Traditional Family Structures and Other Problematic Things

Blood is thicker than water, friends come and go but family always endures, there is no greater love than a mother’s love, yada yada. People may disagree on smooth versus crunchy peanut butter, diet coke or pepsi max, Republicans or Democrats, but the one immortal truth that appears to bind all society together is the value of family. In classic contentious Feminist Fatale style, I’m here to say that family is extremely overrated, and kind of problematic.

The general concept of a family is pretty harmless, just a bunch of related people loving and supporting each other. But I’m specifically referring to the traditional structure of a typical nuclear family with a married couple and a handful of biological children. For forever and a day, this construction of a family has been a social tool to keep strict hierarchies of power, and somewhat unsurprisingly the main benefactors are the men and the heterosexuals, whilst the sufferers are… everyone else.

The first thing to look at is marriage. Two people signing a government contract and placing metal rings on each others fingers is not exactly the pinnacle of “nature”. Marriage is very much a social idiosyncrasy that has become so steeped in tradition that the idea of not getting married is strange and apparently “unnatural”. And potentially the reason marriage has become so successful and important in our societies is because it does an excellent job of reinforcing gender roles which keeps power within the male institute. Although this sounds very doom and gloom and over-reactionary, if you step through the history of marriage, it’s surprisingly terrifying. In Classical Rome, daughters were the explicit property of their fathers until marriage, at which point they became property of their husbands. A wannabe husband would have to offer a suitable dowry to the father in order to receive the daughter’s hand, and of course she never had a say throughout the entirety of the process. In fact, not much changed for several hundred years in Western culture, because by the Victorian era marriages were conducted roughly the same. Basically, women were objects to be bartered and sold by their fathers; for the right price, some bloke was allowed to have sex with her, and virginity upon marriage was of utmost importance. Interestingly, both Stalinist and Nazi social policy included a return to strict "traditional family values" such as encouraging women to have multiple children for the State and to ensure women keep the "good" Soviet or German home under control while men conscript to fight for the fatherland.

Until varying stages in the 1900’s depending in which country, marital rape was legal, women were expected to agree with their husbands vote, women’s wealth (if they had any in their own name) became property of their husband, and women were forbidden from receiving custody over a child in case of divorce or insufficient finance. Essentially, marriage seriously sucked for women. Like, seriously. Although the suffrage movement addressed some of these issues, a celebration of the institute of marriage validates this objectifying and often violent history and its attitudes towards women.

And in fact, I’m going to go ahead and say that marriage still sucks for women. The role of “wife” carries expectations of performing disproportionate amounts of domestic and emotional labour in comparison to the role of “husband”, being primary caregiver to children regardless of career or other personal ambitions, and sacrificing her social life for the isolating company of her family - as if two, three, or four other people can satisfy all your interpersonal relationship needs.

And of course there is still the ongoing issue of the queer community being completely excluded from the norm of marriage, further ostracising them from mainstream society by denying them what is supposedly the best way to officiate your relationships with other humans. Once again - celebrating marriage and it’s role in the “perfect” family structure completely invalidates the experiences of gay, trans and aromantic people and their partners.

Children also suffer from this strict and unforgiving environment. Little girls grow up observing their mothers and are subtly conditioned into understanding that this limited existence is their inescapable birthright. For boys and children of other genders too, the family structure enforces very strong gender roles, encouraging the damages of both femininity and toxic masculinity, or the notion that gender is a set and binary thing. On another note, if a family is dysfunctional or abusive, children’s experiences of neglect are invalidated by the strong social narrative that family is the best, most important and most perfect thing in the world; for them it simply is not.

What I find most amusing about many anti-same-sex marriage campaigns is that they worry what legitimising gay couples could mean for the future of the traditional family structure. In my opinion, it is exactly this model of human relationships that causes much of the sexism and homophobia in society, and anything that attempts to challenge it is very much needed.