run economies.

DOMESTIC DRUDGERY AND THE DOUBLE SHIFT

Discussions of the relative work effort which men and women contribute to the family are full of traps.  The question is not one of how much housework or childcare each partner performs, but it includes all the work -- both paid and unpaid -- that goes into raising a family and running a household.  When in 1973 Young and Willmott attempted such a complete computation they concluded that men working full-time, women working full-time and women working part-time each contributed about 60 hours per week, and women not in paid work about 45 hours per week. ⁽¹⁷⁾  Their analysis involved 350 (English) parents using self-recorded time-budget diaries.  The fragmentary nature of much childcare and housework may have led to an underestimation of the work done by the women at home.

Burns refers to no Australian studies which will show that this pattern does not hold in this country.  Later in her essay she does report on Australian research -- the J. Walter Thompson survey -- which indicates that "between one-quarter and two-thirds of husbands (as reported by wives) helped out "actively and consistently" with such tasks as looking after small children, shopping, cooking and cleaning". ⁽¹⁸⁾  This takes no account of men's contribution to gardening, home repairs, car maintenance etc.  The report found that men helped more with housework when their wives were also in the paid workforce.

The most authoritative research on this general question, the Time Use Pilot Survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in Sydney in 1987, shows that non-employed married women average 48 hours per week on unpaid housework, shopping and childcare;  employed married men contribute about 15 hours to the same tasks;  and employed wives about 35 hours.  However, when their total contributions are calculated the study shows that employed, married men and women work (at work and at home) almost identical hours per week and enjoy almost identical time for volunteer/social/leisure activities. ⁽¹⁹⁾  This research supplies no reason to think that in general women work more than men.  Counting both paid and unpaid work, married men on average work a 64-hour week, employed married women work 65 hours, and non-employed women 48 hours -- results very close to Young and Willmott's findings.  These figures relate to all married men and women, and do not measure directly the relative workloads of parents of dependent children, but there is no obvious reason to suppose that the married population is greatly different from the population of parents.  Of course, if we assume that housework and childcare are inferior activities then it will appear that women have been "relegated" to them, but it is this assumption which is at issue.  If, equally arbitrarily, we adopt the opposite assumption, then we will get the opposite result.  In the absence of any overriding argument, the only reasonable assumption must be that people are dividing their labour in ways which happen to suit them best.

In saying this we need not deny that in some households the workload is not shared at all equally.  (Amongst the unemployed, for instance, there is a large discrepancy between the workloads of women and men, with the women working 40 per cent more than the men.  Sole fathers, on the other hand, worked 30 per cent longer than sole mothers on total labour force and household activities.) ⁽²⁰⁾  But it need not be inferred from these isolated cases that the family is a device for the oppression of women by men.  Families are very much more than arrangements for running households.  Even some feminists have grown tired of the obsessive focus on housework.  One critic, American sports journalist and post-feminist Hilary Cosell, has observed how all discussions of marriage eventually "seem to shrivel into one topic:  the division of labour".  She maintains that a woman who accepts the heavier workload is not necessarily selling out on the fundamental principles of sexual politics.  Realism sometimes requires compromises (and sometimes it is men who make the compromise).  Such realism is not incompatible with self-confidence, assertiveness and a refusal to be brow-beaten by opinionated men.  Cosell looks forward to the day when "dishwashing will finally resume its proper perspective in American life:  a subject largely unworthy of debate". ⁽²¹⁾

The domestic drudgery objection also fails to acknowledge the obvious truth that domesticity is now very much less demanding than it has ever been at any time in human history, most particularly because the birth rate has fallen very markedly in recent decades.  Indeed, this decline in domestic demands is an essential premise of one whole strand of feminist argument which Burns fails to mention.  It was Betty Friedan's insistence that the home no longer needed to absorb all the best energies of women which set much of the movement in motion.

HOUSE ARREST AND MATERNAL GUILT

As an addendum to her complaint about women's confinement to the childcarmg role, Burns adds that marriage and family life "can result in near house-arrest of mothers of young children living in poorly-designed housing in areas deficient in community and transport facilities".  It also "sheets home to mothers responsibility for any poor outcomes among their children".  These are two very different objections, and they need to be considered separately.

The "house arrest" complaint is a variation on the familiar feminist theme of the suburban isolation neurosis.  There is no doubt that many women with the care of young children feel that they suffer from loneliness and isolation, and in some cases the effects can be serious, but the issue needs to be kept in some perspective.  Women in the Home found that "social isolation" ranked fourth in the list of homemakers' difficulties and fifth in the list of main difficulties.  It is not clear from this report that lack of transport, which appeared seventh in the list of difficulties, is the main cause of this isolation.  No doubt many women do not have use of a car during the day, and public transport may not provide ready access to family and friends.  For some, isolation can result from a move into a new State or a new suburb, in pursuit of jobs or better housing.  A further factor here is that as more women take more part in paid work, those who remain at home find they have a diminishing range of potential social contacts.

