FEMINISM AND FAMILY: Rethinking the Politics of the Family
Skolnick, Arlene
AFTER SEPTEMBER II, 2001, Dissent published a series of articles that critically assessed traditional left ideas about America and its place in the world. For some time, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein...
...Talk about family change is almost totally disconnected from the discussion of technology and economy...
...ARLENE SKOLNICK, author of Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty, is a member of the board of directors of the Council on Contemporary Families and a visiting scholar at New York University...
...Epstein describes the cultural biases and factual flaws of these arguments, as well as the absence of constructive policy suggestions...
...rising costs for housing, health care, and education...
...People FEMINISM AND FAMILY know that the world has changed, and they know that family life has changed, but they have a hard time seeing the connections between the two...
...We believe that the common ground most of us on the liberal/left share is more significant than our differences...
...a new economic insecurity that reaches far up into the middle class...
...Despite conservative domination of the debate, there seems to be a "silent" progressive majority in the country...
...Some of us try to debunk right-wing misinformation about family life, using statistics and historical evidence...
...For some time, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and I have been thinking about undertaking a similar review of domestic policy, focused on the cultural war over the family...
...As we know from earlier family transformations, coming to terms with the new realities is not automatic or easy...
...If mothers are missing out on time with their children because they prefer work to home and family, it's hard to criticize employers for demanding long hours...
...An understanding of the structural roots of family and gender shifts is essential if we are to reclaim "family values" and develop a pragmatic, progressive, pro-family agenda...
...The moral decline theme demonizes the left, resonates with public anxieties, and has a paralyzing effect on public policy...
...Progressives have not found a language of our own to address these concerns...
...This approach, however, doesn't deal with popular anxieties...
...If what the poor suffer from is not poverty, but bad values, they need moral rehabilitation, not welfare...
...Like many others on the liberal to left side of the political spectrum—progressives, for short—we have been frustrated by the right's ability to dominate public debate about gender, family, and sexuality, even though most Americans don't agree with core conservative policies...
...Though "second wave" feminism is routinely given credit (or blame) for the gender revolution, larger structural forces were also a major factor in transforming both men's and women's lives...
...The current discourse about American children, on the right and the left, is almost entirely focused on the failings of today's parents to provide them with the care and attention they need...
...But marriage has changed, and times have changed...
...To sum up, the aim of this series is not to do battle with friends, but to build a more effective opposition to right-wing control of national politics...
...If the differences are important, we need to overcome them so as to develop a progressive vision of a possible future and a strategy to get there...
...Family stress and disruption, as well as political and cultural conflict, are features of the process...
...Kathleen Gerson takes on the new conventional wisdom, again found on the left as well as the right, that Americans are working too much in order to feed a growing taste for consumer goods...
...In fact, under the cover of "family values," Republican economic policies have done more to destabilize families and communities than the counterculture ever did...
...The three articles in this issue offer more progressive, and more effective, approaches to the issues of women, work, and family...
...In fact, however, most Americans are not so much conservative as ambivalent about family change...
...We need to move away from the right's "good fifties, bad sixties" version of recent history, as well as the left's inverted liberation version of the same story...
...They trace the source of all our social problems to the counterculture of the 1960s, with its "anything goes" sexuality, its selfish individualism, its revolt against authority and tradition...
...In this issue, we present the first three articles in the series, dealing with the theme of women, work, and family...
...The growing insecurity of the labor market and the pressure of long working hours are responsible for the crisis of time and money that haunts most American families...
...WE NEED TO develop a progressive version of "family values," a vision and a moral language of our own...
...Difficult changes in cultural norms, public policy, and social institutions are necessary...
...One of our most important tasks is countering the conservative story about moral decline since the 1960s...
...The late Christopher Lasch's jeremiads are a prime example...
...To be sure, radical feminists, queer theorists, and others have made cogent critiques of traditional marriage...
...Instead, we have responded in inadequate ways to conservative family values discourse...
...Second, how can the enduring human need for care and nurturance be reconciled with the passing of women's collective role as an unpaid labor force to supply those needs...
...a mismatch between the needs of families and the demands of employers for longer hours and lower labor costs...
...Instead of scolding people for the dilemmas they struggle with, we need a moral and politi4 6 n DISSENT / Fall 2004 cal critique of the unprecedented pressures on today's families: growing inequality...
...Meanwhile, the vast majority of American families are struggling to cope with a brutal sink-or-swim economy, intensified time pressures, and a gender revolution We have invited a number of progressive intellectuals to consider what we have been doing wrong and how we could do better...
...The acceleration of technological and socioeconomic change in the last few decades of the century— globalization, new information technologies, the demise of the steady male job, the graying of the population, as well as the decline of gender inequality—made it finally obsolete...
...These are the issues that the culture wars keep out of public discourse about family change...
...We need to make strange bedfellows, starting with each other...
