By: Leslie J.

Miller

Table of Contents
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Agenda
Problem Families then and
Now
Problematizing the
Hidden Injustices of
Normal Family Life
Conclusions

Agenda
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2)
3)
4)
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6)

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Goal of the Chapter

To present a discussion of family problems
that are responsive to the insights that have
emerged from two fields of scholarship:
Feminist studies and The Sociology of
Deviance and Control

Social Constructionists:
The sociology of deviance tell us that social problems are not discovered
This means that social conditions do not become social problems until some
groups make them an issue-that is targeting them, labeling them deviant, and
attempts to put them on the social agenda

The Study of Social Problems is the Study of that

Problematizing Process
By conceptualizing it as a process, we recognize that social problems is an
interaction- often of struggle-between the powerful and the powerless over
those whose ways are the right ways
Miller argues that the family problems of this century and the last can be
understood only against the backdrop of the emergence of the bourgeois family
ideal: the patriarchal cult of domesticity that had the effect of sanctifying a
single familial arrangement as the only proper and respectable one

Chapter Breakdown
Part One:
Outlines the historical process that
produced the modern ideal of the
domestic family and reviews some
attempts to enforce it by regulating
alternative or unfit forms
Though efforts to reform the unfit
family have taken various guises over
the last century, the image of the
normal family is still regularly invoked
to justify the social control of a whole
range of more or less discredited
alternatives
Many feminists have argued that we
should abandon the labelling of
alternative arrangements as immoral,
evil or unhealthy and except the reality
of many forms instead of just one

Part Two:
Develops the insights of feminist
scholars more directly
One consequence of the rise of the
domestic ideal was to focus on those
families that failed to measure up
The main point Miller emphasizes in
part two is that these long hidden
aspects of family life represent forms of
conduct that are currently being raised
as problems by feminists and many
others
Family realities such as the
unrecognized and unpaid labour of
housewives, the normal violence of
routine, the structural impoverishment
of women are presently being targeted
by various groups wanting to raise their
visibility and thus societys recognition
of them as urgent social problems

Problem Families Then and Now

The Rise of the Cult of

Domesticity

Social historians agreed that

over the 18th and 19th
century in Northern Europe,
there arose in the
burgeoning middle class, a
cult of domesticity that made
the new form an object of
veneration

Until the 18th century, the

family existed as a political
and public body, with little or
no private character

Towards the end of the 18th

Century, the domestic or
intimate modern form of the
family emerged and became
the normal standard of living

Pre-modern Family
Was the problem, which was seen as a parasitic
institutional form, whose members were thought to be
making an insufficient contribution to the welfare of
society p. 135
This family was large and diverse, including household
encompassing servants and kin etc.
Most of the states reform policies were not intended to
replace the family but to improve it
Example: The Baby Bonus

The Baby Bonus

Began as a state payment to

any mother who was willing to
raise illegitimate children in her
own family, became a
mechanism which allowed the
state to oversee the physical
and moral hygiene of the
bourgeoisie and later the poor,
family by measuring it against
the standard of the new ideal
p.135

The Ethos of Domesticity had

its origin in European
societies, where privilege
accorded to the new ideal, that
worked to produce a moral
distinction between the
respectable middle-class
family and the work-class
family, who were seen as
deficient and a threat to the
public order

Rearing the Vulnerability of the Child

The modern or domestic family is

described as child centred
This family understands childhood
as a distinct social category
defined by innocence and
vulnerability, in comparison to the
past, where there was a tendency
to ignore childhood
The new understanding meant
that the child and society must be
segregated, as the child was seen
to be vulnerable to societys
corrupting influences
This is linked to parenthood,
whereby the fit parent would
segregate their child from the
world of adults (meaning men)
who were bad influences

Failure to meet this criterion

would produce an unruly child,
a delinquent youth and a
criminal adult
Thus, the unfit family, which
was essentially the unfit
mother, was labelled a social
problem
Above all, the slum and
immigrant families, alternative
family forms (divorced,
blended, gay/lesbian and lone
parent families, as well as the
employed mother) were all
defined as inadequate
environments to raise a child
p.136

Policing the Unfit Family

The Slum Family:

During the years of rapid immigration

between 1860 and the First World War,
critics reserved the greatest concern
for the urban slum families, where the
threat to the child was considered the
greatest

Middle-Class definition of a slum family

focused on the Idle Youth who were
marginally employed as bootblacks
and newsboys, neither going to school
or work, just roaming the streets p. 137

Solutions to this would become the

problem of juvenile delinquency, and
included some things as training
schools or orphanages, that were seen
to install the child into a better home

During the last half of the 19th Century,

childrens wages provided an
important part of family income

In comparison with the modern family,

good parenting came to imply the
complete segregation of the child from
the adult world of paid labour

There was a general belief that

working-class girls should be at home,
rather then at dance halls or theatres,
for example

Excursus: The Tyranny of the Experts

Prior to the rise of the modern state, the local community
and church were the major agents of social control
Mechanisms of control were local and informal, and
included noisy public demonstrations called shivarees
which were designed to humiliate the wrongdoer into
right conduct p.138
The rise of the modern state signalled the weakening of
community authority and the social control of the family
became more standardized and formal
The problem of slum families became in its entirety the
property of the new (male) child-care professionals

