Feminist theory is one of the major contemporary sociological theories, which analyzes the status of women and men

in society with the purpose of using that knowledge to better women's lives. Feminist theorists have also started to question the differences between women, including how race, class, ethnicity, and age intersect with gender. Feminist theory is most concerned with giving a voice to women and highlighting the various ways women have contributed to society. There are four major branches of Feminist theory: Marxist-feminism, Liberal-feminism and Radical- feminism. Each of these views the family in slightly varying terms.
Marxist-feminists/Feminist-Marxist argues that the overthrow of capitalism is necessary to create equality between women and men. The family is an exploitative institution (within the context of a capitalist world). Family passes on pro-capitalist values from one generation to the next. Women constitute a reserve army of labour. The overthrow of capitalism and establishment of a socialist society will result in equality for women alongside men in the economic sphere. Socialist Feminists argue: Marxist feminist theories of the family are inadequate and overly concentrated on capitalism. They do not believe that the overthrow of capitalism will result in equality between women and men. Socialist feminists contend that patriarchy is responsible for male domination over women. Consequently, they believe that if patriarchy is challenged, then women can become equal to men. Altogether, they recommend challenging the dictates of capitalism as well as patriarchy. Both systems have a tendency to subordinate women. If they are challenged, then women, stand a better chance of improving their status in society. There have been gradual changes in society that have benefited women, and helped to improve their social status and general well-being in society. Within the context of the family they argue the roles (between men and women) have become more symmetrical, as men have become increasingly involved in the daily affairs of the family. Further, women have increasingly become co-bread winners, thus removing the strain on the male to be the singular income earner for the family. These changes have afforded the members to enjoy more leisure and other family oriented activities, as opposed to the seemingly disparate role-functions that have characterised the traditional family form. Radical Feminists argue: Patriarchy, a universal dominant force is responsible for female oppression. They argue that within the context of the family males (irrespective of their relational ties to women) has the advantage over women.The family is seen as an institution of exploitation since women and childrens labour are exploited; they are also victims of domestic violence, within the context of the family.Radical Feminists (hard line radical feminists/separatists) contend that the only viable solution to ending female oppression is the abolition of the family. Margaret Benston (1972) argued that capitalism benefits from a large army of women an unpaid workforce- who are compliant and willing to do as theyre told because women have been socialised to act this way and women rears future workers to think the same way. Benston also argues that as her role as a housewife the woman attends to her husbands emotional needs, and this keeps him, the man, in good running order to perform his role in supplying effective waged labour.

Delphy & Leonard (1992) the inequalities in domestic labour continue with wives often flattering, understanding and praising their husbands achievements but men rarely reciprocate. They also found women provide trouble free sex which is important as men best unwind post-coitally.Delphy & Leonard (1992) argue all the unpaid housework and childcare is done by women. Women also make the largest contribution to family life, while men contribute the least but gain the most! Ann Oakley pointed out in the 1970s that housework is tough, demanding and unrewarding, and men are the ones who gain most from this free labour. Married women become economically dependent on their husbands especially as once children arrive women give up work in order to look after the children and even when mothers do return to work its usually part-time rather than full-time employment Beechey believes that housewives carry out two functions: To provide care for current and future workers and To be a cheap reserve army of labour.Liberal Feminists dont blame capitalism or men for unequal treatment of women. Liberal Feminists believe that laws such as the Sex Discrimination act are making life better for women although equality still does not exist. Feminists see the family as male dominated as men are the bread-winners and tend to make all the key financial decisions. Indeed some men use force to get their way. Feminists have stressed the significant amount of domestic violence used by men to their own way in the family. Functionalists and even the New Right would argue that feminists put too much emphasis on the negative side of family life because it ignores the possibility that women enjoy running the home, raising children and being married Also it ignores Wilmot and Youngs ideas on the symmetrical family, and how theres greater equalities in family life with shared conjugal roles While the Western nuclear family has many disadvantages it is difficult to see a functional alternative to it. For example the attempt to abolish the family in the Soviet Union was eventually abandoned as impractical. In Israeli kibbutzim today, parents spend more time with their children. According to Brigitte and Peter Berger despite its disadvantages, the nuclear family represents the best environment in which a childs individuality can develop. They suggest that collective childrearing systems (as in the kibbutz) create more conformist and less creative people than those raised in a nuclear family. Black feminist writers such as Helen Carby have criticised white feminists for failing to consider the significance of racism alongside patriarchy as a form of domination. They agree that for many black women the family can be an oppressive institution. However, they also point out that black women (and men) are oppressed by racism and that the family often acts as a source of support and resistance to racial discrimination and harassment.

New Right defenders of the family have criticised racial sociologists for attacking the family and undermining it. Some politicians and journalists have argued that a lack of respect for traditional family values is the reason for a variety of social problems including crime, youthful rebellion and educational

underachievement. Few sociologists accept this. They see these problems as part of much wider changes in society. Ronald Fletcher has argued that sociologists in recent years have spent too much time criticising the family and have failed to consider how it can be strengthened and assisted in carrying out its role.

