Family Values

Since the 1980s the American family has evolved towards greater diversity and complexity. Yet, paradoxically, it is the essentially conservative nuclear family forged in the 1950s that continues to hold sway as a touchstone in US politics and culture, says Tim Stanley.

n September 20th, 1984 a new sitcom aired on NBC. The Cosby Show starred Bill Cosby as Heathcliff'Cliff ' Huxtable, a middle-class, black obstetrician living with his wife and five children in Brooklyn, New York. It kicked off with a situation that millions of parents could identify with: Cliff's son, Theo, had come home with a report card covered in Ds. Theo's mother was deeply upset and Cliff was furious. But Theo said that his bad grades didn't bother him because he didn't want to go to college. His goal was to grow up to be like 'regular people' and, if Cliff loves his son, won't he accept him for what he is? The audience applauded. This was what TV had

The Changing Face of the American Family O

First family: the Obamas pose for a shot at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll in 2009, with Michelle's mother and the Easter Bunny.

been teaching them for over a decade, that love and understanding were more important than competition and success. But, to their shock, Cosby's character didn't agree. 'Theo,' he said, 'that is the dumbest thing I ever heard! No wonder you get Ds in everything!... I'm telling you, you are going to try as hard as you can. And you're going to do it because I said so. I am your father. I brought you into this world, and I wiU take you out!' The audience's laughter was nervous atfirst,but by the end of the scene they were clapping wildly. Bul Cosby had just turned the liberal logic of TV Land on its head. 'Father knows best' parenting was back. This scene is discussed in the PBS documentary America in Primetime, shortly to be shown by the BBC.

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Family Values

The programme makes the point that because the Cosbys are African-Americans, we might presume that the politics of the show are liberal - sitcoms in the 1970s had tended to use black characters to explore poverty and racism. Yet Cliff Huxtable's old fashioned parenting had much more in common with the optimistic conservatism of the 1980s presidency of Republican Ronald Reagan. The Huxtables were wealthy, professional churchgoers, dominated by a stern father. Alas, among black families their traditional structure increasingly made them the exception rather than the rule. In the America of the 1980s divorce and illegitimacy were rising fast. By 1992, when the show ended, 68 per cent of African-American babies were born out of wedlock. The last episode of Cosby coincided with riots in Los Angeles, the product of economic segregation and black fury at a brutal police force. The show might have started out as a healthy antidote to touchy-feely liberalism, but it ended as escapist fantasy. The Cosby Show's huge viewing figures - among both blacks and whites - tell a confusing story. On the one hand divorce and illegitimacy were changing the character of the American family for good. Un-wed co-habitation was more likely; partners were more inclined to abandon an unhappy relationship; sex outside marriage was common. On the other hand Americans still held heterosexual marriage in high regard and wanted to watch shows that affirmed it. The big TV hits of the 1980s were all centred around traditional families - Mr Belvedere, Wlw's The Boss?, Growing Pains. Ronald Reagan's favourite show was Family Ties, which starred Michael J. Fox as a teenager who rebelled against his liberal parents by campaigning for Ronald Reagan. The answer to this paradox lay in the enduring appeal of the nuclear family. America's nuclear unit wasn't around very long. It was forged by the unique economic and political circumstances of the 1950s, was undermined by social revolution in the 1960s and was revived as an ideal in the 1970s by a conservative movement with a deceptively rosy view of the past. But, while the nuclear family was only representative of how a number of people lived for a few years, its myth has hardened into an ideology. For many Americans it remains synonymous with the hallowed promise of the American dream.

Theideaha 1957 Easter publicity shot for Leave it to Beaver, starring Jerry Mathers as Beaver Cleaver, with his parents and older brother Wally.

like Andy the alcoholic handyman, were layabout bums. It was a world of conservative certainty, held together by a terror of nonconformity. Today Leave it to Beaver is shorthand for the calm and luxury of American life before the storm of the 1960s. In fact the world that it depicted was a historical aberration; before 1950 things had been very different. In 1900 the vast majority of women went out to work and the US had the highest divorce rate in the world. Roughly one in ten children grew up in a single-parent household, hundreds of thousands of offspring were abandoned due to shortages of money and families were plagued with disease and death. Between 35 and 40 per cent of children lost a parent or a sibling before their 20s. It wasn't until the 1950s that life began to get sweeter and more stable for the average American. The decade was characterised by a rising birth rate, a stable divorce rate and a declining age of marriage. In 1950 most married women walked down the aisle aged just 20. Only 16 per cent of them got a job outside the home and a majority of brides were pregnant within seven months of their wedding. They didn't stop at one child: from 1940 to 1960 the number of families with three children doubled and the number of families having a fourth child quadrupled. Contemporary anthropologists dubbed this the 'nuclear family'. They meant nuclear as in a unit built around the nucleus of the father and mother, but the name also resonates with the politics of the Cold War. The family was on the front line of an existential conflict between communism and capitalism. On the
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Sitcom suburbia
In 1957 CBS premiered a TV show called Leave it to Beaver. It starred Jerry Mathers as Theodore 'The Beaver' Cleaver, an inquisitive boy who lived with his parents June and Ward in a leafy suburb. The plot of every episode was the same: Beaver got in trouble, his parents reprimanded him and our hero would learn something about the realities of life. In one storyline Beaver met the son of divorced parents and was jealous of all the presents he got from his estranged dad. But he quickly discovered that divorce also leads to insecurity and depression, so the episode ended with Beaver begging his parents never to part. Divorce wasn't the only model of social dysfunction that the show explored: spinsters like prim Aunt Martha were sexless harpies, while bachelors.
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Family Values

