Chapter 4 The family
What else impedes individual autonomy? The traditional family does and so comes under attack in liberal societies.
The traditional family runs counter to autonomy in several ways. First, it is (to use liberal terminology) “gendered”. There are distinct roles for men and women as husbands and wives, and fathers and mothers.
We don’t get to choose whether we are born male or female, so we don’t get to self-determine which gendered family role we will occupy. Our autonomy is impeded and so the traditional family is looked on negatively as restricting the individual.
Furthermore, traditional family roles are interdependent or complementary. Men and women contribute something distinct to the family and rely on each other to keep things afloat.
That means that the individual is not independent, a key aim for those who seek autonomy. In particular, it is thought problematic that women in the traditional family are not financially independent and are therefore reliant on their husbands.
A further issue is that the traditional family is based (ideally) on stable commitments. Individuals pledge a lifetime of exclusive commitment to each other. But that means that we can no longer self-determine at any time who we will live with or have intimate relationships with. Family commitments are too fixed in the traditional family to fit in well with the goal of autonomy.
Then there is the matter of authority. If the aim is to self-determine, then you will want to have the choice of who is put in a position of authority. But ultimate authority within a family is often wielded by a father, whose position is neither elected nor something we agree to by contract.
It is also an authority which has a deep impact on us, as it confronts us as children or young adults in our daily lives and is intermixed with the personal, emotional relationship we have with our father.
Paternal authority is unchosen; we find ourselves subject to it by an accident of birth rather than through an act of self-determining will. It therefore contravenes the liberal aim of autonomy.
Finally, if we want to self-determine our living arrangements there needs to be a range of family types to choose from. If the traditional family dominates, then there is only one, uniform family type. For this reason, too, the traditional family will be condemned by liberals as an impediment to individual autonomy.
The liberal response
So the traditional family impedes autonomy in a number of ways. How do liberals respond to this?
There are liberals who think of the traditional family negatively as a restriction on the individual and who therefore describe it with limiting words like “fetter” or “prison”.
There are liberals too who give the traditional family the “social construct” treatment. They deny that the family has a basis in nature, or even much of a basis in history. Instead, it is explained as a recent invention (of the 1950s, or the early 1900s, or the late 1700s – the time frame varies) designed to serve some limited economic or class interest.
But if the family is an oppressive social construct, what should be done with it? There are radical liberals who want to abolish the family altogether. But it’s much more common for liberals to want to reconstruct the family to make it fit in better with the aim of individual autonomy.
How do liberals attempt to achieve this? Some pursue a strategy of redefining the family. They insist on an open definition of family, one in which family can be anything that we ourselves make it to be.
Instead of there being a singular family type that we can’t self-determine, family is reimagined to be so fluid, multiple and diverse that we can self-author our own version of it.
Another way to liberalise the family is to loosen the commitments we make to it. Some liberals believe that family commitments ought to be constantly renegotiated. Others look on divorce as a flexible or creative recasting of family life, rather than as a form of family breakdown.
For liberals, the benefit of these looser family commitments is that the individual continues to self-determine at any time who he will carry on a relationship with.
There is another way for liberals to avoid stable family commitments. They can support the drift in society toward ever later marriage. The intention here is not so much to reject family commitments altogether, but to string out a singles lifestyle for as long as possible so that family commitments are deferred until late in life.
Liberals also seek to reconstruct the family by replacing “gendered” parental roles (father and mother) with a single unisex one. They want men and women to be equally committed to, and to spend the same time performing, the traditional motherhood role.
This has the advantage for liberals not only of making our unchosen sex not matter in the family (as parenting has become unisex), but also of removing a distinct paternal role – which overcomes the problem of an unchosen paternal authority.
Liberals do still use the term “father,” but the good father is thought of as the one most committed to a traditional motherhood role. Men in a liberal society are held to be either absent fathers or engaged maternal ones – the possibility of a distinct paternal role is no longer widely recognised.
This doesn’t mean that the maternal role is championed. In fact, it is usually looked down on as depriving women of autonomy as it does not confer financial independence or power in society. In the liberal family, the one remaining parental role is held to be a source of oppression and disadvantage.
It’s not surprising, then, to find liberals who not only want to reconstruct the family, but who also see the family as a lesser life activity. The family in a liberal society is not only subject to radical reform, but also loses part of its status.
The undefined family
We should look now at some specific examples of liberals arguing for such positions. A good place to begin is with attempts to create a more open definition of family.
Liberals think of the set character of the traditional family as limiting and so argue for a more diverse and undefined form of family life.
Susan Barclay, for example, once criticised former Prime Minister John Howard for promoting as an ideal:
the stable, quietly hard-working family, raising two or three quiet, well-behaved children.
Most people would think of this as a positive ideal. But for Susan Barclay a single, stable model of family life does not allow her to define for herself what family might be and therefore limits the very thing she believes defines her humanity, namely her autonomy:
I do not want to be ... squashed into a box defined by someone else. We have the right to choose what, and how, to be. That is the nature of being human.
