In lots of ways families are natural groups that people form to care and support each other. But there’s another, more sinister dimension to “The Family” that oppresses people (especially when those people are women, queer or children).
The Family isn’t just a natural social unit based on caring anymore. It is a rigid economic grouping of people into cramped lodgings and restrictive economic relationships. The Family ceases to be natural the moment that it becomes economically necessary.
The Family subverts the individual. Women are devalued in by an economic system that doesn’t pay them for any housework or child raising labour. Children are totally dependent on their parents for housing and food, and they are totally subject to their parents’ will. The most authoritarian relationship within society is that between parent and child. Some parents invert this relationship and become servants of their children, but they have the quick-release of adulthood – at any time they can regain their authoritative power. When you can no longer choose an alternative, then your individuality is no longer valued. You become “a wife” and “a mother”, and no longer have a name but “honey” or “mum!”.
Individuals who don’t fit within The Family structure find themselves: suffering under the dictatorial yoke of parents and patriarchs; cast into reactive youth cultures; or stoically struggling to maintain a single-parent family on the dole. The Family is the basis of society and to not fit in the family is to be different.
The Family benefits big capital because when individual workers group together, pooling their resources to survive. Wages only need to increase in line with the cost of providing a survival allowance to groups, not in line with the cost of supporting individuals in society. Only 80 years ago, the controllers of wages in Australia would calculate what a woman’s wage was worth by assuming that she lived with a husband and child who would each work – a woman’s wage was 70% of a man’s; a child’s wage about 60%. The Family in Australia has its roots in an economic unit where each party was bound to group together by the need to pool their wages to provide food and shelter for themselves as a group. The man, woman and child were all stuck - but women and children more so.
The Family takes on the cost of child raising and education. Choosing which school your kids goes to is an economic choice – what can you afford? If you sacrifice now, will your child become Prime Minister some day?
Today, little changes. The nature of family is still gendered.
