Changing Family Values

Difference, Diversity and the Decline of Male Order

Gill Jagger,Caroline Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134750368
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Changing Family Values offers a comprehensive introduction to contemporary debates and new research surrounding the family. It explores how we define traditional family values and how these values are perceived as being underthreat in contemporary society. Ranging across politics, social policy, law and sociology, the contributors focus on the diverse realities of contemporary family life. Issues covered include:
* the recent backlash against single mothers
* lesbian and gay families and the law
* men's changing roles within the family
* the future of the nuclear family.
This book is ideal for courses covering the family, a central topic in sociology and women's studies.

1 End of century, end of family?

Shifting discourses of family ‘crisis’

Caroline Wright and Gill JaggerIn

In all countries the purity of the family must be the surest strength of a nation. (Reverend W.Arthur 1885, cited in Showalter 1992:3)

Introduction

According to the voices that make up the chant of traditional ‘family values’, insistent in contemporary Britain as well as in the United States, the turn of our century is marked by a growing crisis in the family, a crisis that may prove terminal unless decisive action is taken. The tabloid press in Britain talk about ‘the collapse of marriage and family life’, discuss ‘the extent of the crisis’ and run a headline ‘End of Family Life in Britain’ (Daily Express cited in Selman 1996:2 and Walker 1996:49). Authors writing under the auspices of the Institute of Economic Affairs speak of the threat to freedom and stability posed by the unmistakable decline in traditional family life (Davies 1993: vi, 7), equating ‘fatherless families’ with rising crime and educational disadvantage (Dennis 1993).

The perceived crisis in the family may be but one example in the 1990s, an age which is, according to several commentators, replete with the language of crises and anxieties (Furedi 1997; Stokes 1992; Dunant and Porter 1996). As Showalter argues in Sexual Anarchy, it need not surprise us that there is so much talk of crisis as the twentieth century closes and the next millennium awaits. She writes:

The ends of centuries seem not only to suggest but to intensify crises…more intensely experienced, more emotionally fraught, more weighted with symbolic and historical meaning, because we invest these crises with the metaphors of death and rebirth that we project onto the final decades and years of a century.

(Showalter 1992:2)

If the ends of centuries share a weighing down of the popular imagination by crises, we might nonetheless expect the themes of the crises to be very different. Yet there are some important parallels between fin-de-siècle angst in the late nineteenth century and now, as Showalter suggests. Both embody fears for the health of the family and the nation; there is nothing new in today’s talk of a crisis in the family. Moreover, the definition and roles of gender are very much to the fore in both cases; it is clear that the concern with the family is a concern with the roles and values of women and men, and with ‘the longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender, as well as race, class, and nationality’ (Showalter 1992:4).

Our purpose in this chapter is to explore the eschatological ideas of family crisis in the 1990s in the light of the invocation of family crisis and degeneration in the 1890s. Such a project opens up several avenues of analysis at once. Primarily, perhaps, it helps to disrupt today’s all too ubiquitous ‘once upon a time there were happy, healthy families’ myth, subverting the monolithic version of ‘the past’ on which it depends. At the same time, it allows us to highlight important differences as well as similarities in the content of the debates between the two periods. In seeking to make sense of these, we need to map out some of the shifting and contested notions of ‘the family’ and of individual, family and state responsibilities across the intervening century. Such an account remains inevitably partial, drawing out themes we consider pertinent (many of which are pursued in more depth elsewhere in this collection) rather than attempting to say all that could be said.

Our first section begins by pursuing the dominant intellectual and political concerns with ‘the family’ in the late nineteenth century. We then turn to the late twentieth century and the lobby for traditional family values, with its echoing idealisation of the family and lament of family degeneration and social decline. Thereafter we begin to compare and contrast these two ‘end of century, end of family’ refrains. In the second section we seek to make sense of the privileging of the family in social commentary, exploring the political spaces that it opens up at the close of both centuries and the place of the family in political narratives about the role of the state. We also look at dimensions of ‘race’/ethnicity, social class and gender in state practices on, and narratives of, family life. Our final section focuses on the gender politics of family values. The prescriptive visions of motherhood that characterised late nineteenth-century angst about the family are set against the moral panic about lone/single mothers in the late twentieth century, and the absence of debate about fatherhood as the twentieth century dawned is contrasted with today’s obsessive anxiety with fatherhood and with men’s role in society more broadly. We argue that in both periods it is through a focus on the family that struggles over gender roles and relations have in part been played out, ensuring that the family looms large in government rhetoric and policies.

