Family Ideology Research Articles

Regulation of unmarried cohabitation in west-European jurisdictions - determinants of legal policy

This article examines the development of statutory regulation of extra-marital cohabitation. It focuses on the private law status of heterosexual relationships in particular West-European countries, although links with same-sex partnerships and comparisons between common law jurisdictions necessitate somewhat broader treatment. The objective is to analyse determinants of legislation, rather than provide a comprehensive account of West-European cohabitation laws. Demographic trends, legal tradition and family ideology provide inadequate explanations for responses in this area. A comparison of the Dutch registered partnership model and French PACS establishes the influence of political culture on legislation and provides a basis for analysis of the future development of legal policy.

Patriarchal Family Ideology and Female Homicide Victimization in Fiji

Despite the burgeoning scholarship on femicide, there has been surprisingly little empirical investigation of the phenomenon in non-Western societies. This study addresses this empirical lacuna by focusing on female homicide victimization in Fiji, a non-Western society. Homicide data spanning an 11 -year period are analyzed for nature, scope and trends. The findings demonstrate that femicides in Fiji are associated with entrenched patriarchal ideologies and asymmetrical gender relations that privilege males.

Adoption, Family Ideology, and Social Stigma: Bias in Community Attitudes, Adoption Research, and Practice

This article explores the impact of the dominant North American genetic family ideal on community attitudes toward adoption, on adoption research, and on the beliefs and attitudes of adoption case workers. It examines how the failure to recognize the stigmatized social position of adoptive families has shaped not only current public opinion about adoption, but adoption research and practice as well. In conclusion, the article offers suggestions for erasing negative bias from adoption research and practice.

The Liminal Family: Return Migration and Intergenerational Conflict in Japan

The central aim of this article is to explore, from the perspective of return migrants, the interplay of power and multiple obligations that shapes the experience of return migration from major metropolitan areas to rural areas in Japan. I suggest that for many, return migration means inhabiting a liminal social position between the neolocal and stem family ideologies that co-exist in Japan. I examine the narratives of two return migrants, with specific reference to the interplay of power relations within the family that contributed to their returns. This article also presents an example of how quantitative demographic data taken from a national census can be used by anthropologists to inform traditional qualitative data. Employing a demographic technique known as cohort analysis, I examine inter- and intraprefectural migration patterns in Japan. Data from the Japanese national census are analyzed to consider the relationship between population distribution and age structure.

STIGMA AND EVERYDAY RESISTANCE PRACTICES

Drawing on fieldwork and interviews from South India (Kerala), the author analyzes married women's experiences of stigma when they are childless and their everyday resistance practices. As stigma theory predicts, childless women deviate from the “ordinary and natural” life course and are deeply discredited, but contrary to Goffman's theory, South Indian women cannot “pass” or selectively disclose the “invisible” attribute, and they make serious attempts to destigmatize themselves. Social class and age mediate stigma and resistance processes: Poor village women of childbearing age are devalued in ways affluent and professional women avoid; differently situated women challenge dominant definitions and ideologies of family in distinctive ways. South Indian women are creating spaces for childless marriages within the gendered margins of families and culturally prevalent definitions of womanhood. The findings contribute to rethinking Western assumptions in Goffman's theory and suggest new directions for research on power and everyday resistance.

Changing Family Tradition: Housing Choices and Constraints for Older People in Japan

The primary objective of this paper is to provide a qualitative analysis of the transformations in the housing choices and living arrangements of older people in Japan. The underlying causes and issues of changing intergenerational linkages were explored in the context of the development of the Japanese welfare state. The fieldwork was conducted in Kitakyushu, Japan, through a series of interviews with older women. The informants were selected from three different welfare sectors - the state, the market, and the family - in order to make a clear distinction among people in terms of their socio-economic status, housing and living arrangements, and degree of family relations. The results of the analysis highlight older people's preference for more independent living with changing family patterns and ideology. It is, however, still constrained by the limited housing alternatives and underdeveloped social services. The paper also reveals the extent of poverty among single women in old age.

