Family Formation

INTRODUCTION
The idea of the “traditional” family of the 1950s is rooted more in nostalgia than in actual fact, according to Goode (1983) as quoted in Zinn, Etizen and Wells (2016). However, while the image of the happy, loving 1950s family may be a fiction, the concept of the nuclear family is one that certainly has some roots throughout the centuries. Though family arrangements and situations have differed greatly from society to society and from time to time, the nucleus of the family has generally consisted of a father, mother and child—though how long it remained intact depended on a number of external and internal factors that could range from the impact of disease to the impact of one’s own internal frustration with so-called family life, leading to estrangement. Prior to the modern era, family dynamics and structures were far more normative and typical. The departure from the Old World, which began with the Reformation and Revolution of the 15th century onward, helped to establish a new process of family formation. This paper will describe that process and show how it has changed dramatically in the last two centuries.
FROM COURTSHIP to MATE SELECTION
Today, the idea of courtship is about as foreign to young couples as the idea of learning classical Greek to read Homer in the original language in which it was written. The concept of “courtship” has been replaced by the idea of “hooking up,” which generally simply means satisfying one another’s sexual urges for a time being before going off to “hook up” with someone else once the emotional satisfaction has been drained from the “hook up” (Hamilton and Armstrong 2019). As Demos (1986) indicates, sexual activity outside of marriage is not a modern invention: men and women have always engaged in this practice—the difference today is that it is far more publically and socially accepted among the majority of society, even if some generations may still regard it as taboo (Zinn et al. 2016). Hamilton and Armstrong (2019) show that especially among the younger generations there is more acceptance or expectation even to “hook up”—and to “hook up” means to some extent to experiment with sex and sexuality.
Yet two centuries ago, “hooking up” would have been somewhat scandalous to polite society. The Puritans surely engaged in sexual affairs—but they did so on the sly—i.e., they did so in secret while in public they put on a veneer of piety and sanctity (Zinn et al 2016). Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is essentially work of literature that serves as a condemnation of the hypocrisy of the early Puritans by focusing exactly on this same point. Nonetheless, the fact remains that if people wanted to “hook up” two hundred years ago, it certainly was not discussed as though it were a norm or a socially accepted practice.
Courtship occurred primarily as a means of mate selection in earlier eras where social rituals were far more common and normative. The rituals of the Old World (prior to Reformation) were still very much a part of society even as society transitioned into the modern era, replacing the Age of Faith with the Age of Reason (wherein natural philosophy begot Romanticism which begot Skepticism which begot Absurdism and post-Modernism). As Coonts (2004) notes, marriage has been in prior centuries as much to do with economic interest as with familial interest: it has been approached like business, with “arranged” marriages the norm in parts of the West at different period leading up to the modern era; it has been romanticized and been approached as something one does when one falls “in love”; and it has been approached as a purely practical affair. In the past century, however, marriage and mate selection has changed dramatically as a result of the women’s movement and liberation: “The extraordinary increase in the economic independence and legal equality of women has reshaped the social landscape of family life” (Coonts 2004:975). The independence that women gained from the domestic sphere primarily occurred in the second half of the 20th century—following World War II, when women were permitted to work outside the home to facilitate the war effort. When the men came home there was a push among women to maintain their independence. This altered the way in which courtship and marriage intertwined.
Even child rearing changed in the 20th century—the idea taking something of a backseat with the arrival of birth control, which was promoted as a way to prevent children from being the result of sexual relations. Skolnick (2011) points out that economic burdens, especially since the Great Recession, are making more and more families re-think having children. However, birth control has been available for many decades and as it has become more and more accepted in the West, so too has the family size begun to shrink. Gender plays a role in all this, too, because the term itself has changed over time. Gender used to be synonymous with sex—i.e., one’s sex determined one’s gender. But today it is more accepted that gender is a social construct and so one may be born with a sex but sex does not determine gender—one’s self can determine gender or society will determine gender according to today’s common gender studies ideas. Gender has morphed in accordance with gender expectations. In the 19th century, gender expectations were standard: men worked in the world and women worked in the domestic sphere; men’s work consisted of labor or intellectual work; women’s work consisted of nurturing and caring for the children and taking care of the home life chores—such as dinner, cleaning, and so on. In the 20th century, that changed as quality of life changed and new expectations about what should be relegated to the gender roles changed. Women began to work in the world and the domestic duties were deemed less important as respect was viewed as being won by being a worker in the world. Today the domestic life has disappeared except for “traditional” families that adhere to the cultural norms and values of the prior century, wherein a woman tends to the nurturing and caring aspects of domestic life because there are children to raise while the man works to support the family. This arrangement still exists—but it is one type of arrangement among many—and there is no uniformity across society. Societal and cultural norms have been fractured.
