Lecture 10/30/18 - Professor Chad Alan Goldberg PDF

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Professor Chad Alan Goldberg...

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OCTOBER 30, 2018 LECTURE 9-A: FAMILY RELATIONS AS PROPERTY RELATIONS

• Aristotle concluded that family is necessary and natural" • The nature of families varies widely from place to place and over time" • Family relations s property relations" • Property is a social relationship, a way in which people act toward things" • Erotic property: property rights over human bodies" • Raising the simple question, what makes people married?" • Marriage has been a contract for sexual access to others" • Much more males owning women’s bodies" • Generational property: property rights regarding children" • Negative aspects: what parents cannot do with their children" • Positive aspects: what parents can do with their children what other people cannot" • Generational property system has changed over time" • Household property: property rights over goods held or owned by the family" • It takes work to make these goods consumable " • Capitalist- men work who get the capital and the women change the capital into goods" • Changing- women have moved into the labor market, especially the better changing labor market" • Household labor is increasingly outsourced" • The more money wives earn is relative to how much power they have in their family" • Property systems, including sexual ones, are produced by social circumstances and change with them" • Collins says that property systems are not natural" • The “christian revolution” of the fourth century CE transformed:" • Erotic property via new marriage rules" • Prohibited cohabitation without marriage" • Prohibited marriage to close kin" • Redefined property rights over the person’s bodies" • Generational property via the invention of godparents" • It was godparents who named the children" • Godparents were guardians of the child’s religious faith, primary person at baptism " • Served to redefine what parents could or couldn’t do with their children" • Household property via strategies of heirship (how a man can provide himself with an heir)" • Church benefited from this by increasing the share of wealth and property given to the church" • Historical development of the family" • The victorian revolution" • A “love revolution” in the victorian era (1837-1901)" • Marriage for love rather than arranged by families " • Emergence of marriage market " • Individual marriage market (dating)" • Puritanical attitude toward sex" • Unequal distribution of erotic and household property between the sexes compelled women to trade their erotic property for men’s household property" Confining sex to marriage raised the value of women’s erotic property" • • Worked in women’s favor" • End of the Victorian family" • At the end of the 19th century, economic, social, and cultural changes disorganized the victorian family" • New women- created the first wave of feminism" • According to collins, the single most important thing transforming the family in the 20th family was the dislocation of the women in the household"

• Entry of women into paid labor force resulted in more equal distribution of erotic and household property between the sexes" • Women’s declining economic dependence on humans made it less important for women to confine sex to marriage" • Most true to the most successful women" • For collins, its not surprising that people are waiting longer to get married, rise in divorce, cohabitation, and single family households" • Future development of the family?" • Growing legal recognition in the West of civil unions or marriage for same sex couples in Europe, American, and other parts of the world" • Began growing in the 1990s" • By 2011, same sex marriage was becoming legally recognized in 10 countries and continues to grow" • States began to legalize same sex marriage in the 2000s" • This trend may be a consequence of earlier changes in heterosexual marriage" • Stressed the love revolution of the 19th century that others can dictate who you married" • The advent of birth control and assisted reproduction weakened the connection between marriage and procreation" • Women challenged the power dynamic between men and women in families" • These three changes in marriage open the door for gay and lesbian couples " • Two trends transforming family life in the west today:" • Civil unions or marriage for same sex couples" • New alternatives to marriage for heterosexual and homosexuals alike" • French “civil solidarity pact”" • Both trends made possible by earlier changes in heterosexual marriage" • Victorian love revolution" • Weakened connection between marriage and procreation" • From legal subordination of times toward reciprocal and negotiated relationships" • Summary" • Family relations may be seen as relations of erotic, generational and household property" • In early modern Europe, parents, kin and community arranged marriages based on social and economic bases. The victorian love revolution allowed individuals to negotiate their own marriages on the basis of romantic love" • Because erotic and household property were unequally distributed between the sexes in victorian era, women traded erotic property for men’s household property. Women’s growing economic independence transformed this arrangement" • Longterm historical changes in how family life is organized may have paved the way for more recent trends involving the legalization of same sex marriage and the growth of civil unions for both heterosexual and homosexual couples"...