It is true that many suburban areas lack much sense of community focus, apart from the local shopping centre.  Government-initiated attempts to "build community" are fraught with difficulties, but the case may not be entirely hopeless.  The Western Australian Government is attempting to improve this situation by setting up "Family Centres" in such suburbs, facilities which will include playgroups and other community activities, and which will be managed by local people.  Other states have experimented with "neighbourhood houses".  It would be useful to monitor and compare the progress of these attempts.

In passing here, it is worth noting the implausibility of the common claim that strong family relationships tend to weaken community bonds.  There is good evidence that many community organisations -- sporting clubs, churches, service clubs and the like -- are led and run by people with the self-confidence which conies from strong family support. ⁽²²⁾  Social workers in areas in which family breakdown is prevalent do not report high levels of community-mindedness and participation.

Burns's "maternal guilt" objection -- the alleged blame which attaches to mothers if their children go off the rails -- involves questions about which it is almost impossible to generalise.  Do women get the credit when their children turn out well?  Is this credit or blame much different from that which men or women experience when things go right or wrong in their paid work?  Do we not make allowances for the fact that children are born with personalities of their own which function independently of the efforts of their parents?  Anyone who thinks there are clear-cut answers to these questions is looking at the world through monochrome spectacles.

UNHELPFUL HELPERS

The failings of the helping professions can hardly be counted as grounds for complaint against the institution of the family, which is itself often an important source of resistance to excessive interference in people's lives by well-meaning but self-interested professionals.  There is no doubt that in recent years families have been besieged by advisory organisations telling them how to bring up their children, what foods to eat, etc.  Some observers of this trend think there has been a causal relationship at work here:  as the prestige and importance of these groups has grown, so the status and self-assurance of the family has fallen.  These may or may not be causally connected.  The most basic issue here is that of consumer sovereignty.

Actually, well-meaning intrusion into the internal affairs of families is not confined to the helping professions.  Few of these have been as dogmatic and bossy about the conduct of family life as has the feminist movement

THE STIGMA OF SPINSTERHOOD

According to Burns, this stigma has lessened in recent times, but "it is still something to be reckoned with".  Yet although she gives the subject no further discussion it is, when taken in conjunction with her next objection -- family or workforce? -- in some ways at the heart of the whole debate.

THE FAMILY OR THE WORKFORCE?

The question here is this:  do women have a real choice about whether or not to marry and have children?  Feminists commonly make it sound as if this is not a real choice.  Both early conditioning and later social pressure, we are told, leave no option for the majority of women.  The fact that most women do marry and have children is taken to show just how effectively they are socialised and how powerful is the pressure.  They rarely encounter models for other modes of life.

What this argument obscures is the fact that whether or not something counts as "conditioning" or "pressure" depends in part upon whether it is, or is believed to be, a genuine good.  Consider an analogy:  a child is brought up to appreciate good music.  Her parents encourage her to sing, to attend concerts, to learn an instrument, to listen to the classics.  On becoming an adult she decides to give it all up, against the wishes of her parents and contrary to the advice of her friends.  Has she suffered "conditioning" or "pressure" in her upbringing?  If the terms can be used to cover this sort of case then they have lost all the negative force which they are usually thought to carry.  But suppose she carries on and becomes a moderately competent trombonist.  Has she had no real choice about this?  The analogy with getting married and having children requires no labouring.  Only if we assume that these are not satisfying ways of life can we show that they result from adverse kinds of causation.

Contrary to the whole tenor of feminist thought, it might plausibly be argued there has never been a time when less effort was made to prepare people for marriage and parenthood than at present.  And the opportunities open to "spinsters" are now very great, both in work and in private life.  According to Burns, girls are conditioned to lack interest "in acquiring the attitudes and jobs that might open up a 'male' career".  However, 61.8 per cent of females but only 53.4 per cent of males completed secondary education in 1988;  in 1987, 71,300 females but only 67,400 males were attending universities and colleges of advanced education. ⁽²³⁾  By the reasoning commonly employed by feminists these differences would have to be construed as evidence of discrimination against males.  (Further evidence of the subjugation of boys might be sought in their heavy predominance in remedial classes or in the fact that they are subject to far more disciplinary action than are girls.)  If the emphasis is placed upon the fact that women do not often end up as architects, managers, mathematicians and accountants, then any explanation will need also to explain why so many of them are now succeeding as lawyers and doctors.  If the question is why so many women work in service industries and clerical work and not in heavy industry, labouring or trades then perhaps the answer is that they are better suited to that kind of work.

Writing of the first feminist movement, G.K. Chesterton commented that "twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry We will not be dictated to:  and proceeded to become stenographers". ⁽²⁴⁾  Some will read this as a cheap sexist jibe;  others might see in it a defence of the role that women play in the home, which was probably Chesterton's intention.  More usefully, it might serve as a reminder that for most people most of the time the decision between work in the home and paid work is a rather pragmatic and mundane adaptation to a complex of circumstances, and has little to do with "liberation" from the "tyranny" of domesticity.  The feminist retort to this is of course that women are given only the low-paid low-status jobs left over after men have had first choice.  To establish this claim it would need to be shown that women who pursue full-time careers with the same tenacity and skill as men do worse than men do.  Whether or not this is so is not a matter for armchair philosophising, and it would be foolish to pronounce upon it without good evidence.  There may not be any clear-cut generalisations possible here:  the truth may be that it is true in some places and not in others.

