Raising the Family

...the rights of homosexuals??arise from the inability of either of the two firmly estab?lished ideologies we have been talking about to defeat the other...

...The Su?preme Court's acceptance of feminist law professor Catharine MacKinnon's expan?sive view of sexual harassment may be a significant exception...

...Neither do far less extreme advocates of feminism and "family values...

...The fact that radical views of the American family have a long academic history may be less surprising than their continued coexistence with those same "family values" that Calhoun's succes?sors continue to deride...

...It could be that questions regarding the family have little political salience be?cause most people see government and legislation as largely irrelevant to their private lives...

...Press coverage of the Bureau's report exaggerated its findings, but al?most none of the commentators believed that living in a household without two married parents was good for children...

...Although he did not claim with some later feminists that the nuclear family itself is a recent, inherently oppressive in?vention, he predicts: "The marriage of the future will be recognized to be a psychic union of man and woman on a basis of ab?solute equality and rights in every respect...

...Everyone knows that an increased stress on personal autonomy for adults has led since the 1960s to a sharp increase in the number of unmarried couples living together and/or having children...

...He talks repeatedly about "a reconstruc?tion of society on a democratic basis...

...Despite the zealotry of both pro-choice and pro-life activists, the public as a whole appears to regard abor?tion as a settled question, perhaps even (dare one say it...

...It seems a good idea to keep quotation marks around a phrase that has become such a powerful slogan for both supporters and attackers...

...On the contrary, they appear to be thought too important to let politicians take them over...

...Although the name of Karl Marx never appears, Calhoun, a sociolo?gist at Clark University, wrote sentences such as: "In general, the colonial family [was] a property institution dominated by middle-class standards, and operating as an agency of social control in the midst of a social order governed by the interests of a forceful aristocracy which shaped religion, education, politics, and all else to its own profit...

...A recent Census Bureau report indi?cates that the proportion of children who live with both their biological parents and no stepsiblings is now just over 50 per cent, presumably an all-time low...

...Like so many facets of public opinion, this one bears hardly any relation to con?ventional distinctions between liberals and conservatives...

...the family goes back to the age of savagery while the state belongs to the age of civilization...

...The rhetoric of Left and Right notwithstand?ing, the percentage of the population whose lives are directly affected by ho?mosexuality, abortion, or spousal vio?lence is relatively small...

...True, polls and studies tell us little about how the man in the street or woman in the office perceives the relationship of families to government...

...Conserva?tives are fond of pointing out that groups of people who don't constitute families in the traditional sense try hard to be accepted within an ideal that they simul?taneously claim to find oppressive...

...With the exception of blacks, who in this respect are strikingly different from their white fellow citizens, Americans since the late '60s have??at the same time as the reach of government has been drastically growing??become increasingly dubious about the ability of large-scale government programs to help them...

...To that extent, Dan Quayle's remarks two years ago about Murphy Brown have become the received wisdom...

...His book has been out of print for half a century, but if he could come back today he would have the sense that his views of the American family and the forces that shape it, even his vocabulary, have for the most part become reigning orthodoxies in education and much of the press...

...The lack of political response does not mean the many kinds of values families ambiguously represent are be?coming irrelevant...

...Furthermore, the proponents of each point of view pay less attention to the other than seems humanly possible...

...In 1994 many mainstream conserva?tives have been going through the mo?tions (William Bennett is an exception) of defending the family while casting about for more powerful ammunition...

...It is not only the Right that has found "family" problems a less than satisfacto?ry basis for victory...

...a question not of the first importance...

...Second Thoughts RAISING THE FAMILY BY CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN ARTHUR W. CALHOUN is a for?gotten name among social sci?entists, but 75 years ago he pub?lished a three-volume Social Histoiy of the American Family that was way ahead of its time...

...For the family as an existing institution and "family values" as that term is used today, Calhoun had total contempt...

...The equivalent cause on the Left, abortion, has similarly gone flat...

...The so-called traditional family??i.e., a married couple and their children, if any??shows no signs of dying out, while attempts to define other kinds of fami?lies have largely failed to persuade peo?ple outside particular advocacy groups...

