Tim Stanley - The Changing Face of the American Family

Family Values

Since the 1980s the American family has evolved towards greater diversity and complexity. Yet,

paradoxically, it is the essentially conservative nuclear family forged in the 1950s that continues to

hold sway as a touchstone in US politics and culture, says Tim Stanley.

The Changing Face ofthe American FamilyO

n September 20th, 1984 a new sitcomaired on NBC. The Cosby Show starredBill Cosby as Heathcliff'Cliff ' Huxtable, amiddle-class, black obstetrician living

with his wife and five children in Brooklyn, NewYork. It kicked off with a situation that millions ofparents could identify with: Cliff's son, Theo, hadcome home with a report card covered in Ds. Theo'smother was deeply upset and Cliff was furious. ButTheo said that his bad grades didn't bother himbecause he didn't want to go to college. His goal wasto grow up to be like 'regular people' and, if Cliffloves his son, won't he accept him for what he is?

The audience applauded. This was what TV had

First family: the Obamaspose for a shot at theannual White House EasterEgg Roll in 2009, withMichelle's mother and theEaster Bunny.

been teaching them for over a decade, that love andunderstanding were more important than competitionand success. But, to their shock, Cosby's characterdidn't agree. 'Theo,' he said, 'that is the dumbest thing Iever heard! No wonder you get Ds in everything!... I'mtelling you, you are going to try as hard as you can. Andyou're going to do it because I said so. I am your father. Ibrought you into this world, and I wiU take you out!'The audience's laughter was nervous at first, but by theend of the scene they were clapping wildly. Bul Cosbyhad just turned the liberal logic of TV Land on its head.'Father knows best' parenting was back.

This scene is discussed in the PBS documentaryAmerica in Primetime, shortly to be shown by the BBC.

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The programme makes the point that because theCosbys are African-Americans, we might presume thatthe politics of the show are liberal - sitcoms in the 1970shad tended to use black characters to explore povertyand racism. Yet Cliff Huxtable's old fashioned parentinghad much more in common with the optimistic conser-vatism of the 1980s presidency of Republican RonaldReagan. The Huxtables were wealthy, professionalchurchgoers, dominated by a stern father. Alas, amongblack families their traditional structure increasinglymade them the exception rather than the rule. In theAmerica of the 1980s divorce and illegitimacy wererising fast. By 1992, when the show ended, 68 per cent ofAfrican-American babies were born out of wedlock.The last episode of Cosby coincided with riots in LosAngeles, the product of economic segregation and blackfury at a brutal police force. The show might havestarted out as a healthy antidote to touchy-feely liber-alism, but it ended as escapist fantasy.

The Cosby Show's huge viewing figures - amongboth blacks and whites - tell a confusing story. On theone hand divorce and illegitimacy were changing thecharacter of the American family for good. Un-wedco-habitation was more likely; partners were moreinclined to abandon an unhappy relationship; sexoutside marriage was common. On the other handAmericans still held heterosexual marriage in highregard and wanted to watch shows that affirmed it.The big TV hits of the 1980s were all centred aroundtraditional families - Mr Belvedere, Wlw's The Boss?,Growing Pains. Ronald Reagan's favourite show wasFamily Ties, which starred Michael J. Fox as a teenagerwho rebelled against his liberal parents bycampaigning for Ronald Reagan.

The answer to this paradox lay in the enduringappeal of the nuclear family. America's nuclear unitwasn't around very long. It was forged by the uniqueeconomic and political circumstances of the 1950s,was undermined by social revolution in the 1960s andwas revived as an ideal in the 1970s by a conservativemovement with a deceptively rosy view of the past.But, while the nuclear family was only representativeof how a number of people lived for a few years, itsmyth has hardened into an ideology. For many Ameri-cans it remains synonymous with the hallowedpromise of the American dream.

Sitcom suburbiaIn 1957 CBS premiered a TV show called Leave it toBeaver. It starred Jerry Mathers as Theodore 'TheBeaver' Cleaver, an inquisitive boy who lived with hisparents June and Ward in a leafy suburb. The plot ofevery episode was the same: Beaver got in trouble, hisparents reprimanded him and our hero would learnsomething about the realities of life.

