From the issue dated November 4, 1992
Scholars Attempt to Debunk Stereotypes of American Family
By Peter Monaghan
Olympia, Washington -- Stephanie Coontz would like politicians who bandy about the phrase "family values" to know that "Leave It to Beaver" was not a documentary.
The much-ballyhooed traditional family -- self-sufficient, patriotic, and God fearing -- usually includes a working father, homemaker mother, at least two children, and a house in the suburbs. That kind of family is a figment of our nostalgic imagination, argues Ms. Coontz, a historian at Evergreen State College.
The idealized image of the family "is an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never coexisted in the same time and place," she says.
That is the gist of Ms. Coontz's new book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, published last month by BasicBooks. Many ideas about American families, she says, are informed less by reality than by old television series like "Leave it to Beaver," "Ozzie and Harriet," and "The Donna Reed Show."
Ms. Coontz is one of many historians, sociologists, and other scholars who are studying families and trying to revise common beliefs about them. A number of these scholars deplore the idea that families today should live up to certain standards -- standards, they quickly add, which are based on a distortion of reality.
"It's nauseating," says Elaine Tyler May, of the way Presidential candidates and others have invoked "family values" this year. "The Republicans are not only abusing the whole idea of family values; it is also the most ahistorical presentation of family issues imaginable," says Ms. May, a professor of American studies and history at the University of Minnesota and the author of a book about families in the 1950's.
Ms. Coontz's new book, which complements an earlier volume, The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600-1900 (Verso, 1988), is a polemical, exhaustively researched work. In it, she debunks several myths about American families, such as the idea that American society would be better if it returned to family values of an earlier era.
"There is no one family form that has ever protected people from poverty or social disruption, and no traditional arrangement that provides a workable model for how we might organize family relations in the modern world," she writes.
In an interview at her home here, Ms. Coontz talked at length about nostalgia and how it denies the diversity of family life and leads to "wildly exaggerated" claims about the present and the future.
Among the myths she assails is the idea that feminism, particularly women's demands for equality in the workplace and at home, has destroyed the American family. The single mother of an 11-year-old son, Kristopher, Ms. Coontz vigorously scuttles the idea that children can be raised properly only in traditional families. The quality of life for children in any kind of family, she says, depends on many things -- such as activities and role models outside of the home -- not just on how many parents they have.
She demolishes no myth more mercilessly than that of the self-sufficient family -- the idea that the proper American family is an enterprising one that needs and accepts charity from no one.
The suburban family of the 1950's, she writes, was "more dependent on government handouts than any so-called `underclass' in recent U.S. history." How so? Ms. Coontz cites such items as artificially low interest rates for home mortgages, programs to build highways to the suburbs, tax breaks, Social Security, and many other entitlements. Few of those programs were enjoyed by the working-class and inner-city poor, who nonetheless contributed to them, she says.
Nor were the 1950's an era of abstinence and deferred sexual gratification, Ms. Coontz says. Teen birthrates soared in the 1950's, reaching highs that have not been equaled since. From 1944 to 1955, the number of out-of-wedlock babies placed for adoption increased 80 per cent.
Teenage sexuality today is actually not that different from that of the 1950's, she says, except that women today cannot afford to marry young and stay at home with their children.
Speaking about her research before community groups, labor organizations, and on radio and television shows, Ms. Coontz says she has found "a lot of willingness to get beyond the rhetoric and speak about the larger issues we face." Too little has been done to address the economic and political forces that are the true causes of much social disruption, she argues.
If American politicians -- Republicans and Democrats -- wanted to present a more-informed picture of family life and the forces that shape it, they need only browse through some of the many recent works on the subject.
University presses have published detailed research on small facets of family life, scholars say. Commercial publishers, they say, are giving academic authors a growing outlet for interdisciplinary studies that often include agendas for reform.
BasicBooks, for example, is publishing many books on the history and contemporary problems of the family because those subjects attract both general and academic readers, says Steven Fraser, an editor at the company.
