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.
Part
Two:
The family– affect and economics
History does seem important
when talking about family, and my snapshot of Augustan Rome is meant
to alert us to how vital the nexus of family has been to political
action and political decisions, from the power of the Anglo-Saxon
kin group, waging war throughout the island, to Queen Victoria’s
nine children, bringing hemophilia to Europe's royal families (her
two carrier daughters produced four carrier granddaughters, including
Alix, wife of Czar Nicholas II). But while history may seem remote,
family isn’t. When I meditate on what “family”
means, I recognize that everyone has one. Even in its absence, family
has meaning insofar as generation and parenthood incontrovertibly
exist. Of course, the mere fact of existence doesn’t produce
meaning. Rather, meaning comes from the imaginative structures of
our thoughts and feelings. These thoughts and feelings inculcate
and reflect a society’s values; consequently, these structures
translate into action— in the case of Augustus, into laws
as well as into Virgil’s poetry. Certainly the definition
of family runs a gamut of meaning for current American culture,
much of which responds to historical change. I’m not going
to present an exhaustive “since the beginning of time”
survey of the creation of “family” but I can suggest
how “family” gets its meaning and power. I’d like
to propose two things that help explain the power of our feelings
when it comes to family, and the vested interest the state has in
that definition and in those feelings. I hope in this way to help
us recognize and assess the challenges and attractions of the political
uses of family values rhetoric.
I think there are two
constants in the structure of our imaginations concerning family.
First, the family is the original nexus of affect, of emotion, for
just about everyone (and the lack of family also affects our emotional
attachments). The nuclear family has been the center of that emotional
nexus for about the past three hundred years. The other constant
is that the nuclear family, in its creation and persistence, has
become the state’s prime economic unit. The family, in particular
the nuclear family, is thus the center of affect, and the center
of economics. No wonder it pulls at both our heartstrings and our
purse strings.
You don't have to be
a Freudian analyst to recognize the essential part family plays
in engendering a human being’s first emotional responses,
and in shaping those responses in a host of different ways. Freud
called it “The Family Romance” and my gushy sentimentality
in response to images of family— especially in my post-partum
state— has a remote origin and a deep resonance from my own
childhood that cannot be eliminated or ignored, while it is also
devilishly difficult to dissect. Modern American consumer culture
does not ignore the kind of knee-jerk affection the word “family”
can’t help but inspire; instead, it capitalizes on it. Secular
culture’s search for “family values” often satisfies
commercial ends: positive feelings toward family are used to sell
soap. Nevertheless, modern American consumer culture shows its ambivalence
about “family values” when motion pictures with a G
rating tend to flop at the box office, despite an avowed attention
to “family values.” Yet, to be “against families”
is virtually unthinkable, an accusation meant to destroy. Conversely,
to paint a policy or program as anti-family is essentially to sink
it like a stone. Family values rhetoric, in its simplest form, depends
on one thing: a seemingly static, universally understood, and unchanging
definition of “family.”
I want to discuss contemporary
American definitions of family and the changes that a “family
values” rhetoric means to mask— I’m going to suggest
that the definition of family today is far from static and that
a more versatile definition of family promotes gender equity and
women's freedom— yet, first, I think it’s important
to look at a major change the definition of family underwent about
three hundred years ago. The change is a shift in Anglo-European
culture towards the “nuclear family.” A number of large
social upheavals worked together to effect the change that made
the nuclear family the primary imaginative as well as socio-political,
economic unit in the polity. Those shifts included the Industrial
Revolution and, in Marxist terms, the growth of the proletariat;
changes in governmental structure and an increasing secularization
of government in the West; and, most importantly for our purposes,
the reification of sentimentality and emotion directed into marriage.
You probably have heard
in your college literature classes about the intersections between
the sentimental novel and ideas about individual fulfillment, if
not the creation of the individual. A single shift in domestic practice
made a huge difference in the understanding of the self and the
self-in-marriage. Inspired by the troubadour love songs, translated
into action in the sixteenth century and continuing to its full
flower in the eighteenth century—the play Romeo and Juliet typifies this pattern— marriage changed from an arrangement
between parents to an arrangement between partners based on love.
No longer was marriage the business of matching family fortunes
(a practice that itself presupposes more expansive lines of influence
for a family) but the business of finding someone to love. Of course,
“the course of true love did never run smooth,” and
there are plenty of stories about the conflicts attendant upon this
change in Anglo-European society, from low to high. In the survey
of literature I teach at the college level, with readings that run
from Gilgamesh to Arundhati Roy, I spend a lot of time in the middle
term, which treats the high Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the
Enlightenment— the 14th through 18th centuries— showing
my students how the literature we’re reading tracks that change—
a BIG change, I tell them— in the way marriage is conceived
and practiced in Euro-Anglo society.
