Discuss the major changes to have taken place in family life in Britain since the 1950's. How do sociologists understand these changes?

Authors Avatar

Q.7. Discuss the major changes to have taken place in family life in Britain since the 1950’s. How do sociologists understand these changes?

        

The family is a major social institution since it fulfils many fundamental human needs and is a central place for socialisation. As with many aspects of social life the family is commonly seen as constantly changing. Since the 1950’s the subject of the family has seen many significant changes in Britain that effect everyone including sociologists themselves. The modern British family is quite often seen as being in a state of decline because of these changes. A general concern is the privatisation of the family in contemporary industrialised society and the evolving ideologies that people have developed. Developments explored here include divorce and single parent families as well as the issue of gender that is to say masculinity within family life.

To understand fully how and to what extent family life has changed in Britain one must first be aware of family life and theories of it before the nineteen fifties, or especially before industrialisation. Before industrialisation marriage for many was an alliance, people got married for economic reasons. Family life was seen as much different then in the sense that it overlapped with the social and economic life through everyday activities. As a result of this family life was less privatised than it is in modern industrial societies. As production of goods became increasingly organised through places such as factories people went to work outside their home to earn money that they used to purchase goods, whereas before they may well have produced the goods themselves. For Bilton et al this change in people’s lifestyles is ‘Sometimes referred to as the separation of home and work-place’ (Bilton, 1987:260) where families have lost the means of production and therefore families have become privatised as they are separated from the work place.

Join now!

Following on from this, many sociologists argued that the principal type of family was the extended family (Abercrombie, 1994) before the industrial revolution. Many theorists thought it before industrialisation people had closer contact with their kin than they do today and that due to industrialisation with ‘greater geographical mobility’, (Abercrombie: 303) people lost contact with their extended families, which in turn reduced them to small nuclear families similar to what we apparently have today. However this view that pre-industrial families were extended has been disproved by many because evidence of factors such as high infant mortality, low life expectancy and ...

This is a preview of the whole essay