Eugene Volokh thinks that the major dispute between the majority opinion and the dissenting opinion, in the Texas Supreme Court decision on the FLDS community, concerns definition of "household". The appellate court held, and the majority Supreme Court opinion agreed, that the FLDS community is divided into different functional households. The dissenting opinion agreed, apparently, with the State Child Protective Services Department, that the entire compound constituted a single household. Under Texas state law, DPS is empowered to remove children from a household if a member of the household has abused other children. This law would make the definition of a household crucial to the issue whether the DPS had the authority to remove all the children.
It is worth noting that among sociologists who have studied the underclass, both households and families of the underclass (whether white, black, or Latino) are flexible and continually changing. We are discussing here the reproductive family. Fosterage is a common practice, for instance, in the poor black community. A family (a mother and children, with father of children usually not present) that is in difficult financial straits will foster-out one or more children for periods of different term to friends and neighbors who might not be genetically related, i.e., are fictive kin. (See Carol Stack, All My Kin.) There will also be asset sharing--food and money--, on a loose system of reciprocity; when need arises in some household that has shared food or money, that household will have a call on other households that could help it.
The family as extended network of kin and fictive kin is also typical in some special communities. It is typical of agricultural communities, where youths will move from farm to farm learning the farm trades in an informal apprentice system. Perpetual agricultural labor shortage makes such sharing of, especially, teenage labor important.
Some obviously middle class religious communities, such Orthodox Jews, also share children in something like fostering out, though they are not doing so out of economic need. It is common for boys and girls to live with other Orthodox Jewish families, in the US and/or Israel and/or Europe for varying periods. They learn about their faith, learn social skills, and are often introduced to different economic trades.
In middle class throughout our history until the Depression of the 1930s, live-in household servants, mostly maids, were common. Visit any modest town or city in America, visit the old Victorian houses, and you will find "maid's quarters" built into the dwelling, usually with a small stairway leading from the maid's room to the kitchen. In California, there were Chinese servants, in the South, black servants (and earlier slaves), in the Northeast and Midwest, there were Irish servants. In upper class homes, live-in domestic help persisted through the 1940s. Wealthy families with large houses or estates would employ a family, with the women and girls working inside and the men and boys gardening, chauffeuring, and maintaining carriage roads. The families employing these servants seldom thought of them as members of their households, though technically they fit into our definition. They families prohibited intermarriage with servants, so servants were not intended be become part of the family or to join the kin and fictive kin networks. Sexual relations between families and servants were, nonetheless, frequent, with results that still find a place on the nation's newspapers' front pages.
Among immigrant Latinos, extended kin networks are crucial to the system of chain migration, of getting shelter and work in the US (or other host countries) when lacking English language competency, and of surviving in the underclass with intermittent employment. When many of the immigrants come from rural backgrounds, they will have expectations regarding sexual behavior and marriage different from the American norm. In agricultural societies, it is common for women to have to prove they can have children before they are married, in order to maintain farm ownership lineages. It is common for women to marry young (younger than sixteen years of age), and, given the need to prove child bearing capability, that means pregnancy while young. Courtship will often be rough--we learned from a Mexican friend that in his rural home area of Mexico "abduction" by a man of a young woman is a common strategy in finding a suitable wife. Such practices do not, shall we say, translate well to the social world of the contemporary United States.
Similar observations can be made about "households". Households are usually defined as the group of persons living within one domicile, that is, one shelter, whether free-standing detached dwelling, or apartment, or group home (e.g., labor camps and fire houses when cooking by residents is present on site). Normally, in prosperous post-WW2 America, we have seen a single family (under one roof) as constituting a household; but before 1945, many households included roomers (persons who lived in a household without taking meals with it) and kin. This situation occurred because most towns and cities had housing shortages. Families took in roomers to supplement family income. Families also doubled up under one roof, so that a household might include several families. For the housewife, tending a garden and cooking for roomers (making them into boarders) increased family spending money even more. For single women with children and for widows, running rooming and boarding establishments was often the only way (before state welfare became available in the New Deal) to make a living. Everywhere, the expanded definition and functionality of extended households were reinforced by unrestrained immigration (before the Immigration Quota Act). Roomers/boarders might have been immigrants from a region of a country from which the homeowning family of the dwelling had themselves emigrated years earlier.This was common with Italian immigrants. Such living arrangements of course persist widely today in the Southwest and Southern California today to accommodate Latin American immigrants.
In rural America before 1945, it was usual for farm families to send their children to live with families in towns and villages that had high schools, as secondary schools were uncommon in rural areas. It was common for workmen whose labors took them away from their families, such as truck drivers, to live seasonally with another family near their work. It was common for male agricultural laborers, miners, loggers, forest fire fighters, and cowboys, for instance, to live seasonally in company provided group housing, that is, to constitute a household, even as they had wives and children "back home" who constituted households living in domiciles--even, perhaps, renting out rooms until their husbands returned.
Expanded households also established reciprocity relationships that could be transferred to new geographical locations. As owner-resident households lived on average only seven years in a single dwelling, they would themselves expect to be roomers and/or boarders at least once in their own lives. Knowing people who had lived with you would help in settling into a new city.
In all of these kin networks, fosterage, and reciprocity systems, setting up social relationships and marriage were--and remain--important goals, not simply by-products of the living arrangements. The networks are ways for people to define the groups they want their children to marry into, preserving the network's--community's--goals. Second-cousin marriages are therefore common.
In this perspective, FLDS living arrangements are not unique, but typify an historically well-used social strategy for perpetuating families and keeping households afloat. A family can be both a nuclear family and a node on an extended network. A household can be at once a family's domicile and also a locus for reciprocity relations with roomers and boarders. A household can be extended and spread to several adjacent dwellings. A mother would send her sons or daughters to live in other households for a variety of sensible and legitimate reasons, including the hope of marriage, without such social relationships constituting evil or abusive acts. A father or teenage son, and typically it was men, might live in the household of another family for sensible and legitimate reasons, without such arrangements constituting banishment. Indeed, the effort that families put into creating and maintaining kin networks and extended households to support the nucleated family and nucleated household testify to the strength of family and household so defined.
Revised. May 29, 30, 2008.
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