At this point it will be alleged that "structural" discrimination against women is demonstrated by the fact that in general men earn higher wages than women.  Here it is possible to refer to some figures.  In the last quarter of 1988 men earned an average of $512.10 and women $427.20 when employed full-time for an ordinary week's work.  In other words, on average women earned 83 per cent of the male wage.  Other figures suggest that this ratio is strongly related to age:  young women earn almost as much as young men, older women earn considerably less than older men.  In the 15 to 19 age group the difference may be as little as five per cent. ⁽²⁵⁾  The most obvious explanation or partial explanation of this increasing disparity with age is that children disrupt women's careers and thus limit their chances of promotion.  Another explanation is that younger women are better educated, more highly qualified and more career-minded than their predecessors.

Whether evidence of unfair discrimination against women can be derived from these figures depends on how heavily we choose to weight the disruption effect.  It is commonly believed that women's work as homemakers disadvantages them when they return to the paid labour market, but a recent analysis of women's lifetime earnings found, rather surprisingly, that this is effect is minimal.  An econometric study of 2500 women by John J. Beggs and Bruce Chapman, entitled The Forgone Earnings from Child-Rearing in Australia, concluded that although children -- particularly first children -- substantially diminish women's labour force participation "the consequences of children on women's hourly wage rates are negligible". ⁽²⁶⁾

The assumption that women are "conditioned" to adopt certain sorts of work, like the assumption that they are conditioned to raise children, rests on the further assumption that what women choose to do is inferior to the alternative choices they might have made.  Whether it is inferior is little more than a matter of opinion -- the answer will vary from person to person.  It seems best to conclude that the women themselves arc better judges of the kind of work that suits them best than are the feminist theorists.  In any case, the only real issue for public policy is whether any artificial barriers are placed in the way of anyone's choice of occupation.

It can be plausibly argued that if people thought only of their own interests they would probably not have children at all, such is the range of other ways of life now available.  We know that most couples find it very difficult to articulate why it is that they decide to have children. ⁽²⁷⁾  The explanation for this may be simply that the desire to reproduce the species is a biological imperative which manifests itself in ways which are not readily rationalised.

THE PRIVATISATION OF VIOLENCE

"Only a minority of men are violent", as Burns allows, so the fact of domestic violence cannot by itself be used as evidence against the family.  The real issue is why violence occurs in some families and not in so many others.  Burns's objection is rather that, when it occurs, domestic violence is treated by both the police and neighbours as a purely private matter.  The objection is partly about when an outsider should intervene in family conflicts, but underlying it is perhaps a more general issue concerning the boundary between a family and the rest of the world.

Critics of the family very often dislike the privacy of family life.  The value that is placed upon privacy or sociability will vary very much from person to person (and from culture to culture), and it makes little sense to think of one choice as better or worse than another.  Consequently, it makes no more sense to criticise family life for involving privacy than it does to criticise a commune for lacking it.  Families do have boundaries:  without them they could have no autonomy and thus no identity.  The flexibility of these boundaries will vary from family to family.  Such boundaries are not justifications for any sort of behaviour which goes on behind them, but neither can they be crossed by anyone who just happens to dislike the way people behave in their own homes.  Sometimes outsiders -- including the police -- will intervene when they should not;  at other times they will stand back when they should have intervened.  Often, as police find, it is a no-win situation, but just because this is the case it is foolish to blame people who would like to be helpful but don't know when or how to be so.

Much thought is presently being given to these issues in connection with domestic violence, and most of the credit for this can be given to the feminist movement.  But the tendency to overdramatise the issue -- to use it as a stick with which to beat the institution of the family -- appears difficult to resist.  Even Don Edgar, the Director of the Australian Institute of Family Studies, can remark in this context that "Reasoning, explanation, controlling anger and conflict management do not typify the average home". ⁽²⁸⁾  The only evidence adduced for this surprising claim is Paul Amato's study Children in Australian Families suggesting that 70-80 per cent of parents sometimes slapped, spanked or yelled at their children.  This tells us nothing about relations between spouses, which has been the real issue for feminists.

Amato's results do show that all forms of "violence" towards children are more likely to be practised by women than by men -- not surprisingly, as women spend more time with children than men do.  But the results also fail to establish Edgar's contention.  Only if we assume that spanking etc. are not accompanied by reasoning, explanation, the controlling of anger and conflict management can we draw that conclusion.  Amato claims but does not show that physical punishment and other forms of discipline such as sending a child to its room are "coercive, power-assertive forms of discipline that are quite different from forms of control based on love and reasoning". ⁽²⁹⁾  He tells us nothing at all about the circumstances or the frequency of such actions, though his figures show that physical discipline drops off to about 20 per cent for teenagers.  He also found that about 6 per cent of children had at some time been told by their parents that they did not love them, which may be thought a more disturbing statistic than the 70-80 per cent of slapping and yelling.  Putting the two sets of statistics together what we find is that most parents sometimes yell at and hit their children but never tell them they do not love them.  Is this the best method of rearing and caring for children?  Perhaps not, but it is very easy to be pharisaical in these matters.  In any case, it is clear that they cannot be construed as an explanation of violence between men and women without torturing the data to death.

