BRAVE NEW FAMILIES
Stories of Domestic Upheaval
in Late Twentieth Century America
Judith Stacey
New York: Basic Books, 1990
328 pp., $22.95
The traditional nuclear family in America is dead, and no one knows for sure what will replace it. In many respects, modernity itself stands as the principal culprit in the demise of the so-called ideal family and of fulfilling community life more generally. The advance of modernity has led, inevitably, to an increase in the freedom of personal choice and its concomitants - the breakdown of universal norms and absolute values, and the expansion of autonomy, individualism, pluralism, and permissiveness. The social control of life in community has gradually disappeared, and privatism has become dominant.
Brave New Families is sociologist Judith Stacey's attempt to deal with this major problem. The author writes as a "post-Marxist" and a chastened feminist, and she limits her investigation to representatives of the working-and middle-class populations of Northern California, specifically to two "postmodern extended families" in the Santa Clara Valley, which lies on the peninsula just south of San Francisco. These contemporary family networks are characterized by marriage, separation, divorce, remarriage, serial monogamy, adultery, homosexuality, cohabitation, abortion, unwed childbearing, single parenthood, coparenthood, blended and shared households - with four generations of each family present nearby. How different such "brave new families" seem to be from the "traditional" nuclear family portrayed in the popular Ozzie and Harriet show of the 1950s, with its intact household unit composed of a male breadwinner, his fulltime homemaker wife, and their dependent children. Such entities are no longer prevalent in the United States.
Patriarchs to postmoderns
Stacey is correct in pointing out that the Ozzie and Harriet-style nuclear family is really a transitional, modern type of household that came to be dominant only after World War II. Family life changed many times throughout history, particularly during periods of social upheaval. The premodern households of white Americans, for instance, were the constitutive elements of colonial society as a whole. Here the integrated economic, social, and political unit subordinated individual to corporate family interests, women and children to the authority of the family's patriarch. The patriarchs whose decisions controlled access to land, property, and craft skills and the timing and makeup of premodern marriages did not consider the emotional needs of individuals but acted to further the economic, religious, and social purposes of larger kin groups.
Death visited colonial homes so frequently that second marriages and blended households composed of stepkin were not uncommon. Conjugal love was a bonus, not a prerequisite of such marriages. Authoritarian parents often broke the will of obstinate children to save their souls, a process that demanded extensive parental involvement in child rearing.
Stacey insists that the premodern family became modern only after World War II. The process had begun among the
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