Family Foundations – On Shifting Sands?

December 1981
Lakeland

If one takes at face value much of the invective and hyperbole of the “New Right,” the Moral Majority, and similar self-appointed moral judges, the trouble with our nation is that liberals, humanists, and other assorted sinners have undermined the traditional family. The Program Committee has scheduled “Family” as our December theme. The timing is correct. The last days of November and the month of December seem appropriate for this theme. Family consciousness is at its high point of celebration ... cooking delicacies, shopping for family presents, decorating home and hearth, re-unions of family members, and a priority for family activities. Except for religious festivals, organizations have learned not to schedule many meetings in this period.

Let’s look at the family, the misdirected focus of the New Right, the family idea in history, the family today, the reality that there are different strokes for different folks, and lastly the undergirding values which support the emerging varieties of family. The perspective from which I speak is that primary principle in the constitution of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the worth and dignity of every human being.

When the Moral Majority and their ilk pound us with their insistence that traditional family must be restored, I tend to agree with Martin Marty that is is a fundraising invention. As I will discuss, I doubt whether any one traditional family pattern was ever widely established or deeply ingrained. I will mention one attitude of the Moral Majority that seems thoroughly inconsistent – [that] Christian religion should be taught in the schools [but] teaching of sexuality must be kept at home. If sexuality education can be trusted only to parents, why should religion be delegated to teachers who would be constrained from illuminating the manifold differences in religious thought and practice? Normal Lear reported in the June 1981 issue of People for the American Way that one branch of the Religious Right, named the Family Protection Lobby, blocked a bill [in one state] that would have permitted school nurses to answer students’ questions about venereal disease, pregnancy, and drug and alcohol abuse. That’s protecting the family??

Family – home? Do you recall the dialogue between the farmer and his wife in Robert Frost’s poignant poem, The Hired Man? The hired man, a drifter, tired and sick, has come to the farm.

"Warren," she said, "he has come home to die:
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time."

"Home," he mocked gently.

"Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail."

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in."

"I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve."

The Unabridged [dictionary] gives several definitions of family which reflect the way the meaning of “family” has changed through many centuries:

1)The body of servants of a house or the retinue of a person of state or authority
2)The body of persons who live in one house and under one head or manager; a household including parents, children, and servants and as the case may be, lodgers or boarders. For census purposes sharing a common dwelling and table, between and including the extremes of a person living alone and the inmates of a hotel, prison, poorhouse, asylum.
3)Those descended from a common progenitor – the group formed by parents and children, the fundamental social unit of civilized societies.

One scholar of the family (Chas Rosenberg, THE FAMILY IN HISTORY) writes,

“The family is a primary reality not only in terms of individual emotional development but in terms of social and economic development as well. The family functions as a mode of structuring sexual relationships, kinship, relationships and child-rearing – but also as a source of labor and capital accumulation, as a mechanism for the transmission of property and the imposition of social control.”

That is too abstract. What would you think of the system in medieval times (See Philip Aries, CENTURIES OF CHILDHOOD, p. 365) and taken from an account by an Italian after a visit to England: “The want of affection in the English is strongly manifested toward their children; for after keeping them at home til they arrive at the age of seven or nine, they put them out, both male and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years. And these are called apprentices, and during that time they perform all the most menial offices; and few are born who are exempted from this fate, for everyone however rich he may be, sends his children into the houses of others, whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own.” The Italian writer insinuated that the English took in other people’s children because they thought in that way they would obtain better service than they would from their own offspring. In fact, the explanation which the English themselves gave to the Italian observer was probably the real one: “In order that their children might learn better manners.”

Any reading of social history will reveal that while the family is a primary social foundation, the ways of the family have changed again and again under the pressure of economic, political, and social realities of a given period and place. The nurture and nature of rearing children has been a requirement, but the methods and assumptions have huge variations.

Incidentally, I like what novelist Peter deVries said, “the value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.” I must be a slow learner because I need to get the hang of it.

What of the family today? There is a rosy image and idealized stereotype that persists. The “ideal” American family is Father and Mother – daddy breadwinner, mother housewife, two children, and probably Rover the dog, Tiger the cat, two autos in the garage attached to the suburban split level with a barbecue in the backyard and a copiously notated social calendar hung over the kitchen telephone. That pretty picture applies to about one of every sixteen families in our nation today.

At least 1/3 of marriages end in divorce. Indications are that it will rise to 50%. That is an alarming statistic to many. But it is one of my observations reiterated often enough so that it has become one of my cliches, that just as there are bad divorces and good marriages, so there are good divorces and bad marriages.

