We like to think of the family as a haven in a harsh world, but in fact, inequality begins at home

Family Forms and Changes

Choosing a romantic partner doesn’t depend solely on attraction, how well we get along, or shared life goals
Whether we realize it or not, there are also legal, social, and cultural factors that affect our choice
Endogamy refers to marriage to someone within one’s social group (race, ethnicity, class, education, religion, region, or nationality)
Exogamy refers to marriage to someone from a different social group
Monogamy is the practice of marrying one person at a time
Polygamy is a system of marriage that allows people to have more than one spouse at a time
- Polygyny allows men to have multiple wives - more common
- Polyandry allows women to have multiple husbands - rarer

Types of Family Structures

A nuclear family, consisting of a father and mother and their children
Extended family refers to familial networks that extend beyond the nuclear family
There is no real “typical” family in Western society today
- Stepsiblings and half-siblings
- Single-parent families
- Individuals/couples choose not to get married or not to have children
- Multiple generations

Preindustrial families operated like a small business
- Live together with extended family
- The home was a site for work and production, and the entire family was involved
- No clear distinction of work/home, no gender distinction, no wages
- It depended heavily on kinship networks
- Little if any surplus wealth
With the Industrial Revolution, work started taking place outside of the home for a paid wage
- Men were associated with the public world
- A division between work and home was created
- Work and family are separated
- Women were relegated to the private world of managing a household and raising children, for which they were not paid
- Single women would work, but mothers would almost always stay home
Results of Industrial Revolution
- A gendered division of labor arose in the household
- As the mobility of families searching for paid labor opportunities increased, they became separated from their kinship networks
During WWII, women worked all kinds of job while men were at war
Families after World War II
- Men came back and many families were started, leading to baby boom
- In the post WWII era, the nuclear family model has become the dominant model for domestic life
- But nuclear family was never a traditional, timeless, or universal form of family; it was in fact a response to the specific conditions of the postwar economic boom in the U.S.