Life in America today bears little resemblance to that of 40 or 50 years ago. AIDS, crack, homelessness, latchkey children and surrogate mothers are all indicators that the pace of change has outstripped the ability of our institutions to adapt. In "America at Century's End" the contributors have written essays tracing the feel and pulse of American life. The result is a candid snapshot of America approaching the 21st century.
America at Century's End
By Alan WolfeUniversity of California Press
Copyright © 1992 Alan Wolfe
All right reserved.ISBN: 9780520074774One
Backward toward the Postmodern Family:
Reflections on Gender, Kinship, and Class in the Silicon Valley Judith Stacey
The extended family is in our lives again. This should make all the people happy who were complaining back in the sixties and seventies that the reason family life was so hard, especially on mothers, was that the nuclear family had replaced the extended family. . . . Your basic extended family today includes your ex-husband or -wife, your ex's new mate, your new mate, possibly your new mate's ex, and any new mate that your new mate's ex has acquired. It consists entirely of people who are not related by blood, many of whom can't stand each other. This return of the extended family reminds me of the favorite saying of my friend's extremely pessimistic mother: Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.
DELIA EPHRON , Funny Sauce
In the summer of 1986 I attended a wedding ceremony in a small pentecostal church in the Silicon Valley. The service celebrated the same "traditional" family patterns and values that two years earlier had inspired a "profamily" movement to assist Ronald Reagan's landslide reelection to the presidency of the United States. At the same time, however, the pastor's rhetoric displayed substantial sympathy with feminist criticisms of patriarchal marriage. "A ring is not a shackle, and marriage is not a relationship of domination," he instructed the groom. Moreover, complex patterns of divorce, remarriage, and stepkinship linked the members of the wedding party and their guestspatterns that resembled the New Age extended family satirized by Delia Ephron far more than the "traditional" family that arouses the nostalgic fantasies so widespread among religious and other social critics of contemporary family practices.
This chapter summarizes and excerpts from my ethnographic book Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth-Century America (New York: Basic Books, 1990). For constructive responses to an earlier draft, I am grateful to Alan Wolfe, Aihwa Ong, Ruth Rosen, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Naomi Schneider.
In the final decades before the twenty-first century, passionate contests over changing family life in the United States have polarized vast numbers of citizens. Outside the Supreme Court of the United States, righteous, placard-carrying Right-to-Lifers square off against feminists and civil libertarians demonstrating their anguish over the steady dismantling of women's reproductive freedom. On the same day in July 1989, New York's highest court expanded the legal definition of "family" in order to extend rent control protection to gay couples and a coalition of conservative clergymen in San Francisco blocked implementation of their city's new "domestic partners" ordinance. "It is the totality of the relationship," proclaimed the New York judge, "as evidenced by the dedication, caring, and self-sacrifice of the parties which should, in the final analysis, control," the definition of family.1 But just this concept of family is anathema to "profamily" activists. Declaring that the attempt by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to grant legal status to unmarried heterosexual and homosexual couples "arbitrarily redefined the time-honored and hallowed nature of the family," the clergymen's petition was signed by sufficient citizens to force the ordinance into a referendum battle.2 When the reckoning came in November 1989, the electorate of the city many consider to be the national capital of family change had narrowly defeated the domestic partners law. One year later, a similar referendum won a narrow victory.
Betraying a good deal of conceptual and historical confusion, most popular, as well as many scholarly, assessments of family change anxiously and misguidedly debate whether or not "the family" will survive the twentieth century at all.3 Anxieties like these are far from new. "For at least 150 years," historian Linda Gordon writes, "there have been periods of fear that 'the family'meaning a popular image of what families were supposed to be like, by no means a correct recollection of any actual 'traditional' familywas in decline; and these fears have tended to escalate in periods of social stress."4 The actual subject of this recurring, fretful discourse is a historically specific form and concept of family life, one that most historians identify as the "modern family." No doubt, many of us who write and teach about American family life have not abetted public understanding of family change with our counter-intuitive use of the concept of the modern family. The "modern family" of sociological theory and historical convention designates a family form no longer prevalent in the United Statesan intact nuclear household unit composed of a male breadwinner, his full-time homemaker wife, and their dependent childrenprecisely the form of family life that many mistake for an ancient, essential, and now endangered institution.
The past three decades of postindustrial social transformations in the United States have rung the historic curtain on the "modern family"
regime. In 1950 three-fifths of American households contained male breadwinners and full-time female homemakers, whether children were present or not.5 By 1986, in contrast, more than three-fifths of married women with children under the age of eighteen were in the labor force, and only 7 percent of households conformed to the "modern" pattern of breadwinning father, homemaking mother, and one to four children under the age of eighteen.6 By the middle of the 1970s, moreover, divorce outstripped death as the source of marital dissolutions, generating in its wake a complex array of family arrangements caricatured by Delia Ephron in the epigraph.7 The diversity of contemporary gender and kinship relationships undermines Tolstoy's famous contrast between happy and unhappy families: even happy families no longer are all alike!8 No longer is there a single culturally dominant family pattern, like the modern one, to which the majority of Americans conform and most of the rest aspire. Instead, Americans today have crafted a multiplicity of family and household arrangements that we inhabit uneasily and reconstitute frequently in response to changing personal and occupational circumstances.
