Familiarity Breeds Contempt

The Anti-social Family,
by M. Barrett and M. McIntosh,
London, 1982

IT would seem only reasonable to suggest that if the modern family form is to be dismissed as reactionary, oppressive, anti-social and authoritarian, then it at least deserves a fair hearing before being assigned to the scrapheap of history and superseded by alternative social arrangements that are more conducive to human health and happiness.  A fair hearing, however, is precisely what Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh, in their widely read book The Anti-Social Family, fail to provide.  Their failure is not simply unjust and unscholarly but also dangerously naive.

Although it is by no means easy to define precisely the meaning of "the family", still it is difficult to imagine that very many would wish to raise their voices in protest against the conviction that "wherever people are making the kind of long-term emotional and financial commitment to each other to take care of each other and provide ongoing love and intimacy, we have the development of a family arrangement".  This is the view of Lerner, Zoloth and Riles and it is presented by the authors in their introductory chapter.  It has the obvious benefit of clearly laying down what is indispensable to modern family life and even though we must acknowledge that what is necessary and indispensable may not be sufficient -- is a socially approved, permanent, heterosexual relationship also required? -- still it would seem that Lerner et d provide us with a very useful starting point.  The authors, however, are not at all impressed.  This view is simply dismissed as "sloppy and reactionary" but no reasons are given for this negative judgment.

Similarly, Betty Freidan is quoted as saying that the family is really "the symbol of that last area where one had any hope of control over one's destiny, of meeting one's most basic human needs, of nourishing that core of person-hood threatened by vast impersonal institutions" and one naturally anticipates with interest the line of criticism that the authors will direct at this remark (with which, I think, most of us would instinctively agree).  However, no criticism is forthcoming; instead, the authors express their amazement and disappointment that views of the Freidan type "are so publicised in the media and [that] they have led to discussion and controversy among radicals".

In all fairness to the authors, they actually begin their book by conceding just about every point that a "pro-family activist" would wish to insist upon.  They say that "the family offers a range of emotional and experiential satisfactions not available elsewhere in the present organisation of social relations" and "familism is not a ruling-class or patriarchal ideology repressively foisted on an unwilling population".  With regard to the idealised family of fiction and the media, they even concede that "the myth is instructive, the dream pleasurable and the hope rational".  In making these major concessions, the authors certainly appear to be shooting themselves in the foot, but it is of course possible that, as well as the clear-cut benefits of the family, there are major defects as well, and this is precisely what the authors proceed to argue.

The most glaring defect of family life, the authors believe, is the emotional and economic dependence of the wife and the subsumption of the wife and children into the identity of the man as head of the household.  They state that "in this context children, and to some extent wives, are mere extensions of men.  Their needs are defined for them by the head of the family and as part of his needs".  But Barrett and McIntosh might just as well have said of a wife who willingly stays at home to look after the young child that she very much wanted to have and who expects her husband to provide for the family while she does so, that "in this context the child and to some extent her husband, are mere extensions of herself';  indeed if, as seems perfectly reasonable to me, we ascribe to this woman's child, both in and ex utero, a will to live, to be born, to grow and to flourish in a supportive human environment, then we might just as well say of this child that "in this context the mother, and to some extent the father, are mere extensions of itself!"  In other words, the mother-father child relation is one of mutual dependence and it is the dynamics of their "inter-relatedness" that constitute the single, ongoing life of the family -- even though each member participates in this life in its own unique way and from its own distinctive point of view.

Another alleged defect of the family mentioned by the authors is that in the close-knit emotional tangle of the nuclear family nexus, what they call the "confusions of intersubjectivity and the problems of distinguishing oneself from the attributions imposed by those closest to one" may well result in schizophrenia.  Naturally, R.D. Laing's authority is invoked as this point to show how each member of the nuclear family "attempts to regdate the inner life of the other in order to preserve his own".

Because of these possible pitfalls of life in the nuclear family, the authors argue for alternative social arrangements.  However, what these authors fail to realise is that it is not just in the nuclear family that there is a danger of "confusions of intersubjectivity" arising but in any social nexus where growing children interact meaningfully and emotionally with specific "significant adult others" in their lives.  Now, of course, it is perfectly possible to envisage -- and even to find historical examples of -- social arrangements in which children do not grow up with close relations to specific adults who are "significant others" in their lives.  The authors mention the case of the Israeli kibbutzim which were set up to make the community itself, rather than distinct adults (such as children's natural parents), the centre and focus of children's lives and loyalties.  However, the evidence that they themselves cite certainly does not indicate that raising children in this way is an unqualified success.  The authors are equally sanguine about the failure of a host of efforts to eliminate what they see as the "oppressive" aspects of family life by experimenting with various, alternative social arrangements -- open marriages, open families, communes, etc.  However, they doggedly persist in their belief that one day their goal of replacing the family with genuinely non-oppressive social arrangements will be achieved.

One might be tempted, in conclusion, simply to say "good luck to them, and to all who sail on their ship to Utopia" but such well wishes are not in order, at least not in my view, and for this reason.  It is the right of parents to choose to raise their children in whatever social arrangements they wish;  it is even their right (I think, though I have reservations) to allow their children to be raised under social arrangements which discourage the formation of close ties between "their" children (no longer, however, to be regarded as "theirs" in any deep, personal sense) and specific significant adult others (such as their own mother and father).  However, they must excuse the rest of us if utopian endeavours send a chill down our spines and if we fear that such "parents" are hopelessly caught in the grip of a theory and that their children are made to pay a terrible price.