Analysis of the question of child sexual abuse is still in its infancy, but the first careful study of proven cases, based on Victorian Police statistics, by Geoffrey Partington, found that only about ten per cent of cases took place within the family.  Twenty per cent was perpetrated by strangers.  But in a massive seventy per cent of cases the offence was committed by someone professionally responsible for the care of children, such as a teacher or a welfare worker. ⁽³⁰⁾  Within the family, step-fathers were found responsible for under two per cent of cases and fathers also for under two per cent.  If these figures are accurate reflections of the causes of child sexual abuse, natural fathers are (after mothers) the least of our worries in this area.  And perhaps the "stranger danger" campaign should be revised to teach children to beware of professionals.  It is also worth noting that professional social workers who, on the flimsiest grounds for suspicion, interrogate children about events within the family and refuse to take the child's denial of maltreatment as good evidence, may sometimes do as much harm to the child as actual molesters.  Of course, even if Partington's figures are underestimations of child sexual abuse within the family, that would not even remotely show that the family is an inherently abusive institution, just as his actual figures do not remotely show that welfare professionals are inherently dangerous to children.

An equally surprising discovery made by two leading American researchers, Straus and Gelles, is that violence within the home and spousal homicide are as often perpetrated by women upon men as by men upon women, at least in the sample analysed in their study. ⁽³¹⁾  In Australia the spousal homicide ratio is three murders by husbands to one murder by a wife, so perhaps the physical violence ratio is something similar.  If so then we can say that the problem is not simply a male one.  Edgar mentions the American result, but he goes on to claim that "Central to the problem of socialised aggression is the accrual of a massive power base of resources by males". ⁽³²⁾  He adds that "there can be no doubt that men have more to lose from the breakdown of the family than women".  If men have such resources and such interests, and assuming only that they possess a modicum of rationality, it is hard to see why they would commit acts of violence likely to jeopardise the stability of their family.  It is equally difficult to explain the reported level of violence by women against men (in America) or by women against children.

What is needed here is not global and unprovable generalisations about men and women, but insight into the dynamics of particular deteriorating relationships.  And there is good reason to be hopeful that we are coming to understand something of these dynamics.  Work by Ian MacDonald of the Queensland Marriage Guidance Council, for instance, suggests that chronic violence by men against their partners does conform very closely to an identifiable pattern -- a "Cycle of Violence" -- and that it can be cured.  MacDonald's method has been to help men understand the dynamics of this cycle and to teach them stress and anger management techniques.  "Our experience has been that it will take up to 6 months in the [therapy] group before a man can say with confidence that he is violence free", he reports. ⁽³³⁾  MacDonald himself conceives this task as that of undoing a lifetime of sexist socialisation.  He asserts that "Men's power over women is enshrined in almost every area of life in the community", but the fact that he has such success seems to suggest otherwise.  No doctor would expect success if the disease he had to cure was all-pervasive in the community.  In any case, what matters is the success itself.  As he rightly says, "Progress with violent men is hard-won, but the benefits for this generation and for following generations are inestimable".

While the progress of these programs will need to be monitored, the general aim of curing violence is a cause well worth public support.  At the same time women's refuges -- whatever the faults some of them may have -- will continue to be needed.  Refuges and therapy can be supplemented by legal prohibition, law enforcement measures and court-issued restraining orders, and in the recent public awareness campaign these have been the main focus.  While legal restraints are necessary in some cases, this strategy has important limitations.  What makes domestic violence different from ordinary criminal violence -- what makes it more tragic than malicious -- is that it takes place between two people who, in most cases, believe they love each other and want to go on living together.  Often also the perpetrators themselves have been victims, of abusive parents, of bitter divorce struggles between their parents, of school playground bullying, of wartime traumas.  For these reasons the emphasis should be as much on cure and rehabilitation as on prevention by deterrence and restraint.

Feminists have not shown any commensurate interest in the emotional violence which commonly accompanies marital breakup and divorce, particularly the disruption suffered by children, yet if a campaign comparable to the domestic violence effort was applied to family breakdown we might manage to alleviate this form of suffering.

DIVORCE AND THE FEMINISATION OF POVERTY

Burns objects to the "structural inequity" which befalls women when their husband deserts, dies or divorces.  This is a large subject, to be dealt with in two chapters of this book.  All that needs to be said here is that it is about three times more common for women to initiate a divorce or separation than it is for men to do so.

RETHINKING FAMILY ACHIEVEMENTS

If Burns's analysis is a fair average quality sample of the feminist critique of the family then clearly it contains little to cause the ordinary suburban hornemaker to think that her life has all been a dreadful mistake.  It fails quite markedly to show that women in general are the victims of opression.  Two matters of importance arise from it, both of them obvious:  the fact that homemaking is a low-status occupation, and the fact that it is difficult to combine responsibility for children with ambitions for a career, especially a full-time career.

