The contemporary family is indeed difficult to depict and capture. Our ancestors were in a much easier situation – the husband is cutting rye with a scythe, the smiling wife in a headscarf is raking, her thick calves protrude from her ruffled skirt and her monumental breasts are concealed under a white blouse. Their child is sleeping nearby under the bush, laid naked on a nappy. Other paintings by our classical masters – whether it was Josef Mánes, Mikoláš Aleš, Max Švabinský or whomever from this mighty group – display a milking mother positioned in front of a village house, the children playing with a kitty, the little old man weaving baskets and the husband in loafers, with his calves twined around by stripes of leather, beating a piece of iron with a sledge. A family photograph from approximately the same period and the same territory captures the lord and master of the house as seated in a comfortable armchair and surrounded by children arranged by their size, while an equally imposing and somehow corpulent mother, wearing a hat and a close-fitting bodice with dozens of buttons, dominates the background. An apparent nuclear family. The family of a father, a mother and children with strictly outlined and hierarchically determined roles. These images and photographs of 19thcentury families almost radiate the beauty and peace of all participants – and we, who engage in divorce on a massive scale, crash our cars, exert our bodies in gyms and nervously reach out for our ringing cell phones anytime anywhere (since we do not know which opportunity we might miss if we just ignored it), are only silently envious of our predecessors. But what in fact is there to envy? How was it with the family in the known world of that era – i.e. the world of states most of which are today members of the European Union?

The real family in the world known to us during that period was not depicted by anybody at all, or if it was, it was stylized into a form expected and desired by the arriving foreigners (whether Europeans, or Americans). People who lived in Africa, on the coast of the Indian Ocean or somewhere from the Indonesian islands at that time were perceived as the embodiment of savages by the newcomers; in an ideal situation, they were viewed as a certain kind of adult or overgrown children. Today, with our current knowledge about the world and ourselves, we do not exactly know how to capture the family of the globalizing world, and we ask whether we shall depict the specific and unique or the characteristic. But what is “characteristic”? We do not know – and we cannot express it even when it comes to the family in this country. Because the family of today is not just parents and small children; family is, after all, also relatives, parents and grandparents as well as grand-grandparents (since our population is at the moment witness to the frequent co-existence of four generations). And although an elderly person living alone does not represent a family as such, he or she usually is part of some family unit.

What possibly could be the depiction of the contemporary commonplace family with children here and now? Would such a family be portrayed in a living room watching TV; with a father in boxer shorts, sprawled on the sofa; a mother in a tight T-shirt, nibbling biscuits, and a son stuck by the computer with an expression of Dostoevsky’s Player on his face or a pubescent daughter working out the inner part of her thighs? And where would the grandpa be? He would of course be missing in the scene, for what would he do there after all. In the best case, he and the grandmother would probably be somewhere completely different, for example in a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchenette in an unnamed housing estate. The members of these two generations – parents and grandparents – would occasionally give each other a call instead of regularly sitting at one table, while a child would have no idea what his or her father does for living, even though he or she would be perfectly capable of proclaiming the title of their father’s occupation. An exact idea of what it is – if the father was not a physician, teacher, truck or cab driver or, eventually, waiter – would probably be completely absent. As a lobbyist, broker or investment consultant active in the Hlinsko region, dad would definitely earn more than the above-mentioned blacksmith, but his work would be certainly much harder to describe.

If we were to imagine the parents and children spending time together, we would probably only catch them so on vacation. What have they surrounded themselves with? Some sports gear, a tent, inflatable mattresses, PET bottles, juices, creams, badminton, balls and toys of all kinds, cards, blankets, sunglasses and glossy magazines that offer them things which they do not need but which they may have. And if we really wanted to portray them in their own household where one cooks and the other cleans, the author of the given scene would be probably slandered by the fact that it is the mother who wears the apron and it is the father who fixes the dripping taps. Slandered why? Because such an image would reinforce viewers’ standard stereotypical ideas as concerns the division of labour at home and the hierarchic position of a father who is technically more skilful and performs more fundamental work. But let us return to the – so frequently celebrated – family of the past.

