Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

Title
Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands

Author:
W. Bradford Wilcox

Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Date of Publication:
2004

ISBN:
978-0226897097

Rating:
3/10

Summary:
I caught a preview of Wilcox’s work in Context, a sociology periodical for lay audiences. When I read that short summary I knew that I was going to have to read Wilcox’s book because I knew he spun the data like a Bush Whitehouse press secretary. After having actually read the book all I can say is: Wow! I think Wilcox should look for work at Fox News…

The basic goal of this book is to argue that conservative Protestant men are actually close approximations of the “ideal type” of the “new man” – they spend lots of time with their wives and children, they are engaged parents, they do a lot of “emotion work,” and their kids turn out great. As a conservative Protestant himself, Brad Wilcox is hell-bent on finding exactly this, regardless of the actual statistical evidence.

To accomplish this, Wilcox first “[examines] the family and gender ideologies produced by conservative and mainline Protestant churches in the second half of the twentieth century” (p. 3). He then explores how those ideologies are related to the attitudes of married men with children (who are the only people examined in this book). Finally, he analyzes the effect of religious affiliation and attendance on a variety of measures of “ideal parenting” that reflect three dimensions: parenting, household labor, and marriage.

Wilcox ