The Liberal-Left Attacks the Family Once More By Charles Taylor (Florida)
Liberal-Left paper, The Washington Post, responds to the Dobbs decision of SCOTUS, overturning Roe v. Wade, by putting the Leftist case, almost straight out of Friedrich Engel’s (Karl Marx’s writing partner), The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State (1884), which took the position that the nuclear family was a recent social constriction arising from capitalism. The problem is, that a wealth of anthropological evidence gives an origin to the nuclear family much longer than capitalism, and in fact, the family is more fundamental than the state, and nation, which are indeed more recent political constructions.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-real-roots-of-the-nuclear-family/
“Though much of the public seems unaware of it, family scholars believe that—generally speaking—children are best off growing up with their two married parents. These are the children most likely to get the education crucial for maintaining a middle-class life in an advanced economy, to remain stably employed, and to marry and raise their own children to go on and do the same.
But it is not well understood why the married couple—or nuclear family—works so well for kids. The most intriguing explanation I’ve seen can be found in a little-known 2002 book by the sociologist Brigitte Berger: The Family in the Modern Age. It recalls an old-fashioned era of sociology. There are no charts, regressions, or metrics; it is, rather, an exposition of economic, social, and demographic history. Yet it manages to anticipate and explain what today’s empirically grounded sociologists have repeatedly discovered about families and child wellbeing.
And so to Berger’s history: Not so long ago, family scholars labored under the assumption, half-Marxist, half-“functionalist,” that before the Industrial Revolution, the extended family was the norm in the Western world. There was more than a little romanticism associated with this view: extended families were imagined to have lived in warm, cohesive rural communities where men and women worked together on farms or in small cottage industries. That way of life, went the thinking, ended when industrialization wrenched rural folk away from their cottages and villages into the teeming, anonymous city, sent men into the factories, and consigned women to domestic drudgery. Worse, by upending the household economy, the Industrial Revolution seriously weakened the family. The nuclear family, it was believed, was evidence of family decline.
The nuclear family was the dominant arrangement in England stretching back to the thirteenth century.
But by the second half of the twentieth century, one by one these assumptions were overturned. First to go was the alleged prevalence of the extended family. Combing through English parish records and other demographic sources, historians like Peter Laslett and Alan MacFarlane discovered that the nuclear family—a mother, father and child(ren) in a “simple house,” as Laslett put it—was the dominant arrangement in England stretching back to the thirteenth century.
Rather than remaining in or marrying into the family home, as was the case in Southern Europe and many parts of Asia and the Middle East, young couples in England were expected to establish their own household. That meant that men and women married later than in other parts of the world, only after they had saved enough money to set up an independent home. By the time they were ready to tie the knot, their own parents were often deceased, making multi-generational households a relative rarity.
Far from being weaker than an extended family clan, Berger shows, the ordinary nuclear family was able to adapt superbly to changing economic and political realities. In fact, the family arrangement so common to England helps explain why it and other nations of northwest Europe were the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the launching ground for modern affluence. The young nuclear family had to be flexible and mobile as it searched for opportunity and property. Forced to rely on their own ingenuity, its members also needed to plan for the future and develop bourgeois habits of work and saving.
These habits were of little use to the idle, landed rich who were wedded to, and defined by, the ancestral property: think Downton Abbey. Similarly, in extended families, a newly married couple was required to move in with the larger maternal or paternal clan, and to work the family land or maintain the family trade. Under those circumstances, people, particularly women, married young, generally before 20. Between their youth and dependence, the couple was not capable of becoming effective strivers in a changing economy.
Another less appreciated advantage to the nuclear family: it was uniquely child-centered.
These observations are not unique to The Family in the Modern Age. But Berger finds another less appreciated advantage to the nuclear family: it was uniquely child-centered. In societies that rely on extended families, young women had plenty of time to have five or more children. The older brides of northwest Europe, on the other hand, had fewer fertile years ahead of them and smaller families, which enabled them to provide more focused attention on each child. Their children became part of a household already steeped in an ethos of hard work, future-mindedness, and ingenuity. This prepared them to take advantage of the new modes of labor introduced by the Industrial Revolution, which would eventually create an urbanized middle class.
