Ten: Part of “the” Family?
The use of quotes above might draw some scrutiny right away. Why “The” American family? This can be traced back to chapter 5, when I began by discussing Harvard functionalist/consensus theorist/sociologist Talcott Parsons and his work on the nuclear family, a family structure he took for granted, featuring a mother, a father, and children. The nuclear family, recall, implied specific gender norms—it was expected that men worked in offices and factories; women raised children and kept the home in order. As noted in chapter 5, this began to change with feminism calling into question the taken-for-granted gender roles of Talcott Parsons’ post-World War II society. Some described the relationship between men and women in this era as one of mutual dependency and difference; others argued that this expectation was repressive to women. Political figures and public debates have seized upon the changes in “the” family, attempting in particular to trace how such changes have adversely affected children, and abstracting this to society as a whole.
The family is one of the major social institutions studied by sociologists. Families are of central importance with regard to societies: whereas education is taken to be the avenue of secondary socialization, families are the source of primary socialization, the means by which children learn specific norms and standards of their respective societies. The transmission of social norms is viewed, by Parsons as well as by some latter-day consensus-theory researchers, as one of the primary functions of the family.
The family does not just play the role of primary socialization and moral education of children; it has historically also served as a source of stability, permitting a division of labor and shared resources. Is a family without children still a family? Of course. At least…I think so. Is the dog my wife and I love and care for a member of our family? I would say yes—do family members have to be humans? If dogs count, what about goldfish, or chickens? I mean to suggest that, regardless of theoretical approach, the definition of family is a bit more slippery than it first seems to be. For example, some would define a family as a group who share a common bond and live together. Divorced parents and their children (more on this in the next section) don’t live together; are they still a family? What about “commuter marriages” where a couple are married but live in different states? You’re still a family even if you live apart, right? Are you still a family if you live alone? Others would define “family” more broadly—are not, for example, your great-grandparents or your third cousins are still family, even if you have never met them, or they passed away before you were born, right? Go back far enough, and all human beings, and ultimately, all living things, are related to one another. If we are tempted to define family in terms of biology, then biologically speaking, every form of life on earth that lives or has ever lived, is a family member.
There is nothing taken-for-granted about the family structure delineated by Parsons after the Second World War. Definitions of the family are (you guessed it), socially constructed, changing over time and differing across cultures; like other powerful social constructions, this should not lead us to believe that family and family structure doesn’t matter. The idea of family is itself a human universal, found across cultures in place and time, and is perhaps the most important of all social institutions; what varies across place and time is the form that families take.
The nuclear family structure was, for one, monogamous, a relationship confined, at least formally, to a commitment to a single sex partner. Monogamy is not, historically and cross-culturally, “normal”—indeed many societies and cultures have had polygamous relations, in which one was not confined to a single sex partner: polygyny, the marriage of a single male to more than one female, has been rather typical cross-culturally and historically, more so than the monogamous nuclear family. Far less common, but practiced in some cultures, past and present, polyandry is the marriage of a single woman to multiple men. Presently, the idea of polyamorous relationships has also (re)emerged in some cultural contexts, including the United States. In 2016, when I was first writing this book, when I wrote the term “polyamorous,” it appeared in my word processing program with a red squiggly line beneath it. The fact that my spell check program (being less than a decade old) does not recognize the word suggests something specific about it: the idea of polyamory, the unwed romantic attachment between more than one partner, is in some ways (at least formally) quite novel. In 2021, when I went revise this book (and now again in 2022), neither polyamorous nor polyamory are viewed by my spell-checker with any suspicion. As will become clearer in this chapter and the chapters to come, neologisms, or new words, denote that something has changed, culturally, in terms of how we see ourselves as well as what kinds of identities, interactions, and relationships have become accepted.
The idea of marriage that is often taken for granted today is in many ways quite new. Most people throughout the history of humanity did not marry out of “love”—romantic love in the sense in which it is taken for granted in the United States is in many ways an invention of nineteenth century European Romanticism. For most of human history, and across most cultures, people married according to the wishes of their parents, or the pressures of their societies, and these marriages were primarily financial contracts negotiated by those external to those who were to be wed. In Europe during the Middle Ages, for instance, men were expected to own land before marrying (unless they belonged to the serfs, a class of peasants who were essentially bound to the land, but even they often required the blessing of their fellows, their local feudal lord, or both, to marry) which led to men in their thirties and forties often marrying teenage girls. The notion that marriage ought to take place between people of a certain age is also rather new, and in some ways culturally specific—arranged marriages often took place between children, and despite growing international outcry, this practice continues in some parts of the world.