In one storyline Beaver met the son of divorcedparents and was jealous of all the presents he got fromhis estranged dad. But he quickly discovered thatdivorce also leads to insecurity and depression, so theepisode ended with Beaver begging his parents neverto part. Divorce wasn't the only model of socialdysfunction that the show explored: spinsters likeprim Aunt Martha were sexless harpies, while bachelors.

Theideaha 1957 Easterpublicity shot for Leave it toBeaver, starring JerryMathers as Beaver Cleaver,with his parents and olderbrother Wally.

like Andy the alcoholic handyman, were layaboutbums. It was a world of conservative certainty, heldtogether by a terror of nonconformity.

Today Leave it to Beaver is shorthand for the calmand luxury of American life before the storm of the1960s. In fact the world that it depicted was a histor-ical aberration; before 1950 things had been verydifferent. In 1900 the vast majority of women wentout to work and the US had the highest divorce rate inthe world. Roughly one in ten children grew up in asingle-parent household, hundreds of thousands ofoffspring were abandoned due to shortages of moneyand families were plagued with disease and death.Between 35 and 40 per cent of children lost a parent ora sibling before their 20s.

It wasn't until the 1950s that life began to getsweeter and more stable for the average American. Thedecade was characterised by a rising birth rate, a stabledivorce rate and a declining age of marriage. In 1950most married women walked down the aisle aged just20. Only 16 per cent of them got a job outside thehome and a majority of brides were pregnant withinseven months of their wedding. They didn't stop atone child: from 1940 to 1960 the number of familieswith three children doubled and the number of fami-lies having a fourth child quadrupled.

Contemporary anthropologists dubbed this the'nuclear family'. They meant nuclear as in a unit builtaround the nucleus of the father and mother, but thename also resonates with the politics of the Cold War.The family was on the front line of an existentialconflict between communism and capitalism. On the

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Family Values

communist side, the propagandists said, were collec-tivism, atheism and poverty. On the capitalist side wasself-reliance, freedom of religion and a degree ofmaterial comfort unparalleled in US history. Sciencewas eradicating disease, salaries were rising, householdgoods were alleviating drudgery and the nuclearfamily had a friend in big business.

The advertising agencies tried to create the modelof the perfect housewife. A famous article in House-keeping Monthly of May 13th, 1955 explained whatperfection entailed:

Your goal: To try and make sure your home is a place ofpeace, order, and tranquility where your husband canrenew himself in body and spirit... Make him comfort-able. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or havehim lie down in the bedroom ... Arrange his pillow andoffer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing andpleasant voice... Remember, he is the master of the houseand as such will always exercise his will with fairnessand truthfulness. You have no right to question him. Agood wife always knows her place.

Having popularised the ideal of a 'good Wife, theadvertisers recommended products that would put

Darling! You shouldn't have:one of many advertisementspromoting consumer goodsfor the ideal American wifeof the 1950s.

From the Ardiive

J\\e Right-wingMothers ofWartime America

Glen Jeansonne describesthe anti-war, anti-liberal andantisemitic Mothers'Move-ment that attracted a massfollowing in the United Statesin the 1930s and 1940s.www.historytoday.com/archive

perfection within her reach. 'Christmas Morning,She'll Be Happier With a Hoover!' claimed one ad,which featured a housewife excitedly examining hernew vacuum cleaner. Spending on advertising rosefrom $6 billion in 1950 to over $13 billion in 1963.

The efforts of advertising's Mad Men were centralto the 1950s boom. Rohert Sarnoff, president of theNational Broadcasting Company, said in 1956: 'Thereason we have such a high standard of living isbecause advertising has created an American frame ofmind that makes people want more things, betterthings, and newer things.' He was probahly right.Private debt doubled during the 1950s, driving upprofit and productivity and returning much of it tothe male wage earner. The economy grew by roughly37 per cent, with low rates of inflation and unemploy-ment. By 1960 the average family had 30 per centmore purchasing power than it had had in 1950. Thenuclear unit was the engine of America's growth andthe main beneficiary of its economic greatness.