And so dating continues to go on, too. “Hooking up” is not the only method used today—it is just one of many. Cultural expectations play a role in family formation: among traditional or religious populations, cultural norms still hold that there is a romantic notion to love and courtship and that men should provide. Lamont (2019:124) notes that this is especially the case for dating in some circles in the West still today, where “culturally dominant heterosexual courtship conventions dictate that men ask for, plan, and pay for dates, initiate sex, confirm the exclusivity of the relationship, and propose marriage, while women react to these advances.” In today’s culture, some men still want to be the one who makes the decisions, and some women still prefer to be the one to let the man take the lead. Cultures and subcultures abound in which there are different norms, and Lamont shows as much when she examines the queer subculture and how in the LGBTQ+ community the term “butch” is no longer accepted by the members of that culture because it is a label that they are trying to resist (Lamont 2019:130). In the 21st century, resisting norms and cultural expectations is also part of the mating ritual, just as embracing norms and reinforcing traditional paradigms is also still around. Society has undergone a severe fragmentation since the start of the 20th century, and the two World Wars and the advancement of technological progress has assisted in that fragmentation: multiculturalism has prevailed and “norms” are essentially more tribal than they are societal.
THE STRUCTURAL DIVERSITY APPROACH
Because of this transition, the structural diversity approach to understanding the family formation can be helpful. The structural diversity approach is based on the premises that families are social constructs and have changed throughout all history and that family diversity reflects the diverse structures of the larger society. From this perspective, one can explain how the family dynamic and family formation has changed over the past two centuries.
Family formation in the 19th century was largely an extension of the Old World norms and values that had continued to be passed on to the modern era. These norms and values consisted of the Old World expectations about what a family should be and what the purpose of family life should be. Procreation was invariably tied to the concept of marriage and so children were often the fruit of marriage. Marriage was viewed as a social institution and so when two people married, they were taking a vow in public and before witnesses that they would be married till death for the purpose of loving and sustaining one another in a union from which the continuation of society would be promoted—i.e., there would be children. Henry VIII had legitimized divorce, however, two hundred years prior during the Protestant Reformation and so though still somewhat uncommon in the 19th century, a new view of marriage that was not quite what the Old World had embraced was still out and about.
Even today, what marriage is, what it should be, and what it often feels like are big unknowns to people who struggle with various cultural inputs that stem from various cultural seeds: “We live in a society that promotes so many powerful lies about marriage, so many misunderstandings, myths and fairy tales that have become so deeply entrenched in our minds that we are rarely able to approach marriage with reasonable expectations” (Schulman 2004:32). The myths of marriage have come about because during the 20th century divorce become more accepted finally as more and more people began doing it and more and more families were fractured by the wars of the 20th century and by the social revolutions. Marriage and love were at once romanticized, practicalized, puritanized, and delegitimized. Marriage was one thing to one group and something else completely to another group. More often than not persons from different groups and cultural backgrounds and experiences would come together only to find their ideas out of alignment and the world moving and transitioning to new ideas at the same time as they were trying to figure out what ideas they should have and hold about marriage and the family.
As so many changes began to come about in society, structural inequality within the family formation began to be questioned. The roles expected of the genders became confused. The Women’s Movement advocated for women’s rights and men were viewed by the movement as being members of the patriarchy that oppressed women and kept them enslaved to the domestic circle instead of allowing them to be free and independent. Children were viewed as a burden by progressive circles and something of a luxury—to be had only if one wanted them and could afford them. The rearing of children was no longer seen as a duty but rather as a preference (Kim 2019). Gender equality became a battle cry in the latter half of the 20th century and abortion become legalized—so that gender roles were no longer distinctive or distinguishable and children were no longer connected to the idea of marriage. Single parent homes became more numerous and children (accidents as they were called) born out of wedlock became more common. Families were shaped by the cultural elements and cues of the society in which the families immersed themselves and as society had fragmented, there were many variations on the family formation. Thus, in some cases the notion of “family” has transformed completely to mean a single person who has a dog or six cats. In other cases, “family” means a mother with two children by two different fathers, none of whom are in the picture. In other cases, “family” means a mother, father, and children and even extended members of the family (such as grandmother or grandfather). Today, the culturally fragmented society has resulted in a fragmented family formation.
CONCLUSION
Gender roles have changed over the last two centuries and as society has accepted these transformations, family formations have changed as well. The purpose of family formation, of marriage, of “hooking up,” is different depending on one’s group, environment, society, age, gender, or experience. “Hooking up” is somewhat experimental in its essence while “marriage” is viewed as somewhat permanent (though with half ending in divorce, this sense of it has been changed). Children may or may not be part of that picture, which leads many to wonder what the purpose is and whether their views are in alignment. Understanding the need to define views is part of what goes into the concept of family formation.





REFERENCES
Coonts, Stephanie. 2004. The World Historical Transformation of Marriage. Journal of
Marriage and Family 66:974-979.
Hamilton, Laura and Elizabeth Armstrong. 2019. Shifting the Center: Understanding
Contemporary Families. Thousand Oaks.
Kim, Katherin. 2019. Out of Sorts. Shifting the Center: Understanding Contemporary
Families. Thousand Oaks.
Lamont, Ellen. 2019. Shifting the Center: Understanding Contemporary Families.
Thousand Oaks.
Shulman, Polly. 2004. Great Expectations. Psychology Today 37: 32.
Skolnick, Arlene. 2011. Middle Class Families in the Age of Insecurity. Family in
Transition, 17th edition. Boston: Perason.
Zinn, Maxine Baca, D. Stanley Eitzen, and Barbara Wells. 2016. Diversity in Families,
Updated 10th edition. Boston: Pearson.