I've been interested in the political rhetoric of "family values" since what seems to have been the beginning of its 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 values" in one of the televised debates and argued for returning America to its Judeo-Christian roots (I have to wonder what his 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. But the phrase reached the public consciousness in the Eighties and still retains some pull on the popular imagination.
It seems to me that we can trace the beginning of the current "family values" phenomenon in 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, and in that city and its suburbs--and I would guess here too in Eugene--the "Baby on board" sign started appearing plastered to car windows. These square shuddering yellow signs vibrating in the back windows of Volvo station wagons heralded the arrival of a baby boomlet and assured my generation--in our thirties, our biological clocks ticking away--that it was alright to have children. The "baby on board" sign was a signal not to be missed by either political party. 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 a paper that considers its political viability a waste of time. And yet the phrase still seems to resonate powerfully throughout American culture. It was used five years ago 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 have 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 this topic in order to dissect what makes the coinage "family values" such a powerful political tool. To engender some kind of understandability, I've divided my talk into three parts. In the first, to situate "family values" historically, I'll give an example from the ancient world. Then, after looking at some of the 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, although neither is political per se. After looking again at the contemporary scene, I will suggest that the political weight of family values is inextricably tied to women's issues: that the rhetoric of "family values" is used pretty consistently 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. Not everyone will agree with my conclusions, and I look forward to your comments and questions about my thesis.
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 that is used 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, and 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 in a 1995 article, "Most economically well-off women and children are economically dependent on a man" (544). Or, as a recent article in the New York Review of Books put 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 whichwomen could be free and independent. In imperial Rome at the time of Augustus, the three-child woman gains economic and social rewards, yet even then the reward of freedom is rescinded on the basis of principle: women with economic freedom and reproductive success can spell trouble. That fear persists today, and many of the Web sites are quite up-front in certifying the value of women's dependence on men--what in ancient Rome was embodied in the paterfamilias. "Family values" and the group 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 NYTimes, 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 now 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. More on that later.
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 enormous brood, infecting the European royal families with hemophilia. But here's the baseline: 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, existence in and of itself doesn't provide meaning: the imaginative structures of our thoughts and feelings inculcate and reflect a society's values, and 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 similar gamut of meaning for current American culture in response to historical changes such as the one Thelma will outline for us next month--the creation of "childhood." I'm not going to go there, nor can I present an exhaustive "since the beginning of time" survey of the creation of "family." Still, how "family" gets its meaning and power is at issue here, and 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: 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 also 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 as secular culture searches for a baseline of connectedness ostensibly for the moral good but very often devised to sell soap. Certainly modern American consumer culture does have some ambivalences apparent in its attitudes towards family: motion pictures with a G rating tend to flop at the box office, and "family drama" means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. 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 get to 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, before going there, I think it's important to look at a major change the definition of family underwent about three hundred years ago. The change I'm talking about is the change in Anglo-European culture towards the "nuclear family." A number of large social shifts 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 in the Honors College, 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 paper, 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, with the support of children the primary factor involved in European political decision-making.
So are the social changes of the last thirty years the unhappy result of that fabled, now decried "culture of narcissism" that George Bush would be talking about--he is reading about it--if only he could pronounce the word? 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 last year."
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 just about two weeks 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?
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, even as 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" can be 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 this afternoon 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 in Augustus's Rome, removing women from the sphere of male influence is nervous-making. That's the last piece of my argument, and I only got it straight after Jackie Miller brought me an Ellen Goodman column from a couple of weeks ago, wherein Goodman was pointing to the radical disconnect in the Bush administration's ostensible support of Afghan women for whom, to the best of its abilities, the administration 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 Jackie could clearly see is the intimate connection between women's freedom to reproductive choice and family values. What Jerry Falwell's code decries in the phrase "family values" 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 supports children and parents without a lick of nostalgia. I hope that the American polity can someday do the same.
Fraser, Nancy. "After the Family Wage: Gender Equity and the Welfare State." Political Theory 22:4 (1994), 591-618.
Goodman, Ellen. "All women must control their bodies." The Register-Guard, Eugene, OR, Sunday, March 24, 2002, Commentary section.
Hacker, Andrew. "How Are Women Doing?" New York Review of Books, April 11, 2002, pages 63-66.
Jones, A.H.M. Augustus. W.W. Norton, 1970.
Lyall, Sarah. "Out-of-wedlock parenting loses its stigma." The Register-Guard, Eugene, OR, March 24, 2002, page 1.
Struening, Karen. "Feminist Challenges to the New Familialism: Lifestyle Experimentation and the Freedom of Intimate Association." Hypatia 11:1 (1996), 135-54.
Young, Iris. "Mothers, Citizenship, and Independence: A Critique of Pure Family Values." Ethics 105:3 (1995), 535-79.
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