The Sixties swing out of controlBut was everyone really as happy as the ads implied?In 1963 a book hit the shelves that claimed to exposeall the oppression and misery that lay behind Leave itto Beaver's white picket fences. Its author, BettyFriedan, described herself as a housewife and motherfrom the New York suburbs. In 1957 Friedan had beenasked to conduct a survey of former Smith Collegeclassmates. The results depressed her. Girls who hadstudied and excelled at the arts and sciences wereexpected to surrender their minds and personalities totheir roles as wives: 89 per cent of the Smith alumniwho answered her survey were now homemakers.Intellectually repressed and lacking anyway to expressthemselves beyond cooking or sex, the housewife ofthe 1960s was suffocated by what Friedan called thefeminine mystique. 'Each suburban wife struggleswith it alone' she wrote. 'As she made the beds,shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, atepeanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauf-feured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside herhusband at night - she was afraid to ask even of herselfthe silent question - "Is this all?"'

The Feminine Mystique stayed on the New York Timesbestseller list for six weeks and laid the groundwork for afeminist revolution that would redefine the nuclear unitforever. Friedan wanted women to take control of theirlives and the shortcuts to liberation were contraceptionand employment. But the book wasn't quite the impar-tial account that its author claimed. Although she wastechnically a homemaker, Friedan was not an apoliticalhousewife who spent her evenings arranging herhusband's pillow. She was active in socialist politics andhad worked as a journalist for the United ElectricalWorkers union for a number of years after her marriage.Friedan probably hid all these details because shewanted to divorce feminism from radicalism and somake it more palatable to the average woman. Moretroublingly, she exaggerated the degree to which thewomen of Smith College were the passive victims ofpatriarchy. In fact most of the housewives who answeredher survey said they were the happiest they had ever

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Family Values

been - a majority expressed no desire to returnto the world of work. But they did not buy theadvertisers' myth of suburban fulfilment andmany said that they felt frustrated that they couldnot use their intellect in more demanding ways.Instead they were channelling those energies intovoluntary work and party political activism.Contemporary women were already finding waysto overcome the feminine mystique, whileretaining their identities as wives and mothers.

Although Friedan and the women's liberationmovement sometimes imagined that theymasterminded the 1960s cultural revolution theirrole was actually to politicise social changes thatwere already happening. Just as science helped toforge the nuclear family, with better nutrition anddisease control, so it created the conditions for itsdestruction. In 1960 the US Food and Drug Adminis-tration officially licensed the sale of the oral contracep-tive known as the Pill. By 1962 an estimated 1,187,000women were using it. Policy makers thought the Pulwould strengthen the nuclear family by increasingdisposable income via reduced pregnancies. What it didin practice was to weaken the links between sexualpleasure, childbirth and marriage. Sex before andoutside marriage increased, while women who hadmarried became more likely to seek work or stay in it.

The effects of such subtle changes in sexual practicev^ere startling. Between 1960 and 1980 the divorce ratealmost doubled. In 1962 only half of all respondentsdisagreed with a statement suggesting that parentswho don't get along should stay together for thechildren; by 1977 over 80 per cent disagreed. Inthe early 1960s roughly half of women told poll-sters that they had engaged in premarital sex. By

Time magazine's cover ofApril 7th, 1967 shows oralcontraceptive pills, fromthat year available tounmarried women as well

Supporters of the EqualRights Amendment marchthrough Pittsburgh in1976. Inset: a badge wornby opponents of theAmendment.

the late 1980s the figure was five out of six. In theearly 1960s approximately three quarters of Ameri-cans said premarital sex was wrong. By the 1980s thatview was held by only one third of the nation. Themost obvious legacy of shifting attitudes was therocketing rate of births out of wedlock. In 1960 onlyfive per cent of births were attributed to singlemothers. By 1980 the figure was 18 per cent and by1990 it was 28 per cent.

