William Julius Wilson's More than Just Race, Andrew J. Cherlin's The Marriage-Go-Round, Kathleen Gerson's The Unfinished Revolution
Skolnick, Arlene
BOOKS Talking about Family Values After "Family Values" ARLENE SKOLNICK More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City by William Julius Wilson W.W. Norton, 2009, 190 pp.,...
...While anxiety about cultural and moral decline intensified in the eighties and nineties, inequality grew to levels not seen since 1928...
...Not allowed to wear his captain's uniform or command an airliner, and no longer the major breadwinner in the family, Lawlor feels "diminished...
...But suddenly, he and other captains were demoted to the rank of first officer, automatically cutting their salaries in half...
...Radical calls for women's liberation and sexual freedom are often blamed for causing the "crisis of the family," but they came on the heels of vast changes already in process—and well advanced...
...It also mattered how well families coped with changing circumstances...
...Her book is based on intensive interviews with adult "children of the gender revolution," 120 young men and women, ages 18 to 32 (when interviewed in the late 1990s and early 2000s...
...It is as likely to be invoked on the Left as the Right...
...Arlene Skolnick is a visiting scholar at New York University and author of Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty...
...But unlike earlier researchers, they no longer assume that culture is passed along from one generation to the next...
...Family incomes had stopped growing...
...By the 1970s, these liberal attitudes had become, as one study put it, "common coin...
...Whether the mother had a job or stayed home was not a decisive factor in these accounts...
...In the past, he has argued for race neutral policies to deal with new structural real-ities—the disappearance of jobs, failing schools, growing inequality...
...In contrast to Wilson's close-up study of the inner-city black poor, Andrew Cherlin's The Marriage-Go-Round takes a wide-angle look at American marital patterns, Cherlin is a leading demographer of family trends as well as a family scholar...
...Wilson cites recent ethnographic work by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, who interviewed poor white, Puerto Rican, and African American single mothers and found similar responses to persistent poverty...
...Young men and women may share hopes for an egalitarian partnership, but they have worked out incompatible "fallback positions...
...The author, Don Peck, argues that "The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning...
...eventually, cultures and institutions come to terms with the new realities...
...He wants to reclaim—very cautiously—the notion of "culture" to help explain the persistence of poverty and family fragmentation among African Americans in the inner city...
...To liberals at the time, Moynihan's argument seemed racist and victim blaming, even though he was using it strategically to prompt a more aggressive government attack on poverty...
...But they could be poster children for the economic forces that have made even solid middle class lives far more uncertain and stressful...
...These books help us understand our situation...
...But the book presented a remarkably prescient overview of the coming era...
...Yet, we also divorce more than people in other countries...
...In the middle to late 1970s, for example, studies found that families up and down the income scale were feeling squeezed between a stagnant economy and sharply rising prices...
...In the last decade, a small but growing library of books and articles has documented the declining economic fortunes of ordinary Americans...
...They see work as essential to their survival...
...The flourishing genre of pessimistic critiques of American character and culture that began in the forties and fifties went out of fashion in the sixties...
...The unionized working class, particularly white workers, experienced the greatest change of fortune...
...stay-at-home mother, and so on...
...Cherlin sees the contradiction as more extreme now than ever...
...What kind of futures did these twenty- and thirty-somethings want for themselves...
...This is the first generation to grow up with large numbers of mothers working outside the home, rising divorce rates, and declining economic security...
...We refuse to come to terms with the transformation in women's lives and the imbalance between work and family, We have allowed our social infrastructure to erode as much as our physical infrastructure of roads and bridges...
...We have more live-in partners, and we break up with them more often...
...The majority, both men and women, hoped to have an egalitarian as well as a committed relationship, sharing paid work and family care...
...Still, the book's emphasis on "expressive individualism" and "self-development" as the major reason American relationships break down seems at odds with the class differences in marital stability...
...For example, standard research designs typically focus on family structure—two parent vs...
...We produce more inequality and more insecurity than any other "first world" nation...
...Close to half of those with a mother at home wished their mothers had had jobs, either because the family would have been better off financially or because she was frustrated about lost opportunities...
...Americans would experience greater stress and anxiety than at any time since the Second World War: "Tension between work, in the broad sense, and family will probably be the central dynamic of American society...
