[Music] the following program is a WTV classic from the University of Washington in Seattle upon reflection [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to upon reflection I'm Marsha Alvar what is the typical American family and how different is it today than it was at the turn of the century Stephanie Co says that the answers to those questions might surprise us because of the enormous body of Mythology about the family that we've come to accept as fact C teaches at Evergreen State College and is a leading Authority on family issues her newest book on the subject is the way we never were American families and the Nostalgia trap welcome to Aon reflection thank you we hear we certainly have heard a lot in recent years about the breakdown of the family and the erosion of family values how different is today's family and and is it imperal well there are obviously some big differences uh certainly the divorce rate is higher than it's ever been although divorce has been building steadily it didn't come just as a surprise the America has had the highest divorce rate in the world since 188 89 um on the other hand despite the high divorce rate a couple that marries today has a better chance of celebrating their 40th anniversary than any any other time in American history because of the uh fall and mortality rates Blended families most people think of them as new but again because of death rates Blended families of the 9s would look far more familiar to Colonial Americans than the 1950s families would I think as a historian I find what's most difficult about talk about the family is that make people make these sweeping generalizations about it's oh it's getting better or it's getting worse and they don't think about the tradeoffs and that prevents us from having a really good discussion of what things have been gains and what things have been losses why do you think there's been so much concern so much attention on the on the basic health of the family well I think it's uh obviously a very important institution and that that is the place where we feel and experience social crisis in the most personal form Whenever there are big changes in our economic social and political institutions and as we've seen there has been a breakdown of commitments and obligations and traditional ways of reproducing ourselves we feel it in the family we experience it as a family crisis then it's very tempting for politicians and economic Elites to take off on that and say well if only you would organize your families differently if only you would live like those 1950s sitcoms we wouldn't have any economic and political crisis and that's where the Nostalgia turns into a real uh trap and a real way of beating up on people is the concern about the family in and of itself anything new or or have there always been periods where there's been concern about the family and it's it's possible breakdown well no in that sense it's not new the Colonial Americans the first generation that got here was talking about the collapse of the family and how the new generation coming up was destroying things but I think that it always intensifies when there are big changes in the economic and political and social system you had one of those periods back in the switch to wage labor and then another big one back at the end of the 19th century as America became an urban society and the same kind of pattern prevailed then people said oh there's a crisis of the family if immigrants would just organize their families different we wouldn't have poverty in the cities if women would just stop uh pursuing selfish individualism and therefore they criminalized abortion which had not previously been criminal we would have no problem at all and then I think we had a similar impact in the 1980s as the end of the post-war Prosperity came the there was the tremendous changes in economic uh Trends and real wages for workers for political Trends and people again said all right this must be a family crisis and so there was a redoubling of attention to the family so the family really is a reflection of the culture culture and what's going on in the culture at large that's right that absolutely you can't have shared commitment and obligations in a family if you don't in a community at large now in your book you write that when you teach classes one of the things that you like to do early on is to have students write down a list of images that come to their minds when they hear the phrase traditional family what are the things that come back to you most often well it seems to be kind of a combination of uh Nick at night reruns the IM of the great families that always had those discussions right after and the wonderful um family dinners they used to have with everybody calm and the parents dispensing wise advice and then there's a little piece of the Walton throwing in uh from the 30s you know the idea of oh there's also a grandparent around we used to have extended families then there's a little piece from Little Women stories you know about uh when childhood was protected and if the people are conservative they also throw a little bit about colonial days when supposedly a man's home was his castle and they all get mushed together into this strange image do you then ask them how much those images resemble their own families their own lives oh yes when they start researching their own family lives it's just amazing how many will begin to reinterpret even things that they had uh taken for granted they'll find illegitimate children in their past alcoholism abuse or they'll find that they had they used to think they had perfect families and it turns out that the things that really worked for them were rather non-traditional that that it was an aunt or a teacher or somebody else who played a very important role for them is it trouble students when they see that contrast between sort of the Hallmark card version of families and family life as it really is for most of them it relieves them for most of them it takes them off the hook but they thought well we're the only ones yes because most of them would grow up simultaneously fantasizing that things had been really good and they'd had all of these traditions and afraid that they were different that they whenever they violated the Traditions they were the only ones doing so you know I think the the primary reaction to watching those TV reruns is is a sense either of guilt for not living up to yourself or anger at your parents why why didn't we live exactly