10.6092/issn.2611-2752/10430
Public narratives regarding what constitutes a ‘healthy family’ change over time and are closely linked with national history and contingent needs. This essay analyses the interdependence between the American family and the nation from the 1950s to the emergence of the so-called pluralist family in the 1960s and 1970s, up to the revival of family values from the 1980s to the present. It exemplifies how the connection between family and nation tends to strengthen during circumstances of danger, such as wars and economic crises, and to weaken when multiple familial setups are considered. 
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Maurizio Vaudagna
USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics
Gender Roles
Family and Nation in America
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Bringing the History Back In
2020-03-02
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USAbroad
Maurizio Vaudagna
2020/03/02
10.6092/issn.2611-2752/10430
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Università del Piemonte orientale
2611-2752
Gender Roles
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Family and Nation in America
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Bringing the History Back In                          USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics. Vol. 3 (2020)
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/10430                                                           ISSN 2611-2752




                                Family and Nation in America*

                                               Maurizio Vaudagna

                                               Published: March 2, 2020




                                                      Abstract

       Public narratives regarding what constitutes a ‘healthy family’ change over time and are closely
       linked with national history and contingent needs. This essay analyses the interdependence be-
       tween the American family and the nation from the 1950s to the emergence of the so-called plural-
       ist family in the 1960s and 1970s, up to the revival of family values from the 1980s to the present.
       It exemplifies how the connection between family and nation tends to strengthen during circum-
       stances of danger, such as wars and economic crises, and to weaken when multiple familial setups
       are considered.
       Keywords: Family History; American Family; Nation and Family; Public Narratives; Gender Roles.




Maurizio Vaudagna: Università del Piemonte Orientale (Italy)
 maurizio.vaudagna@uniupo.it
Maurizio Vaudagna is professor of contemporary history, emeritus, at the University of Eastern Piedmont.




  * The paper was presented in the 15th CISPEA Summer School: Nation/Nationalism in the US History, Jun. 30 – Jul. 3,
2019. See the full program here: https://www.cispea.it/2019/05/02/xv-summer-school-2019-nazione-nazionalismi-nella-
storia-statunitense/.



Copyright © 2020 Maurizio Vaudagna                                                                                  B. 1
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Family and Nation in America                                                                           USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




1 Introduction
“American society today is deeply divided by conflicting perceptions of what constitutes a family.”1
This heterogeneity can be detected in the definitions of the family. The most frequent distinction
contrasts nuclear, monogamous, heterosexual families with diverse partnerships cohabiting “under
the same roof.” In the former instance the family is “a social unit based on marriage,” which is “the
legal union of a man and a woman as husband and wife.” In the latter there is no requirement of
heterosexuality and monogamy, i.e., in the definition: “All the members of a household living under
one roof.”2
    In many historical occurrences, public leaders, moralists, and thinkers have seen the family as the
fundamental unit upon which society is built, a micro-representation of the social order. The result
was that if the family was ‘healthy,’ whatever that might mean, then society was too. But if the family
declined, or a cry was heard of the ‘death of the family,’ then society would also wither away and die.
    In the course of history, the family has positioned itself in multiple ways within the public/private
dimension. In seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century America the colonial family was perceived as
mainly public, that is aimed to stress familial honour and social standing, to be strengthened by mat-
rimonial strategies, and inter-family and kinfolk alliances. Married couples were submerged in ex-
tended kin and community networks and no notion of privacy had yet emerged.
    However, the family’s public relevance also had to do with historical circumstances that stressed
the private estate, intimate affections, secretive home, which created, in historian Nancy Cott’s words,
“public sanctity in a private space,”3 to be considered the ultimate source of Christian and civil virtues.
    Between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the emerging Victorian bourgeoisie
of professionals, industrialists, financiers and large merchants redefined the emotionalism of family
relations, originated the long-term trend toward the sentimentalizing and sexualizing of the family
and shaped the controlled physical and relational space called privacy. The result was a new, stratified,
more secretive and more detached bourgeois family. The notion of home emerged as both a physical
dwelling and the temple of familial affections, while a Christian home was both a human habitation and
a familial chapel. The civil and legal protection of privacy rights reflected public relevance for the
private orientation of the family.
    In the nineteenth century and beyond, the link between the public sphere and family well-being
went together hand in hand with the national phenomenon. Family security increasingly corre-
sponded to national security and the family lent the nation strategic metaphors in many idioms:
from patrie, to motherland, vaterland, or madrepatria. National emergencies were conceived as the
defence of a public/private familial order, as the magazine Better Homes and Gardens stated during
World War II, “the status of the home [is] the supreme issue in this titanic struggle.”4
    In the United States, familial setups have never been one-dimensional. On the contrary, their
variety reflected the country’s never-ending ethnic, racial, environmental and cultural multiplicity
and the consequent diversity of its familial arrangements. However, just as nationalism is a narration,
at different moments in time the role of the micro-bedrock of the nation has been assigned to only
one type of family. Throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, the national fam-
ily quality has been conferred to the white, nuclear, suburban family, while immigrant, native, and
African-American families have been relegated to the margins of the national narration.
    The changing link between family and nation is exemplified in this study by the shift from the
domestic 1950s to the emergence of the so-called pluralist family in the 1960s and 1970s, up to the
revival of family values from the 1980s to the present. The main feature of this case study is the
transition between historical periods when an exemplary familial model of the national narration, and
the spirit of moral duty that went with it, went through sweeping changes. If the interdependence of