For a long time, scholars, like today's elected officials, treated the family as an institution isolated inside the walls of the home, scholars say. Recently, however, they have portrayed the family as a varied institution with complex connections to other social and political institutions such as schools, banks, and the courts.
Ms. Coontz's book is among several that have recently inspected commonly held assumptions about families and found public and academic discourse lacking. "More and more people in the field of family history are saying that the mythic family emperor has no clothes," says Ms. May of the University of Minnesota. Her Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Period (BasicBooks, 1988) forcefully argues that there was no golden age of the family in the 1950's.
That point is also made by Arlene S. Skolnick, a research psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley. In Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty, a book published last year by BasicBooks, Ms. Skolnick argued that the 1950's were an era "haunted by contradictory demands and expectations" that set the stage for later upheavals. Many features of the decade, such as large families, were statistical "blips," she says.
Ms. Skolnick and other authors say they wish to counter the harsh, pessimistic view of families developed by scholars in the 1970's and 1980's. The most notable critic has been Christopher Lasch, professor of history at the University of Rochester. In his influential The Culture of Narcissism (Norton, 1979), Mr. Lasch blamed the demise of family life on moral and psychological failings. In doing so, Mr. Lasch underestimated major social and economic changes that dramatically affected the family, Ms. Skolnick says.
Writing a true history of American family life, scholars say, means admitting some ugly truths. One, according to Linda Gordon, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, involves family violence. In Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (Viking, 1988), Ms. Gordon studied child abuse, child neglect, incest, and wife beating from 1880 to 1960, arguing that those problems were not recent phenomena.
Such works are emerging, scholars say, at a time when the growing field of family studies is being strongly influenced by other disciplines, particularly feminist studies. This is no accident, given that women, as one scholar ironically puts it, "have a less nostalgic view of the 1950's than men do."
Among subjects being revisited is the true nature and variety of African-American families. Some scholars are looking at the strengths of many black families, such as how members care for children and the elderly -- strengths that often are overshadowed by negative stereotypes.
One surprisingly neglected subject, family scholars say, has been fatherhood. Robert L. Griswold, associate professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, is studying the transformation of the 19th-century patriarch into the 20th-century breadwinner into the often confused father of today.
Not to overlook families without offspring, Ms. May is now writing a book in which she will consider the implications of childlessness in the United States. The book will trace the notion that being a full-fledged American citizen somehow is contingent upon procreation -- not just parenthood.
Meanwhile, the politics of family bashing continues, scholars say, despite their best efforts to inform the discussions with fact. "The rhetoric is so vacuous and destructive," says Ms. May. Most unfortunate, she says, are claims that the problem with today's families is that people are selfish and don't care about their families. That is simply absurd, she says. "People have always cared desperately about their children," she says.
Like many other family scholars, Ms. May sees the rhetoric of family values as "in some ways the same kind of coding as we had with Willie Horton" during the 1988 Presidential campaign. Talk about family values, she maintains, is a shorthand way of appealing to prejudices against minority groups, working-class people, single mothers, and homosexuals. Ms. May is encouraged, however, by the apparent rejection of such appeals.
"The emptiness and destructivness of this particular formulation is so abhorrent to the American people," she says. "One of the Republicans' biggest strategies will prove to be a deadly mistake."
Ms. Coontz agrees. "Family is a huge receptacle right now for combining race and class stereotypes with the comforting idea that they're not race and class stereotypes," she says. "Because, after all, we condemn Woody Allen and the Duchess of York just as much as we condemn the underclass."
The way both Democrats and Republicans have used family values to appeal to voters has not impressed Ms. Coontz. "I think it's essentially phony on both sides, because what's been building since the 1980's is a new kind of social Darwinism that blames poverty and crime and the crisis of our youth on a breakdown of the family," she says. "That's what will last after this flurry on family values."
Copyright © 1992 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