Recombinant Family Life
We are living, I believe, through a tumultuous and contested period of family history, a period following that of the modern family order but preceding what, we cannot foretell. Precisely because it is not possible to characterize with a coherent descriptive term the competing sets of family cultures that coexist at present, I identify this family regime as postmodern. I do this, despite my reservations about employing such a controversial and elusive cultural concept, to signal the contested, ambivalent, and undecided character of contemporary gender and kinship arrangements. "What is the post-modern?" Clive Dilnot asks rhetorically in the title of a detailed discussion of literature on postmodern culture, and his answers apply readily to the domain of present family conditions in the United States.9 The postmodern, Dilnot maintains, "is first, an uncertainty, an insecurity, a doubt." Most of the "post-" words provoke uneasiness because they imply simultaneously "both the end, or at least the radical transformation of, a familiar pattern of activity or group of ideas," and the emergence of "new fields of cultural activity whose contours are still unclear and whose meanings and implications . . . cannot yet be fathomed." The postmodern, moreover, is "characterized by the process of the linking up of areas and the crossing of the boundaries of what are conventionally considered to be disparate realms of practice."10
Like postmodern culture, contemporary family arrangements in the United States are diverse, fluid, and unresolved. The "postmodern fam-
ily" is not a new model of family life equivalent to that of the "modern family"; it is not the next stage in an orderly progression of family history, but the stage in that history when the belief in a logical progression of stages breaks down.11 Rupturing the teleology of modernization narratives that depict an evolutionary history of the family, and incorporating both experimental and nostalgic elements, the postmodern family lurches forward and backward into an uncertain future.
Family Revolutions and Vanguard Classes
Two centuries ago leading white middle-class families in the newly united American states spearheaded a family revolution that gradually replaced the diversity and fluidity of the premodern domestic order with a more uniform and hegemonic modern family system.12 But "modern family" was an oxymoronic label for this peculiar institution, which dispensed modernity to white middle-class men only by withholding it from women. The former could enter the public sphere as breadwinners and citizens because their wives were confined to the newly privatized family realm. Ruled by an increasingly absent patriarchal landlord, the modern middle-class family, a woman's domain, soon was sentimentalized as "traditional."
It took most of the subsequent two centuries for substantial numbers of white working-class men to achieve the rudimentary economic passbook to "modern" family lifea male breadwinner family wage.13 By the time they had done so, however, a second family revolution was well underway. Once again, middle-class white families appeared to be in the vanguard. This time women like myself were claiming the benefits and burdens of modernity, a status we could achieve only at the expense of the "modern family" itself. Reviving a long-dormant feminist movement, frustrated middle-class homemakers and their more militant daughters subjected modern domesticity to a sustained critique, at times with little sensitivity to the effects that our anti-modern-family ideology might have on women for whom full-time domesticity had rarely been feasible. Thus, feminist family reform came to be regarded widely as a white middle-class agenda, and white working-class families were thought to be its most resistant adversaries.