that way as you mentioned so many of these Imes of the ideal family you know Mom and Pop and the kids and everything being wonderful came out of the 50s and particularly out of the the sitcoms that that people watch why are those images so powerful why does that decade Stand Out above all the rest well it's ironic that it stands out because it was the most untraditional decade in America's history for the first time in a hundred years the divorce rate fell the age of um marriage fell the fertility rate increased women's degree of educational equality with men began to diverge even though it had been converging for the last 100 years so it's very ironic that we experience this as as typical and traditional but I think one of the reasons that the images are so powerful is precisely because they were models they were fantasies at the time they were not reality it was a new idea that the family should be the center of your emotion and that the nuclear family could be everything to you and that women could play this perfect role of being sexy wives and at the same time giving mothers which is one reason they invented tranquilizers in the 50s by the way but the point is that all of these sitcoms laid this out as a model precisely because it was a new idea they said hot this is what you should aim for this is what you should live up for look how beautiful it would be if you did that and so the images are very powerful because they weren't even trying to represent a reality so from a distance we look back at them and we say oh gee that must have been reality how nice it would have been well as as you say I think what Leave it to Beaver is not a documentary and it it seems like it's the coupling of this new philosophy about the family this philosophy that emerged in the 50s coupled with this brand new medium that everyone was watching for the first time so so the fact that television became common during that decade must have served as a tremendous potent Force for driving this philosophy into individual homes yes yes the images were very very very powerful because they were new they were combined with the fact that we' just gone through the depression in World War II with very very stressful economic situations family situations people were great separation yes and um violence and doubling up and a high very high divorce rates and U there was a sense that yes this would be exactly what we want that made it very powerful and it was reinforced I think in our own minds when we look back we misinterpret some of the gains of the 50s first of all because we homogenize and we we think that the white middle class experience was typical and secondly because there were things going on that were better than today for example real wages were Rising government subsidies to young families were much much more generous than they are you said in the book we couldn't afford to go back to the 50s no no it's really interesting when people want to go back to the 1950s what they mean is that women should go back to accepting a second class citizenship but they generally have no intention of implementing the kinds of government subsidies to young families and family housing that were also an important part of the package deal that was the 1950s family in reality as you mentioned the the image of the family that we've talked about so far really Deals Only with with the white middle class and and an idealized version of the white middle class at that but you devote an entire chapter of your book to black families and even though those families didn't have those images on television that doesn't mean that great many myths didn't grow up about those families as well yes well first of all uh anybody who watches the television is going to absorb some of those so I'm sure that there are myths in all sectors of the population but perhaps the worst and most destructive thing is that these images of the 1950s families then laid out as normal what was a very much a very class specific and race specific experience and allowed people then as we saw after the Los anges riots just recently to look around at African-Americans or mexican-americans and say well if you would only live like these 1950s family images then you wouldn't have poverty you wouldn't have any of these kinds of problems and that is such a lie and it's so racist that we end up with images of for example the Black cocaine users when in fact your typical crack addict is a white middleclass man in his 40s this is something you can't get from our Contemporary Images and it's part that racism that we find everywhere in discussions about the black family is a very important um consequence of the way that we use these 50s images to beat up on everybody you also mentioned you talk about in that same chapter about the birth rate because there is this predominant image of young black women having an enormous number of of children and that that isn't true either right contrary to what we tend to think of the birth Rats of unmarried black women have actually Fallen since 1970 but because birth rates to married coupled black families have fallen so much faster it turns out that a higher proportion of black children who are being born are being born into single parent families well when you put the two together that then creates a question of well what's happening why are the birth rates to two parent uh families falling so rapidly and when we ask questions it turns out that this isn't just a free choice that they're having fewer children that they would like to have because of the economic crisis of employment facing the black community and that's a slightly different one than the moralism that you got during this last summer you mentioned the economics in in the black community which we've been sort of speaking about as if it's some kind of Monolithic entity how does the fact that that particularly in the last decade or so an enormous Gap has appeared in income in the black community how has that affected the families on on either side of that economic spectrum well that's really important to understand there's a polarization that's occurred in the black community with um college educated uh and professional African-Americans act making some very important gains but at the same time high school educated um black Americans or High School dropouts who used to in the 19 1950s uh and and 60s and particularly in the much maligned 60s had a had a window of opportunity open up to to them through the development of union jobs and job