Families Without Fatherhood - Softcover

Dennis, Norman; Erdos, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0255363516 ISBN 13: 9780255363518

Publisher: Civitas:Institute for the Study of Civil Society, 1993

Synopsis

The authors argue that the traditional family system developed to equip children for their own eventual adult responsibilities, but they present evidence that since the 1960s there has been a weakening of these norms with damaging consequences.

About this title

About the Author:

Norman Dennis, who was Reader in Social Studies at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, has been a Rockefeller Fellow, Ford Fellow, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, California, Leverhulme Fellow, and Visiting Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. With Professor A.H. Halsey he is author of English Ethical Socialism, Clarendon Press, 1988. The Institute for the Study of Civil Society published Rising Crime and the Dismembered Family, 1993 and The Invention of Permanent Poverty, 1997. He edited and with Detective Superintendent Ray Mallon contributed two chapters to Zero Tolerance: Policing a Free Society, 1997 and contributed 'Beautiful Theories, Brutal Facts: the welfare state and sexual liberation' to Welfare, Work and Poverty, 2000, edited by David Smith. He is also well known for his study of a Yorkshire coal-mining town, Coal Is Our Life (with Cliff Slaughter and Fernando Henriques), Eyre and Spottiswood, 1956, and two studies of bureaucracy and politics as they affected the working-class district of his birth, Millfield, Sunderland, People and Planning, Faber and Faber, 1970, and Public Participation and Planners' Blight, Faber and Faber, 1972. He has been a Sunderland city councillor, and is active in his local Labour party. He is currently studying the struggle between the bureaucratic, political, academic and media advocates of family, drug and educational permissiveness in Z|rich and one of their most important opponents, a Z|rich citizen's organization called the VPM. He lives in Sunderland. He is married, with two children and three grandchildren.

Dr George Erdos was born in 1946 in Hungary, and spent his formative years there. He left in 1964. He finished his secondary education in Germany. He then studied psychology at the universities of Frankfurt, New Hampshire, Bar-Ilan, Mainz and Cambridge. He settled in England and is currently lecturer in psychology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He experienced communism directly, and through his German relatives he experienced fascism indirectly. He saw that in times of growing crime and disorder people can be brought to abandon their civil liberties for the sake of security. From 1985 he worked on the Educational Opportunities programme run by Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Its basis was that, in the course of studying for and by obtaining a university degree, the African-American male would assimilate his conduct to that of the white middle-class male and be enabled to enjoy success in American terms. Although the programme was targeted at African-American men, it was actually utilised with enthusiasm by the African-American women participants. Changes taking place at that time in the culture and conduct of white middle-class men stimulated Dr Erdos' interest in the role of the male in English and American society. Dr Erdos is an adherent of ethical socialism, in the sense given the term in English Ethical Socialism. He is married with three children.

A.H. Halsey is Emeritus Professor, University of Oxford; and Emeritus Fellow of Nuffield College. He is the author of numerous books on sociology and social policy, including Origins and Destinations: Family, Class, and Education in Modern Britain, with A.F. Heath and J.M. Ridge, 1980; Change in British Society, 3rd edition, 1986; and English Ethical Socialism, with Norman Dennis, 1988. He edited, with Jerome Karabel, Power and Ideology in Education, 1977.

Peter Saunders is professor of sociology at the University of Sussex, but is currently on a two-year secondment as research manager at the Australian Institute of Family Studies in Melbourne. He has published ten books in the areas of urban sociology, social inequality and social policy, and has held visiting academic positions in the USA, Germany and New Zealand as well as Australia. Recently he has been working on youth welfare dependency and on issues surrounding the reform of the Australian welfare state.

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Preface to the 1993 Edition

In 1990 the Health and Welfare Unit of the Institute of Economic Affairs decided to look at two related issues: first, the changes taking place in family life and, secondly, the growth in criminality among young English men. 'Consensus conferences' were held, to which academics, religious leaders and others from both this country and the United States were invited, with the intention of finding out, if possible, whether there were facts and ethical judgements on these subjects which currently constituted areas of general agreement. Frank and Duffel Powell in Pensacola must be picked out for providing valuable insights at an early stage.

What impressed us in the course of 1990 and 1991 was the strength and extent of the opinion that changes in family life had been significantly detrimental neither to children nor to the general fabric of civil society. So far as the effects on children's well-being was concerned, the utmost concession was as pompous as it was evasive, adhuc sub judice lis est-'the jury is still out'. But even when that concession was made, it was assumed that it was not the alternative family that was awaiting the verdict. The State was in the dock. If the jury did find that the children were suffering, the guilt would lie with the State (that is, with one's fellow-citizens) for failing to provide the newly expanded numbers of fatherless families, created by whatsoever circumstances of preferred life-style or cruel fate, with adequate income and social services. Opposition to these views seemed strangely rare and muted.

We have also been struck by the unexpected slowness of those who had been advocates of the view that 'the family was not deteriorating only changing' to muster any coherent answer to the arguments of Families Without Fatherhood, though some critics have demonstrated that they have mastered the less demanding skills of personal abuse. There is a legend about the great Northern saint, St. Cuthbert, to which we have on one or two occasions alluded because of this. It was said that his body had remained unaffected by death for centuries as it was moved from place to place by pious monks, and for centuries more after it came to rest in Durham Cathedral. When inquisitive minds and prying hands led to the tomb being eventually opened, nothing was to be seen but a handful of dust. To the faithful, that was the predictable consequence of impiety: the saint's earthly body in all its original integrity and beauty had decomposed at the moment of the tomb's opening. People of a more sceptical frame of mind said that there was only dust to be discovered; and it was to be discovered by anybody at all who cared to take the trouble to look.

'Pink McCarthyism' currently inflicts severer penalties on the politically incorrect in the United States than it does here. But there, too, the tide of opinion seems to be on the turn. In April 1993 a leading journal of the liberal-left, The Atlantic Monthly, published a much-discussed and well-received article with a title which only a short time before would have been astonishingly provocative: 'Dan Quayle Was Right'. Its publication not only broke the media taboo on raising the question of whether one sexual and domestic life-style was better than another: in her article Barbara Whitehead argued that it was now established beyond doubt that the family with two publicly and successfully committed natural parents was superior to so-called alternative families. The social science evidence is in: though it may benefit the adults involved, the dissolution of intact two-parent families is harmful to large numbers of children. Moreover ... family diversity in the form of increasing numbers of single-parent and step-parent families does not strengthen the social fabric but, rather, dramatically weakens and undermines society.

We have taken the opportunity afforded by the need again to reprint Families Without Fatherhood to bring the statistics up to date and to consider other material published since September 1992. David Robinson at the library of the University of Northumbria has been his usual extraordinarily well-informed and helpful self.

About this edition

• Publisher: Civitas:Institute for the Study of Civil Society
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0255363516
• ISBN 13: 9780255363518
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 148