The family is the oldest human
institution, even a pre-human institution existing among the great apes. Along
with the deliberate control of fire, which Goudsblom saw as the beginning of
socially-imposed self-discipline and the “civilizing process,” early humans also
developed a variety of kinship institutions. These were rules about who could
or could not marry whom; incest prohibitions and exogamy rules; residency rules
about whose group the new wife or husband lived with; descent rules about which
lines of descent were considered lineages of membership, obligation and
inheritance.
Family and kinship have always been based
on sexual behavior: the right or obligation to have intercourse is the
operational definition of marriage (however sentimentalized or euphemistic the
terminology might be). Intercourse reproduced the social structure from
generation to generation; including status differences between children of socially
recognized marriages, secondary marriages such as concubines, and illegitimate
children who had no legal right to inherit. Regulated and legitimated sex was
the building-block of kinship structure.
De-regulation of sex became systemic change
in human societies when other institutions were created that took the place, in
varying degrees, of family-based economic and political alliances, child-rearing,
and inheritance. Until the end of the
Middle Ages, the kinship-based household was the building block of political
and military power, as well as economic production and consumption. Modernity
began by replacing family-based organization with bureaucracy. States began to
regulate the family household from outside, inscribing everyone on the rolls of
the state as individuals. The core of the family has become personal and sexual
rather than political and economic. What is personal and sexual has become
freer, more a matter of individual choice; at the same time sexual behavior in
the non-family world has become subject to explicit political regulation,
either restricting or permitting. From the early 20th century onwards, there
have been increasingly militant movements on one side or another of what is
sexually permitted, encouraged, or prohibited.
In this context, I will consider current
disputes over sexuality and gender. Why is there an upsurge in anti-abortion
movements just now? I will argue that abortion is primarily about freedom of
sexual action. It is part of an overarching array of issues that includes
homosexuality, which is to say, more kinds of acceptable erotic practices; also
publicizing one’s sexual identity in schools, in using toilets, and in
festivals and parades; not merely private freedom of sexuality but asserting it
as one’s central identity. Politics has become more centered on sexuality than
at any time in history.
These movements are allied in a united
front with a struggle to eradicate gender distinctions. Both sides of the
dispute mobilize movements and propose
laws, each protesting against the other. In larger perspective, it is a struggle
over what remains of the family and what will replace it.
In what follows, I will sketch the many
forms of family-based societies that made up most of human history, from the
tribal and band pre-state period, through the feudal-patrimonial households
which were displaced by the bureacratic revolution. This transition was the
specialty of the two great historical sociologists, Max Weber and Norbert
Elias. Both saw the world-historical importance of the transition, although
they called it different things. Weber called it "rationalization"
(while recognizing the ambiguities of the concept), but principally he saw
modern society as increasingly penetrated by bureaucracy. The lesson of Foucault's
cultural histories is similar, although he says nothing about bureaucracy as a
driving factor.
Elias set out to historicize Freud:
bodily repression of natural impulses is not primordial but dates from the late
feudal period. Psychology is driven by geopolitics; conquering kings
centralized territorial regimes by making the warlords spend time at court--
thereby acquiring manners and self-repression. Courtly manners were adopted by
the middle class as moral obligations. This is the "civilizing process,"
the strengthening of a super-ego of self-control,
taken-for-granted and becoming an unconscious "second nature". Elias
followers (e.g. Wouters) posit further accretions of self-inhibition through
the following centuries up through today.
In this historical context, I will sketch
the history of abortion struggles; the sexual revolution in non-marital sex;
homosexual and transgender movements and the battle of pronouns; and the
perceived decline of the family. This will help answer the question: why anti-abortion
movements now? I will end with some sociological tools for forecasting the
future of the family.
I hope you will excuse me for relying on
American data. Some of these trends originated in Europe; on the whole it has
been a world-wide trajectory (with the notable exception of the Moslem world).