perfection within her reach. 'Christmas Morning, She'll Be Happier With a Hoover!' claimed one ad, which featured a housewife excitedly examining her new vacuum cleaner. Spending on advertising rose from $6 billion in 1950 to over $13 billion in 1963. The efforts of advertising's Mad Men were central to the 1950s boom. Rohert Sarnoff, president of the National Broadcasting Company, said in 1956: 'The reason we have such a high standard of living is because advertising has created an American frame of mind that makes people want more things, better things, and newer things.' He was probahly right. Private debt doubled during the 1950s, driving up profit and productivity and returning much of it to the male wage earner. The economy grew by roughly 37 per cent, with low rates of inflation and unemployment. By 1960 the average family had 30 per cent more purchasing power than it had had in 1950. The nuclear unit was the engine of America's growth and the main beneficiary of its economic greatness. The Sixties swing out of control But was everyone really as happy as the ads implied? In 1963 a book hit the shelves that claimed to expose all the oppression and misery that lay behind Leave it to Beaver's white picket fences. Its author, Betty Friedan, described herself as a housewife and mother from the New York suburbs. In 1957 Friedan had been asked to conduct a survey of former Smith College classmates. The results depressed her. Girls who had studied and excelled at the arts and sciences were expected to surrender their minds and personalities to their roles as wives: 89 per cent of the Smith alumni who answered her survey were now homemakers. Intellectually repressed and lacking anyway to express themselves beyond cooking or sex, the housewife of the 1960s was suffocated by what Friedan called the feminine mystique. 'Each suburban wife struggles with it alone' she wrote. 'As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night - she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - "Is this all?"' The Feminine Mystique stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for six weeks and laid the groundwork for a feminist revolution that would redefine the nuclear unit forever. Friedan wanted women to take control of their lives and the shortcuts to liberation were contraception and employment. But the book wasn't quite the impartial account that its author claimed. Although she was technically a homemaker, Friedan was not an apolitical housewife who spent her evenings arranging her husband's pillow. She was active in socialist politics and had worked as a journalist for the United Electrical Workers union for a number of years after her marriage. Friedan probably hid all these details because she wanted to divorce feminism from radicalism and so make it more palatable to the average woman. More troublingly, she exaggerated the degree to which the women of Smith College were the passive victims of patriarchy. In fact most of the housewives who answered her survey said they were the happiest they had ever
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communist side, the propagandists said, were collectivism, atheism and poverty. On the capitalist side was self-reliance, freedom of religion and a degree of material comfort unparalleled in US history. Science was eradicating disease, salaries were rising, household goods were alleviating drudgery and the nuclear family had a friend in big business. The advertising agencies tried to create the model of the perfect housewife. A famous article in Housekeeping Monthly of May 13th, 1955 explained what perfection entailed:

Darling! You shouldn't have: one of many advertisements promoting consumer goods for the ideal American wife of the 1950s.

Your goal: To try and make sure your home is a place of peace, order, and tranquility where your husband can renew himself in body and spirit... Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or have him lie down in the bedroom ... Arrange his pillow and From the Ardiive J\\e Right-wing offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing and Mothers of pleasant voice... Remember, he is the master of the house Wartime America and as such will always exercise his will with fairness Glen Jeansonne describes and truthfulness. You have no right to question him. A the anti-war, anti-liberal and antisemitic Mothers'Movegood wife always knows her place. Having popularised the ideal of a 'good Wife, the advertisers recommended products that would put
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ment that attracted a mass following in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.
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Family Values

