The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap

358 Pages·1993·3.475 MB·English

by  Stephanie Coontz

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THE WAY WE NEVER WERE
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The Way
We Never
Were
American Families and the
Nostalgia Trap
STEPHANIE COONTZ
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Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction to 2000 Edition
The Way We Wish We Were: Defining the Family Crisis
2
"Leave It to Beaver" and "Ozzie and Harriet": American Families in the 1950s
3
"My Mother Was a Saint": Individualism, Gender Myths, and the Problem of
Love
4
We Always Stood on Our Own Two Feet: Self-reliance and the American Family
5
Strong Families, the Foundation of a Virtuous Society: Family Values and Civic
Responsibility
A Man's Home Is His Castle: The Family and Outside Intervention
Bra-Burners and Family Bashers: Feminism, Working Women, Consumerism,
and the Family
"First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage, Then Comes Mary with a Baby
Carriage": Marriage, Sex, and Reproduction
Toxic Parents, Supermoms, and Absent Fathers: Putting Parenting in
Perspective
I0
Pregnant Girls, Wilding Boys. Crack Babies, and the Underclass: The Myth of
Black Family Collapse
The Crisis Reconsidered
Epilogue Inventing a New Tradition
Notes
Select Bibliography
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Index
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Preface
HIS book began as a conventional chronological account of American family
life from 1900 to 1990, a sequel to my previous book, The Social Origins of
Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600-1900. Since publication of
that book, I have received numerous speaking requests from nonacademic
audiences-hospital ethics committees concerned about how to define families,
psychologists' and social workers' associations, church groups, Rotary clubs,
and labor organizations. In each case, people were seeking a way to assess
the conflicting messages they were receiving (and often feeling) about the
changing forms and functions of American families. Gradually, I began to see
that one contribution I could make to their debates was to place the urgent
concerns I heard at these meetings in some sort of historical perspective.
At first, I unconsciously tried to incorporate this project into my original
outline. The result was a mess-detailed historical chronologies interspersed
with occasional comments on the applicability of some past event to modern
family dilemmas. Susan Armitage, director of American Studies at Washington
State University, first suggested that the prospectus for a sequel to my
previous work now contained within it quite a different book on various myths
about past family life. Simultaneously, a number of op-ed editors at various
newspapers challenged me to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of
family history in more accessible form. Accordingly, I reorganized the book to
highlight particular myths and stereotypes, especially those most directly
applicable to current debates about family life and gender roles.
I received help in recasting my topic from many sources. My editor at Basic
Books, Steve Fraser, provided incisive comments to keep my writing focused.
A dedicated group of colleagues and friends from many disciplines and
occupations met regularly to help me decide how to organize my discussion: I
would like to thank Priscilla Bowerman, Peta Henderson, Jeanne Hahn,
Charles Pailthorp, Larry Mosqueda, Jim Ascher, Suzette McCann, and
Kathleen O'Shaunessy for their extraordinary commitment of time and energy.
I also received helpful advice and criticism from Nancy Hartsock, Steven
Rose, Susan Strasser, Russell Lidman, David Marr, Nancy Holm- strom, York
Wong, Alan Nasser, Jill Severn, Leo and Sherry Frumkin, Ted Brackman,
Gonzalo Munevar, Brian Price, Greg Weeks, Sarah Williams, and Charlotte
Raynor.
My research assistant, Paul Ortiz, worked for starvation wages tracking
down books and articles, checking footnotes, collecting data, and giving me
the benefit of his critical reading of each chapter. Paul Schipper helped me
complete many notes in the copyediting stage, as did several of the library
staff at the University of Hawaii in Hilo, where I was on exchange at the time.
Michael Simmons and John Finnan extricated me from numerous computer
crises. I received generous help from successive secretarial teams: Adelle
Smith, Peggy Davenport, Cindy Fry, Lupe Valadez, and Mary Hansen, and
especially Pam Udovich, who typed and printed my final revisions. The
Evergreen State College kindly provided me with a sponsored research grant
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as well as allowed me an unpaid leave to complete the book, and its library
staff were unstinting in their help.
Finally, I would like to thank my family-nuclear, extended, blended, and
fictive-who have never confused being "untraditional" with being
uncommitted and who have supported me in many ways during the writing of
this book. I am especially grateful to my son, Kristopher, for his patience,
good cheer, and common sense.
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Acknowledgments
In addition to the individuals listed in my original preface, I would like to
thank the following for their contribution to this introduction: for their skill in
tracking down sources, often at short notice, Randy Stilson, Ernestine Kimbo,
Sarah Pederson, and Sara Rideout of The Evergreen State College Library;
Kevin Roddy, Susan Maesato, Thora Abarca, and Helen Rogers of the
University of Hawaii at Hilo Library, and research assistants Jacyn Piper and
Charlene Cole; for assistance way above and beyond the call of duty, my
secretary Julie Douglass; for their astute comments and suggestions, my
current editor Jo Ann Miller, my agent Susan Rabiner, and my husband Will
Reissner; and, as always, my son, Kris.
S. C.
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Introduction to the 2000 Edition
In 1992, during the presidential election campaigns of George Bush and Bill
Clinton, then Vice President Dan Quayle made headlines across the country
by denouncing a fictional television character, Murphy Brown, for having a
child out of wedlock. This book came out that same year, right in the middle
of the ensuing debate over changing family values and structures. Although I
could not have anticipated Quayle's now famous Murphy Brown speech, I
wrote the book because for several years, discussion about America's
changing families had been growing increasingly heated. As a family
historian, I was concerned that the polemics, on all sides, were based on
misconceptions about the past.
My hope was that by exposing many "memories" of traditional family life as
myths, I could help point the discussion of family change and family policy in
a more constructive direction. I wanted to show that families have always
been in flux, and often in crisis. Knowing that there was no golden age of
family life, I believed, would enable people to deal more effectively with the
problems facing today's families than if they continued to romanticize the
"good old days."
In the original introduction, for example, I pointed out that "traditional"
two-parent families had never guaranteed women and children protection
from economic deprivation or physical abuse. Budget studies and medical
records reveal that many families of the past had two standards of living, with
male household heads spending money on beer or recreation while women
and children went without needed food and medical care. Modem statistics on
child support evasion are certainly disturbing, but prior to the 1920s, a
divorced father didn't even have a legal child-support obligation to evade.
Until that time, children were considered assets of the family head, and his
duty to support them ended if he wasn't in the home to receive the wages
they could earn. Wife beating was routinely tolerated by police and social
service agencies well into the second half of the twentieth century, and
spousal rape was legal in most states right through the 1970s.'
Similarly, drug abuse was more widespread at the end of the 1890s than at
the end of the 1990s, and the rate of alcohol consumption was almost three
times higher in the early nineteenth century than it is currently. Prostitution
and serious sexually transmitted diseases were also more prevalent in
America one hundred years ago than they are today'
In many ways, the response to my book exceeded my expectations. I
received hundreds of speaking invitations from groups who wanted to know
more about what had and had not changed in American family life. Employed
mothers and stay-at-home mothers, as well as single parents of each sex,
wrote to me about the stresses and stigmas they faced. I presented my
findings to the House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families,
debated Pat Buchanan on Crossfire, and appeared on the "Oprah" and "Leeza"
television talk shows. Most important, I got in touch with many other
researchers, policymakers, and concerned citizens whose interests lay not in
romanticizing the past but in working with today's families, in all their
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