I couldn’t help thinking of Barbra Streisand (‘memories, like the corners of my mind...’) when I saw the title of this book by family historian Stephanie Coontz, and even more so when I learned that its predecessor was called The Way We Never Were. In some ways, it’s an apt reference point, as Coontz deals to memories and nostalgia for the so-called traditional family.
After having debunked the myth of the historical prevalence of the traditional nuclear male breadwinner / female homemaker family in her first book, published in 1992 in response to the ‘return to family values’ movement that dominated the political agenda around the 1992 US elections, Coontz turns her focus to the present. She was inspired to write this follow-up, published five years later, on the back of her experiences and encounters promoting the first book. While on lecture tours, talk shows and radio chat shows, she found that many people were asking her what they could put in the place of the myths and illusions about the family that she had shattered in her first book.
So the impetus for this book are the questions: are the only lessons from history negative? Isn’t there anything positive families can learn from history and sociology? (3). Coontz thinks that ‘history and social science do have concrete applications and positive lessons for people concerned about what is happening with today’s families.’ (3) It’s refreshing to read a mainstream book by a historian that not only actively engages with the political climate and makes no apologies for doing so, but draws scrupulously on the available historical research to take a long view of cultural, economic and social trends before making pronouncements (a lesson that others, such as David Starkey, could learn before pronouncing on matters in which they have little expertise). Coontz boldly avoids getting into any debate about whether or not she is - gasp! - engaging in ‘presentism’ and instead encourages people to take the long view and look beyond the authority of the individual anecdote.
I was impressed by many things about this book that still, despite the specific political and historical circumstances in which it was written, have a resonance today. First of all, it centres its discussion of family dynamics around power, specifically ‘situated social power’ (18-9) and addresses the inequality between partners in a relationship. But it doesn’t stop at the individual or couple level, and looks to historical trends to de-personalise the debate on the family.
Coontz looks back to the pre-industrial past, as Kate Figes did in Life After Birth, to argue that apart from a small period for middle-class women in the 1950s and 1960s, mothers have traditionally worked. What had irritated me about Figes’ account was that she overlooked the fact that much of women’s work was done in the home, whether it was farm-work or piece-work. Coontz does not gloss over this, but she also raises the equally important point that, in the predominantly agrarian mode of production, mothers not only worked, but fathers played more of a domestic role and were much more involved in child-rearing (perhaps not in ways that we might approve of today, but involved nonetheless).
Coontz is realist enough to know, however, that you can’t turn back the clock on industrialisation. For better or worse, since the early nineteenth century, workplaces have been located outside the home, and negotiating how to get working families to work (in both senses of the word) is dependent on quality childcare arrangements and much greater flexibility in the workplace. Both of these also involve men taking on more of domestic role, so working mothers are not saddled with ‘the second shift’ when they get home.
Elsewhere, she addresses the nostalgia for the 1950s and asks what it is that family values’ advocates find so seductive about this era. At the outset, she notes that this is primarily a white nostalgia: in surveys comparing the responses of white and African-Americans, for example, the former rated the 1950s most positively, followed by the 1960s, while the latter group, rated any other decade including the 1970s and 1980s more highly. It is also, of course, a middle-class nostalgia, and what is more, a nostalgia primarily for those from homes that didn’t suffer the effects of alcoholism or abuse.
Focussing on that fortunate group, she argues that what is so attractive about the 1950s is that, despite the fact that poverty levels were actually higher than in the mid-1990s, they were falling rather than rising, and there were fewer extremes of wealth co-existing side by side. Other factors included the existence of veterans’ benefits, building up of Social Security, mandated rises in the minimum wage, public works spending and the reorganisation of home financing. (40-1) She concludes that ‘politicians are practising a double standard when they tell us to return to the family forms of the 1950s, while they do nothing to restore the jobs programmes and family subsidies of that era, the limits on corporate relocation and financial wheeling-dealing, the much higher share of taxes paid by corporations then, the availability of union jobs for non-college youth and the subsidies for higher education (43). She also cites research that argues that the clawing-back of these programmes beginning in the 1970s may well have been an unforseen consequence of 1950s’ family values and the baby-boom.
Coontz then moves on to argue that working mothers are here to stay, largely as a result of long-term economic and social trends which mean that most families simply can’t afford to do without two working parents. She also argues, compellingly, for the institutionalisation of divorce, as well as re-marriage. What she means by this is the social recognition that divorce is here to stay, with the attendant development of norms to ensure that the severance of a marital union causes as little damage to the family members - particularly children - as possible. Similarly for re-marriage, clearer norms and expectations of the role of new step-parents would ease adjustment and provide for more enduring relationships (108)
Single-parent families, often the butt of conservative ‘family values’ rhetoric and the target of welfare-to-work initiatives (still, unfortunately, an ongoing trend), are also shown to be neither the result of increased permissiveness nor increased welfare in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, Coontz shows that crime and deliquency figures, which disproportionately include children from single-parent families, are, in fact, more closely informed by class and economic deprivation (i.e. single parenthood in these figures is an effect rather than cause). Drawing on sociological research, she argues that in many cases there are benefits for single-parent families, particularly those with access to wider networks of family and friends, in terms of emotional maturity and school results.
After having exhaustively taken apart the rhetoric of family values conservatives - and showing that, indeed, it is primarily rhetoric - Coontz moves on to discuss solutions. She argues that for all kinds of families, cultural norms need to shift: to adapt to the diversity of families (a simple example about the way different homework assignments benefit the arrangements of different family types is instructive), moving forward instead of looking back to ‘the way we never were’ (I’m hearing Streisand again) to develop norms, policies and supports for the array of family types we have now, and working to remove the long-term causes of child poverty.
I guess that requires a lot more commitment than just scapegoating single parents, gay and lesbian parents, and working mothers.
