The Family and Gender

During the period — the 1950s and 1960s — at which the theory of industrial society enjoyed pre-eminence as a framework for social analysis, a specific type of interpretation of the development of the family tended to prevail in the sociological literature. Expressed rather crudely, this interpretation ran as follows. Prior to industrialisation, the family was deeply embedded in a broad set of kinship relations ('the extended family') and was the hub of economic production. The transition to an industrial society, however, in which the family is no longer, as such, a unit of production, dissolved the extended family. Kinship relations became pared down to the 'nuclear family': the parental couple and their immediate offspring. 'The family,' as one observer put it, 'has become a more specialised agency than before, probably more specialised than it has been in any previously known society' (Talcott Parsons, 'The American family', in T. Parsons and R. F. Bales, Family, Socialisation and Interaction Process, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956, p. 10). Most writers who proposed this view, none the less, including Parsons, strongly defended the continuing significance of the family (and marriage) in contemporary society

Industrial society · Industrialisation · Kinship · Nuclear family · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Structural functionalism · Anthropology · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender Studies · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics · Law · Philosophy · Social Policy and Reform Studies

• Capital and the Family

  Open Access•Jens Beckert, Isabell Stamm•British Journal of Sociology•2025

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