Brave New Families

...One of these women had to cope with divorce, a rocky second marriage, and three difficult children with marital troubles of their own...

...The first is that industrialism isolated the family from the world of work and forced women into the confining role of full-time housewives...

...It says a great deal about the role of religion in these people's lives that the Lewisons left the Universal Temple of the Spirit, an unconventional, nondenominational sect, and returned to their Methodist congregation when the minister of the Universal Temple failed to show enough appreciation of the family's grief over the death of their son...

...Stacey notes that "the world's first generation of childhood television-viewers grew up, as I did, inundated by such weekly paeans to the male breadwinner nuclear household and modem family ideology as 'Father Knows Best,' 'Leave It to Beaver,' and 'Ozzie and Harriet.'" No doubt such programs helped to generate a certain "nostalgia" for a type of family life that never existed, as Stacey argues...

...It will not be another Vietnam because we have become sophisticated enough as a nation of viewers to recognize, and even condemn, distortion and prevarication when we see it...

...FRANK McCONNELL Misreadin9 the facts about families udith Stacey wants to convince us that feminism is not a movement of upper-middle-class women alone and that workingclass women, indeed, are the "genuine postmodern family pioneers...

...The same evidence reminds us, however--on a more unfavorable reading-that such commitments are harder than ever to sustain in a world full of economic uncertainty, drugs, and cynicism...

...No detail was too trivial for my insatiety...

...The exuberance and pathos of workingclass culture, on the margins where the wish for respectability is repeatedly thwarted and finally almost extinguished both by circumstances and by reckless, willful invitations to disaster, is a familiar story, as is the mingled warmth and frustration experienced in the extended family...

...I made notes in my diary when volume two was due to be published...

...As Stacey writes, "most of the Lewisons lived hard, drove fast, spent impulsively, and partook liberally of high-risk diets, tobacco, alcohol, and often, drugs...

...Take it from a chaotic neutral gnome thief: "No Blood for Image" is the slogan that will, on this grim path, preserve our sense and sensibility of honor...

...The other endured a whole series of calamities...

...Their success in "actively remaking family life" should reassure those who have been taken in by the "popular lament over family decline...

...For Stacey, such commitments can only be described as a "retreat" from the "arena of postmodern gender and family reform...

...There is nothing strikingly "postmodern" about these families...

...Soon--probably before this appears in print--the body-bags will start coming home...

...but they also generated an equally ahistorical contempt for the benighted women in past times who could not grasp the essence of patriarchical oppression, alas, because they had no exposure to "gender studies...

...Only an ideology resistant to the unwelcome challenge of experience can find "democratic opportunity" in this unrelenting record of downward mobility, economic and emotional devastation, and domestic improvisation...

...They distrust any understanding that would seem to "blame the victim...

...They exemplify, in exaggerated form, the impulsive and self-destructive tendencies that are always present in working-class life: an inability or refusal to plan ahead or save or hold a steady job...

...This at least has the virtue of honesty, but it shows a limited understanding even ofthe"appeal"ofreligion its"seductive power," as she puts it elsewhere...

...But"doctrines" have nothing to do with it...

...Wait a minute," a voice of reason said...

...Her eldest son died in an auto crash...

...The wonderfully wise Ellen Goodman wrote, a week before the war, about the TV-style, slow-motion numbness of this whole catastrophe...

...hot-tempered violence...

...Denis Donoghue, the eminent literary critic who holds the Henry James Chair of English and American Literature at New York University, grew up in Warrenpoint, an austere little seaside town in County Down, on the edge of the Carlingford Lough...

...She studied two women in Silicon Valley, their families, and their friends...

...The last of these labels might at least have the merit of calling attention to the deindustrialization of America (as it is more fittingly referred to), which can be expected to add to the economic difficulties that force people to turn to extended families for mutual aid...

...They may not realize it in the Pentagon, but we have come a way since the Tet offensive...

...that their experiences with men are not likely to foster romantic illusions about the opposite sex...

...But already many of us know that this is not right, and that part and parcel of its deep unrighteousness is its cynical and insulting attempt to make this literally awful BOOKS business into nothing more than a mini-series...

...On the most favorable reading of the evidence, it establishes the continuing importance of long-term, unconditional commitments--to God, to husbands or wives--in the efforts of hardpressed people to assume responsibility for their lives...

...The "isolated nuclear family" is a sociological abstraction that never had much empirical substance until the mass migration to the suburbs, after World War II, broke up the old support systems and made it possible for women to devote themselves, for a time, exclusively to domesticity...

...To paraphrase Ed Murrow, who believed passionately in the truth of the media as a hope and in the benevolence of an informed society, we are not fools nor are we descended from foolish men...