Feminists arguing from the post-modern approach have been criticised for losing sight of the inequalities between men and women in families by stressing the range of choices open to people when they are forming families. By stressing the different experiences of women, difference feminists, tend to neglect the common experiences shared by most women in families. There are many varieties of radical feminism. However, Valerie Bryson (1992) argues that they share at least one characteristic in common. According to her, all radical feminism sees the oppression of women as the most fundamental and universal form of domination. Society is seen as patriarchal, or male-dominated, rather than capitalist, and women are held to have different interests from those of men. Radical feminists do not agree on the source of male domination, but most do see the family as important in maintaining male power. We will now analyse a range of major radical feminist theories of the family. Parsons saw the emergence of the isolated nuclear family in terms of his theory of social evolution. The evolution of society involves a process of structural differentiation. This simply means that institutions evolve which specialize in fewer functions. As a result, the family and kinship groups no longer perform a wide range of functions. Instead, specialist institutions such as business firms, schools, hospitals, police forces and churches take over many of their functions. This process of differentiation and specialization involves the transfer of a variety of functions from the nuclear family to other structures of the society. Thus, in modern industrial society, with the transfer of the production of goods to factories, specialized economic institutions became differentiated from the family. The family ceased to be an economic unit of production. The family in kinship-based society and the classic extended family represent only two possible forms of family structure in pre-industrial society. Historicalresearch in Britain and America suggests neither was typical of those countries in the preindustrial era. Peter Laslett, a historian, studied family size and composition in preindustrial England (Laslett, 1972, 1977). For the period between 1564 and 1821 he found that only about 10 per cent of households contained kin beyond the nuclear family. This percentage is the same as for England in 1966. Evidence from America presents a similar picture. This surprisingly low figure may be due in part to the fact that people in pre-industrial England and America married relatively late in life and life expectancy was short. On average, there were only a few years between the marriage of a couple and the death of their parents. However, Laslett found no evidence to support the formerly accepted view that the classic extended family was widespread in pre-industrial England. He states: There is no sign of the large, extended co-residential family group of the traditional peasant world giving way to the small, nuclear conjugal household of modern industrial society.

Michael Young and Peter Willmott conducted studies of family life in London from the 1950s to the 1970s. In their book The Symmetrical Family (1973) they attempt to trace the development of the family from pre-industrial England to the 1970s. Using a combination of historical research and social surveys, they suggest that the family has gone through four main stages Stage 1 the pre-industrial family. The family is a unit of production: the husband, wife and unmarried children work as a team, typically in agriculture or textiles. This type of family was gradually supplanted as a result of the industrial revolution. However, it continued well into the nineteenth century and is still represented in a small minority of families today, the best examples being some farming families. Stage 2 the early industrial family. The Stage 2 family began with the industrial revolution, developed throughout the nineteenth century and reached its peak in the early years of the twentieth century. The family ceased to be a unit of production, since individual members were employed as wage earners. Throughout the nineteenth century, working-class poverty was wide spread, wages were low and unemployment high. Like Anderson,Young and Willmott argue that the family responded to this situation by extending its network to include relatives beyond the nuclear family. This provided an insurance policy against the insecurity and hardship of poverty. The extension of the nuclear family was largely conducted by women who eventually built up an organisation. their time.The nuclear family has become a largely selfcontained, selfreliant unit. Young and Willmott use the term symmetrical family to describe the nuclear family of Stage 3.Symmetry refers to an arrangement in which the opposite parts are similar in shape and size. With respect to the symmetrical family, conjugal roles, although not the same wives still have the main responsibility for raising the children, although husbands help are similar in terms of the contribution made by each spouse to the running of the household.They share many of the chores, they share decisions, they work together, yet there is still mens work and womens work. Conjugal roles are not interchangeable but they are symmetrical in important respects. The evidence we have presented so far under the heading of The family, industrialization and modernization provides a somewhat confusing picture. On the one hand there is Talcott Parsonss isolated nuclear family, and on the other a large body of evidence suggesting that kin beyond the nuclear family play an important part in family life and that the importance of that role may not have been greatly diminishing. In America, a number of researchers have rejected Parsonss concept of the isolated nuclear family. Sussman and Burchinal (1971), for example, argue that the weight of evidence from a large body of research indicates that the modern American family is far from isolated. They maintain that the family can only be properly understood by rejection of the isolated nuclear family concept. Parsons replied to his earlier critics in an article entitled The normal American family (1965b). He argued that close relationships with kin outside the nuclear family are in no way inconsistent with the concept of the isolated nuclear family. Parsons stated: the very psychological importance for the individual of the nuclear family in which he was born and brought up would make any such conception impossible.

Talcott Parsons argued that the isolated nuclear family is the typical family form in modern industrial society (Parsons, 1959, 1965b; Parsons and Bales, 1955). It is structurally isolated because it does not form an integral