One of the things families do is divide up labor, but the ways in which this is done have varied a lot across cultures. For instance, the notion of children as human beings entitled to special rights, treatment, and privileges, is also relatively new, and unique to specific cultures and social classes. Children throughout much of history, especially in subsistence cultures, societies with economies based on decentralized production for immediate consumption, such as small farming or fishing communities, were viewed as producers, miniature hired hands able to work the fields and to help provide sustenance for the family.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, throughout much of the U.S. and Europe, families from the working classes all worked, with children working alongside men and women, often in heavy industry and other hazardous jobs—it was only among the relatively wealthy and privileged that children, as well as women, did not have to do manual labor to survive. This was class- as well as race-specific: working-class women of all races, but especially women of color, including Black women, Indigenous women, and immigrant women not viewed as white, were assumed (by the white upper classes) to be “built differently” and therefore able to “handle” manual labor—a convenient set of ideas that permitted class divides to continue without impacting upper-class views of women as fragile and needing care and protection (this view, in turn, was shaped and perpetuated by armies of doctors and scientists who were well-paid to treat a growing array of “maladies,” as well as fashion sense and cultural sensibilities that sacrificed mobility and health for rigid beauty ideals).
The idea that childhood is a special time for growing, for play, for learning, is a product of a specific set of circumstances that arose historically very recently, arising in industrial cultures only among the upper classes, but more broadly a product of postindustrial cultures. Both birth rates, the number of children born to a single family, and death rates, the frequency with which people of all age died, are typically quite high in subsistence cultures, so families were typically large: children were needed to work the fields, and many children (as many as half, on average) did not survive into adulthood. Demographers sometimes refer to this as Stage One of a four-stage demographic model. With industrialization came higher standards of living for many (though very unevenly), leading to a second stage, whereby birth rates remain high, and death rates begin to decline, leading to rapid population growth. A third stages leads to gradual decline of birth rates, and a fourth, to a population with low fertility rates, low death rates, and an aging population, and stable or gradually declining population growth. We in the U.S. are in the third stage, and transitioning to the fourth—what this means in terms of families remains to be seen.
In short, though functionalists like Parsons looked to the nuclear family as a model of “the” family. However, this is a model that would be unfamiliar to most human beings in most places and times throughout history, and was in many ways a product of a specific place and time, sociologically speaking, with legally enforced monogamous, heterosexual marriage, an end to child labor, and a growing middle class coupled with a “baby boom” which led women (particularly white, middle-class women) increasingly to focus on home and child-rearing. What U.S. pundits often take to be a “traditional family,” or the nuclear family model with specific divisions of labor for men, women, and children, is largely a product of white, middle-class life in the United States following the end of the Second World War. This does not mean that the family structure to which Parsons pointed is not significant—indeed, there are social problems at the intersection of the past, and future, of the structure of the American family that are hotly debated, and about which sociologists know a good deal. And as you have undoubtedly noticed thus far in this work, institutional changes and cultural shifts often bring with them unintentional, and sometimes adverse, consequences.
I have mentioned above that one of the primary considerations in relation to families is their role as agents of primary socialization. Put simply, and in functional terms, the family raises children to become members of society. The family, then, is also structured around reproduction. Much like societies have gender norms (see chapter 5), societies also have sexual norms—accepted or expected ways of expressing one’s sexuality. Far from being universal, sexual norms vary widely across cultures and times—for example, the belief that sex is predominantly for reproduction has held sway in some cultural contexts, but has fallen out of favor in the U.S. The view that marriage should occur before childbirth—and the expectation that those who marry are expected to have children—has also come to be controversial contested. However, earnest and rigorous research on sex really did not begin to take shape until the twentieth century, so much of what was known prior to this is based on observation or speculation, often mixed with the biases of time, place, and researcher.