As a sociologist accustomed to exploring the underside of phenomena and to reveal contexts as well as contradictions, I dare to accompany the above-mentioned chocolate-box, “educational, national-historical” images promoted by our classical artists by yet more spectacles from the past of the family institution which today seems to collapse. In the opening scene of Mrštík’s drama The Village Year, a staggering boy walks onto the stage and begins to yell at a little girl sitting on the floor. The two kids play at family. The imitated models are a drunken father and a subordinate mother curled into a ball. Yes, now they play at it. But later, they will not only exist in the same way and not only in the same theatre drama and in the same novel; figures of this type will also most probably face the same in their real life. Similarly, Maryša in Mrštík’s play of the same name fixes her husband a coffee with rat poison while the man (anti-semitically) screams that the coffee from the Hebe tastes somehow weird. He drinks up, dies, and the tragedy of the unfortunate Maryša shifts into different backdrops. Scenes from Glazarová’s novel Wolf’s Mouth would hardly cheer us up either, and the verger’s wife from the opera Her Stepdaughter by Janáček is, briefly put, a social case – abortion is a sin, delivering an illegitimate bastard is a lifelong disgrace, and the resulting shame would be even more dangerous, so lets better drown the newborn. Plus one more illustration from the same period: “There was granny’s fl at in the cottage which we bought 35 years ago, and from what the neighbours said, it dawned on me, over time, how it looked when two generations lived together and the juniors gave the elders the stipulated benefits even if there was no crop. And now the elders accuse me that a sack of fl our weighs less than we had negotiated before, that the potatoes are half rotten and that they get no meat. We juniors who run the farm simply tell them that the cow swallowed a hair pin, perforated its gut and pegged out before it calved.”

Quarrels, skirmish, lawsuits, suicides. Our literati pastorsrevivalists heard their share about it in the confessionals, and many of them – for example J. Š. Baar, J. V. Rais, V. H. Třebízský and A. Stašek – dealt with it in their novels. The idyll somehow did not take place. And it does not today, either.

Today, a firmly and clearly outlined and established role for man and woman is non-existent. Both men and women are convinced that they have a solemn right to self-realization and to pursue their own professional careers. A man is not the only family breadwinner any more, and thus ceased to be honoured as such. Relationships are far more democratic than before. Whether a woman or a child, they are no longer a man’s property and the man is no longer their master. If a couple breaks up, the state allows for their children to be raised by the parent with whom they live, and with the support of many social benefits. The 20th century, so heavily imprecated (although not by me!), adjudged legal subjectivity to children and even tries to protect them from their parents when needed. Today, fathers and mothers cannot treat their children as they wish – for children do not just belong to them but, so to speak, to society as a whole. If parents do not raise their children properly or if they abuse them either mentally or physically, they face the right of recovery. And if their off spring behaves in contradiction to their ideas, they also have lost the right to disinherit him or her. Even a disobedient child has the right to a certain share of his or her parents’ property even if it is against their parents’ will; the law speaks clearly. Why is it so? The reason is to forestall the parents from threatening their children with disinheritance, and thus from forcing them to make unfree choices. It is obvious that the parents’ authority has been considerably restricted. They cannot even unambiguously decide about the education of their child. The state which, in this case, represents society, can discipline them if they do not send their child to school where it is supposed to be brought up and educated in subjects “universally viewed as important by society.” If I, as a parent, do not want my child to hold opinions contradictory to mine, too bad – and I can only hardly advocate my point before the authorities.

As it follows from the arguments stated above, the society has indeed taken care of a child to a certain extent and, at the same time, the child is not only mine. The social support is moreover accompanied by the social control of how I treat my children and, in fact, also my partner. If a husband used to beat his wife in the past, he might have been denounced by his pals in the pub sometimes and his pastor might have tried to give him a good talking to and ask him to behave from time to time. But there was no one to confront him clearly and efficiently until the wife might have actually been killed.

And how is it with control from the side of the neighbours and the village in Czech conditions today?

The high degree of migration from villages and regions to big cities and vice versa and the fact that people leave for work abroad have reduced the neighbourly relationships to a minimum. True, people did not quit backbiting, but cases when they actively influence these relationships are isolated. This is also why certain types of interpersonal relationships must be regulated by laws and various measures which determine what is allowed and what is not and who is responsible for what. These issues today are, moreover, dealt with by an extensive network of legal advisory centres, whether private or nongovernmental and non-profit. This, at the same time, restricts the influence and behaviour of a family with and towards children and partners, and the influence of elder’s behaviour to the young ones.

The high divorce rate in the Czech Republic – where more than 60 % marriages end in divorce – is, amongst other things, the consequence of our conviction that we are entitled to happiness and that we are entitled to seek it even to the detriment of our children and our partners. And to seek it repeatedly: if it did come out this time, it may come out for the second or the third time… While divorces were rather exceptional and divorced people were largely denounced by society before the Second World War, they are today accepted almost unconditionally. Some recent theories even claim that the first marriage solely represents a certain effort to fulfil social expectations, while the second marriage reflects the right choice. The reality, however, is quite different – the second and third marriages actually end up in divorce much earlier than the first ones. This may also be caused by the fact that the older you are, the worse you are able to conform to your partner. And if relationships do not end up by separation or divorce, it might also be that the partners who have tried to arrive at an optimum solution in this way have already grown too old or one of them has even passed on.

