Full Description
The modern family is under strain. What we crave most from our families is intimacy, warmth and self-fulfilment but we often find this difficult to achieve. We hold onto these expectations of our families even in the face of contradictory experiences, so the family sustains a double life.
The authors explore the gap between our values, expectations and yearnings, and our experiences of everyday family life. Family ritual, political rhetoric, advertising images and television family sitcoms are all windows onto what we want and expect - our myths of the family. Yet our aspirations for intimacy and self-fulfilment are frustrated by unacknowledged inequalities between men and women, and parents and children. The inequalities have their origins in the division of domestic labour and in labour markets that disregard family responsibilities.
The Double Life Of The Family argues that our expectations of family life are more powerful than is usually believed and have enormous influence on both the way governments structure social policy and on the decisions made by ordinary people.
Contents
List of tables and figures
List of abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Preface
1 Is the myth of the nuclear family dead?
2 The other life of the family
3 The rise of intimacy
4 Working for nothing
5 At home: the more things change, the more they
stay the same
6 Pseudomutuality: the disjunction between domestic
inequality and the ideal of equality
7 Economics, breadwinning and family relations
8 How the family is a problem for the state
9 The greatest welfare system ever devised?
Notes
References
Index
![Inscriptiones Graecae. Inscriptiones Atticae Euclidis anno posteriores [Editio altera]. Vol II/III. Pars V Inscriptiones Atticae aetatis quae est inter Herulorum incursionem et Imp. Mauricii tempora Pars.5 (Inscriptiones Graecae. Inscriptiones Attica （2008. X, 218 S. 49 plates. 357 mm）](../images/goods/ar/work/imgdatak/31102/3110206218.jpg)
