In his book, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World 1900-2000, Gsran Therborn discusses changes in the family and family roles over the past century1. He points out that though people hold strong views on the subject, few are truly aware of the facts. Although the high rate of divorce in the US is often cited, being around 50 percent, he points out that Muslim Malaya had a 50 percent divorce rate up to the middle of the 20th century and that there is more domestic work gender bias in the United States than in China. Despite globalization and many common developments worldwide, family patterns have not changed in a global manner. In the early 19th century, the world was divided into five family systems, the US favoring the European model over those of Africa and Asia, which is not surprising since the early immigrants to the US were European origin.
In the American Creole culture, male power was macho, and the family system was patriarchal for the great majority up until the 20th century1. The power was vested in the older males over the young of both sexes and in the institutionalized power of men over women. The rise of an industrial capitalist society protected and reproduced patriarchy because until the rise of corporate business, it was not a system existing primarily on the basis of market rationality. The patriarchal family was considered a heavy social anchor and an essential mechanism for economic enterprise. A prosperous industrial capitalism turned the proletariat into manufacturing working class, with the male taking on the role of the primary bread-winner.
Socialist and Communist revolutions in the 20th century both championed the causes of women, as did the non-Western nationalist-developmentalists in Turkey, women's feminist movements, and a secularized liberalism mainly of Protestant Christian or Jewish provenance1. In the later part of the 20th century in the West, compulsory education for both gi...