Kin
Groups versus Bureaucracy
Kinship was the
earliest form of human organization, and a distinctive break from animal
families. The history of complex organizations took off when they separated
from kin-based households into distinctive organizations for politics,
religion, and economy. But for many centuries these spheres remained connected
in some degree with kinship and household. Big shifts in political organization
during ancient and medieval times, such as recruiting warriors to join
migrating and conquering hordes, were
usually created by pseudo-kinship, a pretence of being descended from some
mythical ancestor. Settled states were almost entirely alliance networks among
armed households. They were "patrimonial households" (a Weberian term
that should not be confused with "patriarchy"), with marriage
connections at their core. But a household was powerful and rich to the extent
it contained many non-kin servants, soldiers, guests, hostages, apprentices, as
well as prestige-giving artists and entertainers. The big break in
organizational forms was the rise of bureaucracy, which as a practical matter
meant that work, politics, religion, etc. were carried out somewhere other than
where families live. The change was visible in the built environment; castles
and homes that were simultaneously work-places gave way to governmental and
commercial buildings, containing their own furnishings, weapons and equipment,
treated as property of the organization rather than of particular persons.
Too much emphasis has
been placed on the concept of bureaucracy as a set of ideals and a form of
legitimacy; it was simultaneously a form of material organization: control
through written rules and records, hence a roster of who belongs to the
organization, what money they collect and spend, recording who does what and
how they did it. It is a network of behavior according to written rules and
reports. Everyone is replaceable according to the rules, which means
procedures, examinations, due diligence and whatever the cliché was at the
time. Schooling is another such bureaucracy, taking away instruction from the
family; and thus simultaneously freeing individuals from family control, while
making them targets for indoctrination by whoever controls the state.
This is an
idealization; empirical studies of bureaucracies show that the rules were often
evaded or manipulated; modern research shows that bureaucrats don't just break
the rules backstage, but know how to use the rules against others, when to
invoke them and when to ignore them. Being maximally rule-bound ("bureaucratic")
is not the most efficient way to do things; but it is an effective form of
organization for breaking the power of kin groups, inherited rule. It keeps an
organization going as an impersonal entity, even if inefficiently. Every
revolution and every successful social movement institutionalizes itself in new
rules and government agencies to enforce them. In this ironic sense, as the
Weberian scholar Reinhard Bendix remarked, democracy extends bureaucracy.
It is in this context
that we can understand the mobilization of conflicts over abortion in
particular and sexual behavior in general.
Abortion
and Sexual Behavior
Abortion is argued in philosophical and
theological terms: on the one hand, the protection and sacredness of life; on
the other, the right to choose, rights over one’s own body. But sociologically,
abstract ideas and beliefs are not the ultimate explanation of what people do.
It begs the question: why do some people sometimes believe one way or the
other? When and why are they vehement
about their beliefs? When do they organize
social and political movements about them?
Arguments about abortion are stated
altruistically: it has nothing to do with me personally, I am concerned for the
unborn children, for the right to life generally. On the pro-abortion side,
there is a general argument that everyone has the right over one’s own body;
but also sometimes personal-- I have the right to an abortion if I want one.
But sociologically, the ground zero is
always pragmatic: a practical matter of how people live. What is the human action at issue behind the
abortion argument? Abortion is about sex-- erotic behavior. Why do some women want abortion? Because they
have sex without marriage, in pre-marital and extra-marital sex. It is freedom
to fuck without worrying about pregnancy, and thus is also a form of birth
control for married couples.
Up through the early 20th century, an
unwanted pregnancy was a fatal life event for a woman. The exception was for
rich women who could keep it secret and farm out an unwanted child to a woman
of the lower classes to care for it. To have a child outside of wedlock was
scandalous, shameful, to be hidden away if possible. It was a badge of shame, punished by being
ostracized; the Scarlet Letter, in
Hawthorne’s novel about 17th Century New England puritans. Worse yet, the mother could be executed for
murder if she had an abortion; or disposed of the infant though infanticide (this
was the plot line of Goethe’s Faust).
That was the historical scenario. Today, some abortions happen because married
women don’t want to have a child at the time; because the child is malformed;
because the mother is in danger; or because it interrupts her career. Most abortions
are to unmarried women in their twenties.
