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SECOND EDITION
You May
Ask Yourself
Dalton Conley
An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist
Chapter 12
Family

©2011W.W.NortonCo.,Inc.
Family Forms and Changes
• Our choice of a romantic or life
partner doesn’t depend solely on
our attraction to someone, how well
we get along with him or her, or
our shared life goals.
• Whether we realize it or not, there
are also legal and cultural factors
that affect our choice.
2
We’re going to talk more about mate selection and social aspects of family formation.

• A nuclear family or traditional
family is a family consisting of a
father and mother and their
biological children.
• Extended family refers to familial
networks that extend beyond the
nuclear family and may extend
beyond the home.
3
When we think of nuclear families, we tend to think of “traditional” families, however, it is important to
note that nuclear families don’t necessarily include a married couple. There are many different ways
that nuclear families can be formed, but you can generally think of this as a heterosexual, two-parent
household with children.
Extended family most commonly includes a family with children and one or more sets of
grandparents, although that is not the only arrangement. When you think of kin, you might think of
family that you would run into at a reunion. You may know some of the people that you see, but there
are probably also people you don’t know, or at least that you don’t know well. However, some common
ancestry ties you together and makes you kin, or “kinfolk.”

• There is no real “typical” family
in Western society today.
– Multiple generations can live
together.
– Families can consist of step-siblings
and half-siblings; there are many
single-parent families.
– Individuals and couples can choose not
to get married or not to have
children.
4
People in sociologists’ deﬁnition of family may or may not share a household, but its members are
interdependent and have a sense of mutual responsibility for one another’s care. This more open-
ended deﬁnition takes into account the diversity among today’s families.

5

Interview, Andrew Cherlin
5
Andrew Cherlin discusses his research
on changing attitudes toward marriage
and describes his concept of the
“marriage-go-round."
Before showing this clip, ask your students how our society’s ideals about marriage have changed, and
why.
In this interview, Andrew Cherlin talks about marriage in America. In his book The Marriage-Go-
Round, he notes that an American child living with married parents is more likely to see his or her
parents break up than a child living with two unmarried parents in Sweden. Ask the class to discuss
the following questions: What does this say about the institution of marriage in America? Does
marriage still have meaning? Is it better for parents to be married than to live together unmarried?
Why or why not? What does marriage mean today?

6
Diversity in Families
• Endogamy refers to marriage to
someone within one’s social
group (race, ethnicity, class,
education, religion, region,
or nationality).
• Exogamy refers to marriage to
someone from a different
social group.
Endogamy tends to be more common for a variety of reasons. We still tend to have de facto segregation
in our society (segregation as a result of housing patterns, economic patterns, etc.), so we tend to
meet people of similar backgrounds. There are also social pressures to marry people of similar
backgrounds. Exogamy is becoming more commonly acceptable, but is still less common than
endogamy.

7
• Loving v. Virginia is the 1967
Supreme Court case that ended
antimiscegenation laws (laws
that said that interracial
couples could not marry).
Although interracial marriage was never illegal at the federal level, from 1913 to 1948, 30 states
enforced antimiscegenation laws, primarily aimed at black–white unions. Many of these laws lasted
until 1967, when the Supreme Court ﬁnally declared them unconstitutional, reversing the 17
remaining on the books.

8
• Monogamy is the practice of
marrying (or being in a
relationship with) one person at a
time.
• Polygamy is a system of marriage
that allows people to have more
than one spouse at a time.
Monogamy, the practice of marrying (or being in a relationship with) one person at a time, is still
considered the only legal form of marriage in modern Western culture.
Polygamy, a system of marriage that allows people to have more than one spouse at a time, is
practiced among some subcultures around the world, but is not widely acknowledged as a legitimate
form of marriage.
You may hear of polygamous relationships, even in the United States. Individuals may claim to be
married to multiple people, but those ties have no legal meaning and would not hold up in a court.

9
• The more common form of
polygamy is polygyny, a system
of marriage that allows men to
have multiple wives.
• Polyandry, a system of
marriage that allows women to
have multiple husbands, is a
more rare form of polygamy.
Polygyny is much more common than polyandry.

10
• About 8 percent of all
households are occupied by
couples who are cohabitating
(living together as a
romantically involved,
unmarried couple).
More than 11 million people are living with an unmarried partner, including both same-sex and
different-sex couples

Families through History
• Early modern families depended
heavily on kinship networks, which
are systems of relationships between
people related by blood and marriage.
These networks weakened as families
became more mobile.
11
The preindustrial family functioned like a
miniature economy.
Everyone worked to produce the food, clothes,
and other items the family needed to survive,
and this work took place in or right around the
home.
It depended heavily on kinship networks,
which are systems of relationships between
people related by blood and marriage. These
networks weakened as families became more
mobile.

• The Industrial Revolution created a
division between work and home.
– Men were associated with the public
world of wage-earning work.
– Women were relegated to the private
world of managing a household and
raising children, work for which
they were not paid.
– Cult of domesticity - true womanhood
centers on domestic responsibility
and child-rearing.
12
With the Industrial Revolution, work started taking place outside of the home, for a paid wage. As a
result, the kind of work that became valuable was the kind that happened outside of the home. This is
when “housework” became unvalued, because it was not associated with a wage.

• The traditional nuclear family is not
a timeless and universal concept. It
developed in response to conditions in
a specific time and place: the post–
World War II economic boom in the
United States.
13
Photo courtesy of Getty.