A number of methodological points should be made about the "critique" of the family.  The anti-family literature fails to be properly critical because it never makes the effort to see why we have families and what it is they really do;  because it constantly generalises from examples of family failure to the failure of the family as a whole;  because it has no account of how and why some families manage to be relatively successful;  because it has little respect for people's ordinary aspirations;  and because it has nothing to put in the place of the family which embodies those aspirations.  We easily believe almost anything about what governments can do to improve the world, or what can be done by the individual in pursuit of his or her own self-fulfilment, but we apply much more stringent standards when judging the achievements of families.  The tendency has commonly been to blame the family for as much as possible, however ludicrous.  We need to distinguish what happens in a family from what happens because it is in a family.  The two are quite different.  Much that goes wrong in families would happen in some other way were the persons concerned not members of any family.  It may be that their being in families actually prevents further and more serious disintegration.

The critics have got one thing about family life right:  it is a low-status business.  Part of the reason for its lack of status is that it is the subject of so much ill-informed and ill-intentioned "criticism", and it would help matters somewhat if this were to die out.  But part of it is in the nature of the thing.  Much of the work of family life is rather tedious.  Housework and childcare especially are slow, day-to-day activities, and the results are nearly invisible.  The critics do not ask creatively what might be done to make them easier.  But more importantly, status is a device for regulating relations between people who are strangers to each other.  It is, in other words, a public phenomenon.  Families cannot use this device, quite simply because they know each other too well.

It is usually those who are hostile to the family who do most to perpetuate the sentimental image of family life, for the purpose of creating a straw target. ⁽³⁴⁾  The truth is that we do not have to take this "critique" half as seriously as it takes itself.  There are things which are problematic about every family, just as there are about all states, societies and people.  But families are as different and as varied as are people and societies.  There are many signs that this anti-family propaganda is in decline, but we do not yet have any convincing picture of what it is that families really do.  And without such a picture we cannot hope to understand or prevent family breakdown, much less eliminate child poverty, which is so often a consequence of family breakdown.

So far the argument will have seemed hostile to feminism.  But not all of feminism is hostile to family life, and it may be that a rehabilitation of our understanding of families can be drawn partly from feminist sources.  Feminist hostility to the family can be partly explained on various grounds.  One is that the problems which feminism has with the family may just mirror, perhaps grotesquely, the general awkwardness our whole culture has here.  But also, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick suggested, it is difficult to combine household and childcare responsibilities with a desire to do something in the public world.  We might learn ways of making this easier.  That the burdens of domestic life are usually borne by women should not be discounted as unimportant.  These considerations make the strains in feminist rhetoric and argument at least partly explicable.  Nor is it too much to hope that something of lasting importance for the understanding of our relation to the family may eventually come out of the movement, or at least from its more clear-thinking and self-critical exponents.  "The Personal is Political" slogan, which was intended to convey a sense of public anguish at private wrongs, can take on a different twist.  It might be used, contrary to its original intention, to make the public world more aware of the importance and value of the private world.  For lack of any better terminology this strand of argument might be known as "conservative feminism" -- assuming of course that a set of ideas can be conservative without being hidebound or illiberal. ⁽³⁵⁾

Where liberal feminism wants women to achieve in public life, conservative feminism wants public recognition of private achievements;  it wants a revaluing of the importance of home and family;  and it portrays the child-rearing skills as central virtues:  empathy, forbearance, nurturance, support, and patience.  But the image is often somewhat stuffy;  it makes women seem secondary, selfless, and dull.  Its central claims are that private achievements within the family have public value;  and that you can have both love and equality between men and women, if you work at it;  but it rarely argues for these with sufficient force.  Its position gets patronised, or matronised, and its voice is rarely taken seriously.

As an example of a kind of conservative feminist argument, consider the following feminist attack on the ideals of liberal individualism by Mary Midgley:

The whole idea of a free independent, enquiring, choosing individual ... in spite of its force and nobility, contains a deep strain of falsity, not just because the reasons why it was not applied to one half of the human race were not honestly looked at, but because the supposed independence of the male was itself false.  It was parasitical, taking for granted the love and service of non-autonomous females (and indeed often of the less enlightened males as well).  It pretended to be universal when it was not.  This equivocal, unrealistic attitude to the mutual dependence central to human life does not just inconvenience women.  It falsifies the whole basis of life.  Morality becomes a lop-sided melodrama.  The virtues and qualities we need for love and service are uncritically despised, while those involved in self-assertion are uncritically exalted (except when it is women who are doing the asserting). ⁽³⁶⁾

This is interesting for a number of reasons.  In the first place it applies very well as a description of what is wrong with much contemporary feminism as well as traditional male attitudes.  Feminists have very often exalted independence, despised self-sacrifice and pretended that their claims and demands were universal when they were not.  Women, because their work had no place for it, were once far better than men at detecting cant and hypocrisy.  This is no longer true.  But also, insofar as liberal feminism is individualist, Midgley's objections hold good against feminism.