The change from the arranged
marriage to marriage for love is fraught with complications. We
read a 1678 novel, the Princess of Cleves, where our heroine marries
at the behest of her family but falls in love with someone else—
her virtue lies in her remaining chaste, unlike the other libidinous
courtiers, both male and female, whose official affairs, like the
king’s, reflect courtly behavior negotiating the competing
interests of family— “family values”?— and
individual emotions. My students ask me, “What does it mean
to shift from marriage for family to marriage for love?” It’s
only in researching this Fortnightly paper that I’ve gotten clear on the ramifications that change has
had in our ideas about self and family in the last three hundred
years. The idea that we marry for love, and that love is the way
we most effectively discover ourselves— that’s our Romantic
inheritance from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—
produces a certain tension that drives at the heart of the current
“family values” rhetoric.
That tension has to do
with the idea of self-fulfillment. Literature from the early Middle
Ages shows that finding yourself didn't have to do with finding
a marriage partner: your choice of spouse— certainly your
choice as it had to do with your emotions— was not the major
component of marriage negotiations. But once marriage choice was
based primarily on love, the Pandora’s box called variously
“self-fulfillment” or “self-actualization”
was opened up, never to close again. What if, in the process of
self-fulfillment, you find another way, or another partner with
whom to be self-fulfilled? And what about “staying together
for the children”? I have found lots of contradictory reports
on the effects of divorce on children's emotional well-being (the
effect on boys has been getting the lion’s share of popular
attention lately), but the most recent things I've read suggest
that differences, when considered in light of individuals’
contribution to society, remain unproven— there are plenty
of contradictory research findings.
But what about that “self-fulfillment”
issue and “staying together for the children”? Social
upheaval between 1970 to 2000 certainly reveals a near-tidal wave
of social change on the marriage front. On the one hand, the last
thirty years have seen a profound shift in the divorce rate: it
“jumped very significantly between 1970 and 1975, peaked in
1981, and since then has been declining back to the 1975 level of
4.7 divorces per 1,000 married couples per year” (Young, 537).
And, as mentioned throughout this essay, the number of children
living with only their mothers has changed dramatically, more than
doubling in that thirty-year span, from 10% to 22.8%. But, on the
other hand, here's a striking statistic— “in the past,
the great majority of single mothers were divorced and raising children
from those unions. Now fully 43.3% have never been married”
(Hacker, 64). One study by the Russell Sage foundation, reported
in the book Out of Wedlock, avers that “about half of all
children are predicted to spend some time in a single-parent family”
(Hacker, 65). As with the changing situation in Europe, where the
stigma of a mother's unmarriedness has lessened, if not evaporated,
so in the United States the requirement of married status has lost
some of its social force for mothers. The economic deterrents remain,
of lesser magnitude in Europe as Lyall’s article points out:
for European political decision-makers, the support of children
is the primary factor motivating policy.
So are the social changes
of the last thirty years the unhappy result of that fabled, now
decried “culture of narcissism” lambasted in the conservative
press? And is family values rhetoric and a return to father-headed
households a necessary corrective to self-realization and individualism
run amok? The new familialists say “Yes,” and blame
“expressive individualism,” along with decreased gender-role
differentiation and a “volunteer theory of moral obligation”
for the ills of the American family (Struening, 139). Yet, in a
wider view of history that looks at the last 300, rather than the
last 30 years, the change that made over marriage from a family
decision— which it remains to this day in many parts of the
world, including India— into a primarily affective choice
paved the way for individual expression and self-fulfillment to
become reasons to break the marriage bond. While the new familialists
argue for a return to marital stability at virtually any emotional,
if not economic, cost, Americans— and their European counterparts—
have been finding other ways to negotiate and handle the changed
valuation of individual self-realization of the last thirty years:
much to the horror of “traditional” morality, they have
been de-linking marriage and childbearing. Lyall tells us of Marit
Arnstad, of Norway. “An unmarried member of Parliament, she
became pregnant while serving as the country’s oil minister,
and is now raising her son on her own. Norway’s crown prince,
Haakon, lived with his girlfriend, a single mother with a toddler,
before marrying her.”
While the first-world
nations of Europe have met the changed status of marriage with continued
economic support for single mothers, American policy has been to
punish the single mother— even as the entertainment networks
parade for profit the children of superstar single moms, such as
Madonna, Jodie Foster, and Rosie O’Donnell. O’Donnell
presents an especially pointed case at this very moment because
she ventured out of the closet two years ago in order to support
the efforts of a gay couple— two male nurses— to legally
adopt a boy with HIV for whom they’ve cared for the last ten
years. Here then we circle back to the beginning of this paper's
meditations and part three of its argument: what is the family values
political debate about REALLY?
Part
3:
It's about gender, stupid.