1.   Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History Of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1998),
     235–236.

2.   Joseph P. Pickett, ed., The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (New York-Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000),
     851.

3.   Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows. A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 157.

4.   Robert L. Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 163.



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family and nation tends to increase during circumstances of national danger, such as war emergencies
first and foremost, and economic depression, other criteria are equally useful for understanding the
nature of this link. When the narration insists on one family model, which is supposedly the ‘right one,’
then the ethic of duty allows little room for individualist self-gratification. This is the moment when
the family role as the founding atom of the nation grows more intense. When, instead, the narration
of familial arrangements takes multiple setups into account and the appeal of pleasure becomes more
pressing than moral duty, then the call to family-nation interdependence becomes more tenuous.



2 The Myth of the Suburban Family as the Banner of Americanism
The end of World War II saw the opening of an age of economic expansion stimulated primarily by
private consumption. Middle-class service jobs for returning GIs multiplied, while a strong national
campaign pressured woman to leave their wartime jobs and go home.
     After the various shocks of the previous fifteen years, what emerged was an updated domestic
project, centered on the need to reconstruct family life. The suburban nuclear family was publicized
as the best place for enjoying the new security and prosperity. In both social data and dominant nar-
rations, the 1950s witnessed the peak of the normative popularity of the monogamous, heterosexual,
filial, prosperous family, which was characterized by the so-called neo-Victorian cult of domesticity. The
familial unit was ideally made up of a breadwinner husband/father, a suburban housewife and mother
with two, three or four dependent offspring enjoying an extended childhood. This model seemed to
embody the ideal of individual self-realization in American life.
     Both the 1950s middle-class family and the so-called companionate family of the 1920s, which was
more cooperative, pleasure- and public-oriented than its turn-of-the-century predecessor, enjoyed
an age of consumer expansion while, however, their contexts were very different. If in the 1920s the
country felt secure, the 1950s were instead the high time of the Cold War, which was not over, it had
just turned ‘cold,’ and both the U.S. and humanity as a whole feared that it might heat up again and
turn into a universal atomic holocaust.
     The difference implied that, while in the 1920s the companionate family had de-emphasized its
task as a patriotic bulwark of national life, in the 1950s, instead, the suburban family typified the
foundation stone of the American Way, a banner to be waved against the dreariness of the adverse
political order. In a famous insect repellent ad, a slender, helmeted Yankee housewife, firmly holding
a hand pump as a machine gun, annihilates soviet bugs invading her kitchen and sink.
     As in the case of the companionate family, in the 1950s public thinking of private life stressed the
importance of sexuality as a source of marital harmony, but, different from its predecessor, the post-
war version was first and foremost filial. The jazz age, by dissolving the earlier ‘natural’ link between
sexuality and reproduction, was preserved, however, the public imagination stressed a calling to cre-
ate large families of three to four children as the ideal of conjugal and familial happiness. During the
years immediately after World War II, the fertility rate, in contrast to its multi-century decline, reg-
istered an unexpected rise which was referred to as the baby boom. Rearing numerous good, patriotic
citizens became central to the family’s national mission. Family happiness and personal maturity were
mainly reached by rearing and educating children, even more than by harmonious marital love, even
if the two were obviously interdependent. Both parents must embody role models without which
their children’s future would be compromised.
     As shown in a 1967 study by sociologist Herbert Ganz, another cornerstone of familiar and personal
self-realization was owning a suburban, single-family home. Ganz emphasized that owning a home
provided men with an amount of self-expression and self-government that was unthinkable for a
tenant. Home ownership permitted families to become stabile, as a symbol of success,5 and resulted
in the protection of democratic institutions and American values.
     Aided by low real estate prices, the epitome of the new prosperity for millions of former GI fami-
lies consisted in the huge wave of small prefab houses in uniform suburbs called Levittown from the


