* Laws such as Child support agency, reinforce nuclear families; men paying for child. * No stigma attached to women divorcing, hence more women likely to get divorced, and marry again, producing reconstituted families. * Secularisation (Stacey); people less likely to get married. 3. Examine the reasons for changes in birth rates and family size since 1900.
From here in 1984 the law allowed couples to petition for a divorce after one year of marriage instead of three, meaning that couples no longer had to endure an empty shell marriage over a long period of time. These main laws made it easier for couples to divorce so nothing was holding them back from divorcing making it less lengthy to divorce a partner because of the new laws removing some lengthy processes e.g. proving fault. Another reason for high divorce rates in the contemporary UK is family changes. Functionalists like Fletcher believed that divorce was rising because people were raising their expectations in marriage, this suggests that higher divorce rates means higher value of marriage.
There have also been other views and explanations of this for example some functionalist views of one below: One such Functionalist Ronald Fletcher (1996) suggested that in this day and age marriage is seen as less necessary and divorce more accepted in wider society, back as far as the 19th century it was much harder to achieve and was even frowned upon. Also he argued that higher expectations of people place on marriage today are a major cause of rising divorce rates. Higher expectations make couples nowadays less willing to tolerate an unhappy marriage. Also those such as Arlie Hochschild (1997) argues that for many women, the home compares unfavourably with work. At work women feel
According to Wilmott and Young (1962) two sociologists who identify joint conjugal roles, there has been a long-term trend towards the symmetrical nuclear family in Britain since the early 1900’s with more and more families conforming to this trend. In their study Wilmott and Young found that there was a pattern of segregated conjugal roles in traditional working class
doi: 10.1111/j.1540-6237.2011.00809.x Zhang, Y., & Van Hook, J. (2009). Marital dissolution among interracial couples. Journal of Marriage and Family, 71(1), 95-107. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741 3737.2008.00582.x Introduction: The world today claims to have come a long way from the bitter days of discrimination, especially in regards to race, and to a great extent this is true. The existence of legal interracial relationships, whether they are romantic or friendly, gives testimony to the fact that society has evolved for the
They are only able to happen slowly, and over the the course of a long period of time. Changes from the current dream ans Hansberry’s dream took many years to change. The Law of the Few plays a huge role in changing the dream. To make the dream go in a better direction, people that are influential in society are In need to adopt this dream as their own. For someone as successful as Bill Gates decided that he wanted to become more laid back, it would make a great deal for others to be attracted to do the same as him.
Half Term Assessment 1. Polyandry mean a woman has two or more husbands 2. The two functions the nuclear family can perform are 3. The three reasons for change in divorce rates since 1969 are that its now easier to get a divorce, people’s views on religion have changed which means they don’t take marriage seriously anymore so they are likely to divorce and they have changed because people expect a lot in a relationship 4. The Marxist view that the main role of the family is to serve the interests of capitalism.
This idea spread into the United States and gained footing during the 1950s. The focus though was less on eugenics and more on the making of a strong family unit. Eugenics is the idea of breeding out those of lesser intelligence or class. However, after World War II, people shied away from the idea of creating a “perfect race.” But there was still a concept of creating a strong, nuclear family consisting of father, mother, and children (Jurczak, 2012, p. 3). Paul Popenoe, a eugenicist, opened the first marriage-counseling center in the United States.
New Right thinkers have seen the trends as a sign of the breakdown of the family and have argued for a return to ‘traditional values’. They suggest that because of the easy availability of divorce, people are no longer as committed to the family as they were in the past. In the last 40 years there were a number of marriage laws that made divorce alot easier, particularly in 1971 The Divorce Law Reform Act which meant that the spouse no longer had to prove that their partner was guilty of a matrimonial offence. This was followed up by the Matrimonial and Family Proceedings Act which insured a newlywed couple could get divorced after only one year of marriage. Both these together made for a good basis for divorce.
* Laumann debated that finding and conveying sexual relationships requires sources as time, money and social capital but why do this if it is better for individuals to discuss about their emotional and physical needs instead of switching partners which cost more. Critical portion The author gives lot of factual components on how the sex strategy changed over the last 50 years. When he explains the group formation of these different groups; Married, dating, cohabiting I am inclined to believe in his argument. It’s a common fact that I witnessed in my daily life that married couples have better chance of being in a long term relationship than those who are single or cohabiting and are afraid of committing. Response Overall, I liked this article.