The Definition Of Family Culture In The Family

Questioning whether or not job culture has expanded at the expense of family culture, forces one to consider how they define “family.” The GOP republican platform holds that family starts at the marriage of one man and one woman and includes the subsequent children that follow, and of course we saw in Weston’s book that we are redefining the meaning of family all the time. Families of all sorts are faced with allocating time and resources between family and career. The way society is continuously evolving; the gap between the two, I believe, will grow and grow.

If one were to follow a fairly conservative notion of family, traditionally this would include mother staying at home doing what some may consider menial tasks and taking care of the children, a task which also carries a plethora of opinions regarding its importance or difficulty. But if we back way up to a truly traditional sense of family we would look at hunter-gatherer societies because they give us some clues about how family culture evolved.

The hunter-gatherer societies of today much as they have in the past regard women and men’s work relatively egalitarian when you compare them to horticultural and modern societies. For example, the San divide tasks by gender, mostly because of availability of breast milk but regard each gender’s tasks as important and meaningful. Among the Aka, fathers spend a great deal of time with their infants just as the mothers do. It should be pointed out that foraging societies have more available time to spend with their families. A large part of their days and lives are spent socializing. Because of the sharing of tasks and resources, around 10% of forager’s time is spent securing food. Whereas people in more modern societies can spend...

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... their wedding night. This stereotype is slowly changing; however the acceptance of a “whorish” man still comes easier and cleaner to mind than the loose woman for most.

Additionally, Mullings mentions that sometimes race and gender compete. She says that when Clarence Thomas, a black conservative Republican was nominated for the supreme courts when at the same time he was facing accusations of sexual harassment against an African American attorney Anita Hill. Although there were several corroborating witnesses and Hill passed a lie detector test, the Senate still voted him in as associate justice of the Supreme Court. Because they needed him to be their “black star,” they were willing to ignore the injustice he had committed against Anita Hill. Not only putting justice on the back burner to do it but also putting crimes against women on the side lines as well.