American Families: Changes in the Twentieth Century
Stern, Mark J. & Katz, Michael B.
WHAT NARRATIVE best characterizes the history of American families? Should their story be read nostalgically, as one of decline from an era when twoparent families with children dominated...
...MICHAEL B. KATZ and MARK J. STERN are coauthors of One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006...
...Rather, we want to emphasize the extent of the upheaval...
...Second, four trends interacted to reconfigure families in the twentieth century...
...How, then, are we to resolve the issue...
...As units, families adopt distinctive strategies for managing and getting ahead, and, as sociologists of family have argued since the inception of the discipline, they constitute key elements of social and economic structure with crucial roles in reproduction, socialization, and the transmission of cultural and human capital...
...in 2000 most were either divorced, separated, or never married...
...nonfamily households, 10 percent...
...The relative stability in the share of single-mother households masks the fact that in 1900 the single mothers were mainly widows...
...The history of families in twentieth-century America has clear implications for progressive politics...
...The first and third were evident early in the century...
...The fraction of the population living in census tracts where more than half the families consisted of married couples with children plummeted: by 80 percent in suburbs, from 59 percent to 12 percent, and by 77 percent in central cities, from 12 percent to 3 percent...
...Although this trend appeared most vividly among African Americans, it marked the experience of all groups, with out-of-wedlock births growing fastest among whites...
...There is a small remainder not captured in this classification...
...We pay special attention to the intersection between family and life course over time and the response of both to massive economic change and shifting patterns of inequality...
...For evidence she draws on the work of sociologists Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout in their excellent recent book, A Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years...
...They are also vulnerable—shifting strategies, recomposing their internal structures, resetting cycles in response to external change...
...the second and fourth started later...
...It has an impact on architectural decisions about what sort of housing to build and the provision of retailing and cultural amenities, trends evident in suburbs, where married couples with children have become a minority of households...
...The Fischer-Hout/Skolnick view of family history, which emphasizes that throughout the twentieth century most children have lived with their parents and most women and men eventually marry, is intensely individualistic...
...Both cite statistics that buttress their cases...
...One is the importance of constructive policies based on a realistic assessment of the needs of persons living in the varieties of family common today, not those supposed to have existed in a mythical golden age or projected for an equally mythical future...
...First, that history traced a pattern from diversity at the opening of the century to increased standardization at its midpoint to a new form of diversity at its close...
...As we have written elsewhere (The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism), "Three attributes characterize all families: a cycle, a structure, and an economy...
...Skolnick argues that both conservative and progressive writers on family overlook continuity...
...Did a singular "American family" ever exist or has diversity been the hallmark of America's families throughout the twentieth century...
...A time-traveler from 1900 finding herself in the America of 2000 would not be too surprised at the division of wealth and income by race, ethnicity, and occupation, but she would be disoriented by the variety and distribution of family forms...
...Fischer and Hout were one of two teams commissioned by the Russell Sage Foundation to write a book putting the year 2000 census in the perspective of social and economic trends in the twentieth century...
...In 1900, this was the approximate share of each type: traditional families, 55 percent...
...There the proportion of the population living in census tracts where women headed at least 25 percent of families soared 440 percent, from 5 percent to 27 percent...
...nonfamily households, 25 percent...
...These currents resulted in a massive rearrangement of household forms...
...They teach at the University of Pennsylvania, where Katz is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and Stern is professor of social welfare and history and codirector of the Urban Studies Program...
...and empty-nest households, 6 percent...
...The question is important because, as both authors contend, divergent narratives of family history lead in different directions...
...Dissent, Fall 2006 and Spring 2007...
...Fischer-Hout and Skolnick are correct to argue that diversity has been the norm in the history of American families and that the predominance of nuclear families with children, high fertility rates, and young marriages in the mid-twentieth century was the exception, not the benchmark against which future change should be measured...
...The answer lies in the importance of institutions...
...Nonfamily households—young, DISSENT / Fall 2007 91 unmarried people between eighteen and thirtyfive living alone or without relatives—also replaced traditional families in both cities and suburbs, rising from 8 percent to 35 percent in suburbs and from 28 to 57 percent in central cities...
...Throughout the century, most individuals lived in one of four types of households: nonfamily, female-head with child, empty-nest couple, married couple with child (traditional families...
...Between 1900 and 2000, the proportion of them living in married-couple-with-children households went down from 67 percent to 39 percent, while the share in empty-nest and nonfamily households combined nearly tripled from 15 percent to 43 percent...