...This will never do...

...and it is questionable, therefore, whether the circumstances that oblige them to work for wages are experienced as liberating in their effects...

...I finally was able to confront nay addiction as I was chewing my way through my seventh biography of Virginia Woolf, and came to a chapter which included verbatim notes she used to leave for her cleaning / woman...

...Even if they do not always identify themselves as feminists, they have absorbed feminist ideas and are experimenting with "alternative models of femininity...

...that they have to contribute to the family's support and even, at times, to assume the full burden of that support...

...Working-class women, as Stacey herself recognizes, attained "this long-denied status" just as it was becoming unfashionable, and economic pressures, in any case, soon forced them back into the labor force...

...The "diversity and the innovative character of many working-class kin relationships"-the prevalence of extended families, blended families, and single-parent households--belie the "Archie Bunker" stereotype, according to Stacey...

...It is also a challenge to self-pity and despair--temptations common to all of us, but especially to those born into the wrong social class...

...that they often express damning views of patriarchy which would be the envy of upper-middle-class feminists...

...Her violent marriage several times approached the point of collapse until it ended, after a reconciliation, in the untimely death of her husband...

...that they find it difficult to assume the role of wifely submission (even though many of them covet that role...

...and all the other habits that have always horrified middle-class observers of working-class culture...

...Elizabeth Shannon used to have an addiction to overloaded biographies...

...Warrenpoint is one...

...They can't take that away from US now...

...an author who couldn't bring himself to leave out one, single, boring, inconsequential fact was no problem for me...

...This familiar view of the family's history underestimates the degree to which even middle-class women led active lives outside the family, long after the advent of industrialism, as volunteers in charitable, philanthropic, and religious organizationsin the case of working-class women, as wage-earners as well...

...People like the Lewisons find a steadying influence--insofar as they find anything to cling to at all--in the extended family (even though family connections are at the same time an endless source of conflict) and in the church...

...We are not a nation of mindless stimulus-response mechanisms who can for long be mass-manipulated by the Tube, just because we know it's the Tube...

...We know--God help us, but this is the cutting edge of our humanity--we know that the blips on the screen are human lives...

...Once in a great while I find such a book...

...Stacey herself, struggling for a formula, admits that "the diversity and complexity of postmodern family patterns rivals [sic] that characteristic of premodem kinship forms...

...The "modem" family BRAVE NEW FAMILIES Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth-Century America Judith Stacey Basic Books, $22.95, 321 pp...

...Submission to God makes people less submissive in everyday life...

...But implicit in what Goodman says is something I've been saying and believing since I started writing these pieces: we are not as dumb as the TV thinks we are...

...We all watched in coma-like horror, she remarks, as George Bush, Saddam Hussein, James Baker, and the rest of the band issued their TV-friendly statements in their TV-friendly suits about the impending possibility of the loathsome...

...Sheep graze on damp, spongy tufts of thick grass, smoke curls into the sky from the few cottages that sit sideways, leeward of the wind, on the 138: Commonweal...

...but it is also debilitating insofar as it serves merely as an excuse for disclaiming any responsibility for oneself...

...A second assumption, that feminism is the only source of self-respect in women, flows from the first...

...Because Stacey assumes that profamily values are antifeminist by definition, she is repeatedly surprised to find evangelical Christians insisting, for example, that men and women are "equal with God" or that the husband's "headship" of the family does not entitle him to "rule over" his wife, as one of them puts it, but rather to "serve [her] with love and respect...

...None of this was focused research, just curiosity gone wild...

...illadvised sexual attractions that dissolve in recriminations...

...A whole winter with Lytton Strachey didn't seem too much time to spend, or a summer with Madame de Stael...

...They aim to make victims acutely aware of their victimization...

...Their leisure time preferences--gambling, flirting, racing, shooting--reflected and reinforced the provocative and ambivalent character of their relationship to social stability...

...On the face of it, Stacey's research does not lend much support to these cheery conclusions...

...One of her three daughters attempted suicide after she discovered that her husband, a heavy drug-user, alcoholic, and parttime criminal by whom she had four children in rapid succession, was seeing another woman...

...but the others have no merit of any kind, as far as I can see...

...The third assumption that dominates and distorts her thinking is that religion interferes with a proper understanding of the world and perpetuates old patterns of domination and dependence...

...The ideology that sustains this bizarre "finding" rests on three assumptions...

...This is, in fact, probably the most initially unpopular war in our history just because it has been so blatantly media-nice-nellied from the beginning...

...Modem social movements, on the other hand, tend to prey on resentment...