I shared these presumptions before I conducted fieldwork among families in Santa Clara County, California. My work in the "Silicon Valley" radically altered my understanding of the class basis of the postmodern family revolution. Once a bucolic agribusiness orchard region, during the 1960s and 1970s this county became the global headquarters of the electronics industry, the world's vanguard postindustrial region. While economic restructuring commanded global attention, most outside observers overlooked concurrent gender and family changes that
preoccupied many residents. During the late 1970s, before the conservative shift in the national political climate made "feminism" seem a derogatory term, local public officials proudly described San Jose, the county seat, as a feminist capital. The city elected a feminist mayor and hosted the statewide convention of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1974. Santa Clara County soon became one of the few counties in the nation to elect a female majority to its board of supervisors. And in 1981, high levels of feminist activism made San Jose the site of the nation's first successful strike for a comparable worth standard of pay for city employees.14
During its postindustrial makeover, the Silicon Valley also became a vanguard region for family change, a region whose family and household data represented an exaggeration of national trends. For example, although the national divorce rate doubled after 1960, in Santa Clara County it nearly tripled; "nonfamily households" and single-parent households grew faster than in the nation, and abortion rates were one and one-half the national figures.15 The high casualty rate for marriages of workaholic engineers was dubbed "the silicon syndrome."16 Many residents shared an alarmist view of the fate of family life in their locale, captured in the opening lines of an article in a local university magazine: "There is an endangered species in Silicon Valley, one so precious that when it disappears Silicon Valley will die with it. This endangered species is the family. And sometimes it seems as if every institution in this valleypolitical, corporate, and socialis hellbent on driving it into extinction."17
The coincidence of epochal changes in occupational, gender, and family patterns make the Silicon Valley a propitious site for exploring ways in which "ordinary" working people have been remaking their families in the wake of postindustrial and feminist challenges. The Silicon Valley is by no means a typical or "representative" U.S. location, but precisely because national postindustrial work and family transformations were more condensed, rapid, and exaggerated there than elsewhere, they are easier to perceive. In contrast to the vanguard image of the Silicon Valley, most of the popular and scholarly literature about white working-class people portrays them as the most traditional groupindeed, as the last bastion of the modern family. Relatively privileged members of the white working class, especially, are widely regarded as the bulwark of the Reagan revolution and the constituency least sympathetic to feminism and family reforms. Those whose hold on the accoutrements of the American dream is so recent and tenuous, it is thought, have the strongest incentives to defend it.18
For nearly three years, therefore, between the summer of 1984 and the spring of 1987, I conducted a commuter fieldwork study of two
extended kin networks composed primarily of white working people who had resided in Santa Clara County throughout the period of its startling transformation. My research among them convinced me that white middle-class families are less the innovators than the propagandists and principal beneficiaries of contemporary family change. To illustrate the innovative and courageous character of family reconstitution among pink- and blue-collar people, I present radically condensed stories from my book-length ethnographic treatment of their lives.19
Remarking Family Life in the Silicon Valley
Two challenges to my class and gender prejudices provoked my turn to ethnographic research and my selection of the two kin groups who became its focus. Pamela Gama,* an administrator of social services for women at a Silicon Valley antipoverty agency when I met her in July of 1984, provided the first of these when she challenged my secular feminist preconceptions by "coming out" to me as a recent born-again Christian convert. Pamela was the forty-seven-year-old bride at the Christian wedding ceremony I attended two years later. There she exchanged Christian vows with her second husband, Albert Gama, a construction worker to whom she was already legally wed and with whom she had previously cohabited. Pamela's first marriage (in 1960 to Don Franklin, the father of her three children) lasted fifteen years, spanning the headiest days of Silicon Valley development and the period of Don's successful rise from telephone repairman to electronics packaging engineer.
In contrast, Dotty Lewison, my central contact in the second kin network I came to study, secured that status by challenging my class prejudices. The physical appearance and appurtenances of the worn and modest Lewison abode, Dotty's polyester attire and bawdy speech, her husband's heavily tattooed body, and the demographic and occupational details of her family's history that Dotty supplied satisfied all of my stereotypic notions of an authentic "working-class" family. But the history of feminist activism Dotty recounted proudly, as she unpacked a newly purchased Bible, demonstrated the serious limitations of my tacit understandings. When I met Dotty in October of 1984, she was the veteran of an intact and reformed marriage of thirty years duration to her disabled husband Lou, formerly an electronics maintenance mechanic and supervisor, and also, I would later learn, formerly a wife and child abuser.
Pamela, Dotty, and several of their friends whom I came to know during my study, were members of Betty Friedan's "feminine mystique"
I employ pseudonyms and change identifying details when describing participants in my study.
generation, but were not members of Friedan's social class. Unlike the more affluent members of Friedan's intended audience, Pam and Dotty were "beneficiaries" of the late, ephemeral achievement of a male family wage and home ownership won by privileged sectors of the working class. This was a pyrrhic victory, as it turned out, that had allowed this population a brief period of access to the modern family system just as it was decomposing. Pam and Dotty, like most white women of their generation, were young when they married in the 1950s and early 1960s. They entered their first marriages with conventional "Parsonsian" gender expectations about family and work "roles." For a significant period of time, they and their husbands conformed, as best they could, to the then culturally prescribed patterns of "instrumental" male breadwinners and "expressive" female homemakers. Assuming primary responsibility for rearing the children they had begun to bear immediately after marriage, Pam and Dotty supported their husbands' successful efforts to progress from working-class to middle- and upper-middle-class careers in the electronics industry. Their experiences with the modern family, however, were always more tenuous and less pure than were those of women to whom, and for whom, Betty Friedan spoke.
Insecurities and inadequacies of their husbands' earnings made itinerant labor force participation by Dotty and Pam necessary and resented by their husbands before feminism made female employment a badge of pride. Dotty alternated frequent childbearing with multiple forays into the labor force in a wide array of low-paying jobs. In fact, Dotty assembled semiconductors before her husband Lou entered the electronics industry, but she did not perceive or desire significant opportunities for her own occupational mobility at that point. Pamela's husband began his career ascent earlier than Dotty's, but Pamela still found his earnings insufficient and his spending habits too profligate to balance the household budget. To make ends meet in their beyond-their-means middleclass life-style without undermining her husband's pride, Pam shared child care and a clandestine housecleaning occupation with her African-American neighbor and friend, Lorraine. Thus Pam and Dotty managed not to suffer the full effects of the "problem without a name" until feminism had begun to name it, and in terms both women found compelling.