training programs that allowed them to get ahead all of those things are gone now you have declining real wages and the younger sector of the population has been hurt most and so that sector of the population of the black population has been throwing into a kind of poverty and an extensive long-term kind of poverty that is unprecedented it's important to remember though that this is also happening to white Americans it's just a matter of degrees exactly but as you said earlier when economic times are rough that's when the pressure is most intense on families so for African-Americans who are lowincome families the stress then presumably is greater on them oh it's trem it's it's just absolutely unbelievable we're talking about cities that are like permanent monuments to to Hurricane Andrew with where where the not only are the jobs gone not only is there poverty but it's unprecedented the extent to which that poverty coexists with an absolutely devastated social and economic environment there are no job networks there at all there's no Transportation Systems there are no social services except the ones that make things worse because of the not in my backyard movements they can put the uh drug treatment centers in these same neighborhoods the result is absolute devastation and as you implied earlier by your other question it also hurts um middle class African-American amilies because the images that people get about the black family are the images of this extraordinary poverty so how do the myths that we have about families what's the linkage between life as it really is for the families that we've described and public policy where do the mythologies play into that how do they help shape or form our public policy about families well I think that the mythology is uh very important and has been used as a real political battering ram in the last few years I think that this family mythology is the new Social Darwinism of the 1990s in the late 19th century we had the individual social Darwinism that said if you're poor it's because of a failure of individual character in the 80s they developed this new idea and we saw it played out very very clearly during the election campaign and after the Los Angeles riots that if you that that family structure is the main cause of poverty race class unemployment somehow these have all become unimportant and if people would just get married and not have babies until both are working then we wouldn't have and incidentally I'm quoting a well-known Economist in saying that if people would just not get married until they both had a job and not have babies until they both had a job we would have no poverty problem in America well tell that to the 74,000 workers that GM is announced it's going to lay off that's nonsense the main causes of poverty and un are unemploy employment our job restructuring our the export of jobs and our racial imbalances but in fact this new mythology of the family says no it's all a question of family and if you have a bad family that's the cause of poverty and also there's this hopelessness attached like all of the talk about crack babies I think the political impact of it is to let the politicians off the hook to say well of course we can't do anything about them this is a throwaway generation they've ruin themselves and uh we don't bear any responsibility you mentioned generations and let's let's look at this institution of the family again through that particular prism not necessarily just going back to the start of the century and comparing it to now but let's look at Generation by generation and how that has shaped the family let's take um let's take the baby boom generation as an example well there are two baby boom Generations uh one is the initial one that were the activists uh a lot of them provided the activists during the Civil Rights and anti-war movement and the women's movement they also were a more affluent sector of the of the population these are the people who began to initiate a lot of the new sexual mores uh new political mores critiques of old consumerism and of the double standard um they were they are frequently blamed for having initiated absolutely you know the kind of sexuality that you see on television today with shows like studs and stuff like that but in fact a lot of their values were opposed to this kind of uh sexual exploitation so are they have do they have different kinds of families um I think all families are particularly affected it's the second wave of the Baby Boomers however the ones who have not had the chance to have the kind of jobs that they expected and to make the use of their education that ta end the ones at the tail end who've had the the worst trouble I think because what they've done is they've experienced some of the gains and freedoms that were real freedoms and gains in comparison to the repressiveness of family relations and gender roles in the 50s and early 60s and we tend to forget just how repressive those roles were they've experienced some of those gains in the context of an economic situation that turns a lot of those gains into much more double-edged sword the right to work becomes now a necessity to work and for many of these it's a very confusing uh disorienting uh conjuncture of events and Trends I'm interested in looking at all of the different parties in in families of really of various types women men and children and how our mythologies about the families have affected each of those parties yes well one really important thing to understand is that our old mythology about the family really all the generalizations we made from the point of view of the male household head so that when people say oh you know once the family was more stable at what cost people who idealize our past for example seem to forget that in anglo-american law right up into the 19th century a man could beat his wife uh until she was senseless so long as he didn't use a stick broader than his thumb that's where our expression rule of thumb comes from children we had no we had societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals before we had any protection for children in families we considered it part of family autonomy to let a parent do whatever they wanted to a child so in the 20th century we've seen a restriction of some of the older rights of male household heads but on the other hand an expansion of some of the rights or refugees at least of women and children there have been trade-offs this way but of course the other side of it