The taboo on unmarried pregnancy fell
away rapidly in some countries (first in Scandinavia, then in the US) in the
1950s and 60s. In part, this was because of much greater acceptance of sex
before marriage; in part because young middle-class couples started living
together without getting married-- a trend that grew very rapidly at the turn
of the 1970s, and was accepted surprisingly soon by the older population.
Before that time, “living in sin,” as it was called, or “shacking up” was
regarded as something poor or non-white people did. But within a few years it
became normal to hear someone introduced as “this is my partner” rather than
“this is my husband, this is my wife.”
The further terminological shift in ordinary language was adopted by
homosexual couples, who more recently have shifted to using “husband and
husband” or “wife and wife,” after winning political and legal battles over gay
marriage.
The political and legal battle for
abortion happened at the same time as the revolution in unmarrried cohabitation.
In Scandinavia limited abortion rights began in the 1930s and expanded; in 1973
the US Supreme Court ruled in the lawsuit Roe v. Wade that abortion was a right
covered in the abstract language of the Constitution. The anti-abortion
movement dates from that period.
The arguments pro and con are on the
grounds of legal philosophy. Translated
into social practice, to restore the ban on abortion means that sex should be
confined to marriage. This means rolling back the sexual revolution of mid-20th
century. On the other side, my body is my own, means in practical terms: I can
have sex with whoever and whenever I want.
Men traditionally had this right; why shouldn’t women?
We are approaching an answer to the
question: why is there a resurgence of the anti-abortion movement just now?
Which is to say, a movement against casual, non-marital sex. This should be seen in the context of the sexual
revolution, starting about 100 years ago.
Sexual
Revolutions
Throughout human history, marriages were
almost always arranged by kin groups rather than the choices of independent
individuals. Pre-state kinship structures were built around marriage rules,
which group should send daughters or sons to another specified group. With the
rise of large-scale warfare and alliance politics, marriages and other forms of
sexual exchange became used as political treaties. Sending daughters of one
leading family as wives or concubines to another leading family made them allies,
and also set the stage for future inheritance of territories depending on
accidents of which children were born and survived into adulthood. Diplomatic
marriages of this sort have continued among royal families (even among figureheads
like Queen Victoria) down to the era of modern democracies (including England’s
Queen Elizabeth II). At less exalted levels of social class, arranged marriages
also existed among property-owning families, an arrangement for continuity in
family enterprises, and sometimes as a means of status climbing where money
could be traded for ancestral status.
Sexual/love affairs also existed in
virtually all recorded societies since ancient times, but mainly outside of
marriage. They were a form of personal excitement, the thrill of a private
backstage (Romeo-and-Juliet) which now appeared in the otherwise
privacy-denying patrimonial household. Most of what we know about such love
affairs is from the literature or entertainment media of the time, which probably
exaggerate them compared to the realities of ordinary life in pre-modern
households. But as bureaucracy and democracy eroded the importance of household
and inheritance for individual's careers, marriage markets spread among the
middle class. The growth of individual marriage markets-- though still heavily
influenced by parents-- can be indexed by the topics of popular literature. The
new ideology of marriage for love combined with a concern for material fortune
is described in the novels of Jane Austen around 1800; it developed more slowly
in French literature (long focused on adulterous adventures), and sentimentally
as well as moralistically in American literature. The belief became
conventional that all marriages happen by falling in love, or at least this
became the normative way of speaking about it.
The 1920s were a revolution in courtship.
Parents steering their children’s marriage choices was replaced by dating and
partying. From now on the younger generation mixed the sexes without
supervision, creating a culture where drinking, dancing and necking was the
main excitement of life rather than a transition to marriage. It was a
rebellious thrill in the US where alcohol was prohibited, but the same style
emerged in England and Germany also.
In the 1930s and 40s, divorce began to be
common, no longer disreputable and scandalous. By the 1960s, almost 50 % of US
marriages were ending in divorce; a level relatively constant since then. This
eroded the ideal of sexual monogamy or "purity"; a large portion of
the population of both sexes were having multiple sexual partners.