In the early 1970s, while their workaholic husbands were increasingly absent from their families, Pam and Dotty joined friends taking reentry courses in local community colleges. There they encountered feminism, and their lives and their modern families were never to be the same. Feminism provided an analysis and rhetoric for their discontent, and it helped each woman develop the self-esteem she needed to exit or reform her unhappy modern marriage. Both women left their husbands, became welfare mothers, and experimented with the single life. Pam ob-
tained a divorce, pursued a college degree, and developed a social service career. Dotty, with lesser educational credentials and employment options, took her husband back, but on her own terms, after his disabling heart attack (and after a lover left her). Disabled Lou ceased his physical abuse and performed most of the housework, while Dotty had control over her time, some of which she devoted to feminist activism in antibattering work.
By the time I met Pamela and Dotty a decade later, at a time when my own feminist-inspired joint household of the prior eight years was failing, national and local feminist ardor had cooled. Pam was then a recent convert to born-again Christianity, receiving Christian marriage counseling to buttress and enhance her second marriage to construction worker Al. Certainly this represented a retreat from feminist family ideology, but, as Pamela gradually taught me, and as Susan Gerard and I have elaborated elsewhere, it was a far less dramatic retreat than I at first imagined.20 Like other women active in the contemporary evangelical Christian revival, Pam was making creative use of its surprisingly flexible patriarchal ideology to reform her husband in her own image. She judged it "not so bad a deal" to cede Al nominal family headship in exchange for substantive improvements in his conjugal behavior. Indeed, few contemporary feminists would find fault with the Christian marital principles that Al identified to me as his goals: "I just hope that we can come closer together and be more honest with each other. Try to use God as a guideline. The goals are more openness, a closer relationship, be more loving both verbally and physically, have more concern for the other person's feelings." Nor did Pamela's conversion return her to a modern family pattern. Instead she collaborated with her first husband's live-in Jewish lover, Shirley Moskowitz, to build a remarkably harmonious and inclusive divorce-extended kin network whose constituent households swapped resources, labor, and lodgers in response to shifting family circumstances and needs.
Dotty Lewison was also no longer a political activist when we met in 1984. Instead she was supplementing Lou's disability pension with part-time paid work in a small insurance office and pursuing spiritual exploration more overtly postmodern in form than Pam's in a metaphysical Christian church. During the course of my fieldwork, however, an overwhelming series of tragedies claimed the lives of Dotty's husband and two of the Lewisons' five adult children. Dotty successfully contested her negligent son-in-law for custody of her four motherless grandchildren. Struggling to support them, she formed a matrilocal joint household with her only occupationally successful child, Kristina, an electronics drafter-designer and a single mother of one child. While Dotty and Pamela both had moved "part way back" from feminist fervor, at the
same time both had migrated ever further away from the (no-longer) modern family.
Between them, Pamela and Dotty had eight childrenfive daughters and three sonschildren of modern families disrupted by postindustrial developments and feminist challenges. All were in their twenties when I met them in 1984 and 1985, members of the quintessential postfeminist generation. Although all five daughters distanced themselves from feminist identity and ideology, all too had semiconsciously incorporated feminist principles into their gender and kin expectations and practices. They took for granted, and at times eschewed, the gains in women's work opportunities, sexual autonomy, and male participation in childrearing and domestic work for which feminists of their mothers' generation had struggled. Ignorant or disdainful of the political efforts feminists expended to secure such gains, they were instead preoccupied, coping with the expanded opportunities and burdens women now encounter. They came of age at a time when a successful woman was expected to combine marriage to a communicative, egalitarian man with motherhood and an engaging, rewarding career. All but one of these daughters of successful white working-class fathers absorbed these postfeminist expectations, the firstborns most fully. Yet none has found such a pattern attainable. Only Pam's younger daughter, Katie, the original source of the evangelical conversions in her own marriage and her mother's, explicitly rejected such a vision. At fourteen, Katie joined the Christian revival, where, I believe, she found an effective refuge from the disruptions of parental divorce and adolescent drug culture that threatened her more rebellious siblings. Ironically, however, Katie's total involvement in a pentecostal ministry led her to practice the most alternative family arrangement of all. Katie, with her husband and young children, has lived "in community" in various joint households (occasionally interracial households) whose accordion structures and shared childrearing, ministry labors, and expenses have enabled her to achieve an exceptional degree of sociospatial integration of her family, work, and spiritual life.
