The decline of the family looms large in the rhetoric of the right. But it has recently re-emerged as a major area of debate and discussion on the left as well. Michéle Barratt and Mary McIntosh's The Anti-Social Family (Verso, 1982, £3.95) and Lynne Segal's collection of essays What is to be done about the family? (Penguin/Socialist Society, 1983, £2.50) both lay down important challenges to much traditional socialist and feminist thinking. Judith Arkwright and Valerie Coultas talked to Lynne Segal and Mary McIntosh about their books.
LS: What is to be done about the family starts from the current Tory appeal to strengthen the family and how well this fits in with government attempts to make cutbacks in welfare provision. It argues that their family rhetoric is little more than an attempt to rationalise these cutbacks; but it also argues that the appeal to the family is nonetheless a strong one because the family means so very much to all of us. This is why it's important to begin to consider the family and the debates about it of the last twenty years.
Criticisms started to emerge from many sources during the 1960s of the stifling and inward-looking character of the contemporary family. A central focus of concern was young people's rejection of the family — their flight from the suburbs into the cities and the criticisms they made of their parents' lives, Missing from these critiques by Laing and others, however, was any account of women's specific situation and frustration in the family. It was only with the emergence of a new feminist critique in the 1970s that the focus shifted on to the misery and isolation of home-bound mothers on the one hand and the problems and tensions of women who go out to work on the other, The book outlines these and the ensuing debates around how we live now and how our needs are met in today's families, looking in particular at the situation of children, the connections between home and work, state provision for people with dependents, and how sexuality, especially for women, is quite rigidly controlled by our ideas of family life.
Finally, it tries to think about and separate our ideas of the family and how we ought to live and care about each other from the reality of how we are actually living today and what our needs really are. And as soon as you do this the first thing that becomes clear is that most people don't live in traditional nuclear families. The collection of essays that I have assembled and partly written attempts to uncover how we are actually living and what sorts of changes we'd make if we are to meet people's real needs in the situations we face.
MM: Like Lynne's, the book that Michéle and I wrote is addressed to a socialist as well as a feminist readership, trying to draw on a tradition — or various traditions — of socialist thinking about the family as well as more recent feminist critiques.
One of the things that we picked up on from the socialist traditions was the critique of the family as being privatised, as representing individualism and private interests; as being constructed dialectically in relation to a public sphere devoid of personal relationships and personal satisfactions subject to the cash nexus and the imperatives of capitalism. We see this in its most extreme form in capitalist society but in other societies too the family has become the place where personal value and personal life are monopolised and where all personal satisfactions are expected to be found and responsibilities expected to lie. People are not expected to feel social responsibility, just responsibility for their own families; social life is impoverished by all that is supposed to happen in the family.
We feel that in practice this means that people who live in families may actually be privileged compared to the huge proportion of people who do not. If you look at social provision — young peoples' homes, old peoples' homes, even educational institutions — all these are impoverished because they are considered second best to life in the family; old peoples' homes, for example, are always thought of as places where you go if the family fails. We feel that social provision could be much more adequate — richer, more rewarding, more truly satisfying the human needs — than it is. So there is a kind of positive conclusion to the book; that the necessity to develop truly social forms is bound to involve an erosion of the family and its monopolisation of caring.
On the other hand, the family can be criticised for not fulfilling even the needs it claims to meet: indeed it can be very destructive to its members. Families are such private, enclosed spheres that they can operate in a way like prisons. It is for these reasons that we called our book The Anti-Social Family.
We also take up various other strands of socialist and feminist thought. One of the things we emphasise is the family as an institution of class, in the sense that it forms the basis on which inheritance of class positions (and, one might add, inheritance of ethnicity and so on) is organised. As well as the inheritance of property, there is also the inheritance of disadvantage for the working class. Insofar as Tory education policy, for instance, offers families freedom of choice in education, what it is effectively doing is to ensure that though educational institutions are social provisions they shall not over-ride family inheritance of advantage and disadvantage.
