I’ve
been interested in the political rhetoric of “family values” since the beginning of the phrase’s current incarnation and
popularity. In the 80’s, the Reagan years, a return to “family
values” was the rallying cry of political conservatives. You
might remember Dan Quayle making his famous swipe at the fictional
character Murphy Brown for her out-of-wedlock birth. Bob Dole used
the phrase “family value” in a televised presidential
debate to argue for returning America to its Judeo-Christian roots
(I have to wonder what his current touting of Viagra has to do with
that position). Family values was the message in speeches delivered
at the 1984 Republican National Convention, which the rest of my
family and I followed on television. That July, just weeks before
the convention, I had delivered my first child, my beautiful daughter
Catherine. Surrounded at home by my own family, including my in-laws,
in a powerfully-alive and completely-enveloping scene of new baby
and family sentimentality, I really felt the phrase’s resonances
in every fiber of my being. How could someone not believe in “family
values” at such a moment? Believe you me, I believed.
Yet how much were my
own special circumstances, as a post-partum mum, hormones in flux
and prone to tears at the drop of a hat, affecting my rational judgment?
Besides, it’s not like the phrase “family values”
didn’t exist before 1980, or before I had a baby, nor that
it remained the exclusive province of political conservatives. The
Democrats just as vigorously latched onto the expression, and it
was not unknown to Bill Clinton, despite it all. While the phrase
first reached the public consciousness in the Eighties, it still
retains its pull on the popular imagination. I trace the beginning
of the current “family values” phenomenon to a bit of
popular culture, a popular artifact, with which you may be familiar.
In the early 80’s I was living in New York. In that city and
its suburbs—and I would guess in Eugene, Oregon, where I now
live—the “Baby on Board” sign started appearing.
Plastered to car windows, these square shuddering yellow signs vibrated
in the back of Volvo station wagons to herald the arrival of a baby
boomlet. These signs assured my generation— in our thirties,
our biological clocks ticking away— that it was alright to
have children. Nor was the “Baby on Board” sign a signal
either political party missed. The capacity of “family values”
rhetoric to fit diverse political leanings could imply that the
phrase’s malleability renders it completely meaningless, so
bereft of import as to make an essay that considers its political
viability a waste of time. And yet the phrase still seems to resonate
powerfully throughout American culture. It was used in the late
Nineties by the Southern Baptists to explain their boycott of Disney,
and currently it’s a code phrase used by some 74,000 Web sites,
as my Alta Vista search for “family values” staggeringly
proved.
Although I come to the
issue with a number of preconceived notions, I've been trying to
sort through my own emotional responses to the phrase and topic
in order to dissect what makes the coinage “family values”
such a powerful political tool. To engender some kind of understanding,
I’ve divided this essay into three parts. In the first, in
order to situate “family values” historically, I'll
give an example from the ancient world. Then, after looking at some
family values rhetoric and facts about families in contemporary
America and Europe, I will go on in part two to explain the two
things that I think give “family values” its unceasing
appeal and political usefulness. After looking again at the contemporary
scene, I will suggest that the political weight of family values
is inextricably tied to women’s issues: the rhetoric of “family
values” is consistently used as a wedge in a larger effort
to reduce women’s freedom and discourage gender equity. These
last two things, women’s freedom and gender equity, are, for
me at least, foundationally important to a just society.
Part
One:
The ancient politics of “family values”
Will Durant calls it
the “most important social legislation in antiquity.”
He's referring to the laws promulgated by the emperor Augustus between
18 B.C.E. and 9 CE, the “Julian laws of chastity and repressing
adultery” and the Lex Papia Poppaea. These laws “encouraged
marriage and the procreation of children,” “penalized
the unmarried or childless of both sexes” and “benefitted
men and women with children by various privileges” (Jones,
132). For instance, as the number of her children increased, a woman
paid less taxes on the property she brought into the marriage until,
after three children, her tax liability went down to zero. Furthermore,
the mother of three children or more received the ius trium liberorum,
meaning that she got to wear a special garment that made visible
the privileges attendant upon her married motherhood. Those privileges
included, in the original legislation, “freedom from the power
of her husband” (Durant, 224). This last provision didn’t
carry the day. Its critics argued that emancipating a woman from
her husband’s decrees fomented danger, and soon enough the
law was changed. Furthermore, we should note that these tax breaks
and privileges were extended only to Roman patricians, not to the
plebeian classes. In fact, Augustus’s impetus for crafting
the legislation to encourage marriage and family came from his worry
that, because the patrician classes were not reproducing at a rate
comparable to the plebeians, Rome ran the risk of seriously diminishing
the numbers and power of its ruling elite.