been - a majority expressed no desire to return to the world of work. But they did not buy the advertisers' myth of suburban fulfilment and many said that they felt frustrated that they could not use their intellect in more demanding ways. Instead they were channelling those energies into voluntary work and party political activism. Contemporary women were alreadyfindingways to overcome the feminine mystique, while retaining their identities as wives and mothers. Although Friedan and the women's liberation movement sometimes imagined that they masterminded the 1960s cultural revolution their role was actually to politicise social changes that were already happening. Just as science helped to forge the nuclear family, with better nutrition and disease control, so it created the conditions for its destruction. In 1960 the US Food and Drug Administration officially licensed the sale of the oral contraceptive known as the Pill. By 1962 an estimated 1,187,000 women were using it. Policy makers thought the Pul would strengthen the nuclear family by increasing disposable income via reduced pregnancies. What it did in practice was to weaken the links between sexual pleasure, childbirth and marriage. Sex before and outside marriage increased, while women who had married became more likely to seek work or stay in it. The effects of such subtle changes in sexual practice v^ere startling. Between 1960 and 1980 the divorce rate almost doubled. In 1962 only half of all respondents disagreed with a statement suggesting that parents who don't get along should stay together for the children; by 1977 over 80 per cent disagreed. In the early 1960s roughly half of women told pollsters that they had engaged in premarital sex. By

Time magazine's cover of April 7th, 1967 shows oral contraceptive pills, from that year available to unmarried women as well

Supporters of the Equal

Rights Amendment march through Pittsburgh in 1976. Inset: a badge worn by opponents of the Amendment.

the late 1980s thefigurewasfiveout of six. In the early 1960s approximately three quarters of Americans said premarital sex was wrong. By the 1980s that view was held by only one third of the nation. The most obvious legacy of shifting attitudes was the rocketing rate of births out of wedlock. In 1960 only five per cent of births were attributed to single mothers. By 1980 thefigurewas 18 per cent and by 1990 it was 28 per cent. Both Left and Right were worried that America was coming apart. Although the 1960s were dominated by the struggles over Vietnam and Civil Rights, an equally big policy challenge was how to save the nuclear famy unit. The Left concluded that the answer was greater government support. In 1965 the liberal sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan published The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. A study of poverty in the African-American ghetto, the so-called Moynihan Report argued that the underlying cause of inequality between black and white was not economics or race but family structure. Moynihan believed that the growing incidence of single motherhood was raising a generation of African-American males who lacked a model of self-reliance, discipline and authority. He advised Democratic President Lyndon Johnson that the solution was job training and education programmes that would empower black fathers to raise their family on a single salary. The welfare state would have to grow. Johnson declared a 'War on Poverty' that created a plethora of entitlements to individuals. \ The use of government subsidies to buy meals (which had been around since the 1930s) increased dramatically under both Democrat and

WOT TIIREATEHED
BY WOMEN FOR EQUALITY

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Family Values

Republican administrations: the number of individuals using food stamps jumped from 500,000 in 1965 to lOmillionin 1971. The overall effect was a fall in the proportion of Americans living in poverty from 19 per cent in 1964 to 11.1 per cent in 1973. But government generosity did nothing to stop the decline of the nuclear unit. Conservatives argued that it actually undermined the family by subsidising absentee fathers, educational underachievement, crime, drugs and a new, somewhat racialised, form of segregation between those in work and those on the dole. Moynihan's ambition to rescue the black family failed. While the median black family income rose 53 per cent in the 1960s, the rate of single parenthood also increased by over 50 per cent. Conservatives began to argue that the welfare state was not the solution but part of the problem. They claimed that the real goal of liberals like Friedan and Johnson was to create a world in which the nuclear family no longer existed.

Lost age of innocence

In 1976 America went to the polls to elect a new president. Its choice was Jimmy Carter, a former peanut farmer and one-term governor of Georgia. With his photogenic famuy and foursquare humity, the Baptist Carter felt like a throwback to the Leave it to Beaver spirit. In the mid-1970s America was experiencing a wave of nostalgia for the 1950s; movies like Grease and American Graffiti celebrated a lost age of innocence and certainty. Carter said that if he won the election he would hold a White House 'Conference on the Famuy' to discuss the best way of reviving some of

The Huxtable family in their Brooklyn apartment, fromthe1984 Cosby Show.