5.   Jan Cohn, The Palace and the Poorhouse. The American House as a Cultural Symbol (East Lansing: Michigan State University
     Press, 1979), 239.



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name of the ubiquitous construction firm Levitt, which characterized the expanding suburban real
estate boom in the America of the 1950s.
    The suburban family’s rehabilitation required that it be carried out far away from the intense
public dimension that had characterized family life during the traumatic emergencies of the previous
two decades. The domestic ideology reached a peak as a life-sustaining position, an economic and
emotional support, a place to raise children and to fulfill one’s personality and happiness. If in the
1920s the advertising of new domestic technologies had emphasized more leisure for enjoying the
resources of public space, instead, in the 1950s ads stressed that less domestic work allowed for more
opportunities for achieving one’s personal and family happiness at home.
    From the late nineteenth century, the middle-class family mission, which had up to then coin-
cided with the Victorian morals of sacrifice and self-control, began to compete with the idea of an
America culture of abundance. The prosperity and conspicuous consumption in the twenty years af-
ter World War II signified the emergence of the so-called ‘two/thirds society,’ where the majority of
the population had the economic means to conduct a comfortable, or at least sufficient, life. In the
past, the morals of self-control and the one-dimensional nature of the ‘good’ family model coincided
with the peak of its national mission. When, on the contrary, the ethics of self-gratification and the
plurality of family models grew stronger, the sense of national duty tended to decline.
    In a nutshell, the domesticity of the 1950s framed an original compromise between the patriotic
task and relaxed enjoyment. It consisted in a strong national mission based on the merging of the
neo-Victorian ethic and the companionate lightness, a family of self-control and that of abundance. Of
the latter, it emphasized a pleasurable life, relative marital equality, relevance of sexuality, importance
of feminine beauty, desire for prosperity and consumption. Of the former, it revived the tradition of
the separate spheres, the sense of familial commitment, the central role of filiality, the calling to act
as the bulwark of stability and morality in national public life.