The book also makes a critique of some social science ideas about the family that have had some popularity on the left — especially the work of Christoper Lasch and Jacques Donzelot. Both, we argue, attempt defences of an old patriarchal family form which they claim has become eroded and weakened. Donzelot's work, in particular, and the way he has been taken up, indicates that there is a danger of support for the family from the left as well as the right because of the ideology which claims that the family is the embodiment of a great many things that we are all agreed are good: caring for other people, mutual support and so forth. In America, in particular, an explicitly left pro-family lobby has emerged; part of our reason for writing our book has been to prevent the same happening here.
JA: In your book, Mary, you stress the strength of the family in society and the fact that it remains apparently unshakeable. You, Lynne, on the other hand, say in one of your essays that the family is an out-moded institution: a bit like the British Empire it has had its time. What is the state of the family today?
LS: What you are pointing to is not so much a contradiction between us but in what people mean by the family. What Mary is talking about is family ideology and what I was attempting to do was to distinguish that ideology from how we are actually living. It is when we look at how people actually live that we say that the family does not exist: there are many family types and the most significant trend in our society today is away from the traditional family. The ideology of the family, however, is very much alive and it is to this ideology which Thatcher is appealing and whose existence in both men's heads and our own allows for the exploitation of women at home and at work: thus women are still seen as responsible for housework and childcare, old people must be cared for in the home, and so on.
MM: I would agree with that but ideology does not just exist up in the air but has an important relationship to how people live. Insofar as you can describe how people live now — whatever the household forms — they are all related to the nuclear family of parents with their dependent children; everything else is a pre-parental stage or a post-parental stage; everything else is defined in terms of the family.
JA: It is quite interesting that the Tories are also debating this question of whether the family is in crisis. Ferdinand Mount in his book says that it is the strongest and most enduring institution in our society and therefore the Tories must look to it as part of the policies they want to pursue. Some Tory MPs, however, are clearly worried about issues like juvenile crime which they blame on the family.
LS: I'm not sure how we are using the word crisis. Insofar as the family is changing it is changing in ways some of which I welcome and some of which create problems for women and all people with dependents but that is not the same thing as saying it's in crisis. What Margaret Thatcher says is that the changes which have occurred in terms of higher divorce rates, the legalisation of abortion and homosexuality have not been in women's interests. Well, I disagree. These changes, to the extent that they have occurred, have not been in the interests of the traditional family but they have been in the interests of those very many women who were able to leave very unhappy and violent marriages.: over seventy per cent of divorces are filed by women. This 'crisis' in the family is one we should 'applaud' because it really represents an increase in the independence of women. But of course it's also true that if a woman chooses to live on her own then she is very likely to be living a life which is more impoverished than a man's because her wages are lower than his and so on.
VC: It seems to me that this flourish of books on the family is the feminist philosophical, or political, response to what the Tories are fighting on now. If you compare what the women's movement was saying ten years ago about the position of women in the family and in society and the kinds of lives women should lead, these books seem much more defensive. Or perhaps feminism is just growing up. These books are coming to grips with the reality of people's lives who don't necessarily live in the 'official' family structure. What do you say to the idea that these are defensive reactions to the Tory offensive?
MM: I don't think in our case it really is. Our book is very much located in debates among socialists rather than in relation to Tory policies. In fact, despite the revelations about the Tory 'Think Tank', I'm still somewhat sceptical about whether there is a coherent strand of Thatcherism that is concerned with the family: I don't think their policies are terribly coherent. The family is an important political arena and they are trying to cash in on its popular appeal — often to defend a set of policies whose mainspring lies elsewhere.
I think that part of the explanation for current feminist interest is a literal growing up: there are now many feminists who are no longer at the stage of reacting against their own parents but are trying to develop their lives as adults, often as parents, and maybe have to look after dependant parents too. We are still involved in the politics of experience and we have had to tackle a whole lot of issues.