those old values. It was exactly the kind of consensusbuilding, moral politics that Carter loved. But after Carter's inauguration the White House announced a name change. The Conference on the Family would become the Conference on Families, reflecting the growing diversity of American family structures. Presidential aides pointed out that roughly a third of families no longer adhered to what they described as the 'nostalgic famuy' - their rather patronising term for the nuclear unit. One person who welcomed the rebranding was delegate Betty Friedan. In her 1981 book The Second Stage she wrote that she was pleased the conference recognised the most important shift in American life that had occurred in the last 20 years: 'women now work'. Indeed they did. In 1950 the proportion of married women under 45 who worked was just 26 per cent; by 1985 it would hit 67 per cent. The growing expectation - and need for women to enter the labour market had a dramatic impact upon gender roles, chd-rearing and patterns of cohabitation. Life for the Seventies woman was more independent and more complex. Friedan hoped that the conference would continue the work of the Johnson administration in expanding government aid to individuals struggling to get by in the new social order. Recession made the task all the more important: 'With men being laid off in both bluecollar and white-collar jobs, with inflation showing no let-up, women's opportunity needed [legal] underpinning to insure the survival of the family.' Friedan's manifesto was something that many European nations would enthusiastically embrace in the

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Family Values

1980s: accept that the famuy is no longer nuclear and bund the welfare and employment opportunities necessary to strengthen its new incarnation. But this wasn't Europe and many Americans responded to social change with either resistance or denial. When the conference wasfinallyheld in 1980 it was dominated by polarising minorities of feminists and social conservatives. America was undergoing a religious revival and the cultural Right was evolving into a well-oiled political machine. Its delegates to the Conference on Families believed that women's best hope of'liberation' was found in marriage, where their compassionate instinct for motherhood formed a perfect union with her husband's authority. To the feminists at the conference such views were the last gasp of an old, patriarchal order that was out of step with the unstoppable march of progress. Boasting superior numbers of delegates, the feminists were able to push through platforms endorsing abortion on demand and gay rights. Their success gave them the illusion of political momentum. But the press and the public were rather more interested in the rhetoric of the conservative delegates, who staged a colourful walkout. Outside the conference, the anti-feminist activist Connie Marshner told the media that 'families consist of people related by heterosexual marriage, blood and adoption. Families are not religious cults, families are not Manson families, families are not heterosexual or homosexual liaisons outside of marriage.' Marshner's simple language articulated the feelings of millions of Americans that the sexual revolution was not just replacing the nuclear unit with something more complex - it was destroying the very concept of family itself. Recognising that this view was gaining currency Carter tried to charm several televangelists at a White House breakfast in Januar)' 1980. The meeting was a disaster. When it was over, the preacher Tim LaHaye prayed 'God we have got to get this man out of the White House and get someone in here who will be aggressive about bringing back traditional moral values'. The religious Right decided that its best shot was Republican Ronald Reagan. When Reagan beat Carter by a landslide in November 1980 he captured two thirds of the white evangelical vote. Politics for the next 30 years would be dominated by the conservatism of Marshner, not the progressive ambitions of Friedan.

Daddy's girl: the Father Daughter Purity Ball at Colorado Springs, 2007, where she silently commits herself to chastity by laying a white rose at the Cross and he signs a commitment to protect her choice.

are more anti-abortion than at any point since the 1980s. Against the European trend toward social liberalism the United States looks even more conservative today than it was when Bill Cosby first told his son to quit griping and start revising. But the nuclear famuy endures as an ideal for good reason. For many middle-class whites the 1950s really were the Golden Age. At home families were large and stable and often kept by a single, generous wage. America was the workshop of the world, producing a fiood of consumer goods that improved the lives of millions. Abroad the USA established itself as a model of the good life. The American Dream - meritocratic and capable of reaping great rewards - set an international standard for democratic capitalism. Never again would Americans tell pollsters that they were as content in their own lives or as confident about their country's direction. It was an age of innocence and sometimes that innocence blinded people to the realities of patriarchy and racism. But it will remain the yardstick by which Americans judge their country for a very long time.
Tim Stanley is associate fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University. IHis documentary Sitcom USA will be broadcast on BBC2 on October 27th at 9pm. Further Reading David Allyn, Mai<e Love, Not War. The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History (Little, Brown, 2000). Mary Dalton and Laura Linder (eds.), The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed (SUNY Press, 2005). D3n\e\ Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, The Cold War, and Modern Fem/n/sm (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). Dominic Sandbrook, Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right (Knopf, 2011 ). I7TTT For more articles on this subject visit |rl' www.historytoday.com

The paradox of the American family

Since the 1980s the American family has continued its inexorable evolution towards greater diversity and complexity. Yet America's popular culture, just like The Cosby Show, continues to celebrate a 1950s' vision of'living right, living free'. It is tempting to accuse conservatives of promoting a paradoxical politics that is out of step with the modern world. In 2012 an estimated 19 per cent of gay people are raising a child in the US, yet every referendum on gay marriage has resulted in its ban. States like Texas offer abstinence promotions in place of sex education, yet people who take a chastity pledge are statistically more likely to get pregnant outside marriage than those who do not. And despite feminism's supposed grip upon the American imagination, voters
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