Search

This article examines how African American women adapt to a shrinking marriage pool. Early theorists and researchers argued that Africans Americans held different and deviant values of family life. It was primarily these values, not the economic and political problems faced by African Americans, that explained their disadvantages in society as well as their inability to establish and form enduring marital unions. The problems of the African American community were caused by the domineering, emasculating matriarchal African American woman who through her unrelenting demands and assertions of independence, forced the African American male out of the home. The woman-centered, matriarchal structure that emerged left little room for the male to exercise control and authority over the woman and any subsequent children that might result from their union. It was thought that African American children raised and socialized in this context grew up largely without the consistent presence of the male figure. The matriarchal family structure was at the core of a tangle of pathology which was both self-generating and self-perpetuating. Within this tangle of pathology young female children come to accept the intermittent presence of the male in the family, and grow up to assume the role as single female heads of their households.

This article examines variations in how what have been commonly labeled traditional normative family boundaries are pushed by various ethnic and gender statuses. Research in family studies literatures has long focused on differences between traditional and non-traditional family forms. With Talcott Parsons' work of the 1950s and the later work of Robert Bales, social scientists conceptualized the family as a unit comprising a married couple, performing duties such as socialization of children, with a traditional division of labor where he worked outside the home and she worked within it. On the other hand, the research literatures also suggest that this model is an extremely limited one. The traditional U.S. family began, largely aided by industrialization, early in the nineteenth century and is a Western invention of the last 150 years, or so. Added to this is the fact that much research has suggested the traditional family form seems never to have described a majority of families in the U.S. Families of lower socioeconomic status could not afford to have only one wage earner in the outside paid labor force, and so the structure of these families adhered to the traditional model much less frequently.