In many cultures (including, to some extent, our own), talking about sex may be frowned upon, or considered in poor taste. Sex is a personal, private matter, not a matter for public discussion. However, it is easy to see why this is, in practice, not always the case—a great deal of social concern is sometimes directed at sexuality, at what kinds of sex people are having, and with whom. Sexual norms are, in many societies, linked to an accepted or agreed-upon family structure, and might also be implied by, or linked to, gender norms (though it is important to understand that gender norms and sexual norms are by no means the same thing).
One sexual norm that has drawn a great deal of both public and sociological attention in recent decades is the concept of heteronormativity. Defining this term is easier if you think about it as a compound word: hetero (sexual) + norm (ativity). You know by this point in this book what norms are, so here we are talking about normativity, a concept from the study of ethics that deals with how we are expected to behave (and how we are expected not to behave). And of course, the term heterosexual refers to a person who is romantically and/or physically attracted to the “opposite” sex—women who are attracted to men, and men, to women. Heteronormativity, then, is a sexual norm that aligns with the nuclear family, the expectation of a couple, a man and woman, who marry and have children, men and women who are in some sense essentially different—the term gender essentialism is sometimes applied to this view of men and women as biologically different. Picking up a thread that wove through the end of Chapter 5, gender essentialism is often contrasted with gender constructivism, an understanding of gender as socially constructed rather than rooted in biology. Both views are, to varying degrees, influential in different circles; although a sociology course will tend to defend constructivism and criticize essentialism, I would take the view that both positions are rather weak on their own. In my view, how we see and make sense of both sex and gender, as well as how we come to understand and express our sexuality, has biological as well as a social dimensions, but this is not the only view that is out there.
Debates at once academic and political have seethed between these two views of gender for some time. Considering what has been covered in this book so far, perhaps it is clear that sex and gender are both biological (in that female, intersex, and male bodies are different from one another, but labels are decided by humans) as well as constructed in the sense that we “take our cues” on how to “do gender” from our society (expressions of gender differ across cultures and history, are at least partially the result of socialization). However, there are issues that are bitterly contested by each respective side, mirroring in some sense the nature versus nurture debate in psychology: are we “born this way” or do we “learn to become who we are”?
Perhaps it is a matter of emphasis—again, I hold the view that who we become is a complex interaction between our genetic material and our environmental influences. This is not an answer, but an avenue to new questions. One of the ways in which we might examine sexuality is cross-culturally, by examining what sexual norms look like in other cultures. If sexual norms are similar across cultures, this might be taken as an argument that there is something essential about the sexual relations that we have come to take for granted within the context of our own culture.
In doing so, it is worth wondering: are sexual norms universal? Do other societies existing today, or societies in the past, share similar sexual norms? There are some issues that must be addressed first. One of these is the assumption of cultural relativism, an idea that emerges from anthropology, an argument that we should attempt to understand what other cultures do in the context of their own cultures, rather than in the context of ours. To do otherwise is to risk ethnocentrism, the belief that one’s own ethnic and cultural heritage is the standard by which all others should be judged (a belief examined in more detail in Chapter 6).
Many (including me) squirm at the term “relativism.” The idea that there are no standards of truth, morality, beauty, or otherwise seems like an extreme position—and it is. There are different ways to understand cultural relativism—many anthropologists attempt to engage with their research subjects by using what might be called methodological relativism, meaning we do not abandon our own beliefs or cultural identities when studying those of another, but we take the beliefs and identities of others seriously as shaping their world and place within it. This is different from (and sometimes confused with) what might be called ontological relativism, a belief that all cultural identities and beliefs should be understood as equally valid, in terms of their understandings of what is true, moral, beautiful, or otherwise.
As a former philosopher, I will save you the gory analytical details and say that I tend to favor the methodological version, but have reservations about the ontological one. I have put these in italics rather than bold because this is really a secondary conceptual issue for researchers of human beings and cultures, though, as you might imagine, it shapes how we engage with the social world in some really profound ways. Many anthropologists emphasize the uniqueness of cultures and cultural currents; what we are about to do falls more along the lines of comparing cultures to one another across place and time, a sub-discipline within the social sciences called ethnology.