...Since then fem?inists have not succeeded in getting a largely sympathetic Democratic Presi?dent and Congress to enact the Freedom of Choice Act, which would place the right to abortion on a presumably firmer foundation than two decades of Supreme Court decisions...

...As well as a Marxist, Calhoun was a strong feminist who even used the term "patriarchy" as a contemptuous descrip?tion of male-dominated society...

...Either one point of view would have prevailed over the other, or each would have been so strongly influ?enced by the other that they would have drifted closer together...

...Family values" may be one of the points at which even an expansive, ac?tivist government reaches the limits of its power...

...Clearlythis sort of feminism is much more vis?ible and influential than it was 30 years ago, though its ability to raise issues has not on the whole been equaled by a capac?ity to determine their outcome...

...In that sense, at least, there is evidence that Americans continue to believe in limited govern?ment...

...MANY OF THE ISSUES that have made recent elections so bit?ter and confusing??histori?cally nonpolitical questions such as abor?tion...

...The family, he concluded in 1919, "is part and parcel of an organic civilization," and "no mere preaching or emotional agi?tation" can determine its future...

...Not so...

...Polls in 1992 indicated that only a tiny percentage of the public regarded abortion as one of the most important issues before the country...

...In his view the inequality of the sexes was apredictable consequence of capitalism, and neither could last long without the other...

...Or a very large part of the popu?lation may simply see it that way and hence ignores appeals from either Left or Right...

...the extent of and remedies for ha?rassment or violence against women...

...But a renewed emphasis on the well-being of those children may yet push matters in the other direction...

...The higher and more obligatory rela?tion," he declares ominously, "is to soci?ety rather than to the family...

...Patricia Ireland and Pat Robert?son rarely communicate...

...But there is am?ple statistical evidence that people are skeptical in general about the effective?ness of the Federal government...

...When the right of one member to be a despot ceases to be recognized in any degree, a start will have been made at establishing the family on a sane basis...

...In?stead two widely held, diametrically op?posed views of the most important rela?tionships in people's lives exist side by side, neither one quite strong enough to prevail...

...I doubt that a re?surgent Dan Quayle, a desperate Bill Clin?ton, or anyone else could run a success?ful campaign on some variety of "family values...

...It is entirely possible that "domestic partnerships" between homosexuals will come to be accepted by the Federal courts or enacted by legislatures in liberal states, but the concept seems unlikely ever to achieve parity with marriage so far as the general public is concerned...

...Government spending, crime, welfare, and term limits appear to have struck pres?ent and future Republican candidates as better bets than the fuzzily resolved ques?tions of homosexuals in the Armed Forces or condoms in the schools...

...Indeed, polls indicate that most of the electorate is deeply dis?turbed by the decline in family stability and the moral values that sustain it...

...This being true, no one should be unduly alarmed at revolutionary utterances with reference to the family any more than he should put confidence in sentimental campaigns for rehabilitation or conser?vation of old values...

...For all his faith in a powerful socialist state, Arthur W. Calhoun would proba?bly approve of the public's apparent lack of response to politicized family issues...

...Admittedly some of the favored issues have family implications, but on the whole the impli?cations have been left to take care of themselves while the candidates have focused on tangible matters such as taxes...

...No matter how much play this set of concerns gets in the media, it's not clear that most people outside the intelli?gentsia are paying greater attention than they did in 1992, when family issues did little for George Bush...

...Still, the continuing power of the fam?ily as a normative structure is matched, in intensity if not in number of believers, by the kind of feminism for which "tra?ditional" is a term of abuse and Ozzie and Harriet the all-time favorite target...

...You might expect that after all this time, in a nation so satu?rated with media, one of two things would have happened...

...A Time/ CNN poll taken in mid-August showed 91 per cent of the sample agreeing that they had little or no confidence in Wash?ington to solve problems...

...The same can't be said for divorce or illegitimacy, but nei?ther problem lends itself to an obvious political solution...

...The men?tion of stepsiblings makes the proportion lower than it otherwise would be, and it is still true that nearly three-quarters of American children live in two-parent families...

...They may be underestimat?ing the impact on family structure of what politicians do, but they could also be trying to protect the intimate parts of their lives from political interference by ignoring appeals from both sides to let "family" issues dominate elections...