is you can't even generalize about this being a loss for men because many men have found that the removal of the old stereotypes has allowed them to explore nurturing aspects of their personality that they never were able to do before sounds like from from that description that you've just given that everybody's actually better off no I wouldn't say that's true uh I think there has been a polarization in many ways there are more we always talk about deadbeat dads there are more fathers running out on child support than than there were 20 years ago on the other hand there was also more fathers spending more time with their kids than there were years and there's also child support until the 1920s a man didn't even have a child support obligation so there have been gains and there have been losses and the most important thing is that there are totally new challenges take for example the Aging of our population and you get all of these people saying oh the family is so selfish today they've abandoned their Elders that is not true families were never responsible for taking care of many elders and particularly they were never responsible because we didn't have the medical technology for taking care of Elders who lived a long time even though they are um handicapped in some way you know um stroke victims or Alzheimer's Etc and the result is a tremendous new burden on families and it's cruel and vicious policy to talk about how families are abandoning their elderly instead of talking about how do we adjust social programs to help families deal with this new challenge one of the things you do in your book is it is you go into very uh specific examples and you look at the origins of of different phrases or or even the meaning of holidays and one of the the really interesting stories in this book has to do with Mother's Day and how filtering through history uh this holiday has just really been turned on its head from what it was intended to be yes uh and it's not it's not I I would like to talk about it but it's important important to say that this is very typical of holidays we tend to look back at the past and think oh you know those days families were closer nonsense right up until the 1920s the most important and emotionally charged holiday in America was the 4th of July which was a Civic holiday Thanksgiving was very low on the list Christmas was a time for partying it was not a time for the family to have all of these expectations you know that caused so much stress in modern families when you get together and we're supposed to be so happy Mother's day is wonderful because the first proposals for Mother's Day came out of the peace activists and social activists of the 19th century they were Mother's Day s apostrophe day plural what mothers should do to mobilize against war or to help the community and it was only in the late 19th century and early 20th century that that began to shift to a celebration of mother in her private role and as soon as it was adopted in 1914 as a mother their apostrophe s day its privatized nature and its rejection of its old political and social origins in a woman's movement meant that it was totally vulnerable to manipulation by the advertising industry and in fact the woman who had spent her life getting Mother's Day accepted found out within a year that it was being so misused that she spent the rest of her life trying to get it uh changed and non-commercialized and that was a much tougher deal she ended up in an insane asylum this is Anna Jarvis who was the daughter of the woman who actually was credited with starting Mother's Day it's really it's really quite a story and it's interesting because here is this holiday that is an outward turning to the community and to the world and a woman's role in those larger venues and now Mother's Day it's turned inward oh yes the cards you know you walk down the hall this sticky sweet cotton candy sentiment and it's all in wom's private role uh and it totally ignores women's social networks and political activism that inspired the day it's very ironic we've been talking about the American family are American families I'm somehow different than than families around the world do other countries not have the same kind of Mythology that we do well not entirely but America's unique in one way we tend to have uh a more sentimentalization of family life and less actual policies to Aid families than any of in other industrial democracies businessmen and politicians from other countries will often tell you in private or in their own to their own people they'll talk about how Americans just go on and on about mother capital M and the the family capital T capital F and yet of course we're the only industrial democracy to lack parental leave policies to lack uh home visitor program for newborn care we have the highest gap between we have uh between rich and poor families than anywhere else in the industrial world so a lot of this rhetoric exists at this tremendously abstract way another big difference is that we tend to again to substitute family mythology for discussing social and economic structural problems during the Depression even um people blamed unemployment in America on their lack of Manliness whereas in Europe they blamed it on lack of jobs we only have about a minute left and I I wanted to ask you from having put together this this immensely detailed uh look at American families if you have any sense of of the future directions families are likely to take well diversity is here to stay we can either go ahead and beat up on people for uh refusing to go along with with our myth or we can start adjusting our school schedules our work policies and our emotional expectations of family life to the reality of American diversity and and I do see Grounds for Hope I find that the American people are far in advance of the politicians on this as we saw by the rejection of the moralizing of the last campaign and that families uh they're going to continue to take different forms and and look in different ways then if if your idea the family is somehow stuck in the 50s sitcoms look you're in for a big surprise that's right they're going to get more diverse whether they're going to get the support systems they need is an open question and it's essentially up to us Stephanie CS I want to thank you so much for joining us on upon reflection to talk about your book the way we never were American families and the Nostalgia trap thank you thank you to see more WTV Classics visit wv.org classics