3 The Emergence of the Pluralist Family
The suburban family was, however, affected by prejudice, exclusions, and inconsistencies. Since the
mid-1960s the consequence was an unprecedented breakdown of the prevailing idea of the family,
and the emergence of new, plural familial arrangements. Middle-class models that had prevailed in
the previous century and a half started to decline. Moreover, changes in sexuality, filiation, gender
relations and the weight of economic, social and emotional factors were so drastic as to prevent a
new general consensus on what was family, and even less, on what was the quintessential ‘American’
family. As a result, the formerly shared sense of a familial national mission declined or, to say the least,
became a field of intense public controversy. At the same time, the rediscovery of the other America
of poverty and exclusion denied the middle class its former self-imagination as the universal class of
all Americans.
     The birth of the new pluralist family has been supported by the sexual revolution which discarded
the traditional link between sex, family and social context. Meanwhile, the birth control pill liberalized
sexual encounters, gave couples the choice of limiting their fertility, and encouraged a sexuality geared
to self-gratification, intimacy and the fulfillment of physical love.
     The youth, and students in particular, who described themselves as post-economic after twenty years
of expansion, were the initiators of the sexual revolution. The culture of abundance allowed them to
pursue their goals of self-realization and of a quality of life, which was preferable to simply maximiz-
ing earnings.
     Their countercultural movement insisted on physical self-awareness. In the earlier history of pub-
lic and private life, which parts of the naked body were visible, or concealed, had been a great moral
and relational subject. Now the unorthodox shift consisted in the cult of nudity, widely exhibited
by young men and women in public places, parks, and concerts. The claim was that of authenticity
which, against an idea of intimacy based on secrecy, regarded the body as an essential site of emotional
self-realization and gratification.
     Sexuality was, therefore, an added value, publicized and intensified both as an avenue of inter-
personal communication beyond traditional codes, and as a chance to experiment with new ways



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for relating in communal circumstances, shared groups and multiple sexual encounters. The slogan
‘make love, not war’ politicized the relational and gratifying role of sex as a critique of warmongering
drives.
    In the meanwhile, the so-called culture of intimacy managed to free people from the margins of
those who did not share the prevalent sexual preferences, such as gays, lesbians and other groups, who
could more openly disclose their choice to both the greater public and to themselves, while earlier this
self-awareness had often been a source of deep pain.
    In the history of homosexuality, as an effect of the tensions between alternative identities and
conformity to the prevalent codes of conduct, the gays’ opinion of the family has been ambiguous.
Until the sixties gay history has been one of individuals. Once the idea of the gay family came into
existence, it took two different paths. On the one hand, it wished to reproduce the model of the
middle-class family; on the other it emphasized the denial of the ‘orthodox’ family lifestyle, and a
search for more libertarian familial and group relations.
    Another strategic factor, which was less dependent on the national mission, helped the pluralist
family to prevail: the new women’s activism, supported by the revived feminist movement and by the
changes in women’s social and economic status. According to the historian Marilyn Coleman, in 1975
more than 36% of married women with infants less than six years old had a job, compared to 10% in
1940.6 The idea that women ‘naturally’ belonged at home was rapidly disappearing.
    These working mothers emphasized not only pay equity but also the double shift worked at home
and on the job, shouldered by women who wanted to stick to both commitments. Since 1966, the
National Organization of Women (NOW) highlighted a new emancipatory feminism, which was to
achieve a “truly equal partnership with men…it is no longer necessary or possible for women to devote
the greater part of their lives to child-rearing.”7 NOW demanded the full participation of both spouses
in caregiving and childrearing obligations.
    It was, however, a new generation of young, radical feminists, originating from the New Left and
revolting against its sexism, who focused on ‘women’s lib,’ meaning women’s social and sexual libera-
tion. Since 1968, the new feminists proclaimed that ‘sisterhood is powerful’ and ‘the private is political,’
and founded separatist groups, movements and venues, including many children’s daycare centers.
    After 1970, one of the most contentious trends of women’s separatism was the emergence of the
lesbian issue. It seemed to be a revolution in women’s sentimental and sexual life, which aimed to
reject middle-class respectability without falling prey to the new ways of patriarchal domination.
    If in a peculiar way, the state of the black family was most important in the family revolution.
The black movement did not emphasize interracial sentimental, sexual, and matrimonial encounters.
Its purpose was to maintain the cohesion of the black community and to counter interracial mix,
mongrelization, that opponents kept shouting out.
    Throughout the 1960s, despite the Supreme Court sentence of the anti-miscegenation laws as un-
constitutional, interracial weddings were quite unusual. In September 1967, Foreign Secretary Dean
Rusk gave President Johnson his resignation when the front cover of Time Magazine published a pho-
tograph of his daughter Margaret Elisabeth marrying a black man.
    At the same time, in contrast to the declining family-nation link, the black family became the
focus of a heated controversy on the nature of the ‘right’ family in America. The case originated in
1965 when the so-called Moynihan Report, entitled ‘The Black Family: The Need for National Action,’
was made public. It was written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Undersecretary of Labor in the John-
son Administration. The impoverished black family in the ghettoes, said the report, was trapped in
a “tangle of pathology” of innumerable divorces, desertions, out-of-wedlock births, and single moth-
ers, causing a steep rise in delinquency, drugs, unemployment and school dropouts. Implicitly, the
failed black family became the ‘anti-American’ family par excellence, and encompassed everything the
proper family should not be. The tough national polemic that followed questioned the pathological
origins Moynihan had selected. Slavery had made it impossible for a black male to lead his family, this



