Discuss family as a basic and fundamental social institution. Do you think changing sex roles necessitate the replacement of family by another institution? (1984)
R. M. MacIver and Charles H. Page (Society, 1949) defined the family as a group defined by a sex relationship precise and enduring enough to provide for the procreation and upbringing of children. It is basic as the first group everyone enters and fundamental because other institutions rest on it. Changing sex roles revive the question of whether it is dispensable.
Why the family is basic and fundamental
- Universality. George Peter Murdock (Social Structure, 1949), found the nuclear family in all 250 societies he surveyed, performing sexual, reproductive, economic and educational functions.
- Legitimacy. Bronisław Malinowski‘s principle of legitimacy holds that every child needs a socially recognised father, placing it in the system of status and inheritance.
- Personality. Talcott Parsons reduced the modern family to two “basic and irreducible” functions: primary socialisation of children and stabilisation of adult personalities. Charles Horton Cooley called such primary groups the “nursery of human nature”.
- Link to other institutions. In India the family is the unit of caste endogamy, property, ancestral ritual and business enterprise.
- Qualifications. Kathleen Gough (1959) showed that among the traditional Nayar, husbands did not live with wives or support children, so the family is universal in function rather than in one form. Friedrich Engels (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884) tied the monogamous family to private property.
Do changing sex roles require its replacement?
The case for replacement
- Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex, 1970) saw the biological family as the root of women’s oppression.
- Edmund Leach (A Runaway World?, 1967) called the family, with its “narrow privacy and tawdry secrets”, the source of our discontents.
- The early Soviet state and the Israeli kibbutz tried communal child-rearing.
The case against
- Melford Spiro first argued (1954) that the kibbutz had no family, then concluded (Children of the Kibbutz, 1958) that it worked as one large family. Kibbutzim later moved children back into parents’ homes.
- Robert K. Merton‘s functional alternatives (crèches, schools, insurance) take over single tasks, but none combines intimacy, identity and care.
- Changing sex roles reshape the family: Michael Young and Peter Willmott‘s symmetrical family, Anthony Giddens‘s pure relationship (The Transformation of Intimacy, 1992).
- Indian evidence. Female labour force participation reached 41.7% in 2023–24 (PLFS), and 89% of women now operate their own bank accounts (NFHS-6). Yet the Time Use Survey 2024 shows women doing 289 minutes of unpaid domestic work a day against men’s 88, so roles are being renegotiated within the family.
- The law is widening the family rather than replacing it. Courts treat long live-in unions as “relationships in the nature of marriage” under the Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (D. Velusamy v. D. Patchaiammal, 2010). Uttarakhand’s Uniform Civil Code, in force since January 2025, makes live-in relationships registrable. In Supriyo Chakraborty v. Union of India (2023) the Supreme Court left same-sex marriage to Parliament.
Conclusion
The family is fundamental because no rival institution yet joins reproduction, legitimacy, emotional security and socialisation. Changing sex roles do not call for its replacement. They call for its democratisation: shared care, recognition of diverse unions and public support for care.