Two tales of family crisis

Constituting family ‘crisis’ in late nineteenth-century Britain

As the nineteenth century drew to a close in Britain, claims in political circles of social crisis and degeneration abounded. These were asserted on the basis of the following ‘evidence’: women having children outside marriage, or not having children at all, prostitution, including child prostitution, homosexuality, sexually transmitted diseases (Showalter 1992:3–4) and the indiscipline of working-class youth (Gittins 1993:143–4). Portrayed by many establishment commentators as symptoms of sexual decadence and degeneracy, there were calls to guard against such ‘evils’ by shoring up the family (Showalter 1992:3) and, where necessary, substituting for deficient families.

High infant mortality rates among the propertyless majority were also invoked as part of the crisis. With the view coming to the fore in parliament that working-class (male) children were a national asset, the soldiers and workers who would populate and consolidate the British empire, so their welfare came to be reflected in state practices (Davin 1978:10). Poor child health was connected not to structural inequalities but to ‘inadequate’ and ‘immoral’ mothers who neglected their children by going out to work and who had to be ‘corrected’ (Dyhouse 1989:84).

Of interest is how tightly the borders were drawn around what constituted the hegemonic family, whose bolstering was deemed so urgent. To be sanctioned and reinforced was a single family form established by a married man and woman and their legitimate children. In other words, a heterosexist concept of the family was invoked: the sexual relations between spouses, for the purposes of bearing children, were the only legitimate expression of sexuality. Moreover, the convention of the family to be championed was also class-specific; it was the bourgeois family form of the new middle classes, with its particular gender division of labour and its particular demarcation of a child’s years into distinct periods of childhood and adolescence.

Within this family, the ‘proper’ role of the woman was deemed to be the full-time care of her children and husband, and children were deemed to require a ‘childhood’ that inculcated them with appropriate moral values and prepared them for adulthood, all in gender specific ways. Men’s role was as economic providers, as representatives of the family in the public sphere and as a source of moral authority. The new middle classes used this gender division of labour within the family as the basis for their claim to moral superiority. They asserted the virtues of husbands taking financial and moral responsibility for wives who were busy creating a regulated domestic sphere, as against the profligacy and excesses of the aristocracy and the dangers of the undomesticated working classes (Gittins 1993:157; Collier 1995:219– 20). Although this specific model of family life achieved wide currency, this is not to suggest that there were not alternative, competing notions of family life in circulation. For example, Dyhouse (1989) details a range of feminist work of the period that is critical of the Victorian bourgeois family and celebrates alternative visions, expressed through women’s fiction as well as in political pamphlets and platforms.

Constituting family ‘crisis’ in late twentieth-century Britain

In the 1980s and 1990s a vocal lobby has also espoused the virtues of one ‘normal’ and ‘traditional’ heterosexual nuclear family form and warned of the perils for society of departure from it (see Fox Harding, Chapter 6)¹.Dissent is vigorous, a clamour of voices seeking to repudiate such narrow and prescriptive assertions of one ‘natural’ family form. And as busy as some academics, politicians and church leaders are, using public platforms to espouse a plurality of family forms, even busier are the many people creating and recreating the wide variety of social relationships they claim as family (see Stacey 1990). However, the lobby for traditional family values is certainly not without influence. It was very active during the latter years of Thatcher’s New Right premiership and throughout the Major years, although, as Fox Harding shows in Chapter 6, its success in terms of legislative impact was mixed. It is perhaps to the level of ideas that we must look to gauge the full significance of this lobby in the late twentieth century. We will suggest that the often crude connections asserted between ‘deviant’ family forms and social ills, as well as a particular vision of individual, family and state responsibilities, are reflected in the debates and policies of the New Left as well as the New Right.

As in the United States (see Stacey, this volume), policy units and think tanks, most notably the Institute of Economic Affairs (Health and Welfare Unit) and the Social Affairs Unit, as well as newspapers, have proved more receptive publishing outlets for the ‘family values’ lobby than the academic presses.² Prominent members of the lobby include the ‘ethical socialist’ academics Professor Halsey and Norman Dennis and the journalists Melanie Phillips and Janet Daley. Their self-declared calling is as lobbyists on behalf of what they call the ‘normal’ family, argued to have been deserted by traditional supporters like the Church of England and to be actively threatened by government policies, feminist ideology, ‘conformist intellectuals’ and reproductive technology (Anderson and Dawson 1986:9–11; Dennis 1993:48).

