Abstract
Introduced in France in 1999 for both same-sex and different-sex couples, the civil partnership known as the pacte civil de solidarité or PACS, has seen a huge quantitative increase since 2001. This chapter compares types of union and attachment to gender roles. We differentiate four types of union linked to different kinds of institutionalization: direct or quasi-direct marriage, standard marriage, consensual union and civil partnership. Attitudes to the gender order are examined for the different forms of unions at two levels. We approach attitudes through household chores, an area that brings gender roles into play. Then, we look at representations from the “value orientations and attitudes” module of the questionnaire, to test the hypothesis that the different types of relationship express different degrees of gender differentiation. Two types of indicators are studied. The first type reflects the attitude to “gender difference” and a gender order that assigns a distinct role to each sex in the social order. The second type refers to the idea of a necessary “gender complementarity” by asking the respondents about their attitudes to single parenthood and homosexuality.
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Notes
- 1.
Women ceased to be considered as minors in 1965 and were permitted to work without their husband’s permission in 1966. The term “head of the family” was withdrawn in 1970.
- 2.
- 3.
Although this is also the case for consensual unions, it was not recognized in law until recently. Cohabiting de facto relationships are governed by the legal regime of concubinage (common-law marriage), which excluded same-sex couples until an article of the Act 99-944 of 15 November 1999 on the PACS. Prior to that, cohabiting same-sex partners were not legally recognized on the grounds that their unions did not present the characteristics of a marital union.
- 4.
In 2007, the mean age at first marriage was 31.5 years for men and 29.5 years for women (Pla 2009).
- 5.
Two years for non-cohabiting unions. Respondents in a civil partnership who intend to marry are included in the civil partnership group. In that case, we chose existing institutional status over intention.
- 6.
The cross tabulations and regressions presented in the Appendices were in fact successively performed on respondents in different-sex couples, then on all the respondents reporting a partner, regardless of sex. Given the small numbers of individuals with a same-sex partner, the results are very similar.
- 7.
- 8.
The regressions on household chores were performed only on respondents in cohabiting different- sex unions. Their socio-demographic characteristics do not differ much from those of the whole sample presented above, except that the number of respondents who say they live with children is much higher for all the categories. See Appendix Table A.1.
- 9.
A logistic regression taking into account the variables from Table 3.1 shows that, all other things being equal, women are more attached to an age difference than men. But a regression by sex shows that it is the youngest women who adhere the most to this idea. Among men, on the contrary, adhesion increases with age.
- 10.
“Can you tell me which member of the household performs the following:
-
preparing daily meals;
-
washing dishes;
-
food shopping;
-
ironing;
-
vacuum-cleaning.”
-
- 11.
See Régnier-Loilier (2007) for an approach to the impact of the presence of a third party on responses.
- 12.
It is possible, however, that an individual might answer yes to this question because he/she thinks that both parents should stay at home when their child is of pre-school age. Asking the same question about the father would eliminate that ambiguity. However, such a response seems unlikely. Moreover, if it expresses an attachment to a family environment in which both differentsex parents are present for the pre-school-age child, it would also reveal an attachment to gender differentiation.
- 13.
The tables and the regressions on values presented in the rest of this chapter concern all the couples, but regressions run on different-sex couples only gave similar results.
- 14.
The expression is borrowed from the sociologist Talcott Parsons (1937), who theorized the functionalist (and highly differentialist) model of the nuclear family in which the man has an “instrumental role” and the woman an “expressive role”.
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Rault, W., Letrait, M. (2015). Diverse Forms of Union and the “Gender Order”. In: Régnier-Loilier, A. (eds) The Contemporary Family in France. INED Population Studies, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09528-8_3
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