LS: I think there is a change in what we are writing today about the family. But we have not rejected our earlier analysis: rather we have changed direction in terms of what we think we can do about it. Mica Nava, writing in my book, is certainly critical of the voluntarism of the early women's movement in thinking we could set up our own alternative households. I think we were very influenced by the libertarian politics of the 1960s which were very anti-state. If we set up nurseries or other things, we wanted not only to control them but to bypass the state — not to seek resources from it. Today we have to face the fact that while feminists have won many arguments — for example on women's right to abortion, contraception, jobs, in the trade unions — despite a token acceptance of feminism, women's situation overall hasn't changed very much because all sorts of more fundamental change is necessary.
JA: Lynne, you place a great deal of emphasis on the alternative lifestyles which people, discussed and developed in the 1960s; you argue that these had a very profound effect on society. But do you really think that alternative forms of household pose a real challenge to the family?
LS: Speaking personally, I have lived in a collective household all my adult life and it has made it possible for me to have a job and bring up a child and avoid the burdens which many mothers feel alongside the joys of child-rearing. In general, I do think that alternative lifestyles, collective households based on sharing housework and childcare, were significant. For instance, because we emphasised both that men should share childcare and the importance of community provision — trying to break down the division between the home and the community — these ideas were taken into the community nurseries we set up. Today, not only community nurseries but nurseries in general often stress the importance of having a male worker, of young children actually seeing that it is not only women who can care for children. This sort of thing is crucially important in the long term in fighting gender roles.
MM: I very much agree with Lynne. In the last chapter of our book where Michéle and I outline strategies, the first area we discuss is personal politics. Much of the reason for disillusionment with what people called 'communes' was that in the 1960s there was an expectation that you could create a socialist commune in the bosom of capitalist society. We should not have expected this because the domestic sphere is so deeply embedded in the way society is organised.
But, on the other hand, we reject the idea that you've got to wait for the revolution before making changes or that you've got to fight simply for legislation, reforms, nurseries ete. We don't believe that people will know how to fight for decent conditions until they have tried struggling with the way that they live their personal lives. The politics of the two must develop side by side.
VC: I don't think anybody disagrees that if you are a woman who is politically active, you have to begin to change your own world; it is not possible otherwise. But the question of how far that is the basis of fighting for feminism is a debatable one. There is a massive variation in the way different people can live: whether you can live in a communal household depends on your bank balance. Many people's cultural options simply don't include an alternative lifestyle.' Lynne said earlier that sections of the labour movement are becoming aware of the need to involve women and to raise questions about things like childcare which were not discussed ten years ago. This is true but I do not think that the fundamental argument to have in a trade union branch is whether or not individual men help individual women in their homes: this is something that the women will fight about at home. The fundamental argument is what to do for women as a whole: how to achieve structural change. Often if you raise demands about sharing household tasks and don't get onto the structural issues it just provides a cop-out for the unions.
MM: But unions are not really concerned with structural change; they are concerned with 'washing-up time', with how jobs are defined. Unless men in the local work situation have their consciousness raised about when shopping gets done and when children have to be collected from school, they won't see that their negotiations about how jobs are going to be done affects whether or not women can do these jobs. Yes, it's a broad structural question but it is also a question of detail.
LS: I would go even further and say that structural change will only come about once the issue of men and women sharing childcare and domestic work is raised. For a start, as soon as you do this you have to talk not just about things that go on in the home but also about a shorter working week and a shorter working day. Demands for shorter and more flexible working time are crucial structural changes in terms of changing the power relationships between men and women. In this country male workers — and it is mainly males — work more overtime than anywhere else in the Western world. We are not likely to see full employment again unless we take up these kinds of demands which women have been feeding into the labour movement for some years. The issue of hours has become a crucial one for the labour movement as a whole because it is closely connected with the way in which industry has been restructuring. It is not just that male workers have been shed but also the way that female workers have been used because they work part time, because their jobs are now more vulnerable and less protected by the trade union movement, and now, increasingly, because a lot of women are prepared to work at home and this fits in with the development of new technology. The issue of hours of work and the connection between home and work is crucial for the trade union movement.
JA: No one disputes that. But that is slightly different. What is the real impact of the changes that have occurred? OK, some trade unions have given more recognition of the need for creches and the sharing of household tasks. These are important; but how much impact have they had in reality? There is almost a sense in which the trade union bureaucracy use these issues as a sop to women, a way of avoiding other issues like unemployment and its implications for women.