Within [the past] few weeks, I attended a wedding celebration in my family. At the family dinner the night before the wedding, the party included the groom’s parents who had been divorced, the mother accompanied by her second husband, the bride’s parents who had been divorced, her father accompanied by his second wife, the bride’s sons by a prior marriage, the groom’s son by his prior marriage, the groom’s sister who has been married twice. There was one couple who had been married only once, the groom’s younger brother and his wife. Now while the location of the placecards had been rather carefully planned out, there was still a general joviality and festivity with no observable hostilities or recriminations. And in today’s world I do not believe that was a particularly remarkable gathering, [nor an] uncommon arrangement of family life today.

Divorce can be expected to be a substantial experience for many – difficult, traumatic, and divisive but nevertheless an intrinsic aspect of our culture. One cause, not usually noted, is our increased life expectancy. The historian Hugh Thomas writes (p. 407) “At the time when statistics began to have any meaning at all, in the 16th and 17th centuries, early death mean that few marriages lasted more than 15 to 20 years (many marriages last longer than that today). In the past, marriages were shortened by death; today, divorce.”

Another inescapable fact – about 1/3 of the 44 million school-age American children have mothers who work full-time. A Department of Labor study predicts that 70% of women will be working outside the home by 1990.

What is the family today? There is the rosy image of the lawn-encircled, mortgage-burdened suburban ideal – one in 16 families as I said. There is also the single-parent family, the mother, usually, who rears her child or children amidst a circle of heavy pressures – working, child care, taking care of the home after work, trying against odds to find moments for social life and some measure of individual fulfillment.

There is the single parent, usually father, who lives alone except for the limited times he may have the children – a night a week or a Saturday. When he is ethical about it, he has heavy financial burdens paying for child support and, perhaps, alimony.

Then there is the married couple, each of whom may have had children by a prior marriage. Sometimes the children in the home are hers, his, and theirs. Anyone who dismissing the probability of sticky problems in this and other similar situations is just naïve about our human emotions, human egos, and human needs.

Consider also the man and woman who live together without the certificate of legal marriage. There may be as many as ten million such persons in this nation, sometimes with child or children in the home.

Also, in considerable number are persons of the same sex living together, homosexual and lesbian relationships – or platonic. Many of the households have ... stability, mutual affection, sharing of goals and goods, not unlike the traditional male/female married couple.

I would surmise also that there are many who have separate domiciles but in all other respects have the quality of a family living under one roof.

I’m sure that you could add other varieties to the many arrangements which in terms of the living qualities involved can be called family, even though not “traditional” family. But as I have indicated, the idea of family has not fixed or certain dimensions and probably never has had.

[CJW insert: Mentioning a few weeks ago that I was going to say something about family in Dec., [a] person – [who] knew more about TV programs – Archie Bunker, Dallas, Three’s Company, One Day at a Time, The Odd Couple, Harper Valley PTA ... any soap opera, realities and wishes and large numbers of people would not be on air if the programs were not identifying with millions]

Thus as in politics, occupation, economics, the idea of family has different strokes for different folks. The options for family are assuredly going to increase. There are communes where a number of people live together for ideological, religious, or economic reasons.

We are certain to see more congregate living, where persons will share one roof for a variety of reasons. The increasingly burdensome cost of housing will demand this. There are many houses where there is unused living space where persons will share a roof, meals, expenses and social interaction. Maggie Kuhn, that feisty, bright, determined Grey Panther, is both a practitioner and advocate of homesharing. The Washington Spectator reports that because of her leadership there are now nearly 100 programs across the country that promote homesharing. “In Seattle, for example, there is homesharing for seniors. You are a young couple looking for a place to live. The office matches you with a couple whose house is too large for their own needs. A three week trial period gives you a chance to see whether the arrangement will work.” I predict that in this decade alone, the number of persons choosing some form of congregate living will increase much more than any present estimate. Good reasons for such arrangements will provide the impetus – economics, the wiser use of presently available housing, fuel and energy, combining of personal resources, our need for human relationships, security, and new experience.

It will be an opportunity to develop not patriarchy or matriarchy, but share-archy (if I may coin a rather clumsy word). Share-archy of course is the best base for families with a certified marriage license or any other arrangement.

In all this, as I indicated at the beginning, there must be a religious base – the worth and dignity of every human being. Those who are greedy, immature, insensitive, exploitative, conniving, and their victims will experience failure. But is this not also just as true as those couples who go into legal marriage?

Martin Buber maintained that there is no community without a common center – that common center for any variety of family in the present and in the future will revolve around a nucleus of loyalty, love, trust, sharing, self-esteem, and respect for others.

A book extensively reviewed in the New York Times is MOTHER LOVE (Myth and Reality) by Elizabeth Badinter, a French writer. It has causes a furor in her native country and probably will here too, as it becomes known.

Mother love, she maintains, is not a gift, but learned. But what fits as a conclusion to this talk is her response to her children when they were “teased by their friends, who said, ‘See, your mother doesn’t love you.’ She had prepared them, beforehand, by telling them, ‘Love is not automatic. We built it together. I choose to love you.’”

Such is the foundation value of family, whatever super-structure it may assume.

What’s your view?