...Those brought up in more "traditional" families were divided...
...So how should progressives talk about families, values, and economics after the financial meltdown, the election of 2008, the noisy Tea Party movement, and the unexpected resurrection of GOP electoral prospects...
...For decades, the study of culture as a factor in poverty, especially black poverty, was virtually taboo for social scientists...
...Peck's article failed to get much attention from the public and the media, especially in comparison to an earlier cover story in the Atlantic, "Dan Quayle Was Right," the 1993 assault on single motherhood...
...Looking back at the rise of "family values" politics in the seventies, historian Matthew Lassiter has argued that the political impact of that pivotal era was not just that conservatives won political power, "but that cultural explanations triumphed over economic ones in setting the terms of public debate and determining the direction of public policies...
...It encouraged a readiness to tackle longstanding problems such as poverty and racial inequality...
...That issue sold a record number of copies and helped to launch the "marriage movement" of the 1990s, and the campaign to end welfare...
...Wilson insists than any broad generalizations about "culture" need to be confirmed by ethnographic evidence...
...It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities...
...William Julius Wilson's More than Just Race extends the analysis of inner-city black poverty that he elaborated in The Declining Significance of Race and The Truly Disadvantaged...
...He seems to share their belief that, except for a small number of abusive or highly conflicted relationships, divorce mostly happens because of the siren call of self-seeking individualism...
...Lawlor's frank description of his emotional reactions to his new financial situation illustrates, in mild form, symptoms of what researchers have called the "normal pathology" of unemployment or other economic falls from grace...
...Studies that look in depth at the lives of individuals and families often complicate theoretical debates about "the family...
...The expansion of higher education in the postwar years had profound effects on attitudes toward gender, sexuality, family life, and the self...
...Embracing the reform of today's high-risk, high-stress economy could be a winning strategy for Democratic candidates...
...Progressives now have a chance to speak for the embattled middle class as well as the poor and excluded...
...He insists that "structure trumps culture," and so efforts to change culture without addressing economic problems are doomed to fail...
...Was the essence of the problem economic or cultural...
...Each looks through both a cultural and an economic lens, but each offers very different pictures of the current predicaments of American families...
...Wilson concludes that the nation needs a new political framing for dealing with racial inequality, one that unites structure and culture...
...the point is to change it...
...Employers still view an ideal worker as someone unhindered by family obligations...
...The boom lasted two decades, but it nurtured a sense that the end of scarcity was here to stay...
...The strains in relationships among the less educated reflect their declining job prospects and the stresses of life on a low income...
...Now, praising Obama's March 2008 speech on race, he argues that the country is ready for a frank discussion of joblessness and the erosion of black families, including a message about "personal responsibility...
...And in the next-to-the-last chapter of the book, "Blue-Collar Blues/White-Collar Weddings," he looks directly at the economic shocks that have hit American workers over the past several decades and shows that it is the less-educated, low-income Americans who are most likely to ride the "the marriage-go-round...
...This pathology, Moynihan argued, was self-perpetuating, passed along from one generation to the next, almost impervious to changing conditions—hence the need for massive government intervention...
...Even during the early 1950s, surveys showed that college-educated men and women had more relaxed views of sexuality, more liberal attitudes toward women's roles, and were more concerned with warmth and intimacy in family relationships...
...He worries that the mortgage payments may now be unaffordable, and that the children, who have not been told of the change in family finances, will finally notice when Christmas brings many fewer clothes and toys than usual...
...At some places in the book, Cherlin sounds almost like the conservative scolds of the marriage movement...
...As of now, however, the media and policy makers seem oblivious to the harm inflicted on children and families by our economic troubles...
...Insecurity crept up the class ladder from the unskilled, through the blue collars, the white collars, and the professional middle class...
...More recently, a cover story on the "End of Men" also attracted a good deal of attention...
...rising outside-the-home employment rates for wives and mothers...
...Much of the book is devoted to tracing the historical development of our distinctive marital culture...
...Moynihan's focus was on what he called "the tangle of pathology" in the black family, which stood "at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society...
...The obsessive focus of cultural critics on the 1960s as the dividing line between traditional values and moral breakdown ignores the enormous social and economic transformations that took place in postwar America...