15

Figure 12.1 Changing Structure of American Families
You May Ask Yourself, 2nd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Figure 12.1 Changing Structure of American Families

©2011W.W.NortonCo.,Inc. Family and Work: A Not-So-
Subtle Revolution
• Several factors have brought about
significant changes in the
organization of work and family
life since the 1970s:
– increasing divorce rates
– decreasing marriage and
fertility rates
– increasing participation of
women in the workforce
14
There have been numerous studies on the effects on children of having a mother who works, and the
ﬁndings have varied enormously.
A new way to approach the topic is to ask how having a working mother affects children within the
same family differently.

A Feminist “Rethinking” of
the Family
• Feminist theorists
suggest gender roles
are learned in the
family. The family
can be a
battleground for
power over decisions
about chores,
housing, raising
children, spending
money, and so on.
15
Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sweet_Baby_Kisses_Family_Love.jpg

Family Roles
16

17
The Chore Wars
• Women today have two jobs:
paid labor outside the home
and unpaid labor inside the
home.
• Second shift refers to unpaid
labor inside the home that is
often expected of women after
they get home from working at
paid labor outside the home.
• Arlie Hoschild (
Arlie Hochschild’s 1989 study of working couples and parents found that women were indeed working two jobs: paid
labor outside the home and unpaid labor inside the home.
Even though many women who are married or live with a male partner work outside the home, they usually take on a
disproportionate share of domestic duties.
This inequality plays out in terms of the time women spend on household tasks, the types of tasks they take on, and in the
perception of the tasks or work.
Studies show that a more equal distribution between men and women of the responsibility for domestic chores makes for
happier and more stable marriages.
Most women without children spend much more time than men on housework; with children, they devote more
time to both housework and child care. Just as there is a wage gap between men and women in the workplace,
there is a "leisure gap" between them at home. Most women work one shift at the office or factory and a "second
shift" at home.
As long as the "woman's work" that some men do is socially devalued, as long as it is defined as woman's work, as
long as it's tacked onto a "regular" work day, men who share it are likely to develop the same jagged mouth and
frazzled hair as the coffee-mug mom. The image of the new man is like the image of the supermom: it obscures the
strain.
Even when couples share more equitably in the work at home, women do two-thirds of the daily jobs at home, like
cooking and cleaning up—jobs that fix them into a rigid routine. Most women cook dinner and most men change the
oil in the family car. But dinner needs to be prepared every evening around six o'clock, whereas the car oil needs to
be changed every six months, any day around that time, any time that day.... Men thus have more control over
when they make their contributions than women do.
''It was an extraordinary experience for me, going to those homes and talking to those women who had great circles under
their eyes. These were women who talked about sleep the way a starving person would talk about food,'' Ms. Hochschild said
in a telephone interview from her home in San Francisco. ''It seemed enormously grim and I would come home feeling
grateful.''

Figure 12.3 Trends in Housework since 1900
Figure 12.3 Trends in Housework since 1900

Swimming and Sinking:
Inequality and American Families
• African American women have
often taken a leading role in
providing for their families.
• African American communities
tend to have expanded notions
of kinship, including even
nonblood relatives.
18
In the 1960s some social scientists presented the role of African American women as a negative,
arguing that this strong role for women undercut the role of the father in black families and
ultimately led to a host of social problems.
W. E. B. DuBois argued that the high rate of female-headed families in the African American
community was a result of racial oppression and poverty, not a cause of it.
William Julius Wilson argued that there is an outright shortage of employed, un-incarcerated black
men with whom black women could hope to form a stable family unit, thus leaving them with little
choice in terms of taking responsibility for their families.

Swimming and Sinking:
• Latinos come from many different
countries and cultural backgrounds,
but some characteristics can be
identified as common to Latino
families, including:
– strong family and community ties
– adherence to traditional gender roles
– devout Catholicism
– high marriage rates
– low divorce rates
19

©2011W.W.NortonCo.,Inc. Swimming and Sinking:
• Single, nonworking mothers face many
challenges, among them the attitude
of critics of welfare, who think
that they prefer being on welfare to
working.
• Most women would prefer not to be on
welfare, but the system is such that
often they end up with less income
and fewer benefits when they move
from welfare to work.
20

©2011W.W.NortonCo.,Inc. The Pecking Order: Inequality
Starts at Home
• The size of a family and its
resources can affect how parents
relate to each of their children
and can create inequalities among
siblings.
• Birth order and “natural” abilities
also play a role, but the bottom
line is that in the home, a status
hierarchy often fosters inequality.
21
Children’s experiences are shaped by family size, birth order, presence or absence of parents,
socioeconomic status, and other sociological variables. In addition, the presence of children affects the
lives of parents.
For example, marital satisfaction tends to decline where there are small children in the house, and a
couple’s gendered division of labor tends to become more traditional when children are born.
When a family has a child (whether the ﬁrst or the twentieth), a new dynamic is introduced to a
system, which causes instability. The instability isn’t permanent – however, there is always friction
when an existing arrangement is changed.

The Future of Families, and There
Goes the Nation!
• Divorce is a constant in our
society, and debates will continue
about its effects on children. The
only certainty may be that high
levels of parental conflict —
whether between married or divorced
parents — are not good for children.
22
Mothers still disproportionately receive custody (physical and legal responsibility for children
assigned by a court), although there is a trend toward joint custody.

Figure 12.4 U.S. Divorce Rate
Figure 12.4 U.S. Divorce Rate

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Chapter 12: Family
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