The Anti-Social Family
by Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh
(Verso, £9.99)

IN THE history of the human race, the nuclear family is a very recent phenomenon and, in this second edition of a book first published in1982, Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh return to their original arguments against the patriarchal concept of the nuclear family and examine later changes that have taken place.

As Marxists and feminists, they argue that such a unit is something which capitalists find a useful tool.

The “average family” headed by a male breadwinner is idealised in government propaganda, the media and in consumer-oriented advertisements. In them, the wife carries out unpaid duties in the home as cook, housekeeper and carer for the young and the old and is expected to help relieve the bourgeois state of its obligations to care for its citizens from cradle to grave.

This also ensures that women are available in times of male unemployment as a reserve and low-paid labour force to combine wage-earning with feeding and raising the family.

The man’s loss of power and self-respect in the household can lead to his depression, violence against women and children or suicide.

But the authors maintain that it is capitalist society, with its constant attacks on the working class, which actually destroys the nuclear family and alternative ways of living such as communal communities, single parent and gay households, as well as ethnic extended families.

Examining the question of the patriarchal family and its origins, Barrett and McIntosh quote Marx and Engels’s contention that this arose to enable the new property owning class to ensure its inheritance through male successors.

They might also have mentioned the Marxist George Thomson’s book The Prehistoric Aegean: Studies in Ancient Greek Society, which shows the early matriarchal period there as prosperous, artistic and stable.

The authors discuss many feminist and Freudian views of the role of the father in relation to children and monogamy, pointing out that not all feminists oppose the idea of the family as a basic social unit but demand equal rights within it, though others favour single-sex households.

While much has improved in women’s, gay and black rights since this book’s first publication and socialist feminists welcome such advances, it’s a sad fact that uncontrolled global capitalism has encouraged new forms of oppression — internet pornography, the sexual commodification of women and children, along with blatant male chauvinism in entertainment, sport and the media and aggressive racism. The Anti-Social Family brilliantly analyses the ideological root of such issues.