Michéle Barrett and Mary McIntosh: The Anti-Social Family, Verso/NLB, 1982. Reviewed by Margaret Coulson [International, November/December 1982]
The idealised picture of the family composed of responsible breadwinner, caring housewife and (two) bright and happy dependent children, living together, in sickness and in health, in their own neat home, smiles out at us from the advertisements. Politicians Tory, SDP, Labour – smile back. Houses are built for this family, social policies constructed around it. Trade unions have struggled for a family wage for it. Churches bless it. It is the foundation of ‘western civilisation, the most precious institution of the ideal society.
Yet most of the time people in this society do not and cannot live within such relationships within a nuclear household. According to one recent estimate, out of the whole economically active population only five per cent are married men with a dependent wife and two dependent children. Dependent children grow up, married women move into paid employment, divorce and death break up households, there is a growth in households of single people and of single adults living with one or more children. In addition, this ideal family is white. It denies the existence of family ideals and relationships which do not take their inspiration from white western Christian ‘civilisation’. White racism both ignores the diversity of family and household patterns in black communities and attacks black people in the context of their family relationships as in their workplaces and communities; this produces a particularly oppressive, complex and contradictory dynamic around black families. The heterosexist structure of this family ideal makes lesbians and gay men invisible, except perhaps as sexual deviants and social isolates.
The ideology of this ‘normal family’ may not be powerful enough to force us all into its household form but it is powerful enough to invalidate and marginalise alternative ways of living and relating. We have to understand the considerable appeal of this often unattainable (or unmaintainable) nuclear ideal in relation to the immensely privileged position which it commands. The ideology of familism pervades this society and engages commitment at all social levels. It is embraced by the labour movement and extends far into the Left. Feminist critiques of the family as the site of women’s oppression have sometimes produced embarrassment on the Left at the extent to which this ideology has been swallowed; but little more than this. Any attempts to reclaim the slogan from Marx and Engels ‘abolish the family’ is dismissed as ultra-left, adventurist, utopian. Nor is there one agreed feminist position on how to confront ‘the family’, Michèle Barrett and Mary Mcintosh ‘believe that in the long term socialists and feminists must develop a political consensus on the family and that the pre-condition for this is more open debate on where we stand’. (p7)
Is this just a plea for more academic discussion? I think not. Ultimately the development of any constructive relationship between socialism and feminism must depend on developing a clearer critical politics on the family’. More immediately a revolutionary politics of the family is needed as part of a critique of Thatcherism in Britain. While the rise of right-wing Toryism and the emergence of the SDP have appeared to indicate both a fragmentation and a polarisation within British bourgeois politics, an underbelly of political consensus has been preserved. ‘The nation and ‘the family’, patriotism and familism, are vital to the popular appeal of the Right.
Thatcherism and ‘the family’
As Barrett and McIntosh point out, the growth of the new Right in the USA, in particular the moral majority, has involved clear, direct and vicious attacks on gains which the women’s and gay movements had made since the sixties. In Britain there has been a more diffused and covert process of turning against, undermining or simply ignoring issues of women’s rights. An explicitly profamily commitment is only now emerging as a central part of the rhetoric of Thatcherism. But it is important to examine Thatcher’s increasingly articulate attachment to familism. In doing this we have to take account of the horrible contradiction of Thatcher herself as a woman prime minister, for this has given a quite peculiar edge to her moral-political mission and to responses to it.
It is because she is a woman that Thatcher’s frequent use of the family/nation analogue both emphasises her authority and strengthens the common sense appeal of her argument. With the nation’s budget as with the family’s ‘we all know’ the importance of living within our means; we cannot abandon the medicine (high unemployment for example) just because it is bitter, it must be taken until the sickness is cured. (Never mind if families do live on credit, if machines kill as well as cure-the common sense may not be very profound).
In presenting herself as a woman prime minister Thatcher has always defended traditional maternal and wifely responsibility. So she has shown us that a woman with ability can climb to the top of the public world and that she has achieved her position without neglecting her duties as wife and mother in her family. The theme of maternal and parental responsibility has been well used; where these are properly developed the family is its own welfare state, where they are not problems erupt which disturb the entire society. At the time of the urban uprisings last summer in Brixton, Toxteth and Moss Side, Thatcher and Whitelaw were repeatedly pushing the blame towards the failure of parental responsibility-these youth had not been properly disciplined, were not being adequately supervised.
Although Patrick Jenkin has explicitly preached that a woman’s place is in the home, the attacks on women’s rights to paid employment have mostly been more indirect and insidious. Thus the DHSS redefinition of ‘availability for work’ which penalises women with children, the attacks on the sectors of higher education in which women are mostly found, the taken for granted sexism of TOPS and MSC courses, the contraction in areas of traditionally female employment, the tightening of regulations around maternity leave, the reductions in welfare state services. Together these raise the hurdles which women must get over in order to get back into paid employment; this is very significant because more women leave employment because of pregnancy than through redundancy and it is being made more difficult to return.