MM: I don't think that is true because I think it presupposes that the family as we know it today, and especially the idea of the male breadwinner, is just a product of capitalism and simply serves the interests of the capitalist class. I think it is more complex: that the family has developed also in response to the needs and demands of the organised working class — that is the organised male working class. They have defended the idea of a family wage, for instance, they have developed the idea of women's wages as pin money and accepted the idea that only full-time work is the real thing. In a sense, the capitalists would not have cared all that much if they would have gone on with the old factory system employing men, women and children. It was partly the organised working class defending itself that produced the family system which we have today. We have to change this and part of the change is arguing the case within the labour movement and within socialist thought as well as against the Tories and other representatives of the capitalist class.
JA: Yes, there is a need for that battle, I agree. But how and on what level? I tend to think that things like the mobilisations around the abortion issue actually had the most positive impact in changing men's consciousness.
MM: Issues like abortion and the vote can become defined as single issues and men can adopt them as liberal issues because they are posed in terms of rights. Feminists may raise other questions about the role of the family and so on in the context of such campaigns but much of this just passes the men by. We have got to convince men that the family is not immutable: it is oppressive to women and can be changed. I think the issue of creches for meetings does raise that. They should not be necessary: they are only necessary because only parents — and only one parent — look after children. Asking for a creche you can make these points. Women don't need single issues, they need a transformation of the family in relation to paid work.
JA: The point is what is the impetus for profound structural changes? The type of campaigns which Valerie and I are talking about do challenge all sorts of ideas and prejudices about the family. But they give a more powerful impetus for actual change of these structures because they involve women organising.
Take the issue of the family wage. I agree that the notion that men are the breadwinners and have to earn enough to keep a family needs to be smashed for things to go forward. But how are we to do this? We can take it up in debate and discussion but a campaign around equal pay for work of equal value or for a statutory minimum wage with women organising is the best way that one can begin to eat away at the idea of the family wage so that it begins to crumble.
LS: One problem with the classical Marxist analysis is that it sees the division of labour in the home as serving the interests of capital by providing unpaid domestic work and constituting a reserve army of labour. But these things don't just prop up capitalism but also support a crucial power division between men and women. While the abortion issue, women's right to control their own fertility, is central, I do not think that it is sufficient in itself. Many men are prepared to accept that women should have the right to abortion but it is much harder for them to accept that the existing sexual division of labour has created real privileges for them which women are now challenging. We have to recognise that there is a separate power relationship which does not just serve the interests of capital but also serves the interests of men.
VC: But if you look at the modern women's movement or the suffragettes you see women coming together around a specific focus, but by politically organising as women round that issue they begin to show their force. This must surely be more politicising for men as well as women. It is the self-organisation of women around their concerns which begins to change consciousness: around issues like creches as well. The demand for changing individual practices within the home can detract from that kind of movement,
LS: But we are not talking about changing individual practices within the home. We are talking about changing the nature of work taking into account that men and women have family lives as well: until men and women see this it will always be possible for them to be played off against each other,
MM: I don't think either of us would want to denigrate the campaign for the vote or abortion rights or the women's peace movement. It is not that we do not think them worth pursuing; but there are other things that need doing which have a longer-term impact.
LS: But why not campaign for shorter working hours as well?
VC: Any campaign which improves the situation of the working class makes the situation of women better as well.
JA: Take the Labour Party manifesto. They start off the section on women by saying the crucial thing is that men and women should share household tasks, swap roles, etc. That is their starting point but with no proposals to back it up.
VC: It's a cop-out for them because it's a moral assertion of what should be and not a commitment to back it up in structural terms.
LS: Yes, it is a moral assertion. They seem mainly to propose more nursery provision and I do not think that is the only issue. We need it but, for example, what about elderly people? There are more women working part time or not working in order to care for elderly people than there are for children. We need all types of welfare provision. But changing roles means not just these things, it means changing the nature of work as well: flexible hours, more pay, job sharing, positive action and so on.