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Feminist perpectives on family

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Feminist perpectives on family
Feminist Perspectives of the Family
There are many different feminist views on the family and how the family should be due to the different strands of feminism, for example: Radical feminists believe that men try to dominate, control and exploit women; Marxist feminists make a direct connection between capitalism and the inferior position women hold in society; and liberal feminists believe that gender inequality comes from ignorance and the social constraints on freedom of choice.
Radical feminists see the family as male dominated as men are the ‘bread-winners’ and play and instrumental role in the family, so they make all the financial decisions, and that men will often use force to keep the family this way, oppressing the woman in the family. This view criticises the New Rights view of the nuclear family and its ignorance of the negative side of the family. Radical feminists often stress the significant amount of domestic violence from men against women in order to get their own way within the family. They also think women become trapped in a marriage with their husbands as they are economically dependent on the husbands, especially after children are born as the women are expected to give up work and look after the children. Radical feminists also believe that women are used as sex objects as a way for the man to unwind after a day at work, and women are rarely given any emotional support from their husbands yet they are expected to give emotional support to their husbands. A criticism of this view is that radical feminists put too much emphasis on the negative side of the family and it ignores the possibility that women enjoy running the home and raising the children.
Marxist feminists emphasise how capitalism uses the family to oppress women and the consequences the family has on women’s lives. Margaret Benston (1972) argued that capitalism benefits from the unpaid workforce of women who are willing to do what they are told because they have been
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