Democratising the Family? Gender Equality, Parental Rights, and Child Welfare in Contemporary Global History

Introduction

Through the lens of ‘shared and equal parenting’, DEMFAM studies the transformation of gender and the family in contemporary global history.

Shift in Family Relations

First, it studies a shift from hierarchical to egalitarian conceptions of family relations, or a democratization of the family. This entails the equalization of parental rights within and outside the domain of heterosexual marriages, which coincided with the harmonization of the rights of marital and non-marital children.

Emergence of Post-Familial Care Arrangements

The emergence of post-familial care arrangements, secondly, led to a denser regulation, or juridification of co-parenting. Inner-familial power shifts were accompanied by a reconfiguration of family-state relations.

Institutional Development

The project investigates the development of judicial and extra-judicial institutions, including:

1. Family courts
2. Social work interventions
3. Mediation agencies

These institutions aimed to promote parental cooperation and safeguard child welfare in familial conflict situations.

Parental Rights and Gender Wars

Finally, it shows how parental rights assumed center stage in the twenty-first century’s ‘gender wars’, or the politicization of gender, sexuality, and the family in struggles over national and religious identity, liberalism, and democracy.

Comparative Analysis

DEMFAM analyses these (limited and contradictory) transformative processes across different political-economic and legal systems within a shared global environment. The project develops a social history of law reform on different political scales to understand global dynamics of divergence and convergence in the transformation of gender and the family.

Methodology

It combines the analysis of transnational knowledge circulation, including:

• Policy transfer
• Civil society mobilization
• Scientific expertise

with the comparative study of family change in:

• Western Europe (FRG, UK)
• Central Eastern Europe (the GDR, Poland)
• South Asia (India)

New Horizons

Integrating research on post-colonial legal pluralism and on (post-)socialist gender and family politics, DEMFAM opens new horizons for global gender history.