Relatively speaking...
You
may think you know who your relatives are - but do you? Of course you
know your immidiate family - your mother, father, brothers, sisters,
spouse, sons, daughters. So you have seven categories of 'primary' relative.
But they have primary relatives too, who are your secondary relatives.
You have 33 categories of secondary relatives. Who all have primary relatives
of their own. Which gives you 151 categories of tertiary relatives.
Life would
be chaotic if they all came to stay at Christmas. So we choose, according
to subtle social rules, to whom we will open our doors, to whom we
will turn for help, to whom we will leave our money when we die.
It runs in the blood
The
major patterns of wealth inheritance in the world are:
KEY
Patrilineal - from father to son (dotted line on tree)
Matrilineal - from mother's brother to her son (solid
line on tree)
Bilateral - from mother and father to son and daughter (not shown on
tree)
• In practice inheritance almost invariably passes through men
• In the UK three-quarters of those who died rich between 1950
and 1975 owed their wealth to inheritance.
Illustration
is from figures from countries in Table below.
*Families can be extended vertically (more than two generations),
horizontally (including aunts, uncles and their children) or
vertically and horizontally.
Third
World goes nuclear 
Numbers
may not add up to 100% because of rounding
* 'Family'
was designated as those people who habitually eat together from
the same cooking pot.
** Malaysia
data did not differentiate between urban and rural households. |
Not
the marrying kind
 
• But
studies show that the rise in divorce rates is partly due
to changes in the laws allowing divorce
• In
the US there was an approximate 30-fold increase in teh number
of people 'living together' between 1960 and 1970.
• 'Non-formal
unions' outnumber marriages in the Dominican Repulic and
in Panama and make up approximately one-fifth of households
in the other Latin American countries studies by the World
Fertility Survey. |
 Labours
of love
• Working
mothers have less than two-thirds of the free time enjoyed
by their husbands according to the International Labour Organisation.
• Housewives
with young children in the West work an average of 77 hours
a week. To hire someone to do the same job at current rates
would cost at least $20,000 per year.
• One-quarter
of all reported violent crime in the UK is wife assault. |
The
chosen few
The
World Fertility Survey asked women aged 45-49 and 15-19 how
many children were in teh 'ideal family'.
Women
are beginning to transform their ideals into reality. In
almost every country they are having fewer children than
their mothers because they marry later, are better educated,
have access to contraception and employment opportunities
outside the home.
And
similar families mean better health for mothers and their
babies. In the US and Sweden when women began to limit childbearing
to the ages of 20-34 there was a 29% drop in infant mortality. |
| Staying
single
• One
in 10 households was a single parent family in teh US in
1975.
• In
France in 1962 one in six women had decided not to have any
children.
• In
the UK in 1979 one in four households consisted of people
living alone.
• In
hondoruras 45% of households in urban areas are single parent
families. |
Sources:
Divorce and illegitimacy figures from European Community Statistical
Office Demographic Statistics ; most other figures from World Fertility
Survey publications.
new
internationalist 118