At the outset of my fieldwork, none of Pam's or Dotty's daughters inhabited a modern family. However, over the next few years, discouraging experiences with the work available to them led three to retreat from the world of paid work and to attempt a modified version of the modern family strategy their mothers had practiced earlier. All demanded, and two received, substantially greater male involvement in child care and domestic work than had their mothers (or mine) in the prefeminist past. Only one, however, had reasonable prospects of succeeding in her "modern" gender strategy, and these she secured through unacknowledged benefits feminism helped her to enjoy. Dotty's second daughter, Polly,
had left the Silicon Valley when the electronics company she worked for opened a branch in a state with lower labor and housing costs. Legalized abortion and liberalized sexual norms for women allowed Polly to experiment sexually and defer marriage and childbearing until she was able to negotiate a marriage whose domestic labor arrangements represented a distinct improvement over that of the prefeminist modern family.
I have less to say, and less confidence in what I do have to say, about postmodern family strategies among the men in Pam's and Dotty's kin groups. Despite my concerted efforts to study gender relationally by defining my study in gender-inclusive terms, the men in the families I studied remained comparatively marginal to my research. In part, this is an unavoidable outcome for any one individual who attempts to study gender in a gendered world. Being a woman inhibited my access to, and likely my empathy with, as full a range of the men's family experiences as that which I enjoyed among their female kin. Still, the relative marginality of men in my research is not due simply to methodological deficiencies. It also accurately reflects their more marginal participation in contemporary family life. Most of the men in Pam's and Dotty's networks narrated gender and kinship stories that were relatively inarticulate and undeveloped, I believe, because they had less experience, investment, and interest in the work of sustaining kin ties.21
While economic pressures have always encouraged expansionary kin work among working-class women, these have often weakened men's family ties. Men's muted family voices in my study whisper of a masculinity crisis among blue-collar men. As working-class men's access to breadwinner status recedes, so too does confidence in their masculinity.22 The decline of the family wage and the escalation of women's involvement in paid work seems to generate profound ambivalence about the eroding breadwinner ethic. Pam's and Dotty's male kin appeared uncertain as to whether a man who provides sole support to his family is a hero or a chump. Two of these men avoided domestic commitments entirely, while several embraced them wholeheartedly. Two vacillated between romantic engagements and the unencumbered single life. Too many of the men I met expressed their masculinity in antisocial, self-destructive, and violent forms.
Women strive, meanwhile, as they always have, to buttress and reform their male kin. Responding to the extraordinary diffusion of feminist ideology as well as to sheer overwork, working-class women, like middle-class women, have struggled to transfer some of their domestic burdens to men. My fieldwork leads me to believe that they have achieved more success in the daily trenches than much of the research on the "politics of housework" yet indicatesmore success, I suspect, than have most
middle-class women.23 While only a few of the women in my study expected or desired men to perform an equal share of housework and child care, none was willing to exempt men from domestic labor. Almost all of the men I observed or heard about routinely performed domestic tasks that my own blue-collar father and his friends never deigned to contemplate. Some did so with reluctance and resentment, but most did so willingly. Although the division of household labor remains profoundly inequitable, I am convinced that a major gender norm has shifted here.24
Farewell to Archie Bunker
If this chapter serves no other purpose, I hope it will shatter the image of the white working class as the last repository of old-fashioned "modern" American family life. The postmodern family arrangements I found among blue-collar people in the Silicon Valley are at least as diverse and innovative as those found within the middle class. Pundits of postmodern family arrangements, like Delia Ephron, satirize the hostility and competition of the contemporary divorce-extended family. But working women like Pamela and Dotty have found ways to transform divorce from a rupture into a kinship resource, and they are not unique. A recent study of middle-class divorced couples and their parents in the suburbs of San Francisco found one-third sustaining kinship ties with former spouses and their relatives.25 It seems likely that cooperative exfamilial relationships are even more prevalent among lower-income groups, where divorce rates are higher and where women have far greater experience with, and need for, sustaining cooperative kin ties.26
Certainly, the dismantling of welfare state protections and the re-privatizing policies of the Reagan-Bush era have given lower-income women renewed incentives to continue their traditions of active, expansionary kin work. The accordion households and kin ties crafted by Dotty Lewison, by Katie's Christian ministry, and by Pam and Shirley draw more on the "domestic network" traditions of poor, urban African-Americans described by Carole Stack and on the matrifocal strategies of poor and working-class whites than they do on family reform innovations by the white middle class.27 Ironically, sociologists are now identifying as a new middle-class "social problem," those "crowded," rather than empty, nests filled with "incompletely launched young adults," long familiar to the less privileged, like the Lewisons.28 Postindustrial conditions have reversed the supply-side, "trickle-down" trajectory of family change predicted by modernization theorists. The diversity and complexity of postmodern family patterns rivals that characteristic of premodern kinship forms.29