Both Left and Right were worried that Americawas coming apart. Although the 1960s weredominated by the struggles over Vietnam andCivil Rights, an equally big policy challenge washow to save the nuclear famüy unit. The Leftconcluded that the answer was greater govern-

ment support. In 1965 the liberal sociologist DanielPatrick Moynihan published The Negro Family: TheCase For National Action. A study of poverty in theAfrican-American ghetto, the so-called MoynihanReport argued that the underlying cause of inequalitybetween black and white was not economics or racebut family structure. Moynihan believed that thegrowing incidence of single motherhood was raising ageneration of African-American males who lacked amodel of self-reliance, discipline and authority. Headvised Democratic President Lyndon Johnson thatthe solution was job training and educationprogrammes that would empower black fathers toraise their family on a single salary. The welfare state

would have to grow.

Johnson declared a 'War on Poverty' thatcreated a plethora of entitlements to individuals.

\ The use of government subsidies to buy meals(which had been around since the 1930s)increased dramatically under both Democrat and

WOTTIIREATEHED

BYWOMEN

FOREQUALITY

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Family Values

Republican administrations: the number of individ-uals using food stamps jumped from 500,000 in 1965to lOmillionin 1971. The overall effect was a fall inthe proportion of Americans living in poverty from 19per cent in 1964 to 11.1 per cent in 1973. But govern-ment generosity did nothing to stop the decline of thenuclear unit. Conservatives argued that it actuallyundermined the family by subsidising absenteefathers, educational underachievement, crime, drugsand a new, somewhat racialised, form of segregationbetween those in work and those on the dole.Moynihan's ambition to rescue the black family failed.While the median black family income rose 53 percent in the 1960s, the rate of single parenthood alsoincreased by over 50 per cent. Conservatives began toargue that the welfare state was not the solution butpart of the problem. They claimed that the real goal ofliberals like Friedan and Johnson was to create a worldin which the nuclear family no longer existed.

Lost age of innocenceIn 1976 America went to the polls to elect a new presi-dent. Its choice was Jimmy Carter, a former peanutfarmer and one-term governor of Georgia. With hisphotogenic famuy and foursquare humüity, theBaptist Carter felt like a throwback to the Leave it toBeaver spirit. In the mid-1970s America was experi-encing a wave of nostalgia for the 1950s; movies likeGrease and American Graffiti celebrated a lost age ofinnocence and certainty. Carter said that if he won theelection he would hold a White House 'Conference onthe Famuy' to discuss the best way of reviving some of

The Huxtable family intheir Brooklyn apartment,fromthe1984 Cosby Show.

those old values. It was exactly the kind of consensus-building, moral politics that Carter loved.

But after Carter's inauguration the White Houseannounced a name change. The Conference on theFamily would become the Conference on Families,reflecting the growing diversity of American familystructures. Presidential aides pointed out that roughlya third of families no longer adhered to what theydescribed as the 'nostalgic famuy' - their rather patron-ising term for the nuclear unit. One person whowelcomed the rebranding was delegate Betty Friedan.In her 1981 book The Second Stage she wrote that shewas pleased the conference recognised the mostimportant shift in American life that had occurred inthe last 20 years: 'women now work'. Indeed they did.In 1950 the proportion of married women under 45who worked was just 26 per cent; by 1985 it would hit67 per cent. The growing expectation - and need — forwomen to enter the labour market had a dramaticimpact upon gender roles, chüd-rearing and patternsof cohabitation. Life for the Seventies woman wasmore independent and more complex.

Friedan hoped that the conference would continuethe work of the Johnson administration in expandinggovernment aid to individuals struggling to get by inthe new social order. Recession made the task all themore important: 'With men being laid off in both blue-collar and white-collar jobs, with inflation showing nolet-up, women's opportunity needed [legal] underpin-ning to insure the survival of the family.'

Friedan's manifesto was something that many Euro-pean nations would enthusiastically embrace in the

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Family Values

1980s: accept that the famuy is no longer nuclear andbund the welfare and employment opportunities neces-sary to strengthen its new incarnation. But this wasn'tEurope and many Americans responded to social changewith either resistance or denial. When the conferencewas finally held in 1980 it was dominated by polarisingminorities of feminists and social conservatives.