...Most dramatic was the change in nonfamily households...
...In part, the disagreement between Trimberger and Skolnick rests on what at first seems an arcane scholarly disagreement about the unit of measurement: is the trajectory of family history best captured by concentrating on the family and household settings in which most individuals lived, as argued by Skolnick, or by tracing the composition of families and households over time, as Trimberger does...
...Should their story be read nostalgically, as one of decline from an era when twoparent families with children dominated the domestic landscape but as one of relative stability over time or should it emphasize fundamental changes undermining the very concept of "family" itself...
...And a third is the intellectual task of finding a new definition of family capacious enough to embrace the variety of families in twenty-first-century America...
...Why did we believe it important to focus on households and families as units rather than solely on the domestic experience of individuals...
...It is neither necessary nor appropriate to cast this family transformation as a morality play, for it results from adaptations to forces over which individual families have had little control...
...Skolnick's focus on individuals leads her to argue that most people still live in nuclear families and that marriage is about as strong as ever...
...Our book, One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming follows a different tack in examining family and household history over the course of the century...
...To take another example, consider individuals age 18 and over...
...From this vantage point, with the family and household as the unit of measurement, what are the major trends in twentiethcentury domestic history...
...We were the other team...
...singlemother families, 30 percent...
...These questions underlie the exchange between E. Kay Trimberger and Arlene Skolnick that followed Skolnick's article on marriage...
...During the twentieth century, their share of all households leaped 226 percent...
...In contrast, we see families and households as institutions with distinctive features...
...It affects the demand for public and private services, such as schools and supports for the elderly who do not live with their children or single mothers without adequate incomes...
...Consider the history of suburbs...
...They were, first, the reduction in marital fertility...
...These changes reshaped the domestic landscape...
...The third trend was that the elderly less often lived with their children, and fewer relatives and boarders stayed with families as well...
...In the same years, the proportion of individuals living in them jumped 252 percent...
...By 2000, the balance had shifted dramatically: traditional families, 25 percent...
...It influences local politics, too, as when school bond issues go down to defeat...
...Families all pass through a sequence of stages from for90 DISSENT / Fall 2007 mation through dissolution...
...The proportion of emptynest households increased 129 percent...
...all are formed by a set of relationships between people with different roles and statuses...
...Between 1970 and 2000, out-of-wedlock births among black women grew 82 percent and among white women, 404 percent...
...and all must acquire and allocate the means for their subsistence...
...Trimberger emphasizes change...
...Second was the partial disconnection of marriage from parenthood...
...The economic, social, and political ramifications of this change would take us beyond the scope of this discussion...
...It implicitly views family and household as shells inhabited by more or less autonomous individuals...
...the number of individuals living in them rose 216 percent, while the fraction of female-headedwithchild households grew 26 percent compared to an increase of 72 percent in the number of individuals living in them...
...But it would be wrong to minimize its extent or implications...
...Conservatives, for instance, have equated "family decline" with moral decay and used it to justify a variety of antiprogressive positions...
...Change was greatest in the suburbs...
...Empty-nest households also became more common in suburbs: the fraction of the population living in census tracts where they made up at least 45 percent of all households jumped from 14 percent to 25 percent...
...On closer inspection of the data, the stories do not vary as much as they at first seem...
...single mothers, 28 percent...
...We focus on households as the unit of measurement and examine the experience of individuals by tracing the history of the life course, especially the transition from adolescence to independent adulthood and the transition to old age...
...Whichever way one looks at the numbers, profound family change has taken place...
...Trends within other types of households tell a similar story...
...For example, between 1900 and 2000, the proportion of married-couplewithchildren households declined by 52 percent while the proportion of individuals living in these traditional families dropped by 37 percent...
...A sharp rise from 5 percent in 1940 to 23 percent in 2000 in unmarried adults age eighteen to thirty-five living together—what we call nonfamily households —constituted the fourth trend...
...Another is the importance of basing urban and suburban planning on a clear understanding of how domestic landscapes are changing...
...that is, the sharp decline in the number of children born to married couples...
...The following figures are based on a sample of fourteen metropolitan areas between 1970 and 2000...
...empty-nest households, 16 percent...
...In the last analysis, the trends that emerge from an institutional as contrasted with an individualcentered view of family history are not as different as commentators on either side of the divide imply...
...ASECOND POINT about the historical importance of families as units is this: the mix of family/household types in a given place has major social, economic, and political consequences...
Vol. 54 • September 2007 • No. 4
