Check out the notes below from What Makes a Family? and include your thought on the program and issues discussed in the comments below!
What makes a family?
- Broad question, lots of complexity
- Impacted by many things – politics, religions, beliefs, laws
- Definition of family has shifted over time
Dr. Elizabeth Rose is a historian with interests in women, children, and social policy, past and present. She is the author of The Promise of Preschool: From Head Start to Universal Pre-K (Oxford University Press, 2010) and A Mother’s Job: The History of Day Care, 1890-1960 (Oxford University Press, 1999), as well as many articles on preschool, child care, and motherhood in several different books and journals. She has taught classes on the history of motherhood at CCSU, Wesleyan, and Vanderbilt and is currently the Library Director at the Fairfield Museum and History Center in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Anne spent nearly 30 years working for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, including her work as the founding Executive Director of Love Makes A Family, the lead organization that successfully fought for the freedom to marry in Connecticut. She is a graduate of Davidson College and Yale Divinity School.Anne is originally from North Carolina and though she will always be a Southerner at heart, she has lived in Connecticut for 32 years, 30 of those with her wife, Charlotte Kinlock, and pets too numerous to list. She serves as the Moderator at Immanuel Congregational Church (UCC) in Hartford.
Dr. Elizabeth Rose:
Prospectives from history
- For a historian endless topic
- Different kinds of family relationships in different time periods, certain things about today may be new or different but there are many experiences that are similar in looking to the pas
- Lots of different ways people have created their own families
- Marriage – think of it as a private and personal relationship, something we choose and that has great personal meaning
- Marriage in fact needs to be publicly recognized in some way
- No other institution is so private and so public
- Why is the government involved in marriage at all
- Marriage has been a means of strengthening public authority
- Church in the middle ages
- States in the modern age
- Marriage seen as metaphor or model for government itself
- MAN governed over household
- New government set up on the consent of the governed – marriage would also be based on consent
- Voluntary allegiance
- Public policy encouraging marriage, recognizing common law marriage, state had interest in encouraging people to marry, households that were governed by male head who had political representation
- Who could marry and who couldn’t
- Enslaved people were not allowed to marry did not have civil status as full person
- Marriage represented indication of citizenship – slaves could not give consent as they did not own themselves
- Marriage seen as requirement for citizenship
- End of slavery, former slaves flocked to get married – reunite their families
- 1,000s of people looking for family members
- Importance of legal recognition of marriage
- Polygamy
- Intense hostility
- 1878 – congress has power to make polygamy a crime, religion not a justification
- polygamy linked to despotism and opposite of democracy
- Bans on interracial marriage
- 1948 CA became first state to declare this unconstitutional
- Have always been changes in understanding of marriage and definitions of marriage
LBGT families and how can they be legally recognized
What makes a family?
What makes a family?
- Love
- Whether or not the government or faith communities recognize families they are still a family
- End of next month supreme court will rule on the marriage case
- Does not mean churches will have to recognize marriages will have to recognize same sex couples
- Marriage will be redefined or changed
- Give over 1,000 rights, protections, and benefits to loving and committed couples
- Being able to say that you are married gives a respect and dignity
- Made progress in the last 18 months – 37 states where same sex couples can marry
- 72% of americans in 1967 opposed inter racial couples
- Today only 30% of americans oppose same sex marriages
- CT was 2nd state to allow same sex couples to marry
- Told our stories
- 2001 very controversial issue – very few elected officials that were willing to come out publicly and support
- People continued to talk about it
- Move from engaging peoples brains to engaging their hearts
- Civil union
- Needed to talk about something beyond rights and benefits
- Engage unlikely partners
- Clergy, people of faith
- Civil rights communities
- Republicans
- Hard to deny rights and equalities to someone you know
- Less of a threat to civilization and more friends and neighbors and co workers
- Still work to do
- Marriage is not the only way to have a family
- More than half the states in the country still do not have protection of LGBT in terms of housing, education, and employment
- Connecticut has always been a leader on many family issues
- Important that once marriage becomes legal we don’t close our minds and say we are done
When did gay marriage start?
Anne Stanback:
- First legal marriage in Netherlands in 2000
- Massachusetts in 2004
- As far back as the middle ages there may have been something like same sex marriage
When was the shift from children as workers to children as part of the family?
Dr. Rose
- Economic setting
- Colonial family – lots of children, needed people to work on the farm, some children might die before they reached adulthood
- Overtime economic functions move out of the household, mans works takes him out of the home, children are not economically useful, they become the opposite
- “Pricing” the priceless child
- Sentimentality attached to the idea of childhood, innocence late 10th century ideals associate with middle class families and urban families, associated with education become more important and more prolonged and the idea that children are not supposed to work
- Families move into the factory, men woman and children working in the mills
Marriage has never been restricted to those are are swearing to have children
-definition of family moves away from requiring people to have children
Assuming court acts in favor, such euphoria that we’ve won, what will activist groups do to focus on other things?
Did corporations have something to do with rapid movement?
Anne Stanback
- It's not about marriage at all but about trying to get protections for employment and housing
- Any political work requires a lot of public education, especially true for the transgender community
- Decade or so behind people understanding sexual identity
- Scare tactics – bathrooms
- Freedom for all americans
- Commitment to transgender community
- More than just lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender
Did corporations have something to do with rapid movement?
Anne Stanback
Has zoning ever been used to say what is or isn’t a family?
Dr. Rose:
Anne Stanback:
Are there some groups of people that are very resistant to the change?
- Absolutely
- Each group impacts another
- Corporations recognize they need to recruit everyone to get the best people
- They have the ears of legislators
Has zoning ever been used to say what is or isn’t a family?
Dr. Rose:
- Been used to control what types of people live in certain areas
- Exclusionary zoning
- Move towards voluntary kinships
- Golden Girls phenomenon
- Birthrate continues to drop
- Marriage itself is decreaing – becomes an aspirational thing, cant married till you’ve arrived at a certain emotional and economic stability
- Family is a lived experience and a metaphor
- Can mask power relations but also be a powerful relationship
Audience member:
I work in the mental health field and have never worked with a client who didn’t feel failed by the idea of a nuclear family. We need to change the definition of family. - Coming out is important in many forms
- People kept quiet for many reason
- Criticism of marriage equality movement
- -seen as holding up one model and only one model as a result there have been cases where states get rid of domestic partnership
- Need more options
- At war with true values and the “naturals” they’ve been raised with
- Not trying to change values, trying to tap into the right values
- Use the right words
- Need more research into language that is used
Are there some groups of people that are very resistant to the change?
- Less so than has been stereotyped
- Latino families are more supportive than white communities
- More associated with the frequency in which they go to church
-Educate yourself on the history behind marriage and family
-Learn about the marriage equality movement
-Vote for officials who support equity in families
-Advocate for intersectional approaches to family advocacy
-Watch the Golden Girls- advocate for shared housing and fair zoning policies
Have any more action steps to add? What do you think about the changing definition family? Let us know below!
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