Newspaper columnist Andrea Burns also had some advice for John Howard. She told him that the traditional family was unacceptable because it was not sufficiently diverse:
the days of the white bread, nuclear family are over. There are many ways to commune, love and create a home ... It’s inconsequential who makes up that circle of love...
But if the form of the family is inconsequential then it becomes difficult to define the term family – to agree on what it really is. It becomes indefinable and therefore loses meaning.
And liberals do like to keep definitions of the family as vague as possible. There’s this, for instance, from Sam Page, an executive director of Family Relationship Services Australia
The definition I like now is whoever you share your toothpaste with, that’s your family.
Even vaguer is this liberal woman’s attitude to defining motherhood:
I refuse to define my Feminist Motherhood ... I want my daughter to have a happy and successful life as an adult, which she will define individually. I will not confine my Feminist Motherhood by defining it.
But if motherhood is such an open entity that it can’t be defined, why should we respect it as something distinct and meaningful? We have no idea what it is that we are supposed to respect or admire.
This refusal to define motherhood has even crept into the corporate world. For instance, many Australians will remember the advertising slogan of Tip Top Bread: “Good on you Mum, Tip Top’s the one”. The bread company felt obliged to issue the following statement regarding this slogan:
These days, of course, the carer identified as ‘Mum’ can be any member of the family, a partner or even a flatmate …The advertising campaign uses the emotional power of ‘Good on You Mum®’ to set the scene for the new family, whatever that may be...
So mum can be anyone, male or female. And the new family is so diverse it is indefinable and unknown (“whatever that may be”). The category of family is being broadened here at the cost of its real, identifiable character.
It was exactly this problem which created a headache for a group of large American companies, including General Motors, IBM, Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble. These companies set out to create some family friendly television programmes to suit their advertising needs. The project almost failed at the outset:
The first meeting was almost the last. "It broke down because we couldn't define family," Wehling says.
It was agreed to leave the term family as an unknown, so that,
From that meeting emerged the group of advertisers called the Family Friendly Programming Forum, whose improvement plan for television included a script development fund for "family" shows - without defining what "family" was.
It’s an unusual situation: companies wanting family friendly programming but not being able to actually define what a family is.
The unfixed family
The more stable family relationships are, the more fixed they will seem – which is a problem for liberals who want the flexibility of choosing who they will live with at any given time.
It is to be expected, therefore, that some liberals will welcome the transition to less stable family relationships.
Take the philosopher A.C. Grayling. He is a liberal autonomist:
The most congenial moment in the moral progress of humanity for Grayling seems to be the Enlightenment. This is the age whose best minds affirm the fundamental good of personal and political autonomy.
Grayling has described the mainstreaming of divorce in positive terms as,
Liberating people to more generous possibilities for living flourishing lives.
The Canadian academic and politician Michael Ignatieff has described a father walking out on his sons as an “act of the liberal imagination” because it upholds an individual’s needs against “the devouring claims of family life”.
Professor Ellen Lewin, an American academic, claims that women experience divorce as a “step up” and that at the core of divorce stories “is the theme of increasing autonomy and competence”.
An Australian writer, Jane Caro, has also put a positive spin on unstable family relationships. She watched the 7UP documentary series which tracked the lives of a group of English children. None of the three working-class girls ended up married with children. For Jane Caro, this means that women’s life outcomes have diversified, and can finally be self-determined:
For the first time in recorded history, women began to have choices about the kind of life they would live. Indeed, Apted’s four girls, particularly those from working class backgrounds have demonstrated precisely that. One has had a high-powered career and in the last film had chosen to become a single mother; another is a single parent due to divorce and the third, who runs a mobile community library for children, has not had children at all.
Without doubt, the increase in the choices women have about the shape their lives will take has been exhilarating, exciting and not before time.
Jane Caro looks on divorce and single-motherhood as exhilarating and exciting social trends because they allow for more choice and so permit a more self-defined life.
For some liberals, divorce is a creative rearrangement of family life, one that proves that family can be anything we want it to be:
A family law specialist, Caroline Counsel, agrees that “separation does not destroy family, it just means that parents are geographically located in different areas” ... Counsel specialises in collaborative practice, where couples are encouraged to agree on how the post-marriage family should operate. These agreements are often broader and more creative than ones that go through the courts...
“The courts haven’t led on this, they have been followers but there is scope for them to become leaders because it’s evident that families can be anything they choose to be.
How else might liberals aim to create “unfixed” family commitments? Some liberals want our relationships to be continuously renegotiated, as this means, in theory, that they are always being self-determined.
Germaine Greer, for instance, supports the trend away from marriage and toward cohabitation on these grounds:
One way of interpreting this trend is to see it as keeping the relationship in a state of constant negotiation, in which nothing can be taken for granted...
Pamela Kinnear, an Australian social commentator, agrees. Writing as a “social progressive” she disputes the idea that there is such a thing as family breakdown. She believes that what we are witnessing is a “transition to a new diversity of family forms”:
social progressives reject the notion of family breakdown and argue that we must accept the transition to a new diversity of family forms. They regard the idea of family as an evolving social construct.