America was undergoing a religious revival and thecultural Right was evolving into a well-oiled politicalmachine. Its delegates to the Conference on Familiesbelieved that women's best hope of'liberation' wasfound in marriage, where their compassionate instinctfor motherhood formed a perfect union with herhusband's authority. To the feminists at the conferencesuch views were the last gasp of an old, patriarchal orderthat was out of step with the unstoppable march ofprogress. Boasting superior numbers of delegates, thefeminists were able to push through platformsendorsing abortion on demand and gay rights. Theirsuccess gave them the illusion of political momentum.

But the press and the public were rather moreinterested in the rhetoric of the conservative delegates,who staged a colourful walkout. Outside the confer-ence, the anti-feminist activist Connie Marshner toldthe media that 'families consist of people related byheterosexual marriage, blood and adoption. Familiesare not religious cults, families are not Manson fami-lies, families are not heterosexual or homosexualliaisons outside of marriage.' Marshner's simplelanguage articulated the feelings of millions of Ameri-cans that the sexual revolution was not just replacingthe nuclear unit with something more complex - itwas destroying the very concept of family itself.

Recognising that this view was gaining currencyCarter tried to charm several televangelists at a WhiteHouse breakfast in Januar)' 1980. The meeting was adisaster. When it was over, the preacher Tim LaHayeprayed 'God we have got to get this man out of theWhite House and get someone in here who will beaggressive about bringing back traditional moral values'.The religious Right decided that its best shot wasRepublican Ronald Reagan. When Reagan beat Carterby a landslide in November 1980 he captured two thirdsof the white evangelical vote. Politics for the next 30years would be dominated by the conservatism ofMarshner, not the progressive ambitions of Friedan.

The paradox of the American familySince the 1980s the American family has continued itsinexorable evolution towards greater diversity andcomplexity. Yet America's popular culture, just likeThe Cosby Show, continues to celebrate a 1950s' visionof'living right, living free'.

It is tempting to accuse conservatives of promotinga paradoxical politics that is out of step with themodern world. In 2012 an estimated 19 per cent of gaypeople are raising a child in the US, yet every refer-endum on gay marriage has resulted in its ban. Stateslike Texas offer abstinence promotions in place of sexeducation, yet people who take a chastity pledge arestatistically more likely to get pregnant outsidemarriage than those who do not. And despite feminism'ssupposed grip upon the American imagination, voters

Daddy's girl: the FatherDaughter Purity Ball atColorado Springs, 2007,where she silently commitsherself to chastity by layinga white rose at the Crossand he signs a commitmentto protect her choice.

are more anti-abortion than at any point since the1980s. Against the European trend toward social liber-alism the United States looks even more conservativetoday than it was when Bill Cosby first told his son toquit griping and start revising.

But the nuclear famuy endures as an ideal for goodreason. For many middle-class whites the 1950s reallywere the Golden Age. At home families were large andstable and often kept by a single, generous wage.America was the workshop of the world, producing afiood of consumer goods that improved the lives ofmillions. Abroad the USA established itself as a modelof the good life. The American Dream - meritocraticand capable of reaping great rewards - set an interna-tional standard for democratic capitalism. Never againwould Americans tell pollsters that they were ascontent in their own lives or as confident about theircountry's direction. It was an age of innocence andsometimes that innocence blinded people to the reali-ties of patriarchy and racism. But it will remain theyardstick by which Americans judge their country fora very long time.

Tim Stanley is associate fellow of the Rothermere AmericanInstitute, Oxford University. IHis documentary Sitcom USA will bebroadcast on BBC2 on October 27th at 9pm.

Further Reading

David Allyn, Mai<e Love, Not War. The Sexual Revolution:An Unfettered History (Little, Brown, 2000).

Mary Dalton and Laura Linder (eds.), The Sitcom Reader:America Viewed and Skewed (SUNY Press, 2005).

D3n\e\ Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The FeminineMystique: The American Left, The Cold War, and ModernFem/n/sm (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).

Dominic Sandbrook, Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970sand the Rise of the Populist Right (Knopf, 2011 ).

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