The Tragedy Of "Family Values"

We hear a constant barrage of propaganda from the neo-conservatives and ultra-conservatives, especially those among the so-called "Religious Right" (which is predominantly the Christian Right that works its political agenda while crying "Foul!" any time they do not get their desired outcome), regarding "family values."

What bothers me is that these same people ignore the realities faced by American families over the last 300 years. Indeed, those "family values" included our earliest settlers and colonials living in families that relied upon slavery and indentured servants (who were often treated worse than slaves) for survival in the "New World" even though slavery and forced servitude were predominantly non-existent in the countries of origin for these colonists.

Then there is the fact that most American colonists married off their female children by the age of 16, more often at an earlier age. These ultra-conservatives touting "family values" also forget that during the many revivals of religion throughout the American settlements were conducted on the basis of back woods and settlement practices of drunkenness, incest, sexual assaults and the de facto enslavement of women, including the sale of women as brides. They also seem to forget the mistreatment of Native American peoples, including enslavement, massacres, forced relocation, impressment into military service during the wars between super powers, and eventual relegation to a status of being less than people.

These folks, who wax nostalgic for the good old days when families were valued, forget that women in the American colonies had few rights, little to no legal recourse for mistreatment or abuse, and very little consideration unless they came from the wealthy elite. Most women in the colonies and early times in America were barely educated. Even the wealthiest women were not well-educated in the liberal arts and sciences, but were relegated to learning the niceties of being a hostess, managing household affairs and supporting the political, business and wealth aspirations of the men in their lives. Even the right to vote wasn't given to women until much later in our country's development, with even the direction of the female vote often being dictated by fathers and husbands right up into the 1960s.

Women were so poorly treated that there were even laws on the books that allowed a man to beat his wife, daughter or female servant with a stick as long as it did not surpass the thickness of a thumb. The waves of immigrant women coming to American soil were often relegated to the lowest paying and/or highest risk jobs, often in situations where they were in debt to their employers and completely at the whim of the employer for every provision of daily living... and at risk for loss of those provisions at the whims of those that could--and often did--accuse them of crimes, immorality and base behaviors without evidence or cause. Indeed, there were women that chose the life of a prostitute, even though it often meant a shorten life, sexually transmitted diseases, and having to share their income with a number of men, including their pimps, officers of the law, health officials and politicians.

Also forgotten is the amount of child abuse and child enslavement under the guise of "apprenticeship" to a craftsman. These forms of child abuse and child enslavement continued into the early 20th century until child labor laws were finally passed to outlaw such practices. Indeed, even outright beating of a child was so common an event that it wasn't even considered a crime until some socially progressive folks brought suit under the laws that prevented cruelty to animals (the first such case was brought in New York).

Even in the days leading up to World War II, most women and children were not living the "life of Riley." During the depression, many women and children were abandoned by the men in their lives. The "dust bowl" created in our farming and ranching states created conditions that literally broke apart families. Widows and orphans were all but abandoned in our society. The condition of poverty affecting families has predominantly been ignored for the larger part of our American history, including being held hostage by the swinging political pendulum of any given period. Immigrants were often left to their own devices as to how they were to survive in our society, which led to the rise of not only social work such as that offered by Jane Addams and Hull House, but also the rise of gangs and organized criminal groups, including the Italian/Sicilian-dominated mafia; the Irish gangs of New York, Chicgo and Boston; the Jewish mobsters that work with, for and against the Italians and Irish; as well as the Chinese tongs branching out among the American "China Towns."

As a former social worker, I have seen how the vast majority of American families live in the United States. The "norms" that these ultra-conservatives broadcast as "family values" has never existed as norms. These family values are, in reality, nothing more than a myth created by those that actually believe they are "normal" and an example of the ideal family. But when we examine these ideals, we see that these ultra-conservative folks often require the women in their lives to dress in a certain manner or face punitive measures. They live in a manner where they are required to manage all the child care, household chores, shopping and some form of part-time work, if not full time.

As was recently illustrated by one such family participating in the so-called "reality show" where wives from two distinctly different families swap the wives of the family ("Wife Swap"), a women from a staunch ultra-conservative Mennonite family was required to do all the housework, all the shopping, all the meal preparation, all the washing and ironing, and all the child care while her husband came home and spent practically no time engaged in anything but giving orders to his wife and children.