Two crises, same difference?

The evidence relied upon in the 1990s to ‘prove’ the crisis in the family bears a striking resemblance to that invoked in the 1890s: lone/single motherhood; rising crime rates; indiscipline in schools; sexually transmitted diseases (with the emphasis on HIV/AIDS rather than syphilis); and lesbian and gay relationships. To these might be added rising divorce rates and the concern that cohabitation is replacing marriage. Again, a particular heterosexual, nuclear family form, with a very specific history, is idealised and universalised. Indeed, the ‘crisis’ in the family in both cases can be seen as no more than the ‘gap’ between the ideological construction of ‘the family’ and the diverse realities of family life (Gittins 1993: viii).

There are also important differences in the two narratives, however. In the 1990s, the rigid gender division of labour of male breadwinner and female home-maker cannot be so unambiguously idealised by the lobby for traditional family values. Paid work, albeit often part-time and poorly paid, has become the norm for women across all classes in Britain. Indeed, it could be argued that the economy now relies more than ever on the ‘cheap’ labour of women workers. Moreover, amidst high levels of male unemployment and increasing demands for families to pay their own way and take financial responsibility for areas of need no longer adequately provisioned by the state (such as dental care, health care, education, care of the elderly), women’s wages are crucial to the very maintenance of family life. In this context, advocating that women be forced out of paid employment would be untenable. This is not to say, however, that the lobby for traditional family values does not express a preference for women to be in the home, particularly when they have young children.

If a rigid gender division of labour cannot be so forcefully decreed, we suggest that there is also a shift from the 1890s to the 1990s in the mode of despatch of relationships and family forms which differ from the nuclear ideal. What was pathologised in the late nineteenth century, to be stamped out at all costs, is more likely to be tolerated in the liberal democracy of the 1990s, at least rhetorically. However, the lobby for traditional family values typically asserts that such tolerance must be accompanied by moral censure. The role of the contemporary state should, in their view, be to mark out and reward nuclear families as morally superior to any other form, and do nothing to encourage diversity.

State regulation of lesbian and gay sexualities provides a good example of the difference between the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth century in this respect. In 1885 a new offence of gross indecency outlawed sexual acts of any kind between men, and in 1895 the celebrated playwright Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years of hard labour in prison. As the century closed, and with the Wilde trial fuelling the newly emerging stereotype of ‘the homosexual’ as a personality, displacing the emphasis on sodomy as a practice, the position of the Crown was clear: practising homosexuals were criminals. It was also clear that homosexual acts were defined as between men only. Lesbian practices, although subject to censure, have never been illegal and have more often been ignored.³

In the late twentieth century, in contrast, lobbying on the state regulation of lesbian and gay sexualities, by those espousing the ‘traditional’ family, attempts to combine (rhetorical) tolerance with censure. A good example is some of the lobbying in the run up to the legislation passed in the House of Commons in June 1998 to lower the age of consent for homosexual sex from 18 to 16, making it equivalent to the age of consent for heterosexual sex. The Maranatha Community, a national movement of Christians based in Manchester, despatched a lengthy document to MPs making the case against lowering the age of consent on medical, social and religious grounds.

Introductory remarks include the ‘need to accept individuals as they are, without condition’, and profess to recognise ‘the deep hurts and often sense of injustice carried by many men and women who consider themselves to be homosexual’ (The Maranatha Community 1998, no page numbers). Yet the tenor of the document as a whole is clear: it stereotypes homosexuals as deviants with confused identities whose promiscuous sexual practices are a major health risk, who are unsuitable to raise children, whose personal relationships are of poor quality and whose sexuality is an abuse of God’s gifts. Since the House of Commons vote was later over-turned in the Lords, such lobbying may have found its mark. It remains to be seen whether, as widely predicted, new legislation will prevail.

Meanwhile, past ‘successes’ of the campaigners for traditional family values still endure. Witness Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, the first explicitly anti-gay and lesbian legislation of the twentieth century, which makes it illegal for local authorities to intentionally promote homosexuality or the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended (sic) family relationship (Powell 1998:16).⁴ Although the Labour government has promised to repeal this legislation, at the time of writing (June 1998) it remains on the statutes and a recent attempt to bring the first prosecution under Section 28 has been reported (see Sanderson 1998).

To reiterate, the idea that there is one ‘right’ family form, and that deviation from it carries great risks for society and nation, characterises both the 1890s and the 1990s. This is not to say that this notion of an ideal family type is...