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Social Imagination

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Submitted By lace82
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The Sociological Imagination according to C. Wright Mills is states that the sociological imagination is a quality of mind that allows us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in society. (Mills, 1959, pg 6). He also explains the links between personal issues and public issues by helping to identify a personal issue and identifying it in the social structure. One tragic public issue that is very common in society today is ‘Domestic Violence’. For many years domestic violence in the family has been a private issue and was never spoken about in society. By using the three sensibilities that make up the sociological imagination which are the historical, cultural and critical sensibilities, society can begin to understand the radical changes in how society thinks we as individuals ‘should’ behave towards one another especially in the family unit according to societies expectations and social norms.
The issue of domestic violence within families was evident in earlier societies. Using the historical sensibility we can see how society used to live and see how we have society has transformed our ideologies of this horrific public issue of domestic violence. From the earliest record, most societies gave the father or the patriarch of the family the right to use physical force against the women and children that he was in control of. This was evident in the reign of Romulus back in 753BC. Abbott (1852, p. 242) states that:
The power of the father over his household was supreme. He was magistrate, so far as his children were concerned, and thus not only require their services, and inflict light punishment for disobedience upon them, as with us, but he could sentence them to the severest penalties of the law, if guilty of crime. This also reveals men being the dominant perpetrators, and also generates the thought of gender inequality. To the

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