...Cynthia Epstein takes issue with the new attacks on working mothers, especially on women who pursue professional or managerial careers...
...Until we replace that narrative with a different one, we will not see another era of progressive reform, no matter which party wins the next election, or the next...
...They have "no compelling reason to vote Republican," unless the GOP raises social and cultural issues...
...Cultural warfare has evolved over the past three decades into an essential political tool for conservatives...
...If the right is pushing marriage as the solution to poverty and other social ills, these leftists call for the abolition of marriage...
...But conservatives, following Atwater's advice, also speak to the ambivalence and anxiety most people feel about the bewildering cascade of changes in family life in recent years and its effects on children...
...We have the highest rates of child poverty, and provide the lowest levels of quality child care, early education, and health care...
...Strober argues for a public infrastructure that would enable parents to sustain themselves and nurture their young...
...The postindustrial era is undoing the distinctive breadwinnerhousewife family model that emerged in the early nineteenth century, and at the same time it is undoing the elaborate gender ideology of "separate spheres...
...In future issues, we will publish articles on the politics of marriage and divorce, the evolution of family values as a partisan political weapon, discourses of cultural and moral decline on the left, parental anxieties and possible left strategies for dealing with them, the abortion wars, and other matters...
...As Alan Wolfe and others have found, the split between traditionalists who lament the passing of the Ozzie and Harriet era and modernists who welcome the new freedoms exists within individual men and women, as well as between the two sides in the culture war...
...Nevertheless, the culture war and its key words—"traditional family values," "moral decay," "breakdown of the family," "permissiveness"— provide the language in which morality, sex, gender, and marriage (other matters too, such as crime and drugs) are discussed...
...More recently, some progressive writers, discussing economic and social dilemmas such as balancing home and work, often slide into a moralizing criticism—of women who "choose" to work more than they really "have to," for example, or of families who work long hours to pay for their "consumerist addictions...
...There is another contrasting but equally troubling tendency: many leftists now use a language of nostalgia and moral decline that is virtually indistinguishable from the moralizing rhetoric of the right...
...The predicaments of today's families stem from two structural dilemmas: first, how can the needs of families and communities for security and stability be reconciled with a globalized, fast-changing economy that, at least in its neoliberal version, demands maximum flexibility, minimal labor costs, and the dismantling of social safety nets...
...For the right, keeping these issues off the table makes good sense...
...A majority of the American public has never favored the core conservative agenda—slashing government services, massive tax cuts for the top few percent, privatizing everything in sight...
...DISSENT / Fall 2004 • 4 5 FEMINISM AND FAMILY Part of the reason is that over the past three decades conservatives have built and funded a network of foundations, think tanks, and media of all kinds (and all brow levels—high, middle, and low), with the explicit mission of turning far-out conservative ideas into conventional wisdom and then into public policy...
...Critics from both the right and the left accuse middle-class women of neglecting their children and exploiting the immigrant women they employ as nannies and housekeepers...
...And conservatives tell a seemingly plausible story about the origin of the social upheavals that have transformed the country since the 1950s...
...And marriage matters enormously to the vast majority of Americans— including most gays...
...How can we change the terms of political debate to advance our own moral message and vision of a better future...
...The United States lags behind all other Western democracies in providing for the needs of children...
...They are also responsible for the "care deficit" that social critics denounce...
...In 1984, the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained why: ordinary American voters, he argued, tend to be economically liberal but culturally conservative...
...declining public services...
...Surveys over time and over a range of issues reveal that most Americans take liberal positions on women's rights, sex education, the environment, corporate deregulation, health care, Social Security and Medicare, programs for poor children, and the like...
...and on, and on...
...In the course of the twentieth century, this "women's place is in the home" doctrine became less and less reflective of how women actually lived...
...Some progressive intellectuals fall into what might be called "the culture war trap," and accept the conservative terms of debate...
...If progressives don't make these connections, who will...
...Gerson argues that the problem lies not with personal values, but with the world of work and the failure of our institutions to meet the needs of today's dual-earner or single-parent families...
...Myra Strober makes the case as an economist that children should be seen as public goods, not simply as private concerns of their parents...
...This cultural shift in time preferences, argue the critics, results in neglected children and the erosion of civil society...
...Some choose to fight and even inflame the culture wars, writing and speaking as if it were still the 1960s...
...Yet progressives have had a hard time converting this potential majority into winning numbers at the polls...
...DISSENT / Fall 2004 n 47...
...If consumerism is driving overwork, then it's hard to complain about stagnating wages...
...Strober concludes that since children as a group cannot speak for themselves, they need adults to lead a movement on their behalf...
...To repeat: the doctrine of moral decline benefits only the right because it disables institutional change...
...Nor does it offer an alternative to the right's before-and-after story about the 1960s...
Vol. 51 • September 2004 • No. 4
