Lee Rainwater - Family Design : Marital Sexuality, Family Size, and Contraception

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Family Design

Family Design

Marital Sexuality Family Size and Contraception

Lee Rainwater

First published 1965 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1965 by Social Research, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2007021052

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Family design : marital sexuality, family size, and contraception / Lee Rainwater,

p. cm.

Originally published: Chicago : Aldine Pub. Co., 1965 in series: Social research studies in contemporary life.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-202-30937-8

1. Family sizeUnited States. 2. Birth controlUnited States. 3. Sex roleUnited States. 4. FamilyUnited States. 5. Family life educationUnited States. I. Title.

HQ762.U6R35 2007

306.850973dc22

2007021052

ISBN 13: 978-0-202-30937-8 (pbk)

Acknowledgments

T HIS STUDY was sponsored by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc.World Population Emergency Campaign. I am grateful to Planned Parenthood for its continued support of research begun in an earlier pilot study. The findings and interpretations reported here are, however, the sole responsibility of the author and should not be taken as reflecting the policies or points of view of Planned Parenthood, or of individuals who have given me the benefit of their critical advice.

The Social Science Committee of Planned Parenthood, under its Chairman, Edward Solomon, provided helpful criticism and encouragement in the initial planning stages of the study, as did Ronald Freedman and the late P. K. Whelpton. Arthur A. Campbell, Steven Polgar, Margaret Snyder, Christopher Tietze and Charles WestofF were kind enough to read various portions of the manuscript and give me their critical comments. I have been helped by these comments, as well as by the example of their own work on family planning and limitation.

The data for the study were collected by Social Research Services, Inc. I am grateful to Mrs. Leone Phillips, its President, and to her associates, Hannah Bratman and Cynthia Fennander, for supervising the field work. Needless to add, I owe a great debt to the interviewers, whose persistence and resourcefulness in handling a difficult assignment contributed immeasurably to the study. There are too many of them to mention by name, but to all of them, my thanks.

Finally, I wish to thank my wife, Carol Kampel Rainwater, for her work in preparing the index, and for other wifely facilitations during the writing of this book.

Lee Rainwater

Contents

Introduction

T HE QUESTION of the number of children they will have is a vital, complex, deeply involving one for American couples. Though some couples maintain an attitude of fatalism and vague hopefulness about the size their families may eventually reach, most give a good deal of active consideration to the number of children they really want and can afford (psychologically, socially, economically) and to ways of achieving this goal. In doing so couples deal with many kinds of conflicts conflicts between their own views and those they feel society offers as appropriate, conflicts between themselves, mixed feelings within themselves. These conflicts can apply to both the question of the family size preferred and to the means for seeing that preference becomes a reality. Some couples experience all of this in a context of not being able to have all of the children they want, but most are concerned with the problem of not having more children than they want.

With respect to family size preferences, a couples problem is essentially that of coming to some successful resolution of (1) each individuals desires with those of his partner, and (2) their joint desires with their perception of the societys norms about family size. The technology for accomplishing these goals, contraception, does not make the task easyno method now on the market is regarded as really perfect, each makes demands on the user, each has certain difficulties people would like to avoid, and all have the disadvantage of reminding one of the unfortunate necessity to limit and coerce nature, and of the necessity for being rational about such private and disturbing aspects of the human state as sexual relations and the genitals. Almost all of the methods are known to be imperfect in their effectiveness, which introduces a very disturbing note of uncertainly into what is already an emotionally complex situation. In sum, the individual husband or wife is confronted with

1. a demanding social task of integrating personal, marital, and cultural demands about an appropriate number of children
2. by means which require conscious attention to usually avoided sexual aspects of marital living
3. and by means which, furthermore, are believed to have an alarming potential to fall short of 100 per cent effectiveness.

All of this becomes important when considering problems of encouraging effective family planning because each of the difficulties and challenges enumerated above can repercuss on the use and choice of contraceptive methods. Attitudes having to do with feelings about how many children one should have can affect contraceptive behavior, as when a couple resolves differences between them in desired family size by having accidents which are then blamed on the method, or chooses a highly reliable method only after having enough children to feel above social criticism and thus keep peace in the family. Similarly, couples who choose a method they regard as not 100 per cent effective may end up practicing the method rather carelessly on the ground that its not much good anyway (this often happens with rhythm). And attitudes and feelings about sexual relations and the genitals can condition both the choice of contraceptive method and the care in practicing it.

Most of these themes can be seen in the following discussion by a woman in her early thirties who has four children.

I have a daughter who was born in 1949, and a son born in 1951, and then in 1953 we had another daughter and finally we had our youngest, a boy, in 1955. [Do you want more?] Heavens, no! Im 34 and my husband is getting close to 40. I like to be young with my children and enjoy them, and since we got married so darned young I want time alone later. My husbands in complete agreement with me. With the high cost of education and the necessity of having a child go to college we would be foolish to have more. I used a diaphragm before and after our children were born until I started using the pill (about three years ago). I hated the diaphragm and so did my husbandit was messy and miserable. Im so glad we have the pill. We both have complete faith in it. It is such a convenient thing to pop a pill in your mouth every morning. Im completely sold on it.

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