Idea of progress: how does the evolution of society influences family structure?

Idea of progress

Introduction:

«Family: a social unit where the father is concerned with parking space, the children with outer space, and the mother with closet space», is Evan Esar’s definition of family.

I’m going to talk about the notion « idea of progress ». We can say that the idea of progress consists in believing that the world can become better in terms of science, technology, liberty and quality of life. This idea has shaped most of western civilization’s vision of history. Progress implies changes, evolution from an old order with old traditions to a new and modern one.

We are going to explain how does the evolution of society influences family structures?

I’m going to illustrate this notion with the traditional families, and the new modern family structures.

Traditional families

• First, during the 50’s there isn’t equality between women and men. Indeed, the family’s structure is based on the relation parents/children. The mom is a homemaker, she has to cleaning, cooking and childcare; the dad is the breadwinner and often the family lives in the suburbs: like on the text “the nuclear American family” where we can see a traditional family with 2 parents who are married and their biological children. Furthermore, some prints ads show the importance of women within the family.
• We have also breaking family models that challenged the traditional families of the 50’s, as the divorce which is a new concept but it wasn’t socially accepted like nowadays, the blending families, laws on abortion, same-sex marriage.

New modern family structures

• Nevertheless, the society has evolved and family’s structure too. The woman began to work so they have become increasingly important in the family. In France, some laws were put in place in order to give women more freedom, such as the Veil law in 1975 which allow abortion. That’s an example of how women have become more important in the society. Furthermore, the women were overwhelmed because she is multitasking as we can see on the video from The Middle where we can see the family at breakfast time. The mom is overwhelmed because she has to prepare breakfast, drive the children to school, and then go to work. This videos shows up the inequality between the two parents and the gap between the ideal American family and reality.

• Therefore, the world and society have evolved a lot and today we can see that there are different types of families such as The Cosby Show. Indeed, this is another family because they are more modern than the family in 50’s. We can see a blend family. They were funny and free family. Also, we have the remarriage, interracial couples, single-parent families, same-sex couples and parents, and surrogate mothers, that are represented as “modern family”. These types of family aren’t the “ideal” or “perfect” family anymore as there was fifty or sixty years ago.

Conclusion: 

To conclude,  

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