6.   Marylin Colman, Lawrence H. Ganong and Kelly Warzink, Family Life in 20th Century America (Westport, CN: Greenwood,
     2007), 147.

7.   Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty. A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1997), 277.



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‘humiliation’ had perpetuated itself, and made him inclined to flee familial responsibilities, while pro-
ducing the needy matriarchy that replaced absent fathers. The entire African-American community
retorted that the black family’s problems did not originate from within the black community itself,
but from the poverty and discrimination that had plagued it long after the end of slavery.
    To sum up, the matrimonial revolution consisted first and foremost at the end of its universality
as a regular lifestyle. As the median marriage age increased from 20.3 years in 1960 to 23 years in
1984; in 1988, 20% of the families consisted of only one-member. In the 1970s in particular, a large
number of single women decided to never marry, or remained single because of divorce, which in
1980 had reached the enormous percentage of 50% of all marriages. The very notion of divorce un-
derwent a drastic change. If earlier it had to be caused by the gravest reasons, with one of the spouses
being the guilty party, after 1970 it became the “no-fault divorce,” which could be authorized by mu-
tual consent or by one of the spouses deeming that marital life was irreparably fractured. Thanks to
birth control, numerous women started thinking it possible to have children without being married,
or cohabiting with the father or with another man. Moreover, in 1973 the Supreme Court legalized
abortion, which empowered women in the self-government of their reproductive rights, and made
unwanted pregnancies, which earlier amounted to half the total, much less dramatic.
    What resulted was, as mentioned, the so called ‘pluralist family’ characterized by many different
settings, none of which could claim a prevalent national mission.
    Two-parent families now account for 15% of the family units, while two-earner families are in
need of nursery schools, childcare centers, or infant caretakers. The numerous single-parent families,
mostly working mothers, are often affected by familial and filial poverty and in need of pay equity and
flexible working hours. ‘Recombinant’ families coincide with the second, third, or fourth marriage or
partnership. The relevant issues here are the economic status of former spouses and offspring and the
psychological adjustment of infants and children to non-biological parents and complicated networks
of brothers, sisters and relatives from other marriages. Childless couples are very numerous because
of the decreasing fertility rate, and 2% of the total population are lesbians and homosexuals, who very
often contribute to a large cohort of cohabitations, who long for the same rights as married couples.
    Feminist historian Alice Kessler-Harris has summarized the implications of the family revolution:
“The most dramatic transformation of our generation has been the diminution of the importance of
marriage for the distribution of goods, income, policies in our society. That we have now come to
rely much more on individual effort within and outside of marriage,”8 is evident.
    At the end of the seventies the interdependence between family and American national identity
could hardly be perceived as both concepts were undergoing fractures and segmentations. The con-
text had changed: the Cold War had pushed many Americans to cling to the flag and the family that
personified it. Instead, the emergencies of the sixties and seventies, the war in Vietnam, the black
revolt and economic decline had convinced large segments of the American population to censure
traditional definitions of Americanness and search for another America.
    The simultaneous revolution in family law stressed that familial Americanness consisted in recog-
nizing the primacy of individual rights over public priorities. Up to that time the obvious premise
of family law had been that the nuclear family, being the preeminent national unit, had enjoyed a
privileged status and that government benefits could discriminate against non-nuclear families.
    The legal revolution stressed, instead, that the family decline as the foundation for legal prerog-
atives. The noted 1965 case, Griswold vs. Connecticut, sentenced matrimony as a basic private right
of American citizenship. What emerged were children’s rights, privacy rights, gender-equality rights, re-
productive rights, and courts sentenced that the government could not define the family in restrictive
terms. Rights emphasized individual personality in relation to family membership, which, for exam-
ple, applied to the contentious field of reducing parental authority over minor offspring. It was legal
for a ‘competent’ minor woman to have an abortion or use contraceptives with no parental permission.
This constitutional trend contributed, according to Nancy Cott, to “knock marriage from its position
of preeminence as ‘pillar of the state’.”9

