Year: 1993
Type: article
Abstract: It is striking how many times the death-knell of the bourgeois family has been sounded this century.Equally striking is the similarity of means and instruments devised, or simply resurrected, in the interests of "preserving" a concept that has historically been more ideal than real.The "family besieged was the central motif of countless reformist campaigns in early twentieth-century Canada, inspiring a vast catalogue of proposed social remedies, from improved public health and housing through eugenicist, racist campaigns to sterilize the "unfit" and block immigration.Behind this family crisis theory were overlapping social groups, drawn largely from the urban, Protestant, "British" and professional cadre, who devoted themselves to promoting the traditional family ethic in response to, and frequently in spite of, changing historical contexts.'In so doing, they looked increasingly to the state to vanquish the foes, real and imagined, of the modern family.What explains the origins and persistence of this "save the family" campaign in its myriad forms?How did the health of the.family and that of society become so intertwined as to be synonymous?And how, in western societies largely given over to the individualist ideal, did the state come to be seen as the foremost arbiter of all such familial/social interests?Marxist theorists argue that the welfare state arose to ensure the reproduction of labour, the maintenance of society's economically-dependent (of whom women and children have historically formed the majority), and social stability.'Feminists have pointed out that state intervention also attempts to 1 The literature on moral and social reform in Canada is extensive; of the more recent examples, see A. McLaren, Our Own Master Race (Toronto 1990); M .Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap and Water (Toronto 1991), and, with specific reference to marriage and family, J. Snell, In the Shadow of the Law: Divorce in Canada 1900 -1939 (Toronto 1991)).Older studies that discuss intervention in the family for social purposes include N. Sutherland, Children in English Canadian Society (Toronto 1976); V .Strong-Boag, The New Day Recalled (Markham 1988); and the seminal works by C. Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World (New York 1977), and J. Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York 1979).On the "family ethic," see M. Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women (New York 1987). 2 See, for example, J. Wayne, "The Function of Social Welfare in a Capitalist Economy," in J. Dickinson, B. Russell, eds., Family Economy and State (New York 1986), 56-7; J. Dickinson, "From Poor Law to Social Insurance," ibid., 115; E. Zaretsky, "Rethinking the Welfare State," ibid., 105; W. Seccombe, "The Expanded Reproduction Cycle of Labour Power in Twentieth-Century Capitalism," in B. Fox, ed.,
Author: Cynthia Comacchio
Institution: University of Toronto
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W578891308