Staking claim to the family

...Progressives and social feminists alike pointed to an inclusive definition of family that pushed its boundaries to include those heretofore excluded...

...Jane Addams rejected the idea of marriage for herself, and spoke of escaping the demands of "the family claim...

...In short, nothing should be done by a larger and higher organization that can be done as well by a smaller...

...Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor during the New Deal, was quoted in 1933 as saying that she "never recommends a public career" for women, because "the happiest place for most women is in the home...

...The wife and mother became the "angel in the home," the guardian of family values unsullied by contact with the sordid values of the public, capitalist world...

...There ain't no fambly now...

...IN ALL these ways the definition of family was broadened at the same time that Progressivism sought, through reform, to bring more people into a share in the benefits of American society...

...Worse off we get, the more we got to do.' " From the Joad family's journey across the desert to the California border and Ma's firm resolve: "The family got to get acrost," it is only a short distance to San Francisco and Mario Cuomo: We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way, with the whole family intact...

...Classical liberalism, a product of the political and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, described society as a collection of individuals...

...Nurturance could become, in liberal rhetoric, a function of Commonweal: 490 the family, whatever form that family takes — be it singleparent, two-parent, adopted, "blended," or a family which draws upon the presence and resources of grandparents or siblings...

...Mary Lyndon Shanley addresses this issue in Families, Politics, and Public Policy (Longmans, 1983), a recent anthology on family and politics edited by Irene Diamond...

...On the one hand, thousands of women were appointed to government jobs, many of them to patronage positions at the recommendation of Eleanor Roosevelt...

...In 1984 it was painfully apparent that liberals had, at best, a weak, unformed notion of what they were doing in staking claim to the family issue...

...Their inspiration in all this was a vision of American society as family...

...And, ironically, it was the centrality accorded in the liberal tradition to individualism, coupled with the notion of separate spheres and the moral superiority of true womanhood, that provided the opening for women to move out of the home and the exclusive role of wife and mother, and back into the public sphere, albeit in defense of "family values...

...Settlement workers and social feminists were particularly concerned with women, children, and families...

...If instead of lowering the minimum wage for students, we increase the minimum wage to a realistic level, the concept of comparable worth should be truly irrelevant...

...Thus we find Jane Addams writing: "Probably no young matron ever placed her own things in her own home with more pleasure than that with which we first furnished Hull House...

...And from this care and concern for the next generation, grounded ma faith in the future, it is not too great a leap to viewing nurturance as the function of a just society — and its government...

...most notably its flirtation with fascism in 1930s Europe...

...In 1889 she brought the settlement house movement to Chicago in the form of Hull House...

...Ferraro also spoke of herself as the mother of a son (noting that she was the first major candidate able to make that claim), and of her hope, as a mother, that she would never see that son go to war...

...Initially Steinbeck's characters see "family"as exclusive — the nuclear family — and traditional...

...John Steinbeck's novel of the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath, embraces all of these currents...

...The emphasis can be shifted from the biological function of family life and gender roles therein to the task of nurturance itself — the fostering of the emotional and physical well being of the members...

...To the Editors: The League of Women Voters strongly supports comparable worth ["Women, Work and the Question...

...A prime example was Jane Addams...

...Yet she opposed the ERA on the grounds that it would wipe out the protective legislation of the previous decades...

...We must be unusually committed and caring as we seek to expand our family to include new members...

...Addams even brought her heirloom silver to the house...

...But their activism, as well as their avoidance of the "family claim" in their own lives, belies this...

...Shanley writes: While liberal ideals have been efficacious in overturning restrictions on women as individuals, liberal theory does not provide the language or concepts to help us understand the various kinds of human interdependence which are part of the life of both families and polities...

...Nevertheless, settlement work at its heart reflected women returning to the public sphere in defense of the values of the home...

...Liberal Catholic politicians have much to offer in this area...

...In a more diffuse but still dangerous sense, subsidiarity becomes an excuse for selfishness , the ignoring of broader social needs, or a smug justification of the status quo...

...In Steinbeck's novel, family ultimately becomes synonymous with society...

...This sense of the loss of identity and loss of family in modern society is captured by the French writer Paul Nizan in the novel Antoine Bloye...

...Carefully woven together threads of the progressive, liberal, and feminist movements of the last century yield a tapestry both complex and subtle, equal to the evocative imagery of family employed by conservatives...

...It could be charged that by starting from the premise of separate spheres for men and women, and by championing the natural role of woman as life-giver and nurturer, that the social feminists bowed to the prevailing conservatism of society and reenforced women's necessary identification with the traditional family...