Moving forward, it is worth noting that to understand sexuality in relation social problems is to understand that sexuality, alongside families, is a foundational aspect of culture, and that sexual norms are by no means universal. In fact, there is only one sexual norm that has ever been suggested as a possible universal: the incest taboo, a prohibition on sex between closely related people. Even this, however, is not necessarily the same across cultures. In many times and places, it has been acceptable, for instance, to marry, or to engage in sex with, one’s first cousin. Genetically, your first cousins share with you 12.5 percent of your genes (your parents each share one half, their siblings, one quarter, and the children of your parents’ siblings, one eighth). Some societies consider this to be an acceptable practice; others are deeply opposed. Biologist and naturalist Charles Darwin married his cousin; founding sociologist Max Weber married his second cousin, Marianne Weber, a writer, scholar, and theorist as well (who outlived her husband, and diligently worked to publish his materials; without whom we might not have access to as much of Max’s work as we do).
Speaking of philosophy, there is another logical fallacy that emerges out of studying cultures and what they in fact do: the naturalistic fallacy. It is sometimes assumed that because social scientists argue that there are certain things that are true according to nature, that these things are therefore morally right. If we find, for example, that human beings throughout history have been violent, and want to argue that humans are therefore in some way violent by nature, this is one thing: Humans are violent. This is quite different from arguing that humans have a moral obligation to be violent: Humans should be violent. Similarly, take a big step back, deploy a bit of sociological imagination, and you can think about what other societies and cultures do (as well as our own) without necessarily engaging in celebrating or condemning.
One of the more well-known studies of sexuality was conducted by Broude and Green (1976), who compared attitudes toward homosexuality, a term (out of favor today due to certain historical and clinical circumstances which I will discuss in further detail later: I will tend to use “same-sex relationships”, “gay”, or “lesbian,” and so on) meaning engaging in sexual relations with members of the same sex. They found wide variation in attitudes: in about 41% of cultures, same-sex relationships were strongly disapproved of, and punished. However, the second-largest category of cultural variation was the number of cultures that accepted or ignored same-sex relationships or treated them as normal: nearly 22% of cultures examined fit into this category. Three other categories fall between these—some (11.9%) of cultures had no such concept.
Other research has found that the tendency to have sexual norms that are in opposition to same-sex relationships and sexualities is more often found among societies that are more patriarchal, or male dominated (see Chapter 5 for more on patriarchy). Punishment of same-sex relationships is also more often applied, both historically and in the present, toward men than women—again, this takes place in more male-dominated cultures. It seems possible, then, that given our culture’s systematic challenges to traditional gender roles as outlined by the patriarchal nuclear family as they began in the 1960s, relaxed attitudes toward same-sex relationships in our society parallel changes to the social structure which tended away from a more strictly defined patriarchal set of gender roles. Put more briefly, second-wave feminism likely led indirectly to a wider acceptance of same-sex relationships in our society today. But I am jumping ahead a bit in the story.
One of the earliest studies of sexuality in the United States took place during the first half of the twentieth century, near the post-World War II era. This research was conducted by pioneering “sexologist” Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956). Kinsey published several works during his lifetime, particularly Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). His exhaustive qualitative research allowed him to collect thousands of in-depth interviews on people’s sexuality. The fact that empirical work on sex was almost unheard of until after the Second World War is in and of itself rather stunning in the current context. Sex, across cultures and history, was often not considered a valid subject of academic study (except, perhaps, for the occasional ravings of a philosopher decrying its ability to distort our rational faculties).
One of Kinsey’s central findings regarding human sexuality was that, even in the context of the United States, there was a great deal of variation in sexual behaviors. Kinsey pioneered efforts to quantify human sexuality with the Kinsey Scale, a scale ranging from zero to six on which he was able to situate one of his (at least for the time period) more surprising findings. While there were people who were exclusively heterosexual (marked zero; Kinsey himself disputed whether anyone was “truly a zero”) and people who were exclusively homosexual (marked six), a significant proportion of his study fell into the ambisexual range, one through five. A number of people’s respective sexualities changed over the course of their lives—many had same-sex encounters early in life, perhaps around young adulthood, later to marry and find themselves within the confines of a nuclear family. Again, whether this is biological, cultural, or some conjunction of the two, is still under debate and scrutiny to this day. But Kinsey in many ways revolutionized our understanding of sexuality as social scientists.