Since the transition from childhood to
adulthood involves a shift from a life-stage in which sex is officially
prohibited to a stage when it is allowed, the teen years are a center for
sexual regulation and associated ideologies. The 1950s produced a new social
category, the “teenager”. Working class youths no longer entered the labor
force, as governments made them attend secondary school; with free time on
their hands, teens created social clubs and gangs, got their own style of music
and dancing, with a tone of rebellion against traditional middle class
propriety. The rise in crime rates began at this time, and continuing from the
1950s into the 1990s. How to bring up children became a topic of controversy
ever since. Apart from psychological advice on home life, the social instrument
for shaping and controlling the emerging generation has become schools and the
policies by which they operate. Hence a new site for political struggle.
The
Invention of the Social Movement
Here we step back again to trace another
offshoot of the bureaucratic revolution.
The social movement is a form of organization and politics outside of
the family and household, but also outside of formal bureaucrities: that is to
say, it it a mode of creating new networks that did not exist before,
recruiting persons wherever they might come from, generating an alliance of
individuals held together by their devotion to a common cause. Social movements
are a distinctively modern form. They scarcely existed in the era of kinship
politics, where household might shift alliances but individuals within them
could not go out to join movements on their own. The exception was religious
movements, chiefly in the monastic world religions such as Buddhism and
Christianity during their early phases of expansion. But as these religions
achieved success they tended to ally with the patrimonial households of the
aristocracy, and religious conversion generally took place en masse by the
conversion of leading aristocrats who ordered their subordinates to follow.
Other large-scale religions, such as Confucianism, Hindu sects, and Islam,
generally blended with and reinforced existing kinship politics.
Charles Tilly dates the invention of the
social movement to the late 1700s in England and France. Prior to this time,
there could be local protests and uprisings in periods of food scarcity and
distress, but they remained localized and when serious were almost always put down
by superior military power. The bureaucratic state changed the logistics of
political activism; it promoted roads, canals, transport, postal services and
the delivery of books and newspapers; social movements were now able to
organize large number of people across long distances. And the increasingly
centralization of the state gave movements a target for their grievances: the
capital city and the central government itself. Movements developed a
repertoire of techniques for petitioning and protesting, ranging in militancy
from demanding reforms and new laws, to overthrowing the state by revolution.
In democracies, social movements became an alternative to struggling for power
through periodic elections; one doesn't always win the vote but protest movements
can be mobilized at any time to bring pressure on the authorities to make
urgent and immediate changes.
With the expansion of communications --
telephone, radio, film, television, computers and the internet-- the material
means for mobilizing social movements have vastly expanded. In the 19th and
early 20th century, the main social movements were class-based, especially
labour movements; sometimes ethnic and nationalist; sometimes humanitarian
reform movements. From mid-20th century through today, the variety of social
movements has exploded into a cascade of social movements, all competing for
attention.
Sexual
Movements
What was different in the 1960s was that
political and social movements became heavily based among the young (in
contrast to labour movements, based on married adults). The shift was driven by
a huge increase in university students. Again the underlying force was a
combination of bureaucracy and democracy. State universities proliferated in
response to popular demands for educational credentials once monopolized by the
elite. Ironically, this set off a spiral of credential inflation, as
once-valuable school degrees (secondary school diplomas; then undergraduate
degrees) became so widespread that well-paying jobs increasingly demanded advanced
professional degrees. The political side-effect, however, was that the group of
young-adult "university age" students became a favourable base for
organizing social movements: students have flexible hours, are freed from
family supervision, massed together in their own spaces, and thus available for
speedy communications and the emotionally engaging rituals of rallies, marches,
protests, and sit-ins. With the adoption of non-violent techniques of
"civil disobedience" borrowed from Gandhi's independence campaign in
India, militant social movements could both claim the moral high ground, and
apply pressure by disrupting public routines. Such movements could also spill
over into property destruction and violence; as Tilly noted, a violent fringe
has historically existed around any large public protest.