Over time, with the increasing complexity of the labor market and the arrival of mass schooling, forward-thinking, child-centered parents were best equipped to organize themselves around what Berger calls “the family’s great educational mission.” Extended and clan families under the control of an older generation would be less adaptive since grandparents were more likely to bring up baby the old-fashioned way; larger families, meanwhile, tended to encourage older children to take charge of their younger siblings.
So how does all of this help us understand today’s debates about married couple vs. single-parent families? Researchers find that children growing up with two married parents are more likely to develop “soft skills” like self-control and perseverance that are more crucial than ever to school and labor-market success. Some of this could be chalked up to the logistical problems faced by a single parent.
But if we follow the logic of Berger’s history, another explanation presents itself: the children of married couples are internalizing their parents’ bourgeois aspirations and child-centeredness, both of which lie deep in the bones of the institution they have chosen to enter. Contemporary parents continue to marry late—at least those who do marry—and only after they are equipped to teach their kids the skills that they themselves have already learned. Their parenting style can be described as “concerted cultivation”: they devote great time and attention to developing their children’s skills. Single parents tend to be younger, less-educated, and more inclined to believe in the child’s “natural growth,” to use another of Annette Lareau’s terms.
Helicopter parents with their obsessive interest in their children’s physical, emotional, and cognitive development are the latest, if occasionally absurd, personification of values with strong historical roots. But, as it has for centuries now, their child-centeredness and future-oriented planning appears to be paying off.”
And here is the fantasy:
“The White Christian nationalist myth dates to the founding and maps onto the idea of “republican motherhood.” In the Revolutionary era, the ideal woman was a married White Christian mother who would raise her children to be worthy, educated citizens. This meant raising sons who would lead the new republic, and giving daughters the tools to serve as mothers for the next generation. Women had few legal rights themselves, but their domestic and maternal roles were supposedly responsible for securing the survival of the new American experiment. This construct did not apply to women of color and to other mothers whose sons were not seen as future American leaders.
Building on these ideas, 19th-century society viewed married White Christian women as the moral center of the family — and of American life more broadly. Their alleged greater morality and gentle nature acted as a bulwark at home against the external world of vice and corruption. But this construct also reinforced the notion that these women belonged at home, lest their morality be scrubbed off by wading into the corrupt (male) realms of politics and the economy. …
The myth of American women as domestic beings and the moral center of their families and the nation continued into the 20th century — surviving the achievement of women’s suffrage and the increasing number of women forced into the workforce by the Great Depression and World War II.
In the 1950s, these traditional gender roles were amplified as part of the United States’ Cold War competition with the Soviet Union — a nation where many women worked for the state alongside men, as their children went to state-run day cares. To demonstrate that the United States was different from (and superior to) its archenemy, old ideas about gender and family were rebranded. Government and media alike idealized what became called the “nuclear” family in this new atomic age: the White family headed by a heterosexual married couple with a male breadwinner and a female homemaker living in a suburban home with their children. But the government did more than idealize the White nuclear family — it helped create more of them. The GI Bill offered predominantly White male veterans of World War II entry into a comfortable middle-class consumer lifestyle with a free college education and cheap, government-subsidized mortgages. White families, in turn, used those mortgages to purchase single-family homes in suburbs that excluded families of color. As a result, millions of White women who had worked outside the home were now out of jobs, with limited opportunities beyond child-rearing and homemaking. …”
Instead of homemaking, motherhood and raising children, as was done by humans in all past societies throughout history, abortion and contraception permits a sexualised culture of hedonism, well-illustrated by the thoughts of Liz Phair, who is apparently a pop star.
“Pop star Liz Phair is mourning the demise of Roe v. Wade, saying the court case that legalized abortion in 1973 has allowed women to engage in sex without the “fear” of carrying and raising a child.
Liz Phair eulogized Roe w. Wade in a tweet late Friday.”
Comments