Abstract
Families in Latin America have gone through a silent revolution affecting the role of women, leading to decreased marriage and increased divorce and separation, as well as out-of-wedlock births and more mono-maternal families. We argue that two problematic features of the region’s family regimes have deepened: an unbalanced patriarchal contract, and a divergence along class lines in how families adjust to confront a transformed socioeconomic landscape. The upper and upper middle classes exhibit a move towards a more gender egalitarian division of labour, informal yet childless first unions, less and later fertility, and relatively stable levels of mono-maternality. Lower-income groups see persistent early fertility with decreasing stable bi-parental families with a traditional sexual division of labour, while another increasing proportion witness the disappearance of men as providers. Despite some changes, the State has not kept pace with these transformations with adapting and expanding social protections to meet these forms of social vulnerabilities.
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Notes
- 1.
The pace of change really picks up towards the end of the twentieth century. In just 15 years, nuclear male headed families lose almost 20 percentage points, while female headed households gain more than 10 percentage points.
- 2.
Gender here is understood as the social construction of features associated with male and female roles in society. The power of these features is such that they not only apply to heterosexual partnerships but extend to homosexual ones as well.
- 3.
A key contribution of Pateman’s (1988) notion of contract is that it challenges a liberal notion of individual freedom to place subordination as the subject matter of contracts (and, through contract, marriage, for instance).
- 4.
Lone mothers are women who bring up children on their own, regardless of why they are not living with the child’s father. Lone mothers are not defined by their civil status (as it is the case with “single mothers” and they need not be head of household nor the main economic contributor (Chant 1997).
- 5.
As a recent overview of the literature, this book chapter provides a more detailed discussion of scholarly work on the expansion of women’s access to monetary transfers.
- 6.
We are not citing in here the rich body of research on the effects of CCTs upon women’s access to economic resources and state demand of their additional unpaid work. Most scholars agree on the positive effect of the former—albeit the usually meager size of the transfers involved—and on the problematic character of the latter.
- 7.
Extensive reference to research on the subject conducted across the region can be found in Arza and Martínez Franzoni (2018).
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Blofield, M., Filgueira, F., Giambruno, C., Martínez Franzoni, J. (2021). Beyond States and Markets: Families and Family Regimes in Latin America. In: Sátyro, N., del Pino, E., Midaglia, C. (eds) Latin American Social Policy Developments in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61270-2_9
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