We can see in the Roman
emperor Augustus’s legislation some of the hallmarks of the
“family values” political rhetoric still in use today.
Augustus’s legislation was openly class-oriented and geared
towards Rome’s already-privileged patrician classes. I would
suggest that much of today’s political rhetoric of family
values— the kind of thing visible in many of those 74,000
websites— conjures an ideal two-parent suburban family, with
a median income of just over $60,000. That's the figure the year
2000 US census gives for the median income of married couples with
children. About 60% of American children live with their married
biological parents— that describes my kids and their comfortable
suburban Eugene life pretty accurately. This kind of family remains
in the majority of American households, although the numbers have
certainly shifted rather dramatically since 1970, when 82% of children
lived with both biological parents. Interestingly, the year 2000
census lists the median income for once-married women raising children
on their own as $19,934, less than a third of the married household's
$60 K income, while the married parents’ income itself rises
to almost $73,000 when both parents work full-time. When only the
father works in a married couple, the median income is $45,315.
If you're keeping track
of the math, you've probably noticed that, even for full-time work,
women are paid much less than are men. As Nancy Fraser of Northwestern
asserts, women's earnings are less than 70% of men’s, and
much of women’s labor is not compensated at all, plus “many
women suffer from ‘hidden poverty’ due to unequal distribution
within families” (598). For mothers who have never married,
the median income is a paltry $13,048, a figure that is below the
current poverty line. On the other hand, in the United States in
the year 2000, the median income for solo fathers is $32,427; these
solo fathers account for only 2.5% of living arrangements for children,
while single mothers account for nearly a quarter of households
with children. The disparity between men's and women's wage-earning—
between the high figure of just under $20 K for women and the low
figure of over $32 K for men— is striking. As Iris Young succinctly
states, “Most economically well-off women and children are
economically dependent on a man” (544). Or, as Andrew Hacker
puts it, “The ‘family values’ credo according
to which youngsters are served best by having a full-time mother
is reserved for those who have found and kept a husband who can
foot the bills” (63).
Augustus’s legislation,
even though it concerned both men and women, and even though it
worked against the interests of the childless members of both sexes,
linked upper-class women's childbearing capacity to economic, political,
and social rewards that included a measure of freedom. Even then,
however, the question was the extent to which women could be free
and independent. In imperial Rome at the time of Augustus, the three-child
woman gains economic and social rewards— for a moment. Then
the reward of freedom is rescinded on the basis of principle, if
not fear: women with economic freedom and reproductive success can
spell trouble. That fear persists today, and many of the Web sites
that use “family values” in their rhetoric are quite
up-front in certifying the value of women's dependence on men—
what in ancient Rome was embodied in the paterfamilias— on
religious grounds. But religious groups are not alone in their approach.
“Family values” and the group of philosophers called
“the new familialists”— William Galston, Barbara
Dafoe Whitehead, Jean Bethke Elshtain, David Blankenhorn, Christina
Hoff Sommers— essentially argue the need for public policy
to support the male-centered family. Clearly, as evident in the
census statistics I’ve cited, economics in America already
favor that arrangement, with or without government intervention.
So why is it that nearly one out of four American children lives
with only her mother? Or, to provide a contrast, why is it that,
according to Sarah Lyall of the New York Times, 49% of births in
Norway were to unwed parents? (As Lyall reports, in Britain the
number is 38%, and in France 41%, and these births apparently come
with no stigma attached.)
How American society
manages the tie between women’s economic freedom and childbearing
appears in the glaring American census statistics I've just quoted,
which demonstrate the single mother’s disadvantages, while
at the same time the figures from Europe suggest a sea-change in
attitudes and a real difference from the American picture. As Lyall
says, “Buoyed in part by policies that allow them substantial
financial grants even when they return to work and start earning
money, single mothers in many European countries are considerably
better off than in the United States, where some 45% to 50% of single
mothers live beneath the poverty line.” The new familialists,
along with the conservative Christian websites I visited, touted
the value of the stay-at-home mom. Yet think of the cognitive dissonance
between this position—the value of a full-time mother—
and attitudes that shape public policy towards poor single mothers:
the popularity of “welfare-to-work” apparently sees
no public benefit in supporting the stay-at-home welfare mom. Instead,
the great success of the Clinton administration’s welfare
reforms was to put that poor single welfare mother to work. Thus,
the “family-values” rhetoric divides along class lines,
re-establishing privilege and ignoring the real needs and real lives
of mothers and children in the one-in-four households where children
live with a mother only. Cognitive dissonance continues in the way
American cultural stories— our movies, our television shows—
idealize both the stay-at-home mom and the self-realized woman executive.
Well, maybe a little less the executive, in the wake of Martha Stewart.
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