Janeen Baxter reviews the new textbook by Jo Lindsay and Deborah Dempsey. This is an article from the November edition of Nexus, the newsletter of the Australian Sociological Association, edited on behalf of the Families, Relationships and Gender thematic group of TASA.
Jo Lindsay and Deborah Dempsey
Families, Relationships and Intimate Life. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, Australia and New Zealand. 2009.
This book has succeeded if it has challenged you to reflect on the tension between notions of the personal and the structural, commitment to others and individual satisfaction, choice and duty, democracy and inequity in contemporary relationships (Lindsay and Dempsey, 2009: 233).
Families, Relationships and Intimate Life is a welcome addition to the scant body of contemporary textbooks on families and personal relationships in Australia. It covers all of the key areas, is written in an accessible and engaging fashion and succeeds in explaining some of the complexities of a sociological understanding of families and relationships without making the subject matter overly complicated or dense. As such, the book should appeal to a wide variety of readers both within and beyond academia. As a teaching tool it is likely to be particularly useful to teachers and students due to its comprehensive coverage, useful teaching aids, including lists of key concepts, definitions, discussion questions and recommended readings, and its clear and readable style.
As the title implies, one of the central themes of the book is the importance of moving beyond standard definitions of the “family” to a broader understanding of intimacy and personal relationships. Topics weaved into the discussion include friendship, group households, living apart together, gay and lesbian relationships, cultural diversity and the sandwich generation. In addition to covering the standard areas of sociological theories of family, a history of family demographic patterns, marriage, cohabitation, fertility, parenting, labour, ageing and domestic violence, Lindsay and Dempsey manage to convey an understanding of the need to consider personal relationships that go beyond traditional family relationships.
The reader is exposed to some of the long-established theories of family life such as functionalist and feminist approaches, as well as more recent theoretical perspectives such as those of Giddens, Beck, Beck-Gernsheim and Bauman, and critiques of their work by Smart and others. Overall they do a good job of covering the broad range of traditional topics and theories as well as current debates and new perspectives on family life. Of course, some topics are inevitably left out and in this case, state regulation of family life and the importance of welfare policies in structuring and legitimating certain kinds of families and relationships is hardly mentioned. This would have added an interesting element to the theme of broadening traditional definitions of families to include other kinds of personal relationships. But it is easy to criticise for areas not covered, and in the end the book does a good job of introducing the reader to the field.
Understanding cultural diversity in families and personal relationships is a second main theme throughout the book. This is developed by reference to specific comparisons with South East Asian families in various places, and also a chapter on indigenous Australian families, immigrant families and class differences in family life. These provide useful examples of the socially constructed nature of many aspects of family life as well as interesting examples of family patterns from other cultures. The social forces underlying much of what seem like quite personal decisions is well-illustrated throughout the book, including in one of the opening vignettes by Lindsay concerning choosing a name for her daughter.
One of the most innovative chapters in the book is “Relating Beyond the Cohabiting Couple Household.” Here the authors provide insight into some of the kinds of relationships and issues faced in “non-standard intimacies.” The cohabiting monogamous relationship that has formed the basis of family life in western societies over the last several decades, and particularly during the 1950s and 1960s, may well become less prevalent in future years as new forces of globalisation, individualisation and deinstitutionalisation continue to transform the social world in which we live. It is likely that new forms of family will continue to emerge, including living apart together couples and transnational families that are forced to adapt their personal relationships to new economic realities. Lindsay and Dempsey provide a good introduction to these emerging family types and the importance of understanding the experiences of intimacies and personal relationships that do not fit standard definitions of family.
It will be hard to go past this book if you are teaching a course on sociology of families or households, or if you want to expose students in a variety of courses to the ways in which personal life is structured by broader social, economic and political forces. It is highly readable and enjoyable and should stimulate students to delve further into the complexities and contradictions underlying the organisation and experience of contemporary relationships.
Janeen Baxter
School of Social Science and Institute for Social Science Research
The University of Queensland
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