This ties into the end of Chapter 5, when discussion about the possibility of understanding gender identity as a spectrum took place. Indeed, you could imagine two lines that intersect, creating two axes. You could label the vertical axis “sexual identity” and establish a scale from zero to six, and the horizontal axis, “gender identity.” The purpose of this exercise is to consider how gender and sexuality relate (or more accurately, do not relate) to one another. A person’s gender identity could be thoroughly masculine, and their sexual identity could be exclusively homosexual (6). A person’s gender identity could be androgynous (meaning, recalling Chapter 4, possessing both masculine and feminine gender characteristics) and rate zero on the Kinsey scale. As the two-dimensional graph (whatever its limitations) indicates in figure 10.1. below, social scientists increasingly understand both gender identity and sexual identity as belonging on a continuum, and as being more fluid than either-or categories such as “gay” or “straight” or “manly” or “womanly”.
Until 1974, “homosexuality” was listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) as a mental disorder, a “sexual deviation” by the American Psychological Association. That year, the APA voted to remove “homosexuality” from a list of “sexual deviations” including fetishism, pedophilia, transvestitism, and others. In other words, being gay, lesbian, or bisexual was considered a mental illness in the United States until less than half a century ago, which probably seems like a long time ago to some of the folks reading this, but is less than a decade before I was born.
Speaking of the past, there was a sort of formulaic way of approaching the relationship between gender identity and sexual identity that was still very common back in the last 1990s when I began to study sociology. This sort of “standard model” of gender identity and sexual identity seemed to make things rather simple. Our sex was our “born” identity, based on our biological makeup, and was either “male” or “female”. Our gender was something we learned in the context of our society: we became our gender identity according to the norms and strictures of our society’s expectations. And finally, sexuality, the people we were attracted to, could include the same sex, both sexes, or the “opposite” sex. As noted in Chapter 5, this has already changed quite a bit.
These changes began to really take hold in the 1960s. In part, they can be traced to some of the same cultural shifts and social movements discussed in previous chapters. The status of gay and lesbian Americans came to be problematized. During a period called “the Lavender Scare,” suspicion was raised that gay men who worked as public servants in the United States posed a security risk to the nation, as they could be potentially seduced by Soviet spies and thus give up sensitive information. In the 1950s, alongside the Red Scare discussed earlier in this work, it was made illegal for gay men to hold public office or work in government. Gay men, or even suspected gay men, were fired from their jobs—they had no legal protections or recourse, either in the public or the private sector.
Some of these tensions came to a head with the Stonewall Riots in New York City, where a famous gay bar was raided by police, sparking days of protest and unrest and leading to the political mobilization of numerous gay communities throughout the United States. Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person to be elected to office, earned a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, though he was assassinated the following year. It took decades of mobilization for gay and lesbian rights activists to gain ground. Over time, a sort of coalition of identities began to emerge as part of the struggle, what might affectionately be called an alphabet soup. The earliest years saw gay and lesbian activism, and then bisexual identities: LGB. The rise of transgender activism in the later decades of the twentieth century added a ‘T’: LGBT.
The term queer, which once meant strange or unusual, came to be slur used against those perceived to be gay or lesbian, and was later reappropriated by those fighting for the right to express both gender and sexuality in nonbinary, non-heteronormative terms. As I recall, this, was still widely used in the 1990s when I was growing up as insults. Today, the term queer has also come to describe an “umbrella” category of sexual identity—one who is attracted to people of many genders. Thus: LGBTQ. Social theorists called queer theorists have also adopted this term, giving it a radical, transformative edge. Queer theory challenges boundaries, in speech, in language, in society—it is a way of re-thinking and deconstructing the tidy categories that are framed in terms of essences, between an “us” and a “them” or a “this” and “that”. Queer theory is not always or only applied to issues related to sexuality (though it has much to say about sexuality).
As noted in Chapter 5, intersex has come to be established as an identity. In a sense, intersex emerges from a history of medicalized deviance, much like gay and lesbian identities once did. What I mean by this is that until recently, it was considered relatively uncontroversial to assign a sex, either male or female, at birth, to persons born intersex. Body configurations that did not conform to either male or female were considered deformed, deviant, and were modified via surgery on infants. Some intersex persons have mobilized to resist these practices and other ways in which intersex identities have been marginalized in our society and culture. Thus, LGBTQI.