...He saw this as accomplished directly in parenthood, but we can extend his insight, in light of the discussion of nurturance, to the recognition that the entire family itself performs this function...

...Settlement workers at Hull House, as well as in other settlement houses across the nation, were in the main single women college graduates who sought to perpetuate the sense of autonomy and sorority they had experienced in their student years...

...Women activists of the turn of the century also found themselves in the anti-war camp during World War I. While a minority championed pacifism as a result of socialist or anarchist beliefs, the majority saw consistency in reformist activities defending the values of the home, and their concern to establish a world without war...

...He is no longer quite of their kith and station...

...Erik Erikson defined "generativity" as "the concern for establishing and guiding the next generation...

...This realization contributed in turn to the growth of feminist ideology...

...Wagon train after wagon train...

...We may well inquire: "Are we any longer talking about family...

...One member of the Women's Peace Party, led, not coincidentally, by Jane Addams, stated that women felt a "particular moral passion of revolt" against war because, as the "custodians of the life of the ages" they could no longer "consent to its reckless destruction...

...This idea of nurturance leads naturally, I believe, to the notion of family as a source of identity...

...Furthermore, progressives saw a positive role for government: hence their efforts on behalf of child labor laws, pure food and drug acts, and public assistance to mothers who were heads of households...

...By grounding the issue of family within its proper historical tradition, with particular emphasis on the experience of women reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "family" could become a feminist issue...

...Constantly reaching out to extend and enlarge that family...

...Our flag is red, white, and blue but our nation is rainbow — red, yellow, brown, black, and white — we are all precious in God's sight...

...History refers to these women as social feminists and places them within the Progressive Movement...

...You shouldn't of broke up the fambly.''' Gradually death and circumstances rob the Joad family of its members: both grandparents die, the younger son wanders away, the son-in-law deserts his pregnant wife...

...By contrast, a conservative, organic philosophy sees "natural groupings" — the family in particular — as the basic unit of society, or the' 'cell of the state.'' As a natural and ordained, rather than voluntary, utilitarian ordering, "family" assumes the quality of a moral imperative...

...Similarly, Jesse Jackson employed the metaphor of family to describe the Rainbow Coalition — and beyond this, his hopes for the Democratic party and ultimately a new American society, a society already here would we but recognize it...

...Such appeals are in reality nothing more than the manipulation of fears of an uncertain future, and the fear of social change which often manifests itself in the form of emancipation for women...

...Got nothin' to trus...

...Nevertheless, "Family" has every right to be a liberal issue, and the attempt by liberals to claim it warrants close scrutiny...

...Often women assumed a powerful role in the family, holding it together through strength of will — and often financially as well — finding a job where a man could not...

...As to policy implications I would suggest that here liberals might consider appropriating the notion of subsidiarity as it was originally developed in Catholic social thought...

...Few of these women, as already noted, were themselves wives and mothers...

...Liberal politicians and political thinkers have a remarkable base on which to construct a vital and engaging model of the family, one based on their own history of inclusion, and one open to the political and social needs of the present generation...

...The Democratic platform, which advocated supplemental food programs for low-income pregnant women, school lunches, and government-assisted child care, carried on the tradition begun by the settlement houses which recognized the need for government assistance to dependent families while challenging the state and society to envision itself anew as family...

...YVONNE M. ELIAS What salary reflects New York, N.Y...

...is considerably removed from the world where his parents have lived since their youth...

...Ma laments: "We're crackin' up...

...Taken together, this meant that individuals might choose, at some point, to order themselves into families, but that they might just as easily choose not to do so...

...Settlements provided day care for children of working mothers...

...It is the sense of family as a commitment to the future that is essential here...

...Reproductive rights serve primarily to entrench women's isolation in their unequal relation to the reproductive process, [something] that women as reproducers do not need more of...

...In time, the liberal, utilitarian understanding was cloaked with a bourgeois ethos growing out of the division of labor between the sexes which accompanied industrialization and the loss of a productive function for the family...

...It is more than ironic to argue in this case that children are the responsibility not only of their mothers, but of both parents, the family itself, and ultimately of society...

...Special attention was paid to the needs of immigrant women and their families...

...But it need not be...

...Thus the enactment of policies to remove women from the workforce, either by direct restrictive legislation, by withdrawing support for daycare, or subtler forms of social pressure...

...It offers an inclusive definition of family, guided by a strong matriarch and supported, at one critical juncture, by the state in the form of the government camp...

...How will this inclusive — yes, generous — image of family play in the future to an electorate which has now twice demonstrated its ideologically and fiscally conservative mood, its opposition to "big government," and its seeming hunger for security in traditional values...

