Rethinking the Politics of the Family: Part IV
Skolnick, Arlene
RECENTLY, a PBS Frontline documentary called "The New Asylum" showed how our jails and prisons have become, by default, the nation's mental hospitals. This wasn't an exposé. The prison under...
...The staff seemed to be trying their best to deal with an impossible situation...
...But what, you might ask, has the topic of prisons to do with the culture war and family values, the subject of this series...
...Barnett and Rivers discuss the new biological determinism that purports to show that women are not meant to be leaders, risk takers, or high achievers, especially in math and science...
...But public discussion focuses almost entirely on individuals and their choices, not on America's institutional landscape...
...Finally, Frank Furstenberg challenges the conservative argument that restoring marriage to the status it enjoyed in the 1950s is the key to solving the nation's major social problems...
...Still, it seems inevitable that a new political consensus will one day emerge, because a politics based on myth, nostalgia, and denial is unsustainable...
...Given all the difficulties facing America's working parents, Gornick asks, "Why aren't American parents up in arms...
...In the end, these articles point to the same conclusion: if we truly want to solve the nation's social problems, we need a drastically altered discourse about moral values and about the role of government in sustaining the health and security of parents and children...
...At various times in the past several decades—in the late 1970s, the early 1990s—it seemed as if the country was on the brink of another cycle of progressive reform, to address not just family issues but the social and economic contexts in which they are rooted...
...Each time, the moment was lost to a new round of ideological warfare...
...Yet American families lack supports that their counterparts in other high-income countries enjoy—parental leave, high quality affordable child care, family-friendly work hours and job flexibility, as well as larger social protection systems, such as universal health insurance and protection against sudden fluctuations in income...
...Furstenberg argues that marriage and family patterns have always been in flux, so the reDISSENT / Summer 2005 • 63 POLITICS OF THE FAMILY cent changes are not unprecedented...
...and that the 1950s family pattern was a demographic aberration—not the normative standard by which to measure today's families...
...The idea that women and men are starkly different is part of the current zeitgeist, cutting across the conservative-liberal divide...
...More than that, however, the documentary illustrates the reductio ad absurdum of America's current political culture: its rhetoric of faith and family values combined with its tax-and-services-slashing policies, its deference to corporate power and accompanying sink-or-swim economy, its tolerance of growing inequality, its bread and circuses media, and the unprecedented reliance of the current administration on a strategy of lies and denial...
...Rosalind C. Barnett and Caryl Rivers add another piece to the puzzle—the ideological complex that keeps the focus of public concern on individuals, not institutions...
...She observes that the stressed-out, overworked American parent is a familiar character in the media...
...As a result of all this, prisons have become the social policy of last resort...
...First, it shows how the culture war, with its focus on hot-button issues like gay marriage, end-of-life decisions, and obscenity on television, to name the most recent examples, crowds out discussion of serious social problems...
...The prison under examination didn't seem particularly bad...
...Her answer reveals the mistaken beliefs that shape our consciousness...
...Gornick observes, as did Kathleen Gerson earlier in this series, that some left writers insist that women prefer work to home, and that Americans in general work long hours to feed their insatiable consumerism...
...And conservatives are not the only ones committed to this reduction...
...And they demolish the shaky scientific "evidence" on which such claims rest...
...Only when these problems deteriorate into matters of crime and punishment can "government spending" be justified...
...No longer just the place to incarcerate violent offenders, the prison has become the final common repository of the social problems we are unwilling to prevent or remedy before they grow into crises...
...The untold story here is the role that growing inequality and economic insecurity have played in weakening families and harming children...
...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...
...64 n DISSENT / Summer 2005...
...Janet Gornick's article on resolving workfamily dilemmas illustrates a variation on the general theme of our unwillingness to look at the social sources of family predicaments...
Vol. 52 • July 2005 • No. 3