Creole Family Politics in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"

Domestic ideology in American fiction is a slippery thing, possibly because it is so closely linked to the debates over American slavery. Take, for example, Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel that George Sand proclaimed to be admirably and of the (Review 4).1 In recent years, scholars have (re)discovered that Stowe's brand of sentimentalism was a radical revision of family ideology of the patriarchal sort, and they have praised it for subverting the of American slavery.2 Yet Sand's review ought to remind us that Uncle Tom's Cabin was no work of avant-garde subversion, but rather, a successful bid for national (and even international) prominence. Uncle Tom's Cabin represents a crucial moment in the United States, when debates over slavery in the expanding territories came to redefine the American family and the American nation. In order to repudiate slavery and render it foreign to the sentimental core of her imagined community, Stowe worked hard to disassociate it from another domestic institution that the break-away colonists had inherited from their colonial forefathers: that of the colonial family. In the process, as I will argue, Uncle Tom's Cabin fundamentally restructured the American family by separating settlers from slaves in American households, assimilating French colonial others, and effacing the colonial family's origins as a settler-and-slave formation. To understand just how Stowe restructures the American national home in Uncle Tom's Cabin, it is crucial to decipher her use of Louisiana Creole characters and settings. This is a challenge that even our most celebrated thinkers have failed to meet. In his survey of the black characters in the novel, for example, James Baldwin simply discards those blacks who pass as French or Spanish, since we have only the author's word that they are Negro and they are, in all

Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America

When and why did it become chic for members of white middle and upper classes to perceive and value themselves as neurotic, primitive, and emotionally fragile? Is popular tendency to define self in language derived from revealed (Freudian) truths, or does American culture for various purposes invent and promote and identities? In this fascinating book, distinguished interdisciplinary scholars show that ways Americans imagine innerness and have been shaped by mass media, economics, domesticity, and arts. The authors investigate how changes in ideologies of family, class, race, gender, and sexuality over past two centuries relate to shifts in Americans' visions of self and psyche; they study the psychological as a changing cultural category and emotions as historically shifting self-definitions. Their compelling topics include how Romantic idea of moods was appropriated by nineteenth-century female authors of sentimental fiction; how black jazz musicians have responded to white interpretations of African-American jazz as emotionally and aesthetically deep; and whether women's confessions of victimization on Oprah Winfrey Show are akin to 1970s feminist consciousness-raising groups. Provocative and timely, book challenges premises of psychohistory and dominant ways in which Americans have been taught to conceptualize making of and emotional life.

A linguagem da casa entre os negros no Recôncavo Baiano

Para analisar o sistema familiar dos negros do Recôncavo da Bahia, Nordeste do Brasil, é preciso compreender a construção cultural da organização e das relações sociais, bem como as representações que as sustentam. Este artigo começa com uma discussão das categorias analíticas chave e das metodologias estrutural-funcionalistas, seus fundamentos teóricos e socioculturais e seu lugar nas análises das práticas familiares e de parentesco entre populações marginalizadas da América Latina, particularmente do Brasil. Em seguida, busca explorar os sentidos implícitos, imersos nos contextos socioétnicos, e que estruturam as linguagens, crenças e experiências familiares entre negros na região. O modelo proposto funda-se na associação entre dois níveis conceituais: o das "casas" e o da "configuração de casas" (conjunto de casas estruturadas por uma ideologia da família e do parentesco) como um sistema de significados.

Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Fathers' Involvement

Using national-level data, this analysis examines American fathers' participation in three domains of child rearing for children aged 5 to 18 years. Focus is placed on the extent to which participation varies by race or ethnicity, gender and family ideologies, and the interaction between these factors. Results show that minority fathers consistently outperform White fathers in the cognitive domain. Findings also show that fathers' involvement is a function of an interplay between race or ethnicity and cultural ideologies.

European attitudes towards maternal employment

Uses data from 1994 International Social Survey Programme to examine how attitudes to maternal employment at different stages of child rearing vary across and within eight nations in the European Union, UK, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Italy and Spain. Considers whether a mismatch exists between belief in a women’s right to work and the “traditional” family ideology. Highlights a north/south divide in attitude and differing welfare policies and gender‐role beliefs.

Inside the black box: Dimensions of gender, generation and scale in the Australian rural restructuring process

Using a case study of the South Australian farm crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the article seeks to sympathetically engage with Whatmore's [Whatmore, 1991a; Farming Women: Gender, Work and Family Enterprise, Macmillan, London; Whatmore, 1991b. Journal of Rural Studies, 7(1/2), 71–76] feminist reconstruction of simple commodity production (SCP). It explores the extent to which Whatmore's reformulation of the SCP concept offers a scale- and agency-sensitive framework through which contemporary processes of agrarian change, including changing gender roles in many facets of rural and farming life, can be seen. Using Whatmore's adaptation of Connell's (Connell, 1987, Gender and Power: Society, The Person and Sexual Politics, Allen and Unwin, Sydney) ‘gender order’ and ‘gender regime’ to examine the survival strategies of Kangaroo Island farm families from 1984 to 1993, the article reveals that while Island farm women have played fundamental and diverse roles in the defence of the family farm and the farm family through their on- and off-farm and household labour, farm men's roles have changed little. Nevertheless, the article does find that the established gender order is undergoing gradual and uneven change as a familial ideology - where the maintenance of family living standards is considered more important than the preservation of the family's ties with the land - assumes importance in some young families' adjustment responses. In summary, the article finds that Whatmore's ‘domestic political economy’ provides an important advance in understanding how farm families, and individual farm women and men, negotiate global, national, regional and local pressures for economic and social change.