One glimpses the ironies of class and gender history here. For decades industrial unions struggled heroically for a socially recognized male breadwinner wage that would allow the working class to participate in the modern gender order. These struggles, however, contributed to the cheapening of female labor that helped gradually to undermine the modern family regime.30 Then escalating consumption standards, the expansion of mass collegiate coeducation, and the persistence of high divorce rates gave more and more women ample cause to invest a portion of their identities in the "instrumental" sphere of paid labor.31 Thus middle-class women began to abandon their confinement in the modern family just as working-class women were approaching its access ramps. The former did so, however, only after the wives of working-class men had pioneered the twentieth-century revolution in women's paid work. Entering employment in mid-life during the catastrophic 1930s, participating in defense industries in the 1940s, and raising their family incomes to middle-class standards by returning to the labor force soon after childrearing in the 1950s, wives of working-class men quietly modeled and normalized the postmodern family standard of employment for married mothers. Whereas in 1950 the less a man earned, the more likely his wife was employed, by 1968 wives of middle-income men were the most likely to be in the labor force.32
African-American women and white working-class women have been the genuine postmodern family pioneers, even though they also suffer most from its most negative effects. Long denied the mixed benefits that the modern family order offered middle-class women, less privileged women quietly forged alternative models of femininity to that of full-time domesticity and mother-intensive childrearing. Struggling creatively, often heroically, to sustain oppressed families and to escape the most oppressive ones, they drew on "traditional," premodern kinship resources and crafted untraditional ones, creating in the process the postmodern family.
Rising divorce and cohabitation rates, working mothers, two-earner households, single and unwed parenthood, and matrilineal, extended, and fictive kin support networks appeared earlier and more extensively among poor and working-class people.33 Economic pressures, more than political principles, governed these departures from domesticity, but working women soon found additional reasons to appreciate paid employment.34 Eventually white middle-class women, sated and even sickened by our modern family privileges, began to emulate, elaborate, and celebrate many of these alternative family practices.35 How ironic and unfortunate it seems, therefore, that feminism's anti-modern-family ideology should then offend many women from the social groups whose gender and kinship strategies helped to foster it.
If, as my research suggests, postindustrial transformations encouraged modern working-class families to reorganize and diversify themselves even more than middle-class families, it seems time to inter the very concept of "the working-class family." This deeply androcentric and class-biased construct distorts the history and current reality of wage-working people's intimate relationships. Popular images of working-class family life, like the Archie Bunker family, rest upon the iconography of industrial blue-collar male breadwinners and the history of their lengthy struggle for a family wage. But the male family wage was a late and ephemeral achievement of only the most fortunate sections of the modern industrial working-class. It is doubtful that most working-class men ever secured its patriarchal domestic privileges.
Postmodern conditions expose the gendered character of this social-class category, and they render it atavistic. As feminists have argued, only by disregarding women's labor and learning was it ever plausible to designate a family unit as working class.36 In an era when most married mothers are employed, when women perform most "working-class" jobs,37 when most productive labor is unorganized and fails to pay a family wage, when marriage links are tenuous and transitory, and when more single women than married homemakers are rearing children, conventional notions of a normative working-class family fracture into incoherence. The life circumstances and mobility patterns of the members of Pamela's kin set and of the Lewisons, for example, are so diverse and fluid that no single social-class category can adequately describe any of the family units among them.
If the white working-class family stereotype is inaccurate, it is also consequential. Stereotypes are moral (alas, more often, immoral) stories people tell to organize the complexity of social experience. Narrating the working-class people as profamily reactionaries suppresses the diversity and the innovative character of a great proportion of working-class kin relationships. Because it contains socially divisive and conservative political effects, the Archie Bunker stereotype may have helped to contain feminism by estranging middle-class women from working-class women. Barbara Ehrenreich argues that caricatures that portray the working class as racist and reactionary are recent, self-serving inventions of professional, middle-class people eager "to seek legitimation for their own more conservative impulses."38 In the early 1970s, ignoring rising labor militancy as well as racial, ethnic, and gender diversity among working-class people, the media effectively imaged them as the new conservative bedrock of "middle America." "All in the Family," the early 1970s television sit-com series that immortalized racist, chauvinist, working-class hero-buffoon Archie Bunker, can best be read, Ehrenreich suggests, as "the longest-running Polish joke," a projection of middle-class bad
faith.39 Yet, if this bad faith served professional middle-class interests, it did so at the expense of feminism. The inverse logic of class prejudice construed the constituency of that enormously popular social movement as exclusively middle-class. By convincing middle-class feminists of our isolation, perhaps the last laugh of that "Polish joke" was on us. Even Ehrenreich, who sensitively debunks the Bunker myth, labels "startling" the findings of a 1986 Gallup poll that "56 percent of American women considered themselves to be 'feminists,' and the degree of feminist identification was, if anything, slightly higher as one descended the socio-economic scale."40 Feminists must be attuned to the polyphony of family stories authored by working-class as well as middle-class people if we are ever to transform poll data like these into effective political alliances.