In the self-consciously revolutionary
generation of the 1960s, we called ourselves the New Left, distinguished from
the old Left by being less concerned about ideology than lifestyle. Culture
icons were the hippies, drop-outs from school and career, living in communes
where they shared psychedelic drugs and free love. In reality, most were
weekend-hippies, and most of the free-love communes disintegrated rather
quickly, over jealousy and status ranking. The main legacy of the “free love”
period was that cohabitation-- living together without getting married-- became
widespread, even becoming a census category in the 1970s.
The 70s were dominated by sexually-based
movements. First, the feminist movement sought equal legal
rights and employment opportunities for women; plus its militant lesbian
branch, condemning heterosexual intercourse as the root of the problem. In the
1970s and increasing with each decade through the present, a chain of
homosexual movements demanded not only freedom from discrimination but the
recognition of a new public vocabulary-- gender rather than sex, gay rather
than homosexual, and so on. This has been a cascade of movements, each building
on its predecessors, in tactics, ideology, and lifestyle, each finding a new issue
on which to fight.
Counter-cultures
and Culture Wars
Recent movements are built on prior
movements of cultural rebellion, going back for a century. Like the New Left,
the overall ethos has been antinomian, the counter-culture of status reversal.
These rebellious social movements were paralleled by shifts in
self-presentation, demeanor, and in the media depiction of sexuality. In the
1920s, women’s skirts became shorter; young women adopted a more mannish look. They
also began to show a lot more flesh; body-covering swim suits became briefer;
women athletes exercized and competed in shorts. (The trend also existed in
socialist and Soviet Communist organizations; and in the nudist movement
popular in Germany.) In 1946 came the bikini, created in France and
named for an island where an atom bomb was exploded; eventually there were men
in thongs and women going topless at beaches. The 60s and 70s were a weird
melange of clothing fads: granny dresses and throw-back Sgt. Pepper uniforms;
Nehru jackets, surgical smocks; men in pony-tails wearing pukka-shell necklaces
and jewelry earrings. Most of these styles did not last long, but the
prevailing mood was change for the sake of something different. The long-term
result was the casualness revolution (also called informalization), which triumphed
by the 1990s: wearing blue jeans, T-shirts and athletic clothes on all
occasions, discarding neckties and business suits; calling everyone by their
first name, no more use of titles and once-polite forms of address.
Simultaneously with these changes, erotic
heterosexuality was coming out of the closet, in literature and the media. The
“jazz age” of the 1920s was originally named after a slang word for having sex;
novelists like Scott Fitzgerald and song-writers like Cole Porter were full of
innuendo. James Joyce’s Ulysses in
1922 began literary depiction of the bodily details of sex, followed by D.H.
Lawrence, Hemingway, Henry Miller, and Anais Nin; most of these were published
in Paris but censored elsewhere until 1960, when their mass publication fueled
the sexual atmosphere of the counter-culture. In 1968, Hollywood film
censorship changed to a rating system, marketing soft porn as PG (“parental
guidance”) and hard porn as X-rated. The 70s was the era of the so-called
“Pubic Wars”: glossy magazines with nude photos tested the borders of what
could be displayed, moving from breasts to pubic hair to aroused genitals and
by the 1980s to penetration and oral sex. Pornographic photos had existed
before, but they were cheaply produced and had a limited underground
circulation; now these were some of the biggest mass-distribution magazines.
Sex magazines went into decline in the 90s, replaced by porn sites on the
Internet.
Cultural rebellion spilled over into
language. Obscene words began to be used in political demonstrations; then on
T-shirts, in fashion advertising, and in ordinary middle-class conversation.
The remaining bastian of prohibition on obscene language is what can be said in
school classrooms. Everywhere else,
flauting overt sex has been a successful form of rebellion. One might even say
that the major line of conflict is no longer between economic classes, but a
status division: hip and cool versus square and straight.
