Trends in modern families

Press, 14 August 1976, Page 15

Trends in modern families

The Symmetrical Family. By Michael Young and Peter Willmott. Pelican original from Penguin Books. 388 _ pp. N.Z. price $3.30. (Reviewed by Brian Easton) The family is one of those words like “motherhood,” “work,” and “democracy” which triggers universal approval, even though the underlying concept can mean very different things to different people. In each case social change has been such that the word represented a very different reality a couple of generations ago Young and Willmott identify three historical type families. The Stage I family of pre-industrial times was a unit of production where the men, women, and children worked together in home and field. This economic partnership was, for working class people surplanted after a bitter struggle by the Stage II family, whose members were caught up in the new industrial economy as individual wage earners. The Stage I collective was undermined, and the resulting family

was a stage of disruption. More recently the unity of the family is being "restored in the third stage, which is a collective based on consumption. Alas, the Stage I family has been destroyed, and can no longer be studied except there may be odd New Zealand fossils in own-account enterprises, on the farm, and in the commune. But the co-directors of the

British Institute of Community Studies have interviewed 2644 London families and observed the transition from the second to the third stage family. They identify three features of the new family; its activities are centred upon the home, the nuclear family (of parents and children) is relatively more important than the extended family (with other relatives sharing the common life), and inside • the family the role of the sexes have become less segregated. London is not New Zealand, but we can identify similar trends in New Zealand even if we lack a Social Science Research Council to fund the research to systematise such findings. The implications are fascinating. For instance the symmetrical family in which husband and wife more equally share their tasks must have arisen before the present feminist movement, indicating the latter is a political response to a changing social condtion not, as is sometimes portrayed, a minority group of stirrers. But there is so much in this book that it deserves reading rather than summarising. At the very least it warns us that the family will be a viable social unit not by returning it into the form of the past, but by developing its best features into the future. Those who approve the term “family” need to be acutely aware of the multitude of social phenomenon the term subsumes.