The comment focuses on male/female relations.  In a manner all too characteristic of feminist writing (though certainly not of Midgley's other writings) the passage makes no mention of children, yet it might be applied even more strongly to family life as a whole.  Family members are individuals and they do have interests of their own, but it is hard to conceive of a family which operated predominantly on those individualistic assumptions.  (This holds true also for friendship, and for teamwork in all its various manifestations, but it has special importance in the long-term context of family life.)  Midgley's remarks help to mark the boundary between an individualist ethic of self-fulfilment and an ethic based on the "mutual dependence central to human life".

It is useful to distinguish here between dependence and mutual dependence.  Dependence as such is the condition of young children and sick, disabled and very old adults.  Mutual dependence is an adult possibility.  It entails mutual support, yet it is not inconsistent with self-reliance, a quality which both some conservatives and some radicals properly admire.  The family involves both mutual (husband/wife) and simple (parent/child) dependence.  The traditional purposes of marriage are the creation and nurture of children, sexual mutuality, and companionship between husband and wife.  The old Anglican marriage service speaks of "the mutual society, help and comfort that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity".

An ethic of caring for dependants is dismissed by some militant feminists because it seems to them to be itself a form of exploitation.  There is a grain of half-truth in this:  people occupied in caring for others (both women and men) cannot look after their own interests as well as the rest of us can, and they are therefore vulnerable to exploitation.  This is one reason why families require some social support, though all such outside assistance can easily become outside interference.  Any shift to re-emphasise the importance of homes and families is open to the objection that it thereby devalues the public gains made by women in the past two decades.  But there is no theoretical conflict here.  Both are good, and the world will be richer if we can maximise both.  (In that sense Midgley has not shown that there is anything wrong with liberalism or individualism as public philosophies -- only that they cannot accommodate private life.)

The ethics of the family are very different from the ethics of public life, where the interests of the individual tend to predominate.  Marriage is entered voluntarily;  children are sometimes planned.  But we do not choose where, when and to whom we will be born;  and once having produced children of our own we are more or less stuck with them through thick and thin, whether we like them or not.  Traditional marriage likewise assumed permanence, no doubt partly because care for children requires long-term commitment.  The basic purpose of the family is to bring the next generation into being, and transmit to it self-confidence, competence and respect for others.  This much should be obvious, though it is not often said.  The fact is that to a remarkable extent families do this, and do it moderately well.  The fact is extraordinary because to do the job at all well requires considerable quantities of care, consideration, patience, self-sacrifice, humour, flexibility, self-assurance, not to mention a good deal of time, labour and money.

The scale of this commitment is such that a visiting Martian who knew nothing about human reproduction and life-cycles would surely wonder why we go to so much trouble for so little reward.  Parents sometimes ask themselves the same question.  Of course there are great rewards and pleasures in family life, but many of them are not the standard kinds of pleasure that we tend to seek as adults in search of self-fulfilment in our careers or our leisure activities.  To a large extent the pleasures consist in taking pleasure in someone else's happiness, growth or achievement.  They are the second-order pleasures of altruism.  It is this familial altruism which is the primary form of love and which is essential to personal and social sanity.  It is this altruism which comes to the fore when, for instance, family members suffer serious illness or disability.  It is of course a very different thing from the sentimentalised accounts of the nature of love which somehow predominate in our culture.

In saying this there is no need to deny the genuine danger that parents may be too altruistic for their own good, by seeking to give their children everything for nothing.  There is in every family a complex interplay between parents and children which amounts to the process of moral education.  Clearly, it is within the family that children learn most of what they ever learn about respect for other people.  It is by playing a part in the mini-society of the family that they learn to play a part in the larger society of adults.  Public affections and commitment do not come wholly naturally and without effort.  They have to be learned by being practised in a manageable and friendly environment.  And that involves bumping up against others with conflicting interests and desires, and learning to respect those desires and interests.

The family also acts as safety valve for the pressures and stresses generated elsewhere in society.  This is one reason why family life does not, cannot and should not conform to the sentimentalised image propagated about it by its enemies.  To understand why people -- both men and women -- sometimes seem to behave worse at home than they do in public we need to be sensitive to the safety valve aspect of family life.  They behave worse there because they know that there at least they will be accepted with all their faults.  It is not family life which puts up a false front, it is public life -- and our real selves have to emerge somewhere.  These things should be kept in mind when we are thinking about the serious issues of child abuse and domestic violence.  They are of course not an excuse for such abuse or violence but only a partial explanation of it.  To say this is not to deny that families sometimes generate their own, perhaps unnecessary, crises.  And sometimes these need help from outside the family.  But most intra-family problems, and a great many which originate outside the family, are dealt with inside the family.  The unconditional for-better-or-worse commitment of traditional marriage is a recognition that we need someone to be there when all else fails, or when we ourselves fail.  As Robert Frost remarked, "home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in".

