WOMEN'S POSITION at work can never be completely separated from their position in the family, as long as the family continues to exist as we know it. As long as people live in small, private households of one couple and their children, with a distinct division of labour between women and men, women will be at a disadvantage in the world.
Many people feel that the love, warmth and security that family life provides are sufficient compensation for any disadvantages. The nuclear family seems 'natural' (though our brief account of history has shown that it is not universal), and timeless, even though it has in fact changed as much as any other human institution.
Socialists often describe the advantages of co-operation in terms of family relationships: fraternity, sisterhood, the brotherhood of man and so on. Trade unionists are Brothers and Sisters; branch officers in the print have been Fathers of the Chapel for hundreds of years, but have recently been joined by Mothers of the Chapel in some branches.
The family life of the working class has often been threatened by poverty and harsh laws. The Old Poor Law of Queen Elizabeth I broke up families by taking women and children 'on the parish' only when they had no man to support them--thus men who were unable to support their families through unemployment or poverty were forced to desert them, as the only way they could get any support.
This law also separated poor children from their mothers at the age of seven and sent them to be apprenticed. The New Poor Law of 1834 threatened destitute families with the workhouse or 'Poor Law Bastille' where men, women and children were separated, disciplined, and often half-starved into the bargain as a punishment for their poverty (or 'pauperism', as it was called).
Working people all over the country, but especially in the new manufacturing districts, organised resistance to the harsh New Poor Law. They also organised to demand an end to the exploitation of women and children in the factories. They defended their right to a decent family life, not because middle-class preachers and philanthropists told them that was how they ought to live (though they did tell them), but because without the family they had nothing. Victorian society provided no alternative for the sick, the old, the very young, or the day-to-day needs of the working class.
Today we have a Welfare State which (even under Thatcher) is humane by comparison with the Poor Law Bastilles. Yet it is still no substitute for family life. The more it is 'rationalised'--in other words costs cut and managerial authority increased--the more impersonal, bureaucratic and obviously inadequate it becomes.
It is probably true, for example, that patients recover better at home than in a large, impersonal hospital, even if that means a wife or mother sacrificing her job. But what happened to the small, local convalescent homes and cottage hospitals? We are told again and again that children who go to nursery grow up with more problems than children who stay at home with their mothers. But if nursery provision is so low that there are places only for children who have problems at home already (which is the way it is in most parts of the country) the 'facts' don't prove anything at all.
It is often said that even a bad family is better than a good institution, and this opinion has had great influence on the modern Welfare State, which has been even more reluctant to provide good institutions than to provide real support for families who need it. It is, of course, nonsense.
Even Victorian schoolmasters like Dickens' Wackford Squeers rarely beat children to death; in Britain today, three hundred children a year are killed in their own homes by a parent or parent's partner. No one knows how many battered wives there are, but a serious estimate of the number of places in women's refuges required to satisfy the known needs of battered women is one place per two hundred families. Over half of all women murder victims are killed by the men they live with, and 25 per cent of all violent crime reported to the police is domestic violence (even though most domestic violence is not reported to the police).
What is 'love' in the modern family if it can include all this? The small family household is a boiling cauldron of intense emotions focussed on a few people--hate as well as love, selfishness as well as caring, competition as well as sharing--with the lid screwed down ever more tightly by modern notions of privacy. As we have smaller households, less contact with other relatives and neighbours, and more indoor entertainments and preoccupations, it is no wonder that family explosions can be so terrible.
The family is changing under the pressures of modern capitalism, but it is not yet disappearing--as many people fear and a few, perhaps, hope. The divorce rate is higher than ever before, but many marriages that are broken in the divorce courts today would have been broken by death in the past. In 1911 the average bride could hope to survive for 22 years from the wedding day, and the average bridegroom 17 years. Now the figures are 42 years for the bride and 40 for the groom--'till death us do part' means twice as long as it used to! The number of divorced people who remarry is constantly increasing, too: though many marriages fail, most of those involved try again sooner or later.
The number of single-parent families is also increasing, especially the number of women bringing up children on their own (about 11 per cent of all families with children). If this is a sign that the family is breaking up, it is a very unfavourable one for women. Most single mothers are not like the middle-class women in their thirties who are constantly telling the Guardian women's page what a wonderful experience it all is (one wrote that she decided to have a baby because 'I had my own home, I had fur coats, I'd had rich lovers, I'd had this, that and the other . . . '). More single mothers are very young women who, faced with long-term unemployment when they leave school, find having a baby is the only 'adult' occupation open to them, and who find themselves much worse off than married mothers as far as housing, jobs (fewer single mothers work than married ones) and general freedom of action are concerned; many later marry as the only way they can see of improving their position.