Despite the women's movement, we have seen the role of women in our society take on a considerable schizoid nature in our nation. Women that are career-oriented are often pressured to seek a family structure that does not support career opportunities. Women are often faced with restrictions in the workplace because they are the primary child caretakers in our society. We look at women who want to be stay-at-home mothers with a lot of amazement and quite a bit of disdain. And the poorest women in our society are often the most neglected in terms of education, vocation and advocacy.

So when I read this particular article from the New York Times, I was reminded of how these ultra-conservatives--especially the Christian Right--paint a rosy picture of family life and the values that they think everyone and every family MUST adopt to suit their own needs and preferences... all the while ignoring the realities that we as members of families face and endure. Family values is a misnomer and the concept of a universal set of familial values is a huge myth. Each family has its own values and practices. Until such time as we truly embrace supporting families with effective education, effective job policies, fair taxation plans, and social policies that genuinely helping our families manage the problems that we all face, there will never be any such thing as family values... not even those espoused by the Christian Right, ultra-conservatives or the politically (but profoundly) stupid.

What we need is a genuinely connected and sound approach to supporting families that defines our nation by our highest ideals and fundamental first principles, placing people before profits, health before war, love before conflict and compassion before blame. In the mean time, we are left with our media sensationalizing our lives based on the worst of circumstances, our corporations making huge sums of money by taking advantage of our families, and a political process that is as corrupt as it possibly could be because it ignores our families and our principles.

Illegitimate Complaints

PITY poor little Dannielynn, just 5 months old and already the potentially multimillion-dollar prize in a paternity battle waged by three of the unsavory men who partied with her mother, Anna Nicole Smith, in the last years of her troubled and tawdry life. There’s an even creepier fourth potential candidate: Ms. Smith’s half-sister claims that Ms. Smith’s late husband, the nonagenarian billionaire J. Howard Marshall, left behind frozen sperm. And now Ms. Smith’s estranged mother has also rushed forward to claim custody of the baby. Could anything be worse for this little girl than to be at the center of such a media circus or to end up with one of these characters?

Actually, yes. For thousands of years, the future of a child born out of wedlock was of absolutely no interest to anyone, especially if she was an orphan. The only people likely to take her in were people who needed free labor on their farms or required a child “helper” small enough to run under dangerous factory machines piecing together broken threads or picking up dropped objects.

For 500 years, British law, on which American law was modeled, held that a child born to an unwed mother was a “filius nullius” — literally, a child of no one, entitled to support from no one. Little Dannielynn would not have had a right to her mother’s inheritance, much less a legal claim to receive support from the family of either her deceased mother or her father.

Until a little over a century ago, if an unwed mother died, her parents and siblings, not her child, had first claim to her property. If the child’s mother lived, she was often forced to abandon the child to ensure her own survival. For most of history, a woman’s sexual partner or estranged mother would never have fought for the right to raise a little Dannielynn.

Only for the last 100 years have European and American laws protected the right of children like Dannielynn to inherit from their mothers’ estates. It was not until 1968 that the child of an unmarried woman could collect on debts owed to her mother or sue for a mother’s wrongful death. And the right to inherit from an unwed father was not guaranteed until 1977.

When a young unmarried father, Sherman Gordon, was murdered in 1974, leaving no will, his daughter, who lived with him, got nothing. His possessions went instead to his parents and siblings, because Illinois law did not recognize the rights of illegitimate children.

The sordid details surrounding the battle over Dannielynn have led many people to wish that we could revive traditional family values and re-establish marriage as the central institution for organizing sexual relationships and child-rearing. But as usual, the lessons of history are more complex. The fact that Dannielynn has a right to inherit from either of her parents is the result of legal processes that have undermined the role of marriage in determining people’s economic and social rights. Surely this change is a welcome corrective to the injustice of traditional marriage laws and family values that stigmatized “bastards” for life.

It’s not as if the old laws of marriage and the old family values stopped people from engaging in sordid sexual liaisons; they merely swept the casualties under the rug. When the future President Grover Cleveland fathered an illegitimate child with a department store clerk, he arranged to have his son taken from her by force and adopted by another family. When the mother objected, Cleveland had her committed to an insane asylum. And the African-American mother of Strom Thurmond’s illegitimate child, a former maid in his parents’ house, never exposed Thurmond’s racist hypocrisy, but instead made do with whatever gifts he offered.

The Anna Nicole Smith story may be distasteful. But it hardly represents a more depraved morality than the “dignified silence” that surrounded deviations from the family values and marriage customs of the past.

Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families, is the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”