While marriage was basically the only chance to achieve economic security and full-value social position for a 19thcentury woman, a contemporary woman views it as a matter of free choice. A higher measure of freedom thus also results in a higher divorce rate and in the feeling that “I, as a woman, have the right to seek my own happiness.” The second cause of the relatively high divorce rate is that people entering marriages are now older than before. While “children gave birth to children” in the past regime, today, women usually do not get married before the age of 26. They do not view marriage as the exclusive form of self-realization. And since marriage is revocable, they also naturally seek safety in their own professional careers and are willing to marry only after receiving appropriate qualification. Their independence is thus higher and their willingness and ability to conform are, correspondingly, lower.

The proportion of childless women in the Czech Republic was 6 % in 1990. Ten years later, i.e. in 2000, it was three times higher – 18 %. The higher the social allowances and the social support provided to unmarried women with children, the higher the number of children born outside marriage. While women in poorer countries, where the standard of social policy is low, try to get married and to give birth to children in the framework of marriage, the majority of children in richer countries with high social allowances are born outside the marital institution. Even though the partners may live together, they have no legal bonds to each other. In the very wealthy country of Sweden which, moreover, prides itself as having the largest number of women active in politics, 65 % of children are born into nonmarital relationships. The ratio of “illegitimate” children is even higher in Iceland where it reaches up to 66 %.

Compared to this, the Czech Republic is almost exemplary from the aspect of marriage. Only one fifth of children in our country are born outside marriage and, surprisingly, a prevailing number of women who deliver their children outside of marriage have low education and low or no professional qualifications. Why? The allowances are relatively high exactly for unqualified and single women with children. For women who have good qualifications and are therefore able to earn a decent income, the allowances for single mothers are not so attractive. The argument that higher social allowances would help improve family life thus in fact does not hold water. Just the contrary – the richer the society, the less the people who are born into it. The highest birth rate is, correspondingly, experienced by the poorest countries – Africa, Asia, and Latin America – and the lowest one by the rich states. And this is not only true in the case of continents but also of the individual regions in our republic. On the national scale, the highest rate of unemployment and the lowest average wages are in North Bohemian and North Moravian regions which also have a relatively high natality: 10.6 children for every 1000 women.

The cities with the lowest birth-rate in the Czech Republic are Prague and Brno, where the average income is the highest and the unemployment rate the lowest. The two cities are also characteristic of the lowest cohesion, i.e. solidarity between family members. Places where tram connections are easily available but where there are, simultaneously, many opportunities for entertainment and self-realization are also typical of the least number of contacts among the individual generations. As if the wealth and mainly the various opportunities for entertaining and realizing oneself at work and at leisure divided people instead of connecting them and bringing them together. What shall we do about it? We should realize these facts, accept and reflect upon them, and consciously change them if they do not satisfy us. It is as nonsensical to order someone to strengthen family relationships as to promulgate a year of respect to the elderly or a year of respect to motherhood. We certainly may promulgate them, but it will totally miss the point. Respect, love and affection cannot be realized via any regulation.

Understanding certain phenomena can free us. We come to know that we are not the only ones to have a certain problem and that our troubles in fact go with the flow of contemporary trends.

On that account, let us view the transformations of the contemporary family on the grounds of its past – when it was an elementary rescue network and the only chance for its members and children to survive – as well as on the grounds of its future. Freedom liberates, it allows us to experience more possibilities and gives us a choice but, on the other hand, it limits our certainties – for certainties represent barriers in our decision-making. The more freedom, the higher the risk. This is true in society not only from a political aspect but also from a view of co-existence by the closest people – family members.

The photographs exhibited, created by 17 artists participating in the Funke’s Kolín festival, are a reflection of true reality. They were taken spontaneously, without the authors being aware of the above-mentioned trends in the development of family – and this is why they are so precious. They echo the reality and the transformations of family, and may therefore serve as one of the sources from which we can derive trends, tendencies, changes and peripetia experienced today by the family in our republic. Let us, however, leave these analyses to those that come after us. For the moment, lets just watch and sometimes try to give a thought to the contemporary family in the world, and thus also to ourselves.

Jiřina Šiklová