8.   Alice Kessler-Harris, interview by New River Media, The First Measured Century, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/
     kesslerharris.htm.

9.   Cott, Public Vows, 199.



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    The law has distanced itself from obligations ascribable to family membership, but it has become
more intrusive in the defense of individual rights; for example, such as in the case of domestic violence,
domestic rape or women’s exclusive right to have an abortion, while the approach of earlier family
law was to not intrude beyond domestic walls.
    The link between democracy and the family was also echoed by young critics who, on the one
hand, stressed individualist self-government, but on the other emphasized the pluralist principle as
a cornerstone of democracy. If pluralism was the eminent democratic quality of American life, why
wasn’t it extended to the family as well? If, in the past, the narrative of the national family had been
based on one prevalent model, now the families of the ‘other America’ were multicultural, diverse,
characterized by multiple arrangements which were all equally acceptable, and were the result of
personal freedom more than a national imperative.



4    The Revival of Family Values from the 1980s
Since the emergence of the pluralist family in the 1970s, the link between family and nation has been
converted from the earlier normative American family to the national controversy on family values.
     The pluralist family has remained prevalent. Some of its features have been generalized and nor-
malized, others have seemingly remained extreme and some have been revised or abandoned. There
has, however, been no comeback to one dominant and national model.
     From the 1970s, however, familial innovations have been so drastic, preventing a general consen-
sus to be reached on what the right family might be, and the 1980s saw a change of direction in the
perceptions of a healthy family throughout American public life. Against the individualistic spirit of the
late 1960s and 1970s, the old concept of family values was revived and re-interpreted by the ‘Reagan
Revolution’ of the 1980s, and Bill Clinton’s ‘Third Way’ of the 1990s. The family was redefined as the
fundamental source of social and national values and the patriotic cornerstone of what it meant to
be American. The national mission of the family was back in a big way, even though the controversy
kept raging regarding what defined a healthy family for embodying the American Way.
     The national family debate has been deeply influenced by the shifting public climate due to the
rise of neo-conservatism. Opponents in conservative and Reaganite ranks stressed that pluralist fam-
ilies are less stable, less responsible, easier to be fractured, and that divorced or deserted women are
abandoned in hard circumstances and that children’s interests and rights to self-realization are sacri-
ficed.
     Since the 1980s, a powerful political, ideological, and religious movement has emerged which
has vigorously, and sometimes successfully, contrasted the pluralist family on behalf of the morality
and centrality of a modernized version of the 1950’s suburban family, regarding the very idea of the
American nation. Numerous campaigns have vindicated individual responsibility and self-control on
issues of drugs, alcohol, food, physical and mental fitness and sexual habits. Opposition to abortion
has sometimes become extreme, and various states have banned it from publicly-funded clinics.
     The democrats’ appreciation of family life has also been changing in light of the so-called New
Democrats, the party leadership that emerged in the 1990s as a response to neoconservative success
during the previous decade, who distanced themselves from the New Deal legacy in favor of a ‘new
centrism.’ Especially in the presidential campaign of 1992, the New Democrat, Bill Clinton, tried to
steal from republicans their cherished theme of ‘family values,’ to become the cornerstone of a New
Covenant of progressive politics. The shift, as indicated by ‘family values’ scholar Melinda Cooper,
was a step away from the New Deal’s focus on the government’s duties in favor, instead, on familial
obligations.
     The Clintonian innovation consisted in pairing opportunity and responsibility. Republicans ob-
jected as New Democrats loudly proclaimed ‘family values,’ while they were doing nothing more than
sounding moral tirades to actually help ‘healthy families.’ Clinton stated, “we will demand more from
families, but […] will offer more, too.”10 The government was to stop dispensing welfare, and the peak


