Overview

1
Overview

• Marriage and Family
• Patriarchy
• Traditional, patriarchal conceptions
• Feminist revisions
• Reading of Endless Love
• New Issues in Marriage and Family Gay and
  Lesbian Marriage
• Film Clip If These Walls Could Talk
• Film Freedom to Marry

2
Patriarchy

• Defined roles for women in relationship to men
• Mother
• Wife
• Sister
• Daughter
• Mrs. John Doe
• Ofglen (Handmaids Tale)

3
Marriage and Family

• Personal and institutional
• Marriage- civil and religious
• We find love and relationship as well as power
  and conflict
• Kinship- norms regarding who we can desire, love,
  marry as well as descent and distribution of
  property

4
Traditional Definitions- Websters Dictionary

• Marriage- the institution whereby men and women
  are joined in a special kind of social and legal
  dependence for the purpose of founding and
  maintaining a family
• Family- a group of individuals living under one
  roof and usually under one head

5
Feminist Revisioning of Marriage and Family

• Feminists are often accused of being anti-family
  and anti-marriage but really they believe in
• Choice of whether to marry or not, choice of
  whether to have children or not, choice of being
  alone or not
• Equality of effort- housework, care-taking,
  raising children
• Lack of domination between partners and between
  parents and children
• Disrupt provider/domestic dichotomy

6
Patriarchy- Mother-DaughterRelationships

• Problematic
• Girls identify with their mothers, a sense of
  connection that is incorporated into the female
  personality. However, this mother-identification
  is problematic because, under patriarchy, men are
  more highly valued than women. Thus, while
  daughters identify with their mothers, they also
  reject them. (Patricia Hill-Collins)

7
Mother-daughter Relationships

• Mothers teach Conformity and resistance
• Daughters learn to honor and rebel
• Because women are rarely treated as well as men,
  women think they can avoid that bad treatment by
  being different from the woman they know most
  intimately. And so they rebel.

8
Mother-Son Relationships

• Women raise children in patriarchies, men are
  often absent from the family
• Focused on economic, public roles
• Boys must reject their mothers and create an
  opposite identity from their mothers to become
  male, masculine
• In the absence of male modeling

9
Father Role in Patriarchies

• Economic and public role primarily
• Head of family
• Model of masculinity?