While my ethnographic research demonstrates the demise of "the working-class family," in no way does it document the emergence of the classless society once anticipated by postindustrial theorists.41 On the contrary, recent studies of postindustrial occupation and income distribution indicate that the middle classes are shrinking and the economic circumstances of Americans are polarizing.42 African-Americans have borne the most devastating impact of economic restructuring and the subsequent decline of industrial and unionized occupations.43 But formerly privileged white working-class men, those like Pam's two husbands and Lou Lewison, who achieved access to the American Dream in the 1960s and 1970s, now find their gains threatened and difficult to pass on to their children.
While high-wage blue-collar jobs decline, the window of postindustrial opportunity that admitted undereducated men and women, like Lou and Kristina Lewison and Don Franklin, to middle-class status is slamming shut. "During the 1980s, the educated got richer and the uneducated got poorer. And it looks like more of the same in the 1990s," declared a recent summary of occupational statistics from the Census Bureau and the Labor Department.44 Young white families earned 20 percent less in 1986 than did comparable families in 1979, and their prospects for home ownership plummeted.45 Real earnings for young men between the ages of twenty and twenty-four dropped by 26 percent between 1973 and 1986, while the military route to upward mobility that many of their fathers traveled constricted.46 In the 1950s men like Lou Lewison, equipped with Veterans Administration loans, could buy homes with token down payments and budget just 14 percent of their monthly wages for housing costs. By 1984, however, those veterans' children, looking for a median-priced home as first-time would-be home owners, could expect their housing costs to be 44 percent of an average male's monthly earnings.47 Few could manage this, and in 1986 the U.S. government reported "the first sustained drop in home ownership since the modern collection of data began in 1940."48
Postindustrial shifts have reduced blue-collar job opportunities for the undereducated sons of working-class fathers I interviewed. And technological developments like Computer-Aided Design have escalated the entry criteria and reduced the numbers of those middle-level occupations that recently employed uncredentialled young people like Kristina Lewison and Pam's oldest child, Lanny.49 Thus the proportion of American families in the middle-income range fell from 46 percent in 1970 to 39 percent in 1985. Two earners in a household now are necessary just to keep from losing ground.50 Data like these led social analysts to anxiously track "the disappearing middle class," a phrase which, Barbara Ehrenreich now believes, "in some ways missed the point. It was the blue-collar working class that was 'disappearing,' at least from the middle range of comfort."51
Postindustrial restructuring has had contradictory effects on the employment opportunities of former working-class women. Driven by declines in real family income, by desires for social achievement and independence, and by an awareness that committed male breadwinners are in scarce supply, such women have flocked to expanding jobs in service, clerical, and new industrial occupations. These provide the means of family subsidy or self-support and self-respect gained by many women, like Pam and Dotty; but few of these women enjoy earnings or prospects equivalent to those of their former husbands or fathers. Recent economic restructuring has replaced white male workers with women and minority men, but at less well paid, more vulnerable jobs.52
Whose Family Crisis?
This massive reordering of work, class, and gender relationships during the past several decades is what has turned family life into a contested terrain. It seems ironic, therefore, to observe that at the very same time that women are becoming the new proletariat, the postmodern family, even more than the modern family it is replacing, is proving to be a woman-tended domain. To be sure, as Kathleen Gerson reports in the chapter that follows this one, there is some empirical basis for the enlightened father imagery celebrated by films like Kramer versus Kramer . Indeed my fieldwork corroborates emerging evidence that the determined efforts by many working women and feminists to reintegrate men into family life have not been entirely without effect. There are data, for example, indicating that increasing numbers of men would sacrifice occupational gains in order to have more time with their families, just as there are data documenting actual increases in male involvement in child care.53 The excessive media attention that the faintest signs of this "new paternity" enjoy, however, may be a symptom of a deeper, far less comforting reality. We are experiencing, as Andrew Cherlin aptly puts
it, "the feminization of kinship."54 Demographers report a drastic decline in the average number of years that men live in households with young children.55 Few of the women who assume responsibility for their children in 90 percent of divorce cases in the United States today had to wage a custody battle for this privilege.56 We hear few proposals for a "daddy track" in the workplace. And few of the adults providing care to sick and elderly relatives are male.57 Yet ironically, most of the alarmist and nostalgic literature about contemporary family decline impugns women's abandonment of domesticity, the flipside of our tardy entry into modernity. Rarely do the anxious public outcries over the destructive effects on families of working mothers, high divorce rates, institutionalized child care, or sexual liberalization scrutinize the family behaviors of men.58 Anguished voices emanating from all bands on the political spectrum lament state and market interventions that are weakening "the family."59 But whose family bonds are fraying? Women have amply demonstrated a continuing commitment to sustaining kin ties. If there is a family crisis, it is a male's crisis.