Early childhood education and upbringing: An empirical study on ideals and realities in eight European countries

SUMMARY New general lines of development in contemporary Europe challenge traditional norms related to family life and child upbringing. The number of mothers in the labour force is constantly growing as well as the proportion of young children in different forms of outside-family settings for education and care. New ideals and new forms of living have affected and challenged the interior family life as well as the relation between the family and the state. To describe, analyse and compare the ideals and the contextual circumstances of early child education and upbringing, data of two independently launched studies (EUR- and ISSP-project) concerning child upbringing norms and ideals, mothers' views on public childcare services and general tendencies in family ideology and norms in eight European countries have been examined. The results indicate contextual differences between the compared national samples, related to for example socio-economic circumstances, family policies, and supply and content of public childcare services. The official aims and means of family policies are in some, but not all, cases reflected by micro level activities, depending on their concordance with private norms and ideals.

Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century

George Haggerty examines the 'unnatural' affections that defy cultural taboos and challenge what are seen as natural boundaries to desire. Such affections abound in eighteenth century novels offering a complex understanding of the role of gender and the articulation of female desire during the age in which women came into their own as novel writers. On the one hand defying cultural dictates of domestic and familial ideology, and on the other eroticising relations that the family would naturalise - such as sister, brother, father, and mother - the women novelists have accomplished more than literary history has ever allowed them. What is queer about these works is their refusal to conform to heteronormative expectation as well as their sheer inventiveness of imagined alternatives. The novelists offer romantic friends, effeminized male partners, devoted sisterly affection, mother-daughter bonds, maimed and disfigured heroines, bleeding heroes, abject paternal obsession, and lesbian couples. For the first time, women were able to take a literary form and invest it with some of their own most deeply felt concerns.

Myten om den kinesiske entrepenørånd: etnicitet og kønsrelationer blandt kinesiske indvandrere i Danmark

This article attempts to question the assumption that Confucian values are inherent to the Chinese family and that these values can explain economic success among Chinese overseas. An analysis of Chinese immigrants in Denmark unveils that cultural values are renegotiated in the Danish context as a product of socio-economic conditions. As a result a strong patriarchal family institution has merged and is sustained by the demands of the ethnis niche economy of catering. In contrast to explanations of Chinese overseas economic success as related to the Confucian family ideology of Chinese families in Denmark is one reason among others for the present economic crisis in the Chinese niche of catering.

Relationships Among Dogmatism, Family Ideology, and Religiosity in Master's‐Level Counseling Students

This paper presents the results of a survey of the perceptions of master's‐level counseling students in the areas of dogmatism, family ideology, and religiosity. Participants in the study consisted of 331 master's‐level counseling students from 7 master's‐level counselor education programs in northern, southern, and eastern regions of the United States. A total of 142 participants were classified as beginning participants, and 123 were classified as graduating participants. Findings indicated that graduating participants were significantly lower in levels of dogmatism than were beginning participants. Bivariate and multivariate data analyses also revealed that family ideology was more strongly related to dogmatism than religiosity.

Making kinship in the wake of history: Gendered violence and older child adoption

In the United States children enter the state‐run foster care system because of a range of conditions considered to be “abuse and neglect.” Children entering the system are vulnerable to additional bureaucratically ordained violence, some of which is generic and some of which is gendered. This paper situates the exposure of children in state care to gendered violence in a context of poverty, the scaling back of state social welfare programs, and the interaction of gender, family, and race ideologies. The consequences of early exposure to gendered violence are explored through narratives by parents of girls adopted over the age of two who had been subject to sexual and other forms of gendered violence in or before foster care. The need for intervention on the conditions leading to foster care, better monitoring of children's well‐being in foster care, and training and support of foster and adoptive parents regarding recovery from gendered violence is stressed, as is the need to address the ideological conditions leading to the differential exposure of girls and boys to violation.

Couple childbearing plans and births in Sweden

We use data from a nationally representative sample of Swedish couples to estimate effects of partners' childbearing plans on the rate of subsequent childbearing. Only 11% of the couples in this sample expressed plans in opposite directions (plan to have a child versus not to have a child), but 24% had differing levels of certainty about their plans. Of the couples in which both partners said they definitely planned to have another child, 44% had a child within two years. If neither partner planned to have another child, less than 2% of couples had a birth. The figure was 6% if the partners had opposing childbearing plans. Thus, both men and women exerted veto power over further childbearing. Disagreements were equally likely to be resolved in favor of the woman as of the man, and effects of partners' plans on the birth hazard did not depend on the couple's gender arrangements, family ideologies, or marital status. We discuss these results in the context of Sweden's public support for gender equality and for childrearing, its pervasive contraceptive regime, and its high rates of cohabitation. We also argue for the collection of data from partners in future family and fertility surveys.

