This document discusses the family and its role in shaping identity and social relations. It provides perspectives from several thinkers on how the family instills a sense of belonging and difference through establishing one's name, kin and gender groups. It also examines how the family transmits norms and morality from one generation to the next. Later passages discuss challenges to traditional family structures from the women's and gay liberation movements of the 1960s-1970s who argued they restricted freedom and equality. Current UK family statistics are also presented.

1. Family Matters: The
family and the culture
wars
Jan Macvarish
Saturday 20 July 2019
The Academy

3. Lenore Davidoff, 2011
‘When the child asks ‘Who am I?’, he or she learns that the assignment of a
first name places them within a gender group, a second name within a family
and kin group. This then leads to the question ‘Who are we and how do we
relate to a wider whole?’ It is only possible to answer this by establishing who
we are not. Identity is created through establishing difference, by demarking
‘us and them’. These are not only rational but also emotional imperatives
couched in the language of morality: what we do is right. As the person
matures, these questions extend to ‘Who do I trust?’, ‘What is the group that I
use as my reference point for how a life should be lived?’

6. Edmund Burke, 1790
‘To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we
belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of
public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we
proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.’

7. “Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children's minds. It is the
nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds
and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles
that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can't) you
would see your own mother doing this and you would find it very interesting to watch. It's
quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously
over some of your contents, wondering where on Earth you picked this thing up, making
discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek, as if it were a nice kitten, and
hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil
passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of
your mind and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out the prettier thoughts, ready for you
to put on.”
J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan, 1911

8. Max Horkheimer, Authority and the Family, 1936
‘The individual mechanisms which operate in shaping the authority-oriented
character within the family have been the object of investigation, especially by
modern depth-psychology. The latter has shown how the lack of independence,
the deep sense of inferiority that afflicts most men, the centering of their whole
psychic life around the ideas of order and subordination, but also their cultural
achievements are all conditioned by the relations of child to parents or their
substitutes and to brothers and sisters. The concepts of repression and
sublimation as the outcomes of conflict with social reality have greatly advanced
our understanding of the phenomena mentioned.’

9. Harry Harlow 1952, ‘Maternal Care and Mental Health’

10. 1964
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'

11. Erich Fromm, Crisis of Psychoanalysis, 1970
‘we can say that the patricentric individual --and society -- is characterized by a complex of
traits in which the following are predominant: a strict superego, guilt feelings, docile love for
paternal authority, desire and pleasure at dominating weaker people, acceptance of suffering
as a punishment for one's own guilt, and a damaged capacity for happiness. The
matricentric complex, by contrast, is characterized by a feeling of optimistic trust in mother's
unconditional love, far fewer guilt feelings, a far weaker superego, and a greater capacity for
pleasure and happiness. Along with these traits there also develops the ideal of motherly
compassion and love for the weak and others in need of help’ (CoP, p. 131).

13. Gay Liberation Front Manifesto, 1971
‘Were it not also for the captive wife, educated by advertising and everything she
reads into believing that she needs ever more new goodies for the home, for her
own beautification and for the children's wellbeing, our economic system could not
function properly, depending as it does on people buying far more manufactured
goods than they need. The housewife, obsessed with the ownership of as many
material goods as possible, is the agent of this high level of spending. None of
these goods will ever satisfy her, since there is always something better to be had,
and the surplus of these pseudo 'necessities' goes hand in hand with the absence
of genuinely necessary goods and services, such as adequate housing and
schools.’

14. Gay Liberation Front Manifesto 1971
‘Gay shows the way. In some ways we are already more advanced than
straight people. We are already outside the family and we have already, in
part at least, rejected the 'masculine' or 'feminine' roles society has designed
for us. In a society dominated by the sexist culture it is very difficult, if not
impossible, for heterosexual men and women to escape their rigid gender-
role structuring and the roles of oppressor and oppressed. But gay men don't
need to oppress women in order to fulfil their own psycho-sexual needs, and
gay women don't have to relate sexually to the male oppressor, so that at this
moment in time, the freest and most equal relationships are most likely to be
between homosexuals.’

15. 2017
19 million families in the UK - married or cohabiting couples, couples plus
children or one person plus child(ren)
13 million were married or civil partner couple families
12.8 million were opposite sex married couple families.
35,000 same sex married couples
55,000 civil partner couples