Life in America today bears little resemblance to that of 40 or 50 years ago. AIDS, crack, homelessness, latchkey children and surrogate mothers are all indicators that the pace of change has outstripped the ability of our institutions to adapt. In "America at Century's End" the contributors have written essays tracing the feel and pulse of American life. The result is a candid snapshot of America approaching the 21st century.
America at Century's End
By Alan WolfeUniversity of California Press
Copyright © 1992 Alan Wolfe
All right reserved.ISBN: 9780520074774One
Backward toward the Postmodern Family:
Reflections on Gender, Kinship, and Class in the Silicon Valley Judith Stacey
The extended family is in our lives again. This should make all the people happy who were complaining back in the sixties and seventies that the reason family life was so hard, especially on mothers, was that the nuclear family had replaced the extended family. . . . Your basic extended family today includes your ex-husband or -wife, your ex's new mate, your new mate, possibly your new mate's ex, and any new mate that your new mate's ex has acquired. It consists entirely of people who are not related by blood, many of whom can't stand each other. This return of the extended family reminds me of the favorite saying of my friend's extremely pessimistic mother: Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.
DELIA EPHRON , Funny Sauce
In the summer of 1986 I attended a wedding ceremony in a small pentecostal church in the Silicon Valley. The service celebrated the same "traditional" family patterns and values that two years earlier had inspired a "profamily" movement to assist Ronald Reagan's landslide reelection to the presidency of the United States. At the same time, however, the pastor's rhetoric displayed substantial sympathy with feminist criticisms of patriarchal marriage. "A ring is not a shackle, and marriage is not a relationship of domination," he instructed the groom. Moreover, complex patterns of divorce, remarriage, and stepkinship linked the members of the wedding party and their guestspatterns that resembled the New Age extended family satirized by Delia Ephron far more than the "traditional" family that arouses the nostalgic fantasies so widespread among religious and other social critics of contemporary family practices.
This chapter summarizes and excerpts from my ethnographic book Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth-Century America (New York: Basic Books, 1990). For constructive responses to an earlier draft, I am grateful to Alan Wolfe, Aihwa Ong, Ruth Rosen, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Naomi Schneider.
In the final decades before the twenty-first century, passionate contests over changing family life in the United States have polarized vast numbers of citizens. Outside the Supreme Court of the United States, righteous, placard-carrying Right-to-Lifers square off against feminists and civil libertarians demonstrating their anguish over the steady dismantling of women's reproductive freedom. On the same day in July 1989, New York's highest court expanded the legal definition of "family" in order to extend rent control protection to gay couples and a coalition of conservative clergymen in San Francisco blocked implementation of their city's new "domestic partners" ordinance. "It is the totality of the relationship," proclaimed the New York judge, "as evidenced by the dedication, caring, and self-sacrifice of the parties which should, in the final analysis, control," the definition of family.1 But just this concept of family is anathema to "profamily" activists. Declaring that the attempt by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to grant legal status to unmarried heterosexual and homosexual couples "arbitrarily redefined the time-honored and hallowed nature of the family," the clergymen's petition was signed by sufficient citizens to force the ordinance into a referendum battle.2 When the reckoning came in November 1989, the electorate of the city many consider to be the national capital of family change had narrowly defeated the domestic partners law. One year later, a similar referendum won a narrow victory.
Betraying a good deal of conceptual and historical confusion, most popular, as well as many scholarly, assessments of family change anxiously and misguidedly debate whether or not "the family" will survive the twentieth century at all.3 Anxieties like these are far from new. "For at least 150 years," historian Linda Gordon writes, "there have been periods of fear that 'the family'meaning a popular image of what families were supposed to be like, by no means a correct recollection of any actual 'traditional' familywas in decline; and these fears have tended to escalate in periods of social stress."4 The actual subject of this recurring, fretful discourse is a historically specific form and concept of family life, one that most historians identify as the "modern family." No doubt, many of us who write and teach about American family life have not abetted public understanding of family change with our counter-intuitive use of the concept of the modern family. The "modern family" of sociological theory and historical convention designates a family form no longer prevalent in the United Statesan intact nuclear household unit composed of a male breadwinner, his full-time homemaker wife, and their dependent childrenprecisely the form of family life that many mistake for an ancient, essential, and now endangered institution.
The past three decades of postindustrial social transformations in the United States have rung the historic curtain on the "modern family"
regime. In 1950 three-fifths of American households contained male breadwinners and full-time female homemakers, whether children were present or not.5 By 1986, in contrast, more than three-fifths of married women with children under the age of eighteen were in the labor force, and only 7 percent of households conformed to the "modern" pattern of breadwinning father, homemaking mother, and one to four children under the age of eighteen.6 By the middle of the 1970s, moreover, divorce outstripped death as the source of marital dissolutions, generating in its wake a complex array of family arrangements caricatured by Delia Ephron in the epigraph.7 The diversity of contemporary gender and kinship relationships undermines Tolstoy's famous contrast between happy and unhappy families: even happy families no longer are all alike!8 No longer is there a single culturally dominant family pattern, like the modern one, to which the majority of Americans conform and most of the rest aspire. Instead, Americans today have crafted a multiplicity of family and household arrangements that we inhabit uneasily and reconstitute frequently in response to changing personal and occupational circumstances.
Recombinant Family Life
We are living, I believe, through a tumultuous and contested period of family history, a period following that of the modern family order but preceding what, we cannot foretell. Precisely because it is not possible to characterize with a coherent descriptive term the competing sets of family cultures that coexist at present, I identify this family regime as postmodern. I do this, despite my reservations about employing such a controversial and elusive cultural concept, to signal the contested, ambivalent, and undecided character of contemporary gender and kinship arrangements. "What is the post-modern?" Clive Dilnot asks rhetorically in the title of a detailed discussion of literature on postmodern culture, and his answers apply readily to the domain of present family conditions in the United States.9 The postmodern, Dilnot maintains, "is first, an uncertainty, an insecurity, a doubt." Most of the "post-" words provoke uneasiness because they imply simultaneously "both the end, or at least the radical transformation of, a familiar pattern of activity or group of ideas," and the emergence of "new fields of cultural activity whose contours are...
