The conservative right loves to use the term “family values” as a token cover for their backward bigotry. Used in opposition to abortion, gay rights, or even the increase of women in the workplace, “family values” summons a particular image of the conservatives’ imaginary era of perfection and bliss.
Many people refer to this image as a real time, probably somewhere in the 1950’s; “the good old days” when men worked to support their families, women stayed happily in the home with the children, no one divorced, and no children ran off to live renegade alternative lifestyles tainted with wanton sodomy, teen pregnancy, or drug abuse.
We may have even heard older people reminisce about “the good old days” in terms that make the time seem authentically wonderful: “no one locked their doors”; “neighbors looked after each other”; “marriage meant something back then”; “it was a simpler time”, and so on.
Even if we don’t buy into the conservative agenda against basic equal rights, we may concede that the world has become a much more frightening, complicated place, and that a time period such as the allusive 1950’s seems preferable, even tantalizing.
Unfortunately, no amount of regressive activism on the part of Republicans can return us to a grander time, because those “good old days” simply never existed. I like comedian Lewis Black’s take on the shiny 1950’s ideal [1]:
“It was called the ‘50s. The wife cooked and raised the kids and sent the husband off to work, where he sat every day behind that desk, day in and day out, his soul being sucked from his body; while his wife, stuck at home and so sick of her daily chores that she slowly became addicted to primitive antidepressants, sat hoping against hope Jim wasn’t drunk again when he came home. It almost seems too good to be true.[italics added]”
Of course, the rantings of a comedian hardly prove my point. But as sociologist Stephanie Coontz writes in her book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, Black has fairly accurate assertions.
Let’s begin with the notion that marriage had sanctity in the 1950’s. Coontz writes that the percentage of women over 18 who find themselves not currently married hovers around 20%, a percentage which has held since 1900. In truth, single parenthood has increased, but this hasn’t led to generations of renegade youth that engage in unsafe sex, drugs, and crime: teen pregnancies and violent crime have both dropped to the lowest records since the Justice Department began keeping tabs on such figures in the early 1970’s.
With the decrease in “traditional homes”, supposedly a cornerstone to stable judgment and morality, shouldn’t we see youth elbow-deep in the United States’ underworld?
Next, let’s look at the celebrated image of the stay-at-home mom. Contemporary wisdom tells us that parents spend less and less precious time with their children, and that this destroys the fabric of the “family”. Wrong, says Coontz. The claim that the time parents spend with their children has notably declined in recent decades comes from a 1999 report by Time magazine that Coontz and a score of other writers have since debunked. And prior to the 1950’s, society considered it perfectly normal for children to spend most of their formative years unsupervised, so the importance of a closely-knit nuclear family seems a recent invention.
Furthermore, having a mother figure stay-at-home doesn’t necessarily result in better-raised children. Coontz explains:
“Research demonstrates that telling a woman to give up work she wants to engage in “for the sake of the kids” is precisely the wrong advice, as maternal depression interferes with effective parenting far more than maternal employment.”
Essentially, if a woman would like to become a full-time parent, it serves her best to stay at home, but if she would rather maintain her career, she should do so. And what of Lewis Black’s image of the embittered, drug-addicted housewife? As it turns out, he has a surprisingly sharp understanding of the stress faced by a 1950’s domestic engineer. Gender roles of the time demanded a Stepford-Wives-esque domestic goddess who could effortlessly balance childcare and household duties with sexual devotion to her husband, all managed with a perky attitude and broad smile. Coontz writes:
“The hybrid idea that a woman can be fully absorbed with her youngsters while simultaneously maintaining passionate sexual excitement with her husband was a 1950’s invention that drove thousands of women to therapists, tranquilizers, or alcohol when the actually tried to live up to it.”
And the hopeless husband who comes home “drunk again” in Black’s caricature? It has a shade of reality in its roots, too. A few delusional idealists look back to previous decades as a time “when women were respected”; pampered and provided for by the man of the house. That sugar-coated perspective neglects the higher rates of spousal abuse in the period. According to the Washington DC Center for Social Policy, police and social service agencies frequently looked the other way while men abused their wives during the ‘50s and beyond, and spousal rape persisted as a perfectly legal practice until the mid ‘70s. That hardly sounds like a golden age of wedded ecstacy.
This cursory coverage of the difference between our concept of the “good old days” and its much crueler reality fails to fully address the issues at hand. I highly suggest Coontz’s book for a more in-depth look at the other fallacies of the ‘50s: success and individualism, strong moral centers, crime-free neighborhoods, and numerous others. And when next you feel tempted to idolize another time or place, remember that our perceptions of perfection often stray far from fact [2], and we become distracted with a grass-is-greener mentality.
Print this post [3]
[4]