Homosexual sex came out of the closet at
the same time as the porn revolution. Gay porn magazines and film followed
heterosexual men’s magazines; their circulation was never as wide (Playboy and Penthouse reached peaks of 5-to-7 million), but the gay movement
was more controversial and more activist. It spun off from the resistance
tactics of the civil rights movement, pushing back at police raids of gay bars
and meeting places. It becamc a cascade of movements: gay and lesbian joined by
bi-sexual, queer (militant homosexuals rejecting gay marriage), transgender,
transsexual, non-binary, and more. The growth of this acronym—now up to
LGBTQIA+ -- is itself a sociological phenomenon to be explained, as new
identities have been added every few years, a trajectory likely to continue
into the future. This is the pattern of a social movement cascade; successful
movements do not retire, declaring their cause is won, but spin off new
branches, seeking new niches and issues. The phenomenon is sometimes referred
to as extending social movement frames to new targets.
A related issue has been sex education in
the schools, initially about contraceptives for the prevention of venereal
disease (a term subsequently changed as too judgmental). Sex education grew as
an official alternative to parental advice or to informal peer-group sexual culture;
sex education is the bureacratization of sex. In the early 21st century its
function expanded to teach childen about homosexuality as a protected status,
and as a life-style choice. In recent years there are movements among students
as young as elementary school demanding to be referred to by non-gendered
pronouns; and for government-funded sex-reassignment hormones or surgery. The
fields of struggle have expanded: gender-free toilets; the battle of pronouns,
banning the words “he” and “she”. In 2022, adolescent children have been
charged with sexual harassment for "mispronouning" -- referring to a
classmate as "she" instead of "them." In 2021, the U.S.
House of Representatives passed legislation banning the use of gendered words
“father, mother, brother, sister” in government documents. Federal health
organizations now refer to mothers as "birthing persons" and ban the
term "breast-feeding" in favor of "chest-feeding." (Wall
Street Journal, May 10 and May 24, 2022) There are similar efforts to create
gender-neutral pronouns in French and Spanish, although thus far not very
popular.
Why
Anti-abortion Politics Now?
The arena of such conflicts has become
increasingly political, as activists file lawsuits in the courts and demand new
legislation; escalation on one side leads to counter-escalation on the other.
It is in this context that we can explain why the anti-abortion movement has
become much more militant in the last few years. In 2019, abortions in the US
were about 20% of live births; but in fact the ratio has fallen from 25% ten
years earlier; this is largely due to teenagers having fewer children and fewer
abortions; and to some extent to the growth of homosexuality in the age-group
below 30. The anti-abortion movement has not intensified because abortion was
growing worse; it is just the most prominent way conservative legislators can
strike back at the latest waves of sexual revolution.
Conservatives view these developments as
the decline of morality and good taste;
the intrusion of government into the lives of their children; and
educational policies that they regard as indoctrination. Abortion is seen as
part of the sexual revolution run rampant, separating sex from the family, extolling
forms of sex that turn traditional parenting into an outdated status. Militants
of homosexual movements have declared that hetero-normativity is on its way
out. Homosexuality has become more widespread: it was less than 2% of the Baby
Boom generation; grew to almost 4% of the generation born before 1980; to 9% of
those who became adults around the year 2000. In so-called Generation Z, now
about 18 to 23 years old, identifying as LGBT has jumped to 16%. This is still
far from a majority; but an expanding movement is full of aggressive
confidence, looking forward to a time when the heterosexual family is a quaint
minority.
Conservatives see the same trends but
from a different point of view: the falling marriage rate; below-replacement
fertility, now down to 1.6 children per woman in the US, the lowest in its
history (and even lower in parts of Europe); 40% of all children born to
unmarried parents. More people are living alone; proportionately more among the
aged 65 and older; but in sheer numbers of households, the largest number living
alone are working-age adults.
Strict laws in American states banning
abortion have been created in a situation where the political split between
conservatives and liberals leaves neither of them with a firm majority at the
Federal level, while conservatives fall back on regional state legislatures
which they control. Here also control over what goes on in the schools is
increasingly contested.
Abortion is just one issue in a divisive
cluster of issues. Making abortion laws
more restrictive will not save the family; illegal abortions would re-appear,
recapitulating the conflicts of the 1960s. Conflict over abortion is a symbol
of the bigger question-- what conservatives perceive as a multi-pronged assault
on the family.