...We undermine the conditions that enable families to function well...
...Conservatives, meanwhile, heralded Moynihan as a prophet...
...Then they get caught by the other prong of the cultural dilemma—the commitment to self-fulfillment and personal satisfaction...
...The article went on to tell what happened to Bryan Lawlor, a thirty-four-year-old airline pilot who lives in Virginia with his schoolteacher wife and their four children...
...But for the young adults in Gerson's study, these categories mattered little...
...Almost 80 percent of those brought up with a work-committed mother thought that arrangement was the best...
...Here, Wilson focuses on the link between culture and poverty...
...it has little to do with moral decline and much to do with a political economy that threatens the well-being and stability of all families...
...Indeed, he thinks that Americans marry too much, not too little...
...Consider the long series of anxiety-provoking books and articles— including some by liberals and leftists—from The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man through The Culture of Narcissism, Habits of the Heart, and Bowling Alone...
...These young people can foresee only private solutions to their dilemmas...
...The current book takes the reader on a detailed tour of the debates about the role of "culture"—atti-tudes, values, beliefs, manners, language—and "structure"—discrimination, low wages, joblessness, bad schools, bad housing—in explaining persistent poverty and family fragmentation among inner-city blacks...
...The interviewers asked them to tell the stories of their lives so far and talk about their hopes and expectations for the future...
...We have been stalled at this halfway point for decades...
...But a much larger 40 percent of American children experience at least one change in a parent's romantic relationship...
...He had been a captain earning $68,000 a year, in line for a promotion raise...
...So what can reasonably be said about the state of family life in the first decades of a new century...
...Gerson argues we need to think of a family as a movie rather than a snapshot...
...Perhaps the most remarkable single fact about the 1950s and 1960s was the rise of mass prosperity, produced by the spectacular growth of the American economy, the strength of the labor movement, and massive government spending, much of it justified as defense spending...
...The historian Peter Carroll, in one of the first academic studies of the decade, complained that popular criticism of "narcissism" and "the me decade" masked a "cold disdain for the problems of ordinary people...
...And so the war on poverty became a war against the poor...
...We have one of the highest marriage rates among Western countries: 90 percent of us marry in the course of our lives, only 5 percent down from the all-time high of the 1950s...
...Still, the troubles of today's families have far less to do with morality and values than with vast changes in technology and the economy, in business practices and the organization of work, and in political ideology...
...And it bothers him that he can no longer pick up the check when the family goes out to dinner with his parents...
...In addition to the usual milestones of births and deaths, families experience ups and downs due to events like divorce, illness or accident, drinking or other drug use, or changes in economic fortune...
...No economic system can prosper in the long run if it erodes the ability of its families to nurture their children and meet their basic needs...
...single parent, divorce vs...
...Nearly all wanted marriage or a marriage-like relationship and children...
...Each of the books under discussion was written before the current recession...
...Cherlin focuses in particular on the 8.2 percent of American children who experience three parental partnerships...
...Blaming personal failings and moral decline for social problems is a deeply rooted American habit, reaching back to the Puritans...
...A compilation of their findings, America in Perspective, attracted little notice...
...With a solid marriage, supportive relatives, a roof over their heads, and a still decent two-earner income, the Lawlors are not the hardest hit victims of the current recession...
...For decades Americans have lived as if there is no alternative to our current political economy...
...Women in all three groups value marriage and hope to marry in the future, but there is a shortage of marriageable men in their lives...
...Indeed, the great untold story of the past four decades is the steady erosion of the economic underpinnings of American families, even while the national economy seemed to be thriving...
...Finally, Gerson reports another troubling finding...
...Western culture has always been marked by a strange animosity to material well-being...
...And he insists that statistical research by itself can't explain what a particular behavior pattern means—for example, that the rise in out-of-wedlock births reflects a rejection of marriage, or that giving up on the search for a job reflects cultural beliefs rather than actual experiences...
...Yet Cherlin clearly rejects the marriage movement's prescription for a trip to the altar as a cure for poverty and other social ills...
...The remedy would be massive government funding for jobs, job training, education, and other community programs...
...The postwar boom was over...