Furthermore, marriage and family life are compatible with feminism.  As Hilary Cosell puts it, marriage

satisfies and fulfils the need for intimacy in ways other relationships can't. ... The unwillingness to admit this, to find ways and means for women to create successful personal lives built on their visions of themselves as females, as well as successful business lives, is the termite of the feminist soul. ... The concept that a professional identity and success is a substitute for a female identity -- consequently a marital and/or motherhood identity -- ignores the basic need for companionship all people feel.  It ignores the peculiarly female complications of the need and assumes any differences between females and males are merely environmental, culturally programmed, solely the result of custom. ... [W]hen women live in a world where they are fearful and ashamed to admit that they want to marry and have children, when women live in a world that indicts them for wanting to not only marry and have a child, but remain at home to oversee raising that child, then this new order doesn't offer much of an improvement over the old. ⁽³⁷⁾

The work of American feminist and sociologist Alice S. Rossi reinforces this conclusion.  She rejects the view, "fashionable nowadays, that family systems victimise and oppress women", and argues that marriage and family life are generally good for both men and women.  Her claim is based on research evidence of psychological differences between men and women.  Women, she believes, are more naturally sociable than men:  "they tend to seek out other people;  they form quasi-sisterly relations with other women;  and they turn to parents, adult children, and siblings to satisfy their social and emotional needs, all of which further reinforce their embeddedness in social institutions, a pattern men do not show to nearly the same extent".  Rossi interprets this as suggesting that "a critical function of family systems is to bind men into the social collective".  The advantages of this binding to women, children and men are, she implies, very great.  "All the sociological literature on social deviance lends support to this interpretation, for young, unattached males predominate in sexual violence, alcohol and drug abuse, crime and terrorism". ⁽³⁸⁾  She adds that only for a small minority of men does work provide a comparable force for social integration.

Australian figures on suicide tend to corroborate the view that families are important support systems.  An analysis of ABS data on suicide and marital status between 1971 and 1986 by Trevor Chambers (a researcher for Care and Communication Concern) shows that both men and women who never marry are about three times more likely to suicide than those who are married.  After divorce women and men are about four times more likely to suicide than women and men who are married.  This last figure probably underestimates the disparity because the figures for spouses who are separated are included in the figures for those who are married, and data from Britain which distinguishes between separated and living-together married couples indicates a very high suicide rate amongst separated spouses.  As Chambers observes, "This suggests that, for Australians, the "most suicidal" group is hidden in the statistics among the marrieds". ⁽³⁹⁾

Contrary to the sentimentalised version of family life, the family is a sceptical institution.  It is not starry-eyed and self-admiring.  It has little place for appearances and style.  People are known in their families in ways in which they cannot be known elsewhere.  The principle that no man is a hero to his valet is crucial to the understanding of family ethics. ⁽⁴⁰⁾  Families rarely need to debunk the flightier pretensions of their more ambitious members, for they know without needing to say so how limited public success is.  No man or woman is a public figure to his or her children.  This ethos needs to be cultivated rather carefully now when the traditional guardians of this scepticism, women, are themselves seeking greater public recognition.

Defence of marriage and the family should not need to appeal to any elevated ideals.  The case stands or falls on their ordinary operation.  But marriage and the family do have their own built-in ideals, and institutionalised ideals are more susceptible to a certain sort of criticism than are more down-to-earth social arrangements.  The fact that we don't live up to the ideals can be used to show either that they are not good ideals or that those who espouse them are hypocritical.  This sort of criticism is all too easy;  and the conclusions do not follow from the premise.  A world without ideals is not necessarily better than a world with only half-realisable ideals.  In practice we do need to learn to live with the fact that reality rarely measures up to the ideal, and sometimes we might decide to abandon the ideal itself, but it should not be for the easy reason that it is after all only an ideal.  We learn to live with similar ideals in many other parts of our lives -- in art, in attitudes to nature, in religion, even sometimes in politics.  Marriage and family life require the same kind of adaptability.

Such is the long history of hostility to the family by intellectuals that it will be no easy matter to learn to think both realistically and appreciatively about the institution.  The twin facts that it is still the preferred mode of life for most people and that we have great difficulty in managing family life makes it important that we do learn this.  Ferdinand Mount, who has done much to document this hostility, concludes his The Subversive Family by asking:  "Why do people still wish to submerge, at least partially, their personalities in marriage and devote a great part of their lives, perhaps the major part, to 'working at' this battered old form of human relationship?"  His hesitant answers are worth quoting.

With all its tediums and horrors, [marriage] has both more variety and more continuity than any other commitment we can make. ... Its passions, both of love and hatred, are more intense.  Its outcomes -- children, grandchildren, heirlooms of flesh and blood -- stretch away over the horizon;  they are the only identifiable achievements which most of us are likely to leave behind us, even if, like many achievements, they are liable to be flawed and only partially within our control.  Marriage and the family make other experiences, both pleasant and unpleasant, seem a little tame and bloodless. ⁽⁴¹⁾

This passage does combine realism and idealism.  It may even contain an element of truth.

Having been critical of some feminist attitudes and arguments it is perhaps appropriate to end this chapter by quoting an Australian feminist, Ann Curthoys.  "It's time", Curthoys says, that

feminists began sweeping the ground from under the feet of the Right, not by defending "the family" per se, but by defending those values which it is held to represent:  long-term relationships, emotional commitment, kinship ties, and especially the importance of the close bonding which occurs between parents and children. ⁽⁴²⁾

It is difficult to know whether this is feminism sweeping the ground from under the feet of "the Right", or the Right having swept the ground from underneath feminism, but either way it doesn't much matter.  The important thing is our common commitment to these values, which transcend partisan and factional considerations.  However, if these are appropriate goals then we need social policies which support them, or at least do not undermine them.  The two most notable policy areas concern the financial viability of families and the processes involved in maintaining the long-term relationships central to family life.  The next four chapters will seek to show both that at present we do not have policies which support the objectives outlined by Curthoys, and that if we value those goals we can find ways to assist in achieving them.

