The Family

Abstract

… there are some cogent reasons for believing that social life in general is never in a steady state of conflict — free equilibrium. There is always change, conflict, disagreement over means and ends and gaps between the ideal norm and the activities of everyday life. Rather than being the exception to the general state of social life, the family is best seen as a model of conflict, change and ambivalence… (Skolnick, The Intimate Environment, 1973, p. 435).

In our society the ‘normal’ or ‘conventional’ family has tended to be equated with the nuclear family, that is, with conjugal, small, independent households. Each individual family has been regarded as part of a system of interlocking nuclear families (Harris, 1969; Turner, 1969; Goode, 1964). Hence, in Britain, as in many other countries which have become industrialised, the family is thought to consist of two married parents and their dependent children, usually two, living in a household of their own (Laslett, 1972). The extent to which this is actually so in the mid-twentieth century, and, if it is not, how widespread the variations and the forms they take, has been questioned (for example, by Cogswell, 1975) and will be considered in the present study.