...They want to be actively involved in their children's lives, but their Plan B would focus on breadwinning in the absence of more balanced options...
...He argues that family life in the United States, unlike any other country in the world, is marked by radically contradictory attitudes toward marriage...
...Young men would settle for a neotraditional arrangement, with their wives dropping out of the workforce or shifting to part-time work when children come along...
...The nation, they concluded, was becoming a "high risk, high stress society...
...But the more closely researchers look at survey data and interviewed people in actual families, the less evidence they find to support the rhetoric of decline...
...Wilson agrees with recent researchers who find that inner-city family patterns are more a product of social class or restricted opportunity than of an inherited culture unique to African Americans...
...Part of the problem is that terms like "expressive individualsim" and even "self" have become politically charged...
...And yet our reigning political ideology pushes us in the wrong direction...
...The book is the latest of Wilson's contributions to an argument that began in 1965 over what came to be known as the Moynihan report...
...Just as the dream of a comfortable life began to come true for a wide swath of the population, many intellectuals, social critics, and academics cast a cold eye on postwar American society—especially on the burgeoning middle class and the new suburbia...
...Marriage today is an optional part of life rather than a required one, but it is so prestigious that people try and try again...
...Three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment" had condemned large numbers of inner-city blacks to joblessness and poverty and taken a severe toll on low income black families...
...Cherlin says that he has deliberately written most of the book as if "all Americans were alike in how they live their family and personal lives...
...Globalization, the computer revolution, and new technologies were the driving forces behind the upheaval, but free market ideology fixed the limits of public policy...
...The disconnect continues—even after the financial meltdown of 2008...
...Marriages are much more stable among the college educated: divorce rates have fallen for women with college degrees— just 13 percent will divorce or separate after five years of marriage, while 34 percent of women without high school degrees do so...
...And the less-educated, more economically stressed couples, those most likely to ride the relational merry-go-round, are not the most likely to seek "self-fulfillment...
...They detached his "tangle of pathology" concept from his structural explanations for poverty and his call for reform...
...In contrast to other ethnic groups, blacks confront "chronic racial and economic subordination," as well as isolation in blighted neighborhoods...
...Where are we now, and where can we go from here...
...Whenever a luxury good, such as tea in the eighteenth century, spread to ordinary people, it was denounced as corrupting...
...But easing the work-family problems revealed in her book will require significant initiatives from public and private institutions...
...While the theme of the book is that culture is to blame for marital turbulence, Cherlin hints throughout that the instability of American couples might be linked to the decline of public and private safety nets and the lack of supports for family life that other countries provide...
...These three books confirm what the Oxford researchers predicted nearly three decades ago: "tension between work, in the broad sense, and family" has become the "central dynamic of American society...
...Gerson begins the book with the story of one young man who said he had "three different childhoods" with the same parents...
...To Moynihan, as well as some other scholars, these patterns reflected a culture unique to blacks— their African heritage, the experience of slavery, segregation, and racism...
...Norton, 2009, 190 pp., $24.95 The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today by Andrew J. Cherlin Knopf, 2009, 288 pp., $25.95...
...Government investments in education, scientific research, new technologies, and infrastructure also had social consequences: increased levels of education for both men and women...
...He sees this almost as a Jekyll-Hyde split...
...The more family transitions a child lives through, the greater the risk of emotional and other problems...
...The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation Is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America by Kathleen Gerson Oxford University Press, 2009, 320 pp., $24.95 More than a year ago, the front page of the New York Times featured a story on a new workplace trend...
...In recent years, a new generation of social scientists has revived the study of culture and its links to poverty...
...This revolving-door pattern, Cherlin shows, can be is harmful to children...
...Now critics blamed the rise of consumerism and the growth of individualism for the decline of community and the traditional family, for rising rates of divorce, teen pregnancy, and much else...
...The women, on the other hand, facing a future in which men's jobs have become less secure and marriages less stable, fear being dependent on a man's income...
...What did matter was the emotional quality of everyday family life— whether the mood at home was warm and supportive, full of anger and conflict, or cold and distant...
...It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue collar men...
...He even contradicts the movement's demonization of single parenthood, arguing that a child is likely to be better off in a stable single parent family than in one with a stepparent...