The Italo-Brussels Jehovah's Witnesses Revisited: From First-generation Religious Fundamentalism to Ethno-religious Community Formation

In 1976 a survey was conducted among two Italo-Brussels congregations of Jehovah's Witnesses and the results compared with a number of autochthonous Dutch-speaking and French-speaking control groups. Towards the end of 1996 the author put the same questionnaire to the same two Italo-Brussels congregations as part of a wider survey about allochthonous religious and social networks in Brussels. The results show how the Italo-Brussels community of Jehovah's Witnesses has evolved from being a specific movement, which took advantage of first-generation immigration, into a community in which kinship—as a source of support and as a symbolic frame of reference—and a traditional family ideology are very much in evidence, but which henceforth will be increasingly sustained, on the one hand, by a second generation who have been born and brought up in the “Truth” and, on the other hand, by a network that is based on kinship and social proximity.

The Private Life of the Victorian Novel

REVIEW ARTICLE THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE VICTORIAN NOVEL Deirdre D'Albertis. Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text. New York: St. Martin's P, 1997. ? + 230. ($39.95 US (cloth). Patricia McKee. Public and Private: Gender, Class, and the British Novel (1764-1878). Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. ix + 245. $49.95 US (cloth); $19.95 US (paper). Catherine Waters. Dickens and the Politics of the Family. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 246. $54.95 US (cloth). Each of these books examines the nineteenth-century detachment of private from public existences. Though in the late twentieth century we take the idea of a private life as a given, its separation from public life is not simply apparent. These categories were constructed during the century through re-definitions of knowledge, family life, and ideology. Novels have a place in this construction. Catherine Waters investigates one powerful aspect tool of private life, the idea of family. Waters's study focuses on the family as an "imaginary construct," (16) a part of a middle-class ideology. Middleclass readers and writers assume that the family is a transcendent value, a desirable object that united ages, classes, regions, and genders. Nineteenth-century discourse depicted domestic life as a universal ideal. Following Jacques Donzelot, Waters notices a shift in definition of the family as the family came to be regarded as a nuclear unit through which the state could operate: "a transition of a government of families to government through the family" (26). The nuclear family replaced feudal notions of the family as a bloodline or mercantilist notions of the family as a corporation. Waters shows that Dickens at once participates in familial ideology early in his carer and then begins to question its transcendence later on. 70Victorian Review In a fascinating chapter on Dickens and Christmas, Waters reveals the extent of Dickens's domestic ideology. Waters notes that in the early nineteenth century the holiday was depicted as an old-fashioned feast-day that few celebrated anymore. Christmas had been a village festival, a time for the landowner to treat his servants and tenants. In Pickwick, Dickens represents a traditional, pre-Victorian Christmas celebration. But by mid-century, the holiday was reconceived as a family party; new customs (like the tree) were adopted, and the village events were reinvented in smaller, indoor venues. Scrooge can be seen not only as a convert to Christmas, but to the idea of the family. Dickens's Christmas books not only show a change in the representation or Christmas but in the amount of ideological weight the season was meant to bear. Moreover the Christmas books help create and maintain that ideology. Dickens's many fractured families help establish the ideal family by counter-example. In Oliver Twist, Mrs. Mann, Fagin and the workhouse authorities all access the rhetoric of family life. Dickens provides examples of numerous failing, rather than parodie, families as well. Waters notes that in Dickens, families that do not adapt themselves to the domestic ideology inevitably decline and can only be re-established by a woman who reconfigures the family to fit it. Dickens's portrayal of the Dombeys in Dombey and Son is a diagnosis. Dombey runs his family like and as a firm; he fails to follow middle-class ideology and separate the family from his business practices. When Dombey's firm-as-family fails, a woman is called upon to establish true domestic virtues. Florence creates a family that is almost transcendent - though, as Waters notices, threatening characters like Carker and Alice have been removed from the narrative. Waters notes that that bureaucracy in Little Dorrit exists through a series of families; these families show an older idea of the family not as a nuclear unit, but a public conglomeration of blood relatives. The Barnacles and their bureaucratic tribe support the anonymous functions of governing like the Circumlocution Office. Their presence threatens the idea of the individual self. Mr. Dorrit too, with his misplaced idea of paternalism — while playing at being the Father of the Marshalsea he forgets to be father of his own family — satirizes ineffectual, pre-industriai familial organization. Like so many of Dickens's...