As I medievalist, I know
that rhetoric is often— let us say, rather than “false,”
“nostalgic.” For instance, Chaucer, in his Canterbury
Tales, evokes the rhetorical social paradigm of the three estates—
clergy, nobility, and everyone else—at a time when that tripartite
division had evaporated in practice from the London society to whom,
and about whom, Chaucer writes. Today's “family values”
rhetoric harks back to a gender order that, to use Nancy Fraser's
words,
descends from the industrial
era of capitalism and reflects the social world of its origin.
It was centered on the ideal of the family wage. In this world,
people were supposed to be organized into heterosexual, male-headed
nuclear families, which lived principally from the man's labor
market earning. The male head of the household would be paid a
family wage, sufficient to support children and a wife and mother,
who performed domestic labor without pay. Of course, countless
lives never fit this pattern. Still, it provided the normative
picture of a proper family (591).
Of course that normative
pattern still has force in a culture's imaginative picture of itself,
especially in those slow-moving, commercial institutions wary of
change. But now, and in increasing numbers, real “family values”
that pay attention to the importance for children’s welfare
of “attentive love, nurturance to emotional, intellectual,
and moral maturity, relative stability and orderly change”
are found, as Nancy Young points out, in “a plurality of family
forms: gay and lesbian families, single-parent families, blended
families, nuclear families, extended families” (553). What
makes these kinds of families challenging is that they are different,
and such difference engages our emotions as well as the government's
welfare rolls:
The new familialists
have spoken directly to the anxiety over family change and have
been successful in shaping the national debate over the family.
As a result, much of the family debate is concerned not with how
all households can attain an adequate standard of living, health
care, and housing, but with how the intact two-parent family can
be fortified. Much of the mainstream media dutifully reports new
familialist claims that poverty is caused by nonmarital births
and that single parent households are largely responsible for
crime, high school dropout rates, and drug use… shifting
the debate away from explanations of poverty that highlight its
structural roots onto those that emphasize family composition
and structure (Struening, 137).
Given the great disparity
in earnings, in wealth, why would any woman choose NOT to live with
a husband? This is, of course, the place where the many strands
of thinking I’ve been spinning in this paper all come together.
Not a small number of women escape from abusive relationships—
that’s been one of the changes in the last thirty years. Not
a small number of women who, like men, see partnership as their
way to self-discovery and self-fulfillment—and also see their
own mental and emotional happiness as affecting their children—
find themselves (in both senses of the word) in lesbian relationships.
It is these and other non-normative families, no matter how supportive
of children, that make the proponents of a simplistic “family
values” nervous because, as did those men in Augustus’s
Rome, they fear removing women from the sphere of male influence.
That’s the last piece of my argument. Columnist Ellen Goodman
has pointed to the radical disconnect in the Bush administration’s
ostensible support of Afghan women for whom, to the best of its
abilities, the administration simultaneously denies support for
reproductive choice. Goodman quotes Adrienne Germain of the International
Women’s Health Coalition: “If women can’t control
their own bodies, make their own decisions about when to have children
and how many to have, they have difficulty getting an education
or employment. If they are forced to have sex, denied information
and protection about sexual diseases, it limits how they can be
and act in the world.” What Goodman clearly sees is the intimate
connection between women’s freedom to reproductive choice
and family values. What Jerry Falwell’s coded “family
values” really wants to curtail, if not obliterate, is women's
freedom.
All change is nervous-making:
they knew it in Augustan Rome, they knew it in the court of Henri
II, and J. Edgar Hoover knew it as well as Martin Luther King Jr.
did. How we think about change, how we react to change, as well
as our staying alert to the way our politicians react to change
defines the character of a polity. The ideals of the secular American
polity are freedom, justice, and equality. Those ideals don’t
change— their instantiation does. As Karen Struening says,
“it should be recognized that the cultural changes the new
familialists condemn have made new kinds of fulfilling lives, identities,
communities, and family forms possible. Individuals, especially
gays, lesbians, and all women, who historically have been shut out
of or frustrated with the conventional family are able to form intimate
associations that give them what they need and want” (139).
Or, as Iris Young puts it, “Attitudes and institutional assumptions
that are unfairly biased toward heterosexual two-parent families
put burdens and stresses on many families that others do not face,
which sometimes make it more difficult for them to raise children
well. Injustices in the economic system and workplace structures
prevent many families, including many single-parent families, from
giving their children material comfort and the resources they need
to develop their capacities. In light of such prejudices and unjust
inequalities, the primary way that public policy should promote
family values is by facilitating material and social supports to
enable all families to be as excellent as possible” (553).
The political capital of “family values” in Europe—
“old Europe”— supports children and parents without
a lick of nostalgia. I hope that the American polity can someday
do the same.
mmo : april 2004 |