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ENDNOTES

1.  The correct figure is hard to ascertain but is probably around 75-80 per cent.

2.  Lovejoy, "The Origin of Man".

3.  Clark, "Home Thoughts from not so far Away", 170.

4.  Burns's argument is close to that of Barrett & MacIntosh in The Anti-Social Family.

5.  Adler, "Matriduxy in the Australian Family";  Conway, The Great Australian Stupor, 71-75.

6.  Conway, The Great Australian Stupor, 73.

7.  Peter van Sommers, "Male and Female Body and Brain:  The Biology of Sexual Differentiation", 88.

8.  Social Evolution, 207.

9.  Ibid. 239.

10.  Women's Choices, 211;  see also Wolgast, Equality and the Rights of Women.

11.  Victorian Women's Consultative Council, Women in the Home, Table D.

12.  Ibid. 34.

13.  In Grimshaw & Strahan, The Half Open Door, 132.  Leaving aside male prejudice in this matter, the practical difficulties in trying to have the best of both public and private worlds at once should not be underestimated.  The most constructive and optimistic guide here is Apter's Why Women Don't Have Wives.  By showing what some outstanding women have achieved, and how, she offers inspiration -- and perhaps some false hope, for not everyone can live up to the standards they set.  The sky may be the limit but not everyone can fly in such a rarefied atmosphere.  Hewlett's A Lesser Life:  The Myth of Women's Liberation in America shows -- not altogether intentionally -- how very unprepared many highly-educated young American women are for making this combination of public and domestic life.  See also Cardozo's Sequencing, the theme of which is summed up by the sub-title Having It All But Not All at Once.

14.  Miriam Dixson, "Gender, Class, and the Women's Movement in Australia, 1890-1980", 15.

15.  "Sixty-two per cent of all women and thirty-six per cent of all men with tertiary degrees or equivalent qualifications are employed in health, education or welfare", according to Adam Jamrozik ("Social Policy:  Are there Alternatives to the Welfare State?", 126).

16.  Dixson. op. cit. 23.

17.  Young & Willmott, The Symmetrical Family, 113.

18.  Burns, "Why Do Women Continue to Marry?", 225.

19.  ABS Cat. 4111.1, 1987, 36.

20.  Ibid. 36, 42.

21.  Woman on a Seesaw, 115.

22.  See O'Donnell, "The Social World of Parents".

23.  ABS Cat. 6227.0, May 1989, Table 13.

24.  Quoted by Canovan, G.K. Chesterton:  Radical Populist, 55.

25.  See Anstie et al,, Government Spending on Work-Related Child Care:  Some Economic Issues, Table 2, 8.

26.  Beggs & Chapman, Forgone Earnings from Child-Rearing in Australia, 4.

27.  See Richards, Having Families, on this theme.

28.  Edgar, "Family Disruption and Violence", Family Matters 22 (1988) 13;  Amato, Children in Australian Families:  The Growth in Competence.

29.  Amato, op. cit. 79.

30.  Reported in The Bulletin, 27 September 1988.  On the medical and social complexities of this subject, the indispensable authority, which supersedes much previous guesswork and speculation, is now Wakefield and Underwager, Accusations of Child Sexual Abuse.

31.  Straus & Gelles, "Societal Change and Family Violence".

32.  "Family Disruption and Violence", 14.

33.  Macdonald, "The Cyclic Pattern of Abusive Relationships" in Crawley (ed.), Counselling and Domestic Violence.  See also Jean Beck's perceptive "Wounded Men:  The Hidden Face of Violence" in the same volume.

34.  Actually, this "critique" of the family is mostly very old:  there is little that can be said against the family that was not said long ago by Plato in The Republic.  Anyone interested in the long history of wrestling between the pretensions of public life and people's natural preference for their own private world should read Mount's The Subversive Family:  An Alternative History of Love and Marriage.  See also Jean Bethke Elshtain's Public Man, Private Woman:  Women in Social and Political Thought.

35.  That conservatism is not intrinsically objectionable is shown by the environmental debate.  Conservationists are ecological conservatives;  conservatives are social conservationists.

36.  Midgley, "Sex and Personal Identity.  The Western Individualistic Tradition".  For arguments from a similar perspective see Eastman's Family:  The Vital Factor.

37.  Cosell, Woman on a Seesaw, 109f.

38.  Rossi, "Sex and Gender in an Aging Society", 158ff.  See also her "Gender and Parenthood".

39.  Chambers, "Psychosomatic Suicide", 4.

40.  The maxim comes from Montaigne, and the source is interesting:  "Men have seemed miraculous to the world, in whom their wives and valets have never seen anything even worth noticing.  Few men have been admired by their own households".

41.  Mount, The Subversive Family, 256.

42.  For and Against Feminism, 66.