The Dionne Sisters

Elzire and Olivia Dionne raised several children

under the rural French-Catholic tradition, until the
birth of their 5 daughters in 1934
They had met the requirements for exemplary
parenthood according to their faith and culture (all
5 children were nourished and housed without
public assistance)
The Dionne's did not have indoor plumbing or
electricity at their farmhouse and were considered
to have lost traditional authority after the birth of
their 5 daughters
The girls were later surrender to the state, raised
in a hospital, in a scientific environment under the
supervision of Dr. William Blatz, Psychologist
This is an example of state efforts to enforce the
ideal of the bourgeois domesticity by influencing
child-rearing practices
These sisters have paid for the uninvited scientific
and popular celebrity of their early lives early lives
with adulthoods marked by suicide, poverty and
depression
First Nations families have also experienced a
history the apprehension of their children, as many
were considered unfit parents
Overall, such unilateral acts of state intervention
continue almost always to be directed to societies
most marginalized communities

The Employed Mother

The Employed Mother

The Ethos of Domesticity entails a figure of the vulnerable child together with the
mother who is expected to make the child her first concern, above herself

The problem with working mothers is that she should be minding her children, instead
of going out and working, which became a concern with the ethos of domesticity,
whereby the role of the mother should become the central mission in a womans life

The working mother became a focus of anxiety, as recent debates in connection with
the push for more daycare

Today, mothers themselves continue to show considerable ambivalence about the

appropriateness of their own paid work: they, work, or plan to while insist that their
proper place is at home, at least while the children are young p.143

For those women who work in the labour force, mothering is considered their first
commitment or primary real work

The New Problem: The Lesbian Family

Perhaps the most obvious challenges to the

bourgeoisie ideal of the heterosexual, male
dominated family are the conjugal families
of the 1960s and the alternative family
forms of the 1980s and 1990s, including
gay and lesbian, as well as single headed
families

Arnups study of 5 courts cases dealing with

Lesbian custody before 1984, showed that
court decisions neither repressed nor
tolerated lesbian families as such, but
distinguished between the good and bad
lesbian families p.145

This study showed the states role in

controlling at least this alternative family
form, as well as the goal of the states
efforts

The state is not concerned with lesbian

families per se, but with the way such
families represent themselves publicly with
regard to the domestic standard

In court cases, the determining factor in a

judges decision is not what the mothers
sexual orientation is, but rather what she
does with it

Problematizing the Hidden Injustices

of Normal Family Life
The Feminization of Poverty: Women face higher risks of poverty than
men, which is considered a significant long-term trend
WHY?

Because those women who remained housewives all their adult

years have been disadvantaged materially by their total economic
dependence on their husband, whose support might suddenly
disappear through divorce, desertion or death p. 148

The jobs for which women are hired are overall the worst: they
offer the lowest pay and the fewest benefits (gender segregation
of the labour force)

Cultural assumptions about the nature of femininity also play a

crucial role both in the causes of womens poverty and in its
invisibility as a social problem

Family Violence

The Problem of Family Violence:

Family violence is now seen as violence of

several different kinds- against women,
children, the old, and amongst children
(siblings)
Greater visibility is currently attached to the
abuse of women and children than to sibling
abuse and the abuse of older family
members
Domestic violence is sometimes woman-toman, but more often women and children
are the victims
A recent Canadian survey indicated that
29% of women have experience violence at
the hands of their current or previous marital
partner p. 150
Sociologist of the family warn that parental
homicide is the most common killer of
children, parents continue to fear the
maniac in the schoolyard for example
Some violent acts are also normalized and
reinterpreted as acceptable (Ex. fights
between siblings)

Social Control
According to Miller, when we reassign severe or deviant
violence to others, we evade the recognition that our
intimates can also do us harm
p. 152

Despite attempts to demonstrate, scientifically that

violence is distributed throughout the ambit of human
experience, the violent person who is also an intimate is
not yet culturally defined as a category of deviant
The tendency to medicalize family violence by attributing
it to physical or mental illness worsens the problem, by
blinding us to the cultural roots of the way we understand
the family and the violence within it
p. 152

CONCLUSION

The increase attention paid to social control and its historical evolution has led to
a re-evaluation of the linkage between family and state
Feminist scholars have come to recognize that the various ways in which the
state attempts to suppress or improve problem families has gone against the
interests of women
According to Leslie Miller, state enforcement of the domestic family often
entails direct or indirect repression of other workable arrangements, such as
women working outside the home
On the other hand, however, many feminists recognize that women today
welcome state intervention into their homelives
This chapter raises the question of whether the state, given its subservience to
the interests of capital (patriarchy) can be expected to act against those interests
by taking the side of women in the family
At the present time, family theorists have begun to see the state as an
environment within which family members are seen to be the agents of their own
lives

Discussion Questions
1)

State intervention continues to almost always be directed

towards societys most marginalized communities, and are
conducted in a way that often provokes humiliation,
confusion and often violence. How does the treatment of
lower-class families differ in comparison to upper-class
families, with respect to state intervention and control?

2)

Family violence is presently seen as violence of different

kinds, including violence against children, women, the
elderly and amongst children(siblings). Why do you feel that
victims of domestic violence, in particular women and
children, are reluctant to pursue justification when the
abuser is a family member, and not when the abuser is a
stranger?