...One of the women interviewed by Stacey, citing pride in her mother as an important influence on her own desire for independence, says: "I don't really know what a feminist is, but I like to take charge of my life, try to be the best in whatever I'm doing...

...I don't know if that's a feminist or what...

...Victims of social injustice find it easy to blame everything on systematic oppression---capitalism, patriarchy, racism, the "system" in general...

...It also underestimates the family's historic dependence on supporting networks of relatives, friends, and neighbors...

...If the "cult of domesticity" required women to be clinging and submissive, the feminist movement that began in the sixties has finally taught women, presumably, to be strong and self22 February 1991:137 reliant...

...The lough cuts into the land from the Irish Sea, dividing Northern and Southern Ireland, and creating a political metaphor from its geography...

...Both of the principal women in Stacey's book are fundamentalist Christians, as are many other members of both families...

...She quotes from her field' notes: "I can understand the appeal of such beliefs, but I really can't comprehend how people actually believe this stuff...

...A GOOD PLACE TO HAVE COME FROM WARRENP01NT Denis Donoghue Knopf, $9.95, 194 pp...

...And on some deep level it depresses and disturbs me that they do...

...Her resistance to the implications of her own evidence--her determination to rescue from the evidence support for the ideological preconceptions with which she began--is the real story here, more exciting than "stories of domestic upheaval...

...Stacey's data show that working-class women, as always, have trouble holding their families together in times of economic hardship...

...This libel on our mothers and grandmothers seems to derive largely from the media, which have given currency to an abstract image ofthe"traditional" family that finds little support in the historical record...

...In this way they discourage the assumption of personal responsibili...

...In plain English, these people live on the edge...

...But what is gained, then, by calling these patterns "postmodera," "postfeminist," or "postindustrial...

...the youngest is a drug addict and dealer who has spent a good deal of time in jail...

...and then their adherents are "disturbed" and "depressed" when people turn to religion instead...

...Quite apart from the difficulty that feminism itself has a long history, it is clearly absurd to suppose that earlier generations of women, because they did not have access to current insights into the "social construction of gender," deferred mindlessly to men or wore helplessness as a badge of honor...

...The president was wiser than he knew when, a month ago, he promised that this war--he had already, of course, decided to inflict it--would not be "another Vietnam...

...and that they also seek such support, above all, in religion...

...According to recent polls, most of them would prefer to stay at home...

...a fatalism that often seems to go hand-inhand with a desperate need to tempt fate, to face it down...

...It makes them less fearful but also less bitter and resentful, less inclined to make excuses for themselves...

...The Lewisons look to the church for comfort, and they have no patience with churches that fail to provide it...

...Religion is not just a refuge, a means of security in a troubled world...

...Christopher Lasch may be declining (since it is no longer possible for most husbands to support a wife who stays at home with the children), but the "postmodem," "recombinant" family that is taking its place is a more democratic institution, far more deserving of our support...

...Wage labor is hardly a recent innovation for working-class women, nor does it provide the only escape from full-time domesticity...

...One does not have to be a feminist in order to admire strong women, to see through male pretensions of superiority, or to assume responsibility for one's own life...

...Whenever Stacey encounters such opinions, she describes them as "surprisingly feminized, even protofeminist, doctrines...

...The peace demonstrations will continue and grow--and be more and more reportedjust because it is the nature of information, even or especially at light-speed, to get out...

...On the southern side of the lough, soft, green hills of the Republic of Ireland rise gently from the edge of the water...

...The one reading the evidence cannot possibly support is that working-class women are pioneers of the "postmodern" family...

...that they often seek emotional and material support from friends and relatives instead of expecting the nuclear family to provide for all their needs...

...Religion, likewise, looks like a "retreat from rationalism and secularism," from Stacey's point of view...

...Wrongly condemned (or celebrated) as "profamily reactionaries," working-class women have shouldered the "burdens of freedom" and begun to devise "creative strategies" for dealing with the collapse of the nuclear family...

...There is value in this way of thinking, if it encourages cooperative resistance to exploitation...

...I snapped the book shut and made a clean break...

...Another daughter, a high school dropout, became an unwed mother at an early age, married and divorced another man who beat her (as her father had beaten her mother), and separated from her second husband--an amiable but lazy fellow (a "postfeminist man," in Stacey's euphemistic formulation) who was quite 136: Commonweal happy to stay home while she supported the family--when he tried to undermine her son's faith in God...

...Stacey is sure that it is and is therefore puzzled to find that working-class "feminism" can coexist with a belief in the importance of "absolute commitment in marriage," in the words of another informant...

...I search now for the small but perfect memoir from the author who can judge what is essential, even if the subject is as fascinating as he knows himself to be...

...She died of cancer in her twenties...