More couples now live together without getting married than ever before--though 'common law marriage' has always been well known among the working class and sex before marriage was for hundreds of years a well-established custom that the churches never succeeded in stamping out. Most couples who 'live together' with their children nowadays are families in every sense except the formal, legal one, with very similar relationships to other families. The middle-class 'progressive relationship' is not the commonest kind of non-married couple.
Only 40 per cent of households actually consist of a couple and their children nowadays--but this does not mean that 60 per cent are childless or unmarried people! Because couples now have fewer children over a shorter span of time, they often live together without children for longer than they do with children. After their children have left home, they may have to take on other responsibilities: a survey in North-East England in 1979 found that more households included an elderly or handicapped relative than children under sixteen. This contradicts the picture painted by the Tory government of families having abandoned their traditional responsibilities. The proportion of elderly people in institutions is now many times smaller than it was at the turn of the century, when far fewer people survived to grow old.
The family continues to exist because it is the most convenient way of reproducing and caring for the workforce in a capitalist society. No government is going to spend resources on providing a full range of alternative care--nurseries, canteens, dormitories, and so on--and if they did these would probably be exactly the kind of bureaucratic and regimented institutions that most people think of when they hear such suggestions, because they would be planned from above for cost-saving and efficiency.
In Western capitalist society, private property is transmitted through the family; in state capitalist societies such as Russia and China, it is the privileges of the bureaucracy that are passed on to their children through better education and job prospects. Yet all these societies keep up a myth that people get where they are because of individual effort: the myth of free competition in the West, the myth of the classless society in the East! But in each case, the family reinforces existing class divisions.
How can we change all this, and begin to live in a way that produces fewer disasters and more freedom and equality? There is no way the family can be 'abolished' from above--like religion, banning it would simply drive it underground. The family can disappear only when people choose to live differently. Only a socialist society could offer a better way of life because it would respond to human needs instead of to the drive for profits.
Many different ways of living together and sharing tasks could be tried, for instance, if houses were not all built to the standard one-family pattern; if eating good food outside the home was not an expensive privilege; if adults shared children instead of owning them and smothering them with their own needs and desires. If women and children were not financially dependent on individual men (and if men were not dependent on individual women for personal services!) then tasks might be more reasonably shared and everyone equally rewarded for the work they do. If married couples were not so isolated they might be less possessive and break-ups less frequent or at least less traumatic.
The way that people live will not change until the material conditions--such as housing, social services, the structure of pay and production--change. But socialism means more even than that, for there are ideas and feelings imposed on us by our present kind of society that will be irrelevant and out-of-date in a society run by working people for themselves.
Capitalist society produces people whose aims and desires are 'privatised'. Most people have little or no control over anything outside their own homes. Work consists of boring, repetitive tasks carried out under orders; the only thing that's worse is not having a job at all. Democracy means putting a cross on a piece of paper once every five years. The only place where people are free to make choices and decisions, to do the things that really interest and absorb them, is Home. Literally, you can call your home your own when nothing else is (even if it's mortgaged for the rest of your working life).
In a really socialist society, where the working class was in control, the field of choices and responsibilities would move outside the home. Working people could call the whole of society their own, and would have access to a far greater range of satisfactions than most of us have at present. When most people are busy and happy running things over which they previously had no control, they will not want to be cooped up at home any more.
This will not happen on the day after a socialist revolution, and presumably some people will want to give up small-family life sooner than others, but it will surely happen sooner or later if we manage to arrive at a socialist society. Family-centred feelings will seem as outdated and irrelevant then as the feudal concept of fealty or the ancient Roman idea of honour do now!
Some people already feel that they are happier outside a conventional family situation, and think that if enough people changed their attitudes and lifestyle it would just quietly disappear. That is all right for those who can afford it. It is much easier for people with middle-class jobs and middle-class incomes to find more flexible housing, distribute their time between work and home differently, pay for good childcare and even afford not to cook for themselves so often. (It is even possible for people on the dole to do a few of these things if they don't have children and don't mind living in squalor.) For the majority of working people, these alternative lifestyles are just not available.
People still turn to farnily life as a haven from a harsh and unpleasant world, even if it often a very choppy haven and sometimes a downright dangerous one. The only way this will be changed is by changing the world they are turning away from. It will not be changed by moralising about the family, telling people how they ought to live, or refusing to defend families when they are under attack--as many working-class families are under the Thatcher government's programme of cuts, restrictions and unemployment. There is no eternal right and wrong about the family: it has always been a changeable institution, and it will go on changing whether we like it or not, according to material conditions in the world outside and not according to ideas of morality.