The growing coherence of Thatcher’s family policy has apparently been influenced by Ferdinand Mount’s book The Subversive Family. This confirms one rationale for the reduction and reorganisation of welfare benefits and services, which are perceived as intrusions into the privacy of the family, undermining its capacity to nurture individualism, self-sacrifice and self-help. The idea of the family as a refuge both against the bureaucratic state and against working class collectivism is important in conservative ideology. (‘A vote for Scargill is a vote against your family’ proclaimed the Daily Express on 27 October.) Yet these ideas have a wider resonance in that the welfare state has set up bureaucratic and oppressive structures, and there are divisions within the family, particularly the family of breadwinner and dependants which the Left has been reluctant to recognise.
The Left and ‘the family’
‘Like society in general the contemporary left is familiarised and sections of it are familist’ (p40). The Left is in a weak position to challenge Thatcherism on this ground. Moreover because the chief villain in the reactionary drama of Thatcherism is a woman, misogyny is let loose from the Left and the labour movement as a means of attacking Thatcher at her most vulnerable. Groups such as Women’s Fightback have challenged this within the Left but this reactionary consciousness is resistant to change. In October posters depicting Thatcher on a broomstick ask us to ‘Defend Militant, Burn the Witch”. Clearly within a misogynist culture Thatcher can be attacked and derided for being a woman: a hag, a bitch, a witch but a Left which operates within such a framework has little chance of developing an alternative to Thatcherism or any other variant of bourgeois politics and cannot claim to defend women’s rights.
There is a muddled commitment to “the family’ within the Left. We can’t attack this ideal because the working class needs it; it is the source of comfort and humanity in an alienating and oppressive world. ‘How will the working class survive the present crisis without ‘the family”?” asked a recent letter to the New Statesman.
Similar concerns have been reflected at the level of theory, In an interesting and not entirely negative discussion of recent work on the analysis of the family, Barrett and Mclntosh identify common threads in the influential work of Donzelot and Lasch, both of whom mourn a rather mythical family form which is past or passing. Both imply that women are responsible for this process: women have opened the family door to the intrusive experts of the state who violate family privacy, usurping the authority of the father.
Some of this is strangely similar to Mount’s thesis. Anti-feminist interpretations of trends in the family and in the relationship of family and state spread from right to left. Feminist analyses which have focussed on the relations of inequality between men and women structured into this family form and on the processes within it through which masculine and feminine identity are established are rejected or ignored.
Do we need ‘the family’? What do we need?
Drawing their main inspiration from feminist analysis and debate Barrett and McIntosh argue that ‘the family’ is anti-social. The family gains at the expense of the collective and at the expense of the majority who live, ar any one time, outside its idealised nuclear household form. ‘Caring, sharing and loving would be more widespread if the family did not claim them for its own. (p.80) It could also be argued that the taken for granted view of the family as the basic unit of society blocks our political understanding of what capitalism does to children, to women, to men; it blocks political understanding of racism, of sexism and of class.
But the idea of the anti-social family is not likely to have great appeal within the labour movement or even on the Left. Throughout society there is popular support for the family. Although alternatives may be minimal people do make choices for marriage, for nuclear households, for children. Personal relationships, identity and achievement are measured against its ideals; law, social policy consumption are organised around it; other ways of living and relating are difficult to establish and overwhelmingly evaluated as poor substitutes. Is the family- social or anti-social-unavoidable and inevitable? Is it possible to open up a socialist debate on this issue that does not just become a tug of war between feminists and socialists?
Although its commitments are clear, The Anti-Social Family does offer the possibility of discussion which goes beyond this sort of deadlock. It does this by trying to disentangle the various relationships, experiences, identifications, assumptions, hopes and fears which are knotted together in the mythologised ideal family of capitalism. In addition it tries to identify the principles which might inform a socialist strategy in relation to personal life. The two-fold principles suggested by Barrett and Mcintosh are: ‘(1) we should work for immediate changes that will increase the possibility of choice so that alternatives to the existing favoured patterns of family life become realistically available and desirable: (2) we should work towards collectivism and away from individualism in the areas now allocated to the sphere of the private family, especially income maintenance, the work of making meals, cleaning and housekeeping, and the work of caring for people such as children, the old and the sick or disabled. (p.134)
Thus a framework is proposed within which the family can be analysed and within which practical and specific issues can be examined. For example: Should socialists and feminists make a political decision against marriage because marriage is an oppressive state institution? What is involved in abandoning the concept of the family wage? Or in demanding ‘disaggregation’ in relation to social security? It is important that these questions are taken up more widely and seriously within the Left. Clearly the anti-social family cannot be transformed or transcended in isolation. Personal life can only become more social in relation to changes in all structures of society. But while recognising this we cannot pull conservatively around bourgeois ideals at the level of personal life and expect to build a movement capable of challenging the capitalist economy and its state system.