Why
the Family is Not Likely to Disappear
But there are reasons of a different sort
why the family is not likely to disappear any time soon. When the feminist
revolution took off in the 1970s, men soon discovered they had an economic
interest in their wives’ careers. A family with two middle-class incomes could
outspend a traditional, male-headed upper-middle class household. Two
working-class incomes put a family in the middle-class expenditure bracket. In
the new economic hierarchy, the poorest families are those where one woman’s
income has to care for her children alone. Marriage and its shared property
rights continues to be the bulwark of economic stratification. From a radical left point-of-view, this would
be a reason to abolish the family; or at least take child-rearing away from the
family.
The situation is complicated by gay
marriage, beginning when gay couples demanded the tax and inheritance rights of
marriage. It also creates wealthy households, since gay men are usually middle
class or higher, and two such incomes makes them big spenders-- one reason why
consumer industries and advertising are so favorable to the gay movement. On the other hand, although gay couples
sometimes adopt children (or use sperm donors), the number of children in gay
marriages is small (only 15% of same-sex couples, married or not, have
children) and unlikely to compensate for the overall decline in child-bearing.
There are about 1 million same-sex households in the US; out of 128 million
households, this is less than 1%. Since about 13 million Americans identify as
LGBT, this implies that only 1/6th of them are living with a sexual partner;
most of them are living alone. The big increase in living alone may even be
driven by the rise of homosexuality, or perhaps vice versa. This seems to be particularly
true in big US cities, such as Washington D.C., where one-quarter of the adult
population live alone in apartments, making up half of all households.
Washington is also the city where the largest percentage identify themselves as
LGBT, at 10%.
Can sociology predict the future of the
family? What will happen hinges a great deal on government regulations, and
these depend on the mobilization of political movements against each other. The
Internet era has made it easier for all sorts of movements to mobilize. But
government regulation may become a weapon by which one side can censor the
other and try to keep it from mobilizing. The causes of conflict are easier to
predict than the outcomes, especially when the sides are relatively evenly balanced.
Computerization and its offshoot the
Internet, foreshadow a future in which almost everyone works at home; manual
work is done by robots; everyone spends most of their time communicating
on-line, or absorbed in on-line entertainment. The generation brought up on the
Internet is the shyest generation yet; they have many on-line “friends” but few
friends in the flesh; they are less sexually active; more anxious and fearful.
The issue of abortion may eventually decline, because there is less sexual activity
in the future generation. The immersive virtual world of the Internet, strongly
promoted by today’s media capitalism, may be destroying the family by making it
easy to live physically solitary lives.
Thus the recent jump in identification as homosexual (16% in the
youngest generation) may be largely a matter of announced identity rather than
bodily erotics; a kind of fantasy ideology more than actual sexual practice.
Yet this may be why the family will
survive--- not as the universal social institution, but as a privileged
enclave. It is privileged because it is a place of physical contact; of
interaction rituals, solidarity, and emotional energy. It is also a place of
reliable sex (surveys show that married and cohabiting couples have much more
frequent sex than unpartnered individuals -- they don’t have to spend time
looking for partners). Add to that the
two-earner effect on household income, an incentive for the family to survive.
The trajectory of the last 100 years has
been to undermine the family; but the rise of the disembodied computer world
may change that. I suspect we are heading towards a future where intact
families-- father, mother, and their children of all ages-- are the dominant
class economically; and media-networked or media-addicted isolates, living
alone with their electronics, are wards of the welfare state.
References
Statistical sources:
U.S. Bureau of the Census
Center for Disease Control
National Center for Health Statistics
Statistica.com
Williams Institute
Gallup polls
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Seth Abrutyn and Jonathan Turner. 2022. The First Institutional Spheres of Human
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Philip Blumstein and Pepper
Schwartz. 1983. American Couples. New York:
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Randall Collins. 2014. “Four Theories of
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Randall Collins. 1979/2019. The
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Charles Tilly. 2004. Social Movements, 1768-2004.
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