Critically Assess Sociological Explanations Of Changing Roles And Relationships Within The Family

Critically examine changing roles and relationships within the family

The traditional family in the 1960’s was very patriarchal as fathers were the head of the family and breadwinners. It seems that there have been equality and inequality in families and household. Sociologists are interested in how far couples have a more equal relationship today. According to Parsons view of the family, the father takes the instrumental role, maintain the family by working a wage while the mother takes the expressive role, caring and nurturing and taking main responsibility for the home and childcare. However feminists such as Ann Oakley think that families stays unequal and therefore has been exaggerated which has led feminist questioned the role of males

She studied 128 working and middle class couples and discovers that women were left to do most of the housework and so there was a clear division of labour between the person which carries out the household tasks. More recently, in 1970 Young and Wilmot found that this was changing and joint conjugal roles existed. They believed that men and women helped around the house and this was called the “symmetrical family.” Through symmetrical family they mean in which roles of husband and wives, although not identical are currently much more similar as women now go out to work, men now help with housework and childcare and couples now spends their leisure time together. Young and Wilmot see the symmetrical nuclear family increasing, as the result of social changes in women’s position, geographical mobility, new technology and higher standards of living (Webb et al,

Jonathan Gershuny (1974) found that wives that worked full-time accomplish less domestic work. Wives who don’t go to work did 83% of the housework like wives who worked part-time did 82 % of housework. Similar to Orial Sullivan (2000) analysis collected data in 1975, 1987 and 1997 seen a trend towards better equality as men did more domestic work.

The view of Sullivan and Gershuny are positive ones, like to Young and Wilmot ‘March of progress’ sees that conjugal roles happen to be more symmetrical. However Elsa Ferri and Kate Smith (1996) found that increased employment of women outside the home has small impact on domestic division of labour .Therefore they still believe that women carry dual burden.

In 1999 Gillian Dunne argues that the division of labour continues because of intensely ‘gender script’. It is expectations that start the different gender roles men and women in heterosexual couples are predictable to play. Similarly to Jeffery Weeks (1999) who argues that same-sex relationships suggest better possibilities of equality because the division of labour is open to negotiation and