Families and ideologies
In studies of kinship and the family, anthropologists are increasingly looking at discrepancies between ideology and lived practice, at differences based on class, region, or race and ethnicity, and at the relationship between the state and the family. Goody’s (1983) historical work on the family in Europe specifically linked changes in marriage rules and in inheritance patterns and dowry payments within families to developments within the church and the state, thereby emphasizing the changing nature of family and property relations in the context of external power structures. Feminist social scientists have examined the relationship between gender and family, arguing that the ideology which represents the conjugal family and the household as ‘natural’ units serves to mask inequalities arising from an association of women with reproduction and men with production, a division which renders a great deal of women’s labour invisible. Similarly, social historians have shown that this association of women with the domestic sphere and men with the politico-jural or productive domain was historically specific, arising in Britain in the nineteenth century with the growing influence of a middle-class morality which promoted government legislation removing children from the labour force, relegating their care to women, and representing women as the core of the household, the ‘haven in a heartless world’ to which men could return after their long day in the brutal world of commerce and waged labour. These theories stress the links between capitalism, state legislation and changes in family ideologies, and emphasize the different ideologies of gender and family which obtained at various specific periods among different classes.