OUR FICTIONS AND THE FAMILY
McCarthy, Abigail
OUR FICTIONS AND THE FAMILY Abigail McCarthy No one can deny that Oriana Fallaci has a way with words. She it was who gave us Kissinger, the lonely cowboy-evoking the image from the secretary...
...Is the family amenable to planned social intervention...
...Take, for example, the effect the woman's movement is going to have on the family...
...But recent demographic research has shown these notions to be quite unfounded...
...Passion, intensity at moments-yes, but not this constant awareness, this endless readjusting, this ceaseless hunger...
...I would have preferred a little less science fiction," she is reported to have said...
...Immigrant women cooked and did the laundry in other people's houses, and were often allowed one day to go home to their own children, for a few hours...
...John Demos of Brandeis is one of the few historians trying to recover the truth of the family from historical fact...
...The Plan of Action agreed on at the Mexico City conference stipulated that the rights of women should be protected in all forms of the family: "including the nuclear family, the extended family, consensual union and the single-parent family...
...Forster, has pointed out the essential difference between human relationships in fact and in fiction: "The constant sensitiveness of characters for each other (in novels...
...Mother Seton instituted a foundling home as well as the first parochial school...
...One could go on...
...Let us project neither chimeras nor rainbows-a little less science fiction all around, please...
...Is the notion of 'alternatives' meaningful in any sense...
...is remarkable, and has no parallel in life, except among people who have plenty of leisure...
...Recent research tells us that we can't say much more about it with any certainty...
...A Latin American delegate argued that what she called "the spontaneous family" should be added to the list, noting that in her country only half the family units were legalized...
...I found her comment on the discussion at the International Women's Year Conference in Mexico City equally apt...
...We could well add to that last fact that in many countries heavily Catholic like those in Central America, unlegalized family units do not mean only what we in this country have called common law marriages, but mean a kind of multiple marriage or polygamy made obligatory by machismo...
...Research in the history of the family, Demos says, leads to two conclusions: "there is no golden age of the family gleaming at us from far back in the historical past...
...He puts it well in a paper published in The American Scholar: "To study the history of the American family is to conduct a rescue mission into the dreamland of our national self-concept...
...Observers of human nature must be inclined to agree...
...On one side I hear that all nurturing, authority, love, and trust will depart from the family if women get equal rights...
...I think that Sanchez in that wonderful sociological report, The Children of Sanchez, managed four such unions...
...And there is no good reason to construe recent trends in terms of decline and decay...
...our best institutions have aided the family in transition...
...She it was who gave us Kissinger, the lonely cowboy-evoking the image from the secretary himself, it is true -but with the wit to see how apt it was and faithfully passing it on to us...
...that in the new day marriages, serial though they may be, will never be "dead marriages," whatever that may mean...
...The fundamental unit, then as (Continued on page 541) Abigmil McCarthy (Cont...
...No subject is more closely ibound up with our sense of a difficult present-and our nostalgia for a happier past...
...But perhaps my memory exaggerates...
...By all means, let us consider the relationship of the rights of women to the family-but on the basis of fact...
...It was not only a popular idea but one held by scholars, he says, that premodern society was organized into large kin groups "including several conjugal pairs, spanning three or four generations...
...I recall a woman scholar, one of the most prominent international authorities on development, saying with a helpless sigh, "I think we could cut the population in Latin America in half if the Church would inveigh against the mistress system as mightily as it does against contraception - surely one thing is as sinful as the other, or so I was taught...
...Most women have always worked- and had only spare time left for cooking, cleaning and child-rearing...
...On the other, I hear that a wonderful new day is dawning, that new family structures are a-borning built only on love and trust...
...In both cases I am afraid that the speakers have visions of a family which does not exist, did not exist or cannot exist...
...It is now clear that nuclear households have been the norm in America since the time of the first settlements, and in England for as far back as evidence survives...
...Or the past, one could add...
...This situation has been true only of middle-class women for a comparatively short time in history...
...I find, whether I discuss the women's movement with those of the left or those of the right, even those in the middle-especially in the Church-that I could do with less science fiction...
...How can we plan for the future if we do not know the present situation...
...Father, mother, children...
...They worked in the textile mills ten and twelve hours a day in New England, and the sewing lofts of lower New York -and no one cared about them until they formed their own unions...
...Dr...
...The best Catholic schools, for example, preserved family values and affections while they helped children prepare for life in a new culture in which they must inevitably know more and cope more ably than their parents-always a family-weakening situation...
...All history, all our experience, teaches us that no human relationship is constant, it is as unstable as the living beings who compose it, and they must balance like jugglers if it is to remain...
...One of the most common myths about family is that the historical norm has been the mother who stayed at home, kept house, and took care of the children until they all left home...
...He is skeptical of "social engineering" for the family...
...Moreover, when we realize that the period from 1820 to 1920 encompassed a veritable revolution in American life and culture "exerting extreme pressure on the family, we cannot say with any certainty that any alternative pattern would have worked better...
...One of the greatest of fictioneers, E.M...
...Throughout history the Church founded orders and created institutions to shore up the weaknesses in the family system...
...True, a woman might work in the fields beside her husband like today's migratory worker-but she might be also the primary agricultural worker as in Africa, the Middle East and Asia...
...On the evidence of history, he doubts it...
...We forget that there must have been a large degree of failure in the extended family when almost every county in America had a poorhouse, or, as it was more euphemistically called, a county farm, where people indigent through no fault of their own, lived out their old age in misery and a sort of quasi-slavery...
...now, was husband, wife and their natural children...
...We know from experience, of course, that certain sub-groups in America, especially new immigrant groups, tended to more extension than the native family Jnit the pull of the mainstream norm has been powerful, and...
...What is a family...
...Another myth is that, until recently, we all had the extended family to rely on, and that with just a little readjustment in society and a return to proper values, the extended family could be restored...
Vol. 102 • November 1975 • No. 17
