American Families: Changes in the Twentieth Century: Responds
Skolnick, Arlene
I WILL BEGIN with a general comment, then discuss the specific points raised by Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern. There is a great deal of public anxiety about the dramatic family changes of...
...then came the counterculture and feminism, the moral collapse of the family, and the host of social pathologies we have today...
...But the family-decline debate now seems less urgent...
...Should the focus be on households and families, as they recommend...
...The "D" word supplies the symbolism and emotional force for right-wing social policies—abolish welfare, promote marriage, ban gay unions...
...The choice, they contend, has profound ideological and practical implications...
...On the other hand, they argue that the two narratives of family change "do not vary quite as much as they at first seem...
...One last point: the whole matter of defining "households" and figuring out who lives in them is far more complex, ambiguous, and subjective than Katz and Stern assume...
...In all ethnic groups, distinguishing between "household" and "family" is not a simple matter...
...For one thing, it enables them to track shifts in the living arrangements of people of different ages and genders...
...The Census Bureau has recently funded a set of small ethnographic studies to learn why it is so hard to count all Americans at the places they live, at one moment in time...
...I don't want to burden Dissent's readers with too many words about this "arcane" matter...
...Their approach defines families and households as "institutions," while the other is "intensely individualistic...
...0 N THE ONE HAND, they seem to agree with E. Kay Trimberger that the "decline" (or "change") narrative describes the recent history of American domestic life better than the "stability" alternative they ascribe to me...
...But I don't recognize my own views in their description of them...
...There is a great deal of public anxiety about the dramatic family changes of the past several decades, and news about the disappearing or declining family has become a media staple...
...The political climate is more favorable for progressive policies than it's been for a long time...
...DISSENT / Fall 2007 93...
...Much of their piece deals with what they describe as an "arcane scholarly disagreement" about how to measure family change...
...But they neglect to mention the factor that Fischer and Hout point to as the "driving force" behind these numbers: the increasing lifespans of individuals and married couples...
...Clearly, we have to find another way to talk about family matters...
...Now to the specific points raised by Katz and Stern...
...Katz and Stern make much of the "massive rearrangement of household forms" between 1900 and 2000, when households consisting of married couples with children shrank from 55 percent of the population to 25 percent...
...She is a visiting scholar at the New York University Department of Sociology and a senior fellow at the Council on Contemporary Families...
...And they allude to what seems to be a third narrative according to which American families and living arrangements have always been diverse...
...The same happens when family researchers argue that the story of American family life is one of both change and continuity...
...the culture war seems to have faded, along with Republican political fortunes...
...And the word evokes the a simple before-and-after narrative that explains it all: before the sixties, 92 DISSENT / Fall 2007 all was well with the American family...
...Or should it instead be on "the domestic experience of individuals," which they describe as the approach favored by Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout—and me...
...nor, I suspect, would Fischer and Hout, who actually do focus on household types and on the changing distribution of the population into these types...
...ARLENE SKOLNICK iS the author of Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty...
...And as they apply their analysis in their Russell Sage volume, it makes for a finergrained view of family change than any other I have seen...
...The task now is to develop a family politics for the twenty-first century, aimed at building the social and economic infrastructure that can enable families to sustain themselves, whatever their form...
...Conservatives have honed this pervasive "decline" theme into a potent political weapon...
...Unfortunately, when progressives try to counter the decline theme by arguing that a healthy "diversity" has replaced the "traditional" family, they end up reinforcing the conservative message...
Vol. 54 • September 2007 • No. 4
