• Complain

Barrett Michèle - The Anti-Social Family

Here you can read online Barrett Michèle - The Anti-Social Family full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2015, publisher: Verso Books, genre: Home and family. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Barrett Michèle The Anti-Social Family

The Anti-Social Family: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Anti-Social Family" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Despite much talk of its decline, the nuclear family persists as a structure central to contemporary society, a fact to be lamented, according to the ideas of Michle Barrett and Mary McIntosh. The Anti-social Family dissects the network of household, kinship and sexual relations that constitute the family form in advanced capitalist societies to show how they reinforce conditions of inequality. This classic work explores the personal and social needs that the family promises to meet but more often denies, and proposes moral and political practices for more egalitarian caring alternatives

Barrett Michèle: author's other books


Who wrote The Anti-Social Family? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Anti-Social Family — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Anti-Social Family" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
This edition published by Verso 2015 First published by Verso 1982 Michle - photo 1

This edition published by Verso 2015
First published by Verso 1982
Michle Barrett and Mary McIntosh 1982, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1991, 2015

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-759-8
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-760-4 (US)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-761-1 (UK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

v3.1

Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements

Marx and Engels may have called, in the polemical rhetoric of the Communist Manifesto, for the abolition of the family, but most socialists have long since regarded this as a flight of utopian fancy. An uneasy truce prevails over this most unpopular of orthodox socialist demands. From time to time, however, the calm is troubled, for the politics of the family simply will not lie down. The early years of womens liberation saw a damning indictment of family life; more recently the left has had to confront the equally militant pro-family stance of the new right. We believe that in the long term socialists and feminists must develop a political consensus on the family and that the precondition for this is more open debate on where we stand.

A major difficulty with this is the fact that the family is such a slippery phenomenon. The view we take in this book is that the family must be understood in two senses. It is, of course, a social and economic institution. In the present period it is an institution in which, by and large, households are assumed to be organized on the basis of close kinship relations. We could go further and say that in the present period it is an institution in which households are assumed to be organized, by and large, on the basis of a division of labour between a primary breadwinner (male) and a primary childrearer (female). Although these are assumptions, they are nonetheless part of the family, since they form a crucial element of the conditions on which women and men are employed, the level of their wages, and state taxes and benefits.

Many feminists have pointed out that as a social institution this form of family-household is markedly less prevalent than it is usually assumed to be. The stereotypical nuclear family accounts, roughly, for only a third of households in Britain today. Yet the media give the impression that the entire population is securely bound up in it. So a second dimension of what we refer to when we talk about the family must be the family as an ideology. In many ways the institution and the ideology are reciprocally related, enjoying mutual reinforcement. Yet the ideology of the family is perhaps much stronger, in its own right, than we often allow. The model of family life has pervaded our society in its public institutions to such an extent that, far from speaking of the decline of the family, we should be speaking of the familial character of society.

It is this twofold character of the family that makes it particularly difficult to analyse. Certainly it accounts for the strategy we have had to adopt in writing this book, where different chapters focus on what inevitably appear to be quite disparate topics and levels of analysis. The family can be addressed from the point of view of what needs it is thought to serve; how it is represented culturally; how one understands the acquisition of femininity and masculinity; what should be done about state policy and the law. Clearly some of the issues discussed can more readily be translated into strategies for change than others. Our final chapter sets out for discussion some possibilities of a practical kind. These are not necessarily the most important changes to fight for, and certainly not the only ones, but we regard them as possible concrete targets. More general changes, such as the total eradication of familial ideology from the media and all public discourse, can readily be inferred from the books general discussion.

Two notable absences from the book need some brief explanation. We do not make it clear whether the analysis we present applies across the several family forms of the different ethnic groups in Britain or is restricted to the dominant white family. The appeal of these different family forms, and their constraints and tensions, are undoubtedly distinct, the more so because they exist as forms of ethnic solidarity in a hostile environment. Nevertheless we believe that the same principles of critique would apply, though it is not for white feminists to work out the detailed form that these would take. Some of the strategies for change that we propose would open up new opportunities for everyone in the society, whatever their ethnic origin.

A second absence concerns the relation between the family and sexual preference. It would be ironic for us to be accused of reproducing the hegemonic heterosexism of our culture. Nevertheless we have to some extent inevitably done this, as we believe the present ideology of the family to be so steeped in heterosexism that any realistic engagement with familialism must locate the discussion within that framework.

We have found this a difficult book to write and for this reason are particularly grateful to those who have helped us. Francis Mulhern gave considerable advice and encouragement, and Catherine Hall commented on the entire draft for us. We also thank David Plotke for information about the American pro-family lobby, and Angela Weir for comments on . Obvious though it may be, we should point out that many of the ideas of the book are indebted to discussions and campaigns in the womens movement; in particular we have benefited greatly from the work of Rights of Women and of the Fifth Demand (legal and financial independence) group, especially in relation to policy recommendations.

It is not hard to identify the reason why the book has been difficult to write. The family is a contentious and emotive subject and we are painfully aware that many of our own family and friends will disagree with the arguments we make here. Although we have used a rather impersonal style, no author or reader can be completely detached from the personal implications of the arguments. But personal life is at one and the same time the story of our own lived experiences the context of our deepest motivations, rewards and frustrations and also the product of a particular moment in history and a particular structure of society. So we are often divided between subjective experience on the one hand and political analysis on the other. In recognizing the powerful appeal of the family, and acknowledging the real satisfactions that it can offer, we have drawn from our own experiences. We hope that the book contributes to the difficult project of reconciling private experience and social need, and of dealing with the ambivalence and contradiction that bedevil the political theorization of subjectivity.

I
A Question of Values
1. The Political Context

The family has long been a controversial subject but the present political conflict over it is one in which the stakes have been raised significantly. Indeed, a delegate to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, speaking of the paganistic and atheistic practice of artificial insemination, fearlessly identified nothing less than a world campaign to undermine marriage and the family as the fundamental unit of society. If such an international conspiracy does exist, systematically struggling to erode the integrity of the family, it is certainly meeting a vigorous fightback.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Anti-Social Family»

Look at similar books to The Anti-Social Family. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Anti-Social Family»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Anti-Social Family and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.