10. Linda C. McClain, “Federal Family Policy and Family Values from Clinton to Obama, 1992–2012 and Beyond,” Michigan
    State Law Review, 1621(2013), 1627.



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family legislation of the Clinton administration was the ‘welfare reform’ of 1996, cancelling AFDC,
the leading federal support for poor families, which had built a system of money transfers in favor of
nontraditional units headed by unmarried poor mothers. Clinton’s reform overturned sixty years of
federal responsibility for poor children and their caregivers.
     Instead, the government was to create work opportunities that people in need had to actively
take advantage of, while at the same time, following responsible family and parental behavior. The
AFDC was replaced by the TANF program (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), which was much
shorter in time limits, less generous in money subsidies and conditioned by compulsory retraining
and job hunting (the so-called welfare-to-work precondition). “The new legislation,” said sociologist
Sharon Hays, “was to train poor families in ‘mainstream’ American values.”11 Jobs and responsible
family ways would liberate the poor from the shame of dependence on welfare payments.
     Obama’s family policy mainly followed Clintonian precedents, but also introduced some new
guidelines. As legal scholar Linda C. McClain has emphasized, “one striking feature is the way in
which he [Obama] and First Lady Michelle Obama have made the personal political in relating the
stories of their upbringing, marriage, and experience as parents to concrete policies such as workplace
flexibility, promoting responsible fatherhood and healthy marriage […]. The Obama administration’s
distinct focus on women and girls [has insisted] that many economic and social issues are not just
‘women’s,’ but affect families, men, the economy, and the nation.”12 According to the Pew Research
Center, the presidential couple’s focus on gender issues has convinced many American women to
favor active government and its social services.
     Whether understood in a liberal or a conservative vein, both interpretations of ‘family values’
stressed the social engineering task of governmental family policy in that benefits and opportunities
were to be framed in such a way as to encourage moral and socially beneficial family setups. Scared by
out-of-wedlock births, teen-age pregnancy, the rise in the number of divorces and family desertions,
both parties emphasized that legislation was to foster the right family life.
     What it actually meant, however, differed. Clintonism denied that the legal, nuclear family was
the one acceptable arrangement since cohabitants, remarried or single parents could also fall within
the boundaries of the healthy family. The emphasis fell on the ‘responsible father’ regularly supporting
his children’s emotional, educational and economic lives and keeping constructive contact with their
mother.
     Instead, it was for republicans to proclaim that the only way toward family responsibility was mar-
riage. In George W. Bush’s welfare plan, Working Toward Independence, it was openly stated that child
well-being and responsible fatherhood were achieved via work and legal marriage. In the republicans’
understanding, only the 1950’s-style nuclear model was the ‘right’ one.13
     The current president, a ‘plutocratic populist’ according to distinguished public commentator Fa-
reed Zakaria, has not placed family values at the center of his message. The focus on healthy domestic
units is usually aimed at encouraging national cohesion because of the universality of the family con-
dition. Trump’s populist message is divisive, stressing ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ and ‘family values’ are not
fitting in his rhetoric.
     Trump is perceived to have widened the gender gap, compared to his presidential predecessors,
and his access to power has been interpreted as the backlash of whiteness and masculinity against the
democrats’ ‘rainbow society.’ This has deepened the gap between men’s and women’s evaluation of
his presidential performance. While in early 2019 men’s opinions were evenly divided, 63% of women
were, instead, critical and only 32% were supportive.
     However, on individual family issues the president has erratically fluctuated, mainly responding
to personal popularity goals and electoral expediency. Trump has supported abstinence campaigns
against sex education, as well as anti-contraceptive advertising, because condoms would incite ‘risky’
sexual behaviour. He has also prohibited public funding for family planning agencies if abortion was
mentioned in their pamphlets; he has appointed new anti-abortion justices on the Supreme Court,


11.   Sharon Hays, Flat Broke with Children. Women in the Age of Welfare Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4.