According to Pamela Kinnear, individuals are no longer living their lives in terms of social categories like gender, but are starting to create new ways of life that they invent for themselves:
The social categories of the past (gender, class, race and so on) no longer serve as the framework for individual behaviour or cultural beliefs...
In the age of individualisation, previous modes of behaviour and expectations have been disembedded from society, and we are now in the process of re-embedding new ways of life in which individuals must invent and live according to their own biographies...
Her idea is that the liberal revolution is only half finished. Predetermined categories like gender have been made not to matter, but individuals are still learning to live autonomous, self-determining lives. They are only now beginning to “invent and live according to their own biographies”.
What does that mean for the family? Pamela Kinnear admits that the emerging “pure” liberal relationships will not be stable ones:
In this transition, relationships, including marriage, must be reinvented too. The downside of the 'pure relationship', freed from convention, is some instability as partners continuously re-evaluate their relationship. They ask whether it fits with their own life project to realise self-identity.
The pure marriage, for Kinnear, is one in which each spouse “continuously re-evaulates” the relationship. If the marriage no longer fits the life project of either spouse, i.e. if either spouse feels it isn’t contributing to their mission to self-create an identity, then it is over.
Pamela Kinnear has reimagined marriage and family in a way that prioritises individual autonomy but at the cost of greater instability.
Leaving it to later
There is something else you can do if you feel that stable family commitments will cramp your autonomy.
Rather than rejecting these commitments, you can defer them to some much later time in life, whilst continuing to live an independent, single person lifestyle based on career, casual relationships, travel and study.
The deferral strategy applies to both sexes, but it was particularly common amongst middle-class women in the 1980s and 90s, so I’ll focus on how it has worked out for this group.
Here is Zoe Lewis telling her story:
I was part of the 'golden generation' of women who expected to go to university, have careers and enjoy our sexual freedom.
In our 20s, my friends and I pursued casual relationships, thinking all the 'serious stuff' would come along when we'd reached the peak of our success - i.e. in our 30s, when Mr Right would be attracted like a moth to the flame of our blazing glory.
She didn’t reject “the serious stuff” – she just believed it could be safely deferred until much later in life. But it proved much more difficult to achieve at the last minute than she had thought:
My own late 30s have been spent in an inelegant stumble towards validation - quickly trying to do the thing that defines a woman: have a baby.
And I found myself scratching around in the leftovers of my single male peers to find a partner with whom to have a child before it got too late.
She came to regret rejecting suitable men when in her 20s:
Had I had this understanding of my inner psyche in my 20s, I would have mentally demoted my writing (and hedonism) and pursued a relationship with vigour.
There were plenty of men and even a marriage offer from someone with whom I would have happily settled down. But no, I wasn't prepared to give up my dreams, the life I had been told was the right and proper one for a modern woman.
She did not find a man to form a family with and so became a single mother. But it’s not what she had hoped for and so she has this advice for her younger sister:
I wish I had been given the advice that I am now giving to my sister, who is 22. If you find a great guy, don't be afraid to settle down and have kids because there isn't anything to miss out on that you can't go back and do later - apart from having kids.
She finishes with this wish list:
I wish a more balanced view of womanhood had been available to me. I wish that being a housewife or a mother hadn't been such a toxic idea to middle-class liberals...
...I wish I'd had kids ten years ago, when time was on my side.
Bibi Lynch has a similar story:
I am staring down the barrel of a lonely future without a man, let alone children.
And how do I find myself in this perilous position? One reason is undoubtedly that men like young women. Yes, I was young once and all that. In my 20s and 30s I wasn't exactly a supermodel, but I was constantly surrounded by men. The trouble is I wasn't necessarily looking to settle down back then...
Now that I am, there are very few available men out there.
...In my close circle of friends, there are eight of us who are single and childless. This is a generational phenomenon - we are all aged between 37 and 45.
...What we didn't realise was that men wouldn't be interested when we were ready.
Eleanor Mills agrees that her generation of women have suffered particularly badly from delayed family formation:
This isn’t just about me. One in five females of my generation will never have children; and the Office for National Statistics reports that the more successful you are professionally, the less likely you are to breed. When I look at the women I know who at 40 are single and childless and don’t want to be, my heart aches for them. It is never the ones you’d expect. Many of my singleton friends are at the particularly attractive end of the spectrum; if you’d met them at 20, at university, and been told that at 40 they’d be — unwillingly — alone, you never would have believed it.
This is how she explains the situation:
I don’t think my single friends are on their own because they are too picky. I think it is because as a generation we were bred not to prioritise finding a husband and having a family...
No one, not my family or my teachers, ever said, “Oh yes, and by the way you might want to be a wife and mother too.” They were so determined we would follow a new, egalitarian, modern path that the historic ambitions of generations of women — to get married and raise a family — were intentionally airbrushed from their vision of our future.
...If you want a family, that has to be a priority. My friends and I just assumed the right man would appear at some point.
The message that was delivered to these women was that family formation could be placed low down on a list of life priorities and that an independent, single girl lifestyle should consume their energies and ambitions instead.
It was assumed that family would fall into place later in life, but issues of partnering and fertility led to disappointment for many women.
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