The crisis cannot be resolved by reviving the modern family system. While nostalgia for an idealized world of "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Archie Bunker" families abounds, little evidence suggests that most Americans genuinely wish to return to the gender order these symbolize. On the contrary, the vast majority, like the people in my study, are actively remaking family life. Indeed, a 1989 survey conducted by the New York Times found more than two-thirds of womenincluding a substantial majority even of those living in "traditional," that is to say "modern," households, as well as a majority of menagree that "the United States continues to need a strong women's movement to push for changes that benefit women."60 Yet many people seem reluctant to affirm their family preferences. They cling, like Shirley Moskowitz, to images of themselves as "back from the old days," while venturing ambivalently, but courageously, into the new.61
Responding to new economic and social insecurities as well as to feminism, higher percentages of families in almost all income groups have adopted a multiple-earner strategy.62 Thus, the household form that has come closer than any other to replacing the modern family with a new cultural and statistical norm consists of a two-earner, heterosexual married couple with children.63 It is not likely, however, that any type of household will soon achieve the measure of normalcy that the modern family long enjoyed. Indeed, the postmodern success of the voluntary principle of the modern family system precludes this, assuring a fluid, recombinant familial culture. The routinization of divorce and remarriage generates a diversity of family patterns even greater than was characteristic of the premodern period, when death prevented family stability or household homogeneity. Even cautious demographers judge
the new family diversity to be "an intrinsic feature . . . rather than a temporary aberration" of contemporary family life.64
"The family" is not "here to stay." Nor should we wish it were. The ideological concept of "the family" imposes mythical homogeneity on the diverse means by which people organize their intimate relationships, and consequently distorts and devalues this rich variety of kinship stories. And, along with the class, racial, and heterosexual prejudices it promulgates, this sentimental, fictional plot authorizes gender hierarchy. Because the postmodern family crisis ruptures this seamless modern family "script," it provides a democratic opportunity. Feminists', gay liberation activists', and many minority rights organizations' efforts to expand and redefine the notion of family are responses to this opportunity. These groups are seeking to extend social legitimacy and institutional support for the diverse patterns of intimacy that Americans have already forged.
If feminism threatens many people and seems out of fashion, struggles to reconstitute gender and kinship on a just and democratic basis are more popular than ever.65 If only a minority of citizens are willing to grant family legitimacy to gay domestic partners, an overwhelming majority subscribe to the postmodern definition of a family by which the New York Supreme Court validated a gay man's right to retain his deceased lover's apartment. "By a ratio of 3 to 1," people surveyed in a Yale University study defined the family as "a group of people who love and care for each other." And while a majority of those surveyed gave negative ratings to the quality of American family life in general, 71 percent declared themselves "at least very satisfied" with their own family lives.66
I find an element of bad faith in the popular lament over the decline of the family. Nostalgia for "the family" deflects criticism from the social sources of most "personal troubles." Supply-side economics, governmental deregulation, and the right-wing assault on social welfare programs have intensified the destabilizing effects of recent occupational upheavals on flagging modern families and emergent postmodern ones alike. Indeed, the ability to provide financial security was the chief family concern of most of the people surveyed in the Yale study. If the postmodern family crisis represents a democratic opportunity, contemporary economic and political conditions enable only a minority to realize its tantalizing potential.
The discrepant data reported in the Yale study indicate how reluctant most Americans are to fully acknowledge the genuine ambivalence we feel about family and social change. Yet ambivalence, as Alan Wolfe suggests, is an underappreciated but responsible moral stance, and one well suited for democratic citizenship: "Given the paradoxes of modernity, there is little wrong, and perhaps a great deal right, with being ambivalentespecially when there is so much to be ambivalent about."67
Certainly, as my experiences among Pamela's and Dotty's kinand
my ownhave taught me, there are good grounds for ambivalence about contemporary postmodern family conditions. Nor do I imagine that even a successful feminist family revolution could eliminate all family distress. At best, it would foster a social order that could invert Tolstoy's aphorism by granting happy families the freedom to differ, and even to suffer. Truly postfeminist families, however, would suffer only the "common unhappiness" endemic to intimate human relationships; they would be liberated from the "hysterical misery" generated by social injustice.68 No nostalgic movement to restore the modern family can offer as much. For better and/or worse, the postmodern family revolution is here to stay.
Continues...Excerpted from America at Century's Endby Alan Wolfe Copyright © 1992 by Alan Wolfe. Excerpted by permission.
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