...Rather than rejecting "family values," many of these women see motherhood, married or not, as the most rewarding and important social role they can attain...
...Family values" may have faded, but there really is a family crisis...
...The same pattern appears in any community, whenever jobs decline or disappear...
...these children's family experience differs most from their peers in other countries...
...Affluence was never as widespread as many people assumed, but by the middle fifties, 60 percent of the population had attained a middle-class standard of living, in contrast to only 31 percent in the last year of prosperity before the Great Depression...
...Earlier periods of economic transition have disrupted existing family patterns...
...Yet these high hopes are only part of the story, because Gerson's subjects did not expect to find the jobs that would give them the kinds of lives they hoped for...
...But the unsettled middle stage of any transition is most difficult for families and most contentious politically...
...This book, written for the general public, is a more personal statement about his findings...
...The future would offer less opportunity, greater risks of downward mobility, a widening gap between haves and have-nots, and fewer public efforts to respond to social needs...
...Their Plan B looks toward self-reliance first and finding a compatible partner second...
...At the core of Daniel Moynihan's argument was a seemingly simple statement about the causes and effects of black poverty...
...And the trouble started long before the financial meltdown of 2008...
...But the report was ambiguous...
...This chapter, with its emphasis on class divisions in American society—it also discusses divisions by race and ethnicity—seems separate from the rest of the book...
...But despite the joblessness and poverty that surrounds them, black residents of ghetto neighborhoods share basic American values about the importance of individual initiative and hard work...
...He was particularly horrified by what he saw as the "matriarchal" structure of the black family and the "emasculation" of the black male...
...Their wishes collided with what Gerson calls "resistant institutions"—workplaces that have become both more insecure and more demanding of time and effort...
...Reorienting the debate, though, will require more than replacing cultural explanations with "It's the economy, stupid...
...Was Moynihan talking about "The Negro Family" or the poorest segment of a much larger population...
...The Unfinished Revolution suggests many such complications...
...Further, more than three-quarters of us think that marriage should be permanent and ended only in "extreme circumstances," and we have become more disapproving of extramarital sex than in the past...
...longer, healthier lives—all these were part of the boom...
...We—citizens of the richest country in the world—are told we can no longer "afford" the social policies we had in the past, let alone the newer policies needed to stabilize and support American families...
...Wilson argues that there are cultural reflections of the specific conditions of black life in today's post-industrial inner cities...
...And he points out that even the most educated go through more relationships than their counterparts in other countries...
...On the one hand, we are a highly religious nation with a strong attachment to marriage...
...But Wilson uses the concept of culture in a more nuanced and complicated way than did Moynihan...
...In response to these difficulties, a new gender divide has opened up...
...Besides laying off thousands of workers, employers have also been resorting to pay cuts, downgrades, and shortened work weeks more often than at any time since the Great Depression...
...The two are intricately intertwined...
...Bad economic conditions among whites are a recipe for family troubles similar to those in the ghetto...
...But the old rhetoric was revived in the seventies and has flourished since...
...Nor do they assume that if people change their culture, they will no longer be poor...
...The result was an extreme disconnect between the nation's complacent conversation about GDP and other economic indicators and its worried talk about the family...
...Ever since, they have insisted that ghetto culture is the problem to be solved...
...His message is "slow down"—don't jump into marriage or cohabitation so fast and don't jump out so fast...
...A cover story in the March 2010 issue of the Atlantic described "How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America...
...The basic issue is what kind of country we want to live in...
...There is little discussion in Wilson's and Cherlin's books of the recent transformation of women's lives—the subject of Kathleen Gerson's The Unfinished Revolution...
...One of the book's most surprising findings is that an American child with married parents is more likely to witness a parental break-up than is a Swedish child born to a couple who live together without being married...
...In 1981, three major corporations — American Express, Sun Oil, and Bristol Meyers—asked the British research firm Oxford Analytica to map the economic, social, and political trends likely to shape American society in the 1980s and beyond...
...What is necessary is to change the culture of the poor and, especially, to end government support for the "matriarchal" family...
...Wilson was one of the first social scientists to attempt to redeem Moynihan's reputation by putting the two halves of his argument back together...
...stable marriage, working vs...
...Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults...
Vol. 57 • October 2010 • No. 4