Recently, another category has been brought to widespread attention: some people are asexual, generally meaning a low or nonexistent level of sexual attraction to others of any gender. Asexual persons might not fit on the (over)simplified two-axis model above, and can of course be folks of any gender identity, but they have emerged as a distinctive, and profoundly misunderstood, group. LGBTQIA. As I write this, more letters have been added—for instance, to distinguish between people who are “queer” and people who are “questioning,” as well as between an “A” for those of us who fall along the asexual spectrum, and an “A” for those of us who are “allies” to other groups/categories. This “alphabet soup” is identified as LGBTQ+.
2015 marked a watershed moment in the history and politics of sexual identity. In the Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hedges, bans on same-sex marriage were ruled unconstitutional, making same-sex marriage a reality for many couples throughout the United States (which many states had already enacted years before). In the aftermath, there was both celebration and pushback. Some, under the banner of religious liberties, have asked whether the federal government should be legally empowered to ensure that, for instance, a baker bake a cake, or a minister officiate, for a same-sex couple even if the baker or the minister had personal, moral, or religious reservations about same-sex marriage. After some shifts in the make-up of the U.S. Supreme Court, it is possible at present that this decision will be overturned in the future; however, even if this were to occur, it would not criminalize same-sex marriage. It would mean, instead, that states, rather than the federal government or the constitution, was responsible for laws regarding same-sex marriage.
Attitudes among the public have changed, and in some ways, they have changed even faster since the decision. According to an ongoing Gallup poll, in 1996 just 33 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of Republicans expressed support for same sex marriage. In 2015, those numbers had shot up to 76 percent and 37 percent, respectively, indicating both an overall increase in support and a greater level of political polarization in the United States. Similar changes can be tracked by religion. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2001, 13 percent of Evangelical Protestants supported same-sex marriage, compared to 61 percent of those claiming no religion, 40 percent of Catholics, 38 percent for mainline Protestants, and 30 percent of Black Protestants. By 2014, all these numbers had climbed, though somewhat more modestly than the political figures. Among the unaffiliated, 77 percent supported same-sex marriage, while 23 percent of Evangelical Protestants expressed support. Six in ten Mainline Protestants and Catholics, and 44 percent of Black Protestants, also expressed support.
Broadly speaking, what does this all mean in terms of family? I will attempt to tie together some of the main ideas as this chapter comes to a close. I wonder, and perhaps you do as well, what the future of families and sexuality in the United States looks like. The past few decades have been a period of long, hard-fought, uneven transitions, some with far-reaching consequences. Talking about families means talking about morality and cultural currents, two areas with which sociologists perhaps do not engage nearly as often as with more familiar concepts such as access to resources, race and gender disparities, and even deviance and education. However, understanding these changes against the broader context of the United States as well as how social problems have come to be defined requires examining what has been called the new morality by some.
In the sociology of religion, scholars Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney (1992) began to notice some profound shifts in morality within the context of the United States. The phrase “the new morality” is theirs: by this they describe the changes in norms that emerged in the aftermath of the 1960s, including increased “pro-choice” attitudes toward abortion, new attitudes toward sex, including a decrease in opposition to premarital sex, the expectation that a couple should remain chaste until marriage, as well as extramarital sex, sex with someone other than one’s spouse. A decrease in the stigma once attached to divorce and having children outside marriage became part of this new morality.
Different religious groups and denominations in the United States held vastly different views on these issues, as Roof and McKinney (1992:212) reported decades ago. Some have touted that the United States has undergone a “sexual revolution” in the past several decades, that sexual norms today are radically different from sexual norms two or three generations ago. This belief underpins some of the tensions within the broader American cultural landscape today: as it turns out, sexual norms vary across cultures, and that includes attitudes toward both premarital and extramarital sex. Returning to the work of Broude and Greene (1976), over a third of cultures place no value on virginity, and in such cultures, premarital sex is generally expected and approved. On the other end of the spectrum, just over a third of cultures studied place extremely high value on virginity; whereas punishment for same-sex relations usually focused on males, virginity is often particularly prized for females. Both happen more often within the context of patriarchal cultures more often than more gender-egalitarian cultures. One might then wonder: if the United States is becoming increasingly gender-egalitarian (as evidence suggests it is), or has done so at certain points within the past half a century, might this cultural change account for the changing attitudes toward premarital sex?