...Restrictive legislation of that era forced thousands of married women with civil service jobs to resign, and similar practices were common in the private sector as well...

...Catholic corporate theory has, of course, been put to more dismal uses...

...We believe in a government strong enough to use the words 'love' and 'compassion...

...To new frontiers of education, housing, peace, with the whole family aboard...

...And that very evening, as he sits on his doorstep, Antoine begins to feel that the world toward which his studies are impelling him...

...Indeed, it was their very freedom from familial responsibility which allowed them to direct their activities outward toward the betterment of society...

...Neither the language that traditionally has described the patriarchal family as a "natural'' entity nor the contractual language of liberal political theory provides us with the range of conceptualizations of human relationships that we need even to describe (much less to build) a polity...

...Contrast this loss of identity and family to the words of Geraldine Ferraro at San Francisco: Tonight the daughter of an immigrant from Italy has been chosen to run for Vice-President in the new land my father came to love...

...Today the appropriation by liberals of these insights could prove to be a third way, indeed, a way out of the liberal/conservative impasse on the issue of the family...

...Jane Addams and the settlement houses offer an example of the commitment to social and family needs on the neighborhood scale, and although reformers saw the need in some areas for federal legislation, most reform efforts were directed around city hall...

...Ever'body's in the same wagon' . .. 'Yes,' Ma said . . . 'use' ta be the fambly wa fust...

...He feels the beginnings of estrangement...

...It's anybody...

...Indeed, we might well argue that this reappropriation has brought us full circle to the social feminist position...

...Liberals need to appropriate the idea of family as a source of identity by putting it at the service, not of nostalgia for the past, but anticipation of the future...

...We must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound to one another...

...Again, Cuomo: "We believe in a single fundamental idea that describes . . . what a proper government should be...

...Lifting them up into the wagon on the way...

...But massive unemployment and economic dislocation contributed to the undermining of traditional family roles, as husbands and fathers could no longer support their families...

...Their lives demonstrated that women need not themselves be wives and mothers in order to lead rich, full, nurturing lives...

...Recently, however, a "reclaiming of the stereotype'' by feminists has given nurturance a positive connotation...

...To describe and to build, to formulate an appealing liberal image of family, and then to construct a policy, that is the task liberals in this country face in staking a workable claim to the issue of family...

...Provided by his scholarship education with an entree into the industrial world of 1880s France, young Antoine realizes that in so doing he has lost his family: Antoine suddenly remembers that his mother does not know how to write . . . that she uses words from the dialect of her Gallic country . . . and that these things make city people laugh...

...He is already unhappy as though after a farewell, an irrevocable breach of faith...

...Throughout modern history conservative politicians have appealed to "family" to fill the void created by the collapse of the familiar guideposts of political order, economic stability, and traditional values...

...The classical liberal distinction between public and private spheres grew out of economics, but it reflected equally the commitment to individual rights and a concept of civil liberties...

...The failure of the liberal candidates in 1984 to successfully place their rhetoric within the existing historical tradition is regrettable because, as in the case of Mario Cuomo, one can detect glimmers of the liberal tradition of family...

...Moreover, liberals viewed society in mechanistic terms...

...With that accomplished, shattered social equilibrium and identity are to be restored...

...and I will not break faith with you...

...Mario Cuomo 1984 Democratic National Convention LAST YEAR'S presidential election witnessed an attempt by liberals to reappropriate "family" as their issue, wresting it away from the Republican party and groups on the political right such as the Moral Majority and National Pro-Family Coalition...

...It aint's so now...

...To what purpose, then, their reliance on the rhetoric of family and motherhood...

...A national day care policy, for example, could be an area in which the government could foster organizational initiative and channel funding into neighborhood centers, or give tax incentives to employers to establish such care at the worksite, in proximity to parents...

...Her remarks were rooted in the family-centered, social feminist, and anti-war tradition...

...Family" on their lips evokes the comfort and security of traditional roles and values, whereas the liberal image of the all-inclusive family demands intellectual commitment and financial sacrifice...

...The Republican party platform claimed that "America was built on the institutions of home, family, religion, and neighborhood...

...but then to demand that it is the sole right of the woman (or minor) to make these 20 September 1985: 491 decisions...

...It is essential to understand the place of social feminism within a liberal family tradition of society as family, a view which allowed the social feminists to embrace those excluded from American life — the poor, the immigrant, the working class, the female-headed households...

...The liberalism of the New Deal sent mixed signals on the traditional notion of family...

...The idea of family...

...Above all, what these women did recognize was the potential for mobilizing concern for the unfortunate and the excluded in society by invoking the image of a caring, concerned family...