12. McClain, “Federal Family,” 1716.

13. Ibid, 1650–1651.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/10430                                                                                    B. 8
Family and Nation in America                                                         USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




but he has avoided insisting on the repeal of the Roe vs. Wade ruling. Trump has stated that marriage
is by nature heterosexual, but has at the same time held that the Supreme Court DOMA sentence,
which legalized same-sex marriage, is here to stay.
    The same volatility shows in Trump’s view of work-family balance. In his words, pregnancy is an
inconvenience for employers, equal pay requires that women show that they are as good as men on
the job, and childless families are free riders because children will pay our future entitlements.
    Trump is not a family moralist or traditionalist. His contempt remarks about women and the
style of his own sexual escapades makes him appear as a kind of predatory sexist. On family issues,
the president perpetually oscillates between Reaganite Republicanism and the authoritarian sexist
tradition.



5    Conclusion
Since the 1980s the healthy family has had a comeback as a signpost of the American way. The main
political and intellectual forces of the nation have reiterated that family life is the universal condition
for human life and that the family is a synthesis of political and civil principles which act as a lens for
assessing the health of society as a whole.
    It is, however, equally true that “today the United States is a society without a clear, unitary set of
family ideals and values.”14 While in earlier periods of intense familial, national symbolism the middle-
class family, however defined, was the one American family. Now which family setup best personifies
American values is the terrain for sharp national controversy.
    Out of the heat of the battle has, however, emerged the shared awareness that the core measure
of the American family’s success is the well-being of children and infants, who are often seen as the
victims of the familial restructuring of the 1960s and 1970s. Critics object that the pluralist family
has created a generation of infants affected by a ‘new precocity’ due to the crisis of parental authority,
the laxity of a permissive family and the life span experienced in a single-parent setup, by 50% of the
less-than-sixteen-year-old minors.
    While traditionalists miss the stay-at-home moms of the 1950s, child-friendly policies include tax
credits for small children, family-friendly jobs, tougher obligations for non-cohabiting parents, easier
access to quality childcare and new divorce and custody procedures to support the children’s interests.
    In a nutshell, the nature of the national healthy family is an embattled terrain in today’s United
States. Amidst this confused familial landscape, the 21st century’s national mission of the American
family is no more a single sanctified arrangement, but is mainly measured by its ability to guarantee
children’s well-being.




14. Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, XVII.



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Family and Nation in America                                                       USAbroad. Vol. 3 (2020)




References and Further Readings

Cohn, Jan. The Palace and the Poorhouse. The American House as a Cultural Symbol. East Lansing: Michigan
State University Press, 1979.

Coleman, Marilyn, Lawrence H. Ganong and Kelly Warzinik. Family Life in 20th Century America. West-
port, CN: Greenwood, 2007.

Cooper, Melinda. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and New Social Conservatism. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2017.

Cott, Nancy F. Public Vows. A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000.

Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty. A History of Women in America. New York: Free Press, 1997.

Griswold, Robert L. Fatherhood in America: A History. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

Hays, Sharon. Flat Broke with Children. Women in the Age of Welfare Reform. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003.

Kessler-Harris, Alice. Interview by New River Media, The First Measured Century, PBS, http://www.pbs.
org/fmc/interviews/kesslerharris.htm.

McClain, Linda C. “Federal Family Policy and Family Values from Clinton to Obama, 1992–2012 and
Beyond.” Michigan State Law Review 2013, 1621–1718.

Mintz, Steven and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New
York: Free Press, 1998.

Pickett, Joseph P., ed. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. New York-Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2000.




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