In 1960, Gallup polls suggest that just over two thirds of Americans disapproved of premarital sex. By 2001, that number was just 38 percent. During the same period, the percentage of those who did not consider premarital sex wrong went from 21 to 60. Breaking these numbers down a bit, it turns out that political conservatives, those over the age of 50, weekly church attenders, and people with a high school education or less are more likely to disapprove of premarital sex. The change seems rather momentous; it seems to support the idea that perhaps there has been a sexual revolution. However, this might be misleading: in the work “Sex in America: How Many Partners Do We Have?” the number of sexual partners most Americans have has not changed all that much, and some recent evidence suggests that millennials (those aged 18 to 34 at present) are actually having less sex than previous generations. Additionally, Americans still value marriage, and disapproval of extramarital sex is still quite high, significantly higher than other wealthy, post-industrial nations.
It is also worth noting that although Americans have a higher teen pregnancy rate than many of the other “developed” countries in the world, teen pregnancy rates have decreased steadily since the 1970s, as have birthrates and abortion rates. When we look at families, we see a tendency toward fragmentation of the nuclear family norm—but this is recognized against the background that nuclear families as defined in the 1950s have not been the norm throughout history or cross-culturally. When we look at sex, however, the change is much more uneven across different groups. Americans still seem to value marital fidelity, and this might indicate that the belief that marriage is a dead or dying institution is premature. Divorce rates have actually declined in the U.S.; they were higher in the 1980s, though this is partly because of declines in marriage rates. More and more women, and couples, have chosen alternate family structures for living and child-rearing, with more and more children growing up in single-parent households, or blended families in which, through divorce and re-marriage, families are reorganized within a household. More and more women have entered the workforce, and more men have become “stay at home dads” (though this trend lags behind). The number of households with two parents, one of whom is a single stay-at-home parent and one of whom works, is below twenty percent, and these are largely confined to upper-middle class households (recall that wages have been relatively flat in the U.S. for decades, meaning many economic gains across quintiles mean more hours worked per household).
Sexualities not covered by the heteronormative perspective are still contested, but the trends seem to point toward increased acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer U.S.-Americans. The future of families and sexuality might seem uncertain, but the data tells a rich and complex story about the role of the family and sexuality, and the far-reaching impacts of changing cultural currents on children and adults in generations to come.
Image Credit: Located on “Nuclear Jitters,” from the 1950s blog and mixed-media exhibit Envisioning the American Dream. Blog credit: Sally Edelstein, 2013. Image credit caption: At Home with the Nuclear Family (L) A series of images that ran in Life Magazine are from a government film as part of an Atomic Bomb test taken of a house closest to the detonation of the 3/53 Operation Doorstep (R) Vintage childrens schoolbook illustration 1950s “Stories About Linda and Lee” Source: https://envisioningtheamericandream.com/2013/04/09/nuclear-jitters/
Important Words
Ambisexual
Asexual
Birth rate
Blended families
Cultural relativism
Death rate
Ethnocentrism
Ethnology
Extramarital sex
Gender norms
Heteronormativity
Heterosexuality
Homosexuality
Incest taboo
Kinsey scale
Monogamy
Naturalistic fallacy
Nuclear family
Patriarchal
Polyamory
Polyandry
Polygamy
Polygyny
Post-industrial culture
Premarital sex
Primary socialization
Religious liberties
Queer
Sexual norms
Subsistence culture
Sit With It: Big Questions
Is the nuclear family “on the way out”? If so, what might follow this familiar, agreed-upon family structure in the future? Use evidence from the reading and lecture to make your argument.
Why is family considered a central institution, and why do debates surrounding values, culture, and social change so often involve ideas/debates about the family structure? Draw on what you have learned here, and what you’ve experienced and thought about in the past.
How do historical and cross-cultural understandings of sex and sexuality complicate or challenge “traditional” gender roles and heteronormativity? Give at least one specific example from the course materials.