...Woman's role as nurturer has been used to'explain the existence of the gender gap, the reasons why women feel more keenly, morally as well as financially, the injustice wrought by budget cuts aimed at human services, and why they oppose in greater numbers than do men a belligerent foreign policy...

...You should of went too...

...Subsidiarity holds that power ought to be decentralized, that the good of society is best served not by concentration (the state), but by a multiplicity of institutions: family, neighborhood, community, unions, the church...

...The attempt was unsuccessful...

...The liberal historical tradition discussed here has examples of the "small is beautiful" philosophy, to give subsidiarity its contemporary rendering...

...Wendy Brown recently pointed out (Families, Politics, and Public Policy, p. 335) that the whole language of personal "privacy'' is a paradoxical basis upon which to build a society that emphasizes new forms of family and community life...

...While Geraldine Ferraro spoke often of her immigrant family background (a success story more typically enshrined in the canons of conservative rhetoric), she emphasized at the same time that it was the sacrifices made by her mother which laid the educational groundwork for her pursuit of the nontraditional course of law school and career...

...To my children I say: My mother did not break faith with me...

...One of the characters tells Tom Joad and the preacher Casy that his wife and children went to California with relatives, because he could not bring himself to leave home...

...To all the children of America, I say: The generation before ours kept faith with us, and like them, we will pass on to you a stronger, more just America...

...Casy "stirred nervously...

...Their rhetoric lacked coherence, context, and grounding in a historical liberal tradition...

...The first is laden with dangerous implications of a biologically ordained role for women...

...It is from the depths of despair, 20 September 1985: 489 with the family's shack destroyed by floods and her daughter's child born dead, that Ma accepts help from a stranger, who replies: " 'No need to thank...

...This bourgeois ethos obscured but did not obviate the utilitarian understanding at the heart of liberal, middle-class family life...

...They should incorporate in it elements of the conservative view suggested here, specifically the principle of subsidiarity...

...This notion has found its way into present-day conservative ideology...

...It has today once again become a rationale for women's rightful concern with social issues...

...In the words of historian Nancy Woloch, this was to be "no temporary venture or trial run, the settlement would be a permanent home...

...Programs conducted at the houses included evenings devoted to childcare and homemaking skills...

...The demands of social housekeeping, on the contrary, were such as to recommend it to single women without family responsibilities or obligations of their own...

...In so doing two concepts of value should be appropriated from the conservatives: nurturance and identity...

...This last factor, traditional values, gives us the clue to discover what makes the conservative image of family so appealing...

...There, in these virtues, was the essence of family, not in its patriarchal control or division of labor...

...Home and family became a place of refuge from the public, marketplace world, providing emotional satisfaction and renewal for individuals, values which assumed increasing importance in modern society...

...IN DEFINING FAMILY so broadly, even to the point of using it interchangeably with society itself, do liberals not run the risk of emptying the term of its meaning and evocative power...

...And this is just one area in which such a recasting of vision and programs could link the liberal interest in social equality for women and concern with the needs of families to the appeal of the neighborhood and community images...

...Roosevelt, a veteran of settlement work, was a powerful advocate of women's and family interests...

...At its origins, Catholic social theory proclaimed itself a "third way" between capitalism and socialism...

...In the conservative view, inasmuch as family is part of the fabric of a simpler, pre-modern past, it is threatened by the values of the present: individualism, pluralism, materialism, feminism, secularism, moral relativism, and by the vagaries of the future...

...A breach of faith...

...A carefully defined image of family could in turn indicate directions for public policy regarding family life, and move the present discussion beyond the bounds of the stereotypes in which it is mired...

...Commonweal: 488 While social feminists characterized their work as "social housekeeping" — transferring the values of the home to society at large — the conservative tradition, which reached fruition in the early decades of the twentieth century, reflected the formulation of family as "cell of the state.'' This notion of family dictated a biological function and prescribed a restricted sphere of activity for women...

...According to sociologist Barbara Laslett: In the name of the domestic virtues for which they were increasingly responsible, women — particularly women from the middling classes — became active participants in the religious revivals, moral reform groups and voluntary associations that flourished from the first half of the nineteenth century onwards...

...In another vein, liberals might stop at least to consider the inherent contradiction between their talk of strong families and family values and the disallowance of parental involvement in decisions concerning the reproductive rights of minor children...

...Unable to restore the traditional, rural, hierarchical society of yore, conservatives attempt that which they feel to be within their power — the restoration of the patriarchal nuclear family through reestablishing prescribed roles for women...

...But Steinbeck's characters grow toward the realization of a new family, a new society...

...The idea of family...

...Continued from page 482) of wage that meets today's cost of living, why does the job exist at all...