Debunking the Family Values Myths

Reviewed by Kent Chadwick

The Way We Never Were:
American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
by Stephanie Coontz
Basic Books, a division of Harper Collins, 1992, 391 pages

"History is more or less bunk," Henry Ford told The Chicago Tribune in 1916. "That's history," was George Bush's way in the 1990s of trying to distance himself from the Willie Horton race-baiting of his earlier presidential campaign. "You're history!" is a contemporary threat, not a compliment. Stephanie Coontz, a history professor at The Evergreen State College, is quick to point out this typical American disdain for history. As a social realist from the political left, she is concerned that "the actual complexity of our history - even of our own personal experience - gets buried under the weight of an idealized image."

Both her academic history, The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families 1600-1900 (Verso, 1988), and her popular history, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, effectively uncover the complex variety of family strategies that different American groups have used at different times. "Only when we have a realistic idea of how families have and have not worked in the past," Coontz argues, "can we make informed decisions about how to support families in the present or improve their future prospects."

Coontz sees the family as "both a place and an idea," which is socially sanctioned to bring children into the community and to pass on the community's sense of rights and responsibilities. Different groups and communities develop different family strategies in response to their social, economic, cultural and political environments. Native Americans had a kinship system that stressed reciprocity and made the nuclear family relatively unimportant. The European colonists created a household-family system that guaranteed private property rights, yet positioned each family within a rigid hierarchy of community obligations. The new middle class of the 19th century ruptured the old community hierarchies and instituted a strict division of labor by gender in its domestic family system. The nuclear family system of the 20th century shifted its emphasis to consumption, state-supported privacy and the primacy of the husband and wife's relationship.

In The Way We Never Were, Coontz uses her socio-economic and historical analysis of family systems to critique many of the assumptions that are being bandied about in the emotional debate over family values. Her goal is to expose the myths that are part of our conventional wisdom about families. She rejects as too simplistic arguments like that of Kate O'Beirne's at the Heritage Foundation, which assert "that America's troubles stem from the collapse of 'family stability and the work ethic.'"

Though single-parent families are more likely to be poor than two-parent families, family type accounts for less than a third of the U.S. poverty rate. A University of Michigan study found that "only one-seventh of childhood transitions into long-term poverty were associated with family dissolution, while more than half were linked to changes in labor market participation or remuneration." Further, "a majority of the increase in family poverty since 1979 has occurred in families with both spouses present... the percentage of the poor living in female-headed families has declined since 1978."

The strongest myth that Coontz addresses is the belief that the ideal 1950s family of "Ozzie and Harriet" or "Father Knows Best" is the American norm. In fact, the '50s family was a "qualitatively new phenomena" resulting from the postwar industrial boom and constituting a reversal of all the trends that have characterized every other decade of the 20th century. Throughout the century the age for marriage and motherhood have been rising, but in the '50s it fell. Throughout the century fertility has decreased, but in the '50s it increased. The family values of the 1950s were new as well. Historian Elaine Tyler May contends that, "It was the first wholehearted effort to create a home that would fulfill virtually all its members' personal needs through an energized and expressive personal life."

And not all 1950s families shared in that decade's middle class success. In 1959 one-third of American children and one-quarter of all Americans were poor. Sixty percent of those over 65 had annual incomes below $1,000 in 1958, when the middle class income range was $3,000 to $10,000 a year. Racial segregation and discrimination were the law throughout the South. The poverty rate for two-parent black families was more than 50 percent, approximately the same as for one-parent black families.

Other myths Coontz examines are the supposed self-reliance of the traditional American family, when actually American families have always been dependent on some type of collective institution beyond the family; the imminent demise of the black family, though its extended kinship networks have helped it outlast similar predictions that have arisen in almost every decade for the last 200 years; and the myth that private values and family affection are the traditional center of public life, an idea that arose late in the 19th century and represented a significant retreat from the earlier republican dedication to public values and civic responsibilities.

Coontz's persuasive conclusion is that "Changes in childrearing values and parental behaviors are seldom the result of people suddenly becoming nicer or meaner, smarter or more irresponsible." The problems affecting American families are the result of complicated economic and social transformations as well as of general family behaviors. Solutions will have to do more than just blame American families for failing to recapture a mythic golden age.

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Contents on this page were published in the December/January, 1996 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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