Assess The Usefulness of The Functionalist Perspective for an Understanding of The Family in Contemporary Society

 Functionalist believers can be perceived as ‘sexist’ in some of their opinions on the family as it limits women’s choices to be independent, for example the female role is ‘expressive’ therefore is the pastoral role of the family which looks after everyone’s emotional needs as well as looking after the house and feeding/cleaning the rest of the family. Radical Feminists would strongly object to this as the female is indomitably exploited through housework and the stabilization of adult personalities as she gets no reward materially or emotionally for this extreme amount of work and pressure. Marxism wouldn’t agree with Functionalism either, as it desires equality between everyone and as the female is undermined, this goes against their main goals and values. However in contemporary society women aren’t held back by these circumstances and an increasing number of them are still continuing to enter the workforce, although with the added pressure of the housewife role the modern woman will manage to juggle all these responsibilities outdating the extremely sexist Functionalistic view. I agree with the Marxist view as equality should be with everyone, not just those who can afford it.

 The New Right view is a later development of Functionalism, adopting the same views but takes a negative approach and is critical of the family in contemporary society and scrutinizes the problems with modern society, consequently acquiring the causes. New Right followers are very conservative people and dislike people who scrounge around on benefit payments, mostly lone parent families. Although assessing the problems with society, the New Right theory unfairly stereotypes lone parent families and labels them as ‘benefit thieves’. All Feminist theories disagree with the New Right as they believe they are trying to undo all the achievements brought about by Feminism, including legislation through single mums getting benefits from the government to live and be independent. Feminists also feel that the New Right formation is trying to immobilise female liberation and putting them back in typical oppressive nuclear families. In contemporary society a large majority of female parents are single mothers, however not all of them acquire money from the government and the nuclear family cannot be forced on to society just because NR believe that lone parent families are solely responsible for crime and delinquency.  I do not agree with many of the NR statements, and they are an unfair view of modern society.

 In conclusion, I feel that the Functionalist perspective is an outdated one. It does not parallel against contemporary society and how the typical family live today, as there isn’t just one typical type of family, society today is astonishingly diverse. To modern society the Functionalist view is not all useful, this is not surprising considering that this view was first established in the 1950’s/60’s. To cease this evaluation of Functionalism society has grown to be more modern and diverse, and along the way the family have adapted to these changes which has revolutionized the manner in which we live by today.