Paternal authority within families diminishes with unemployment

Evidence

The results confirmed once again what Sternheim had written in 1933 in his review article on `New Literature on Unemployment and the Family,’ and what had been shown by the Studies on Authority and the Family: that the authority of the father within the family was often diminished by unemployment. The older the children, the more it diminished, and the extent to which it did so depended on the family’s authority structure in the period preceding unemployment. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 690

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Marxist materialist account of how economic structure shapes family relations — a core claim across Critical Theory (e.g. Horkheimer’s account of the bourgeois family’s decline). — connects to: Mass unemployment isolates families and weakens parental authority — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 438; Decline of middle-class ownership eroded the family’s role and paternal authority — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 88; The family means-test undermined working-class men’s masculine status — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 215 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: How exactly was ‘authority structure preceding unemployment’ operationalized in the typologies? Could matter for assessing the construct validity of the 1940 Newark report.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 690

Broader Connections

• Mass unemployment isolates families and weakens parental authority #corroborates (0.95) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 438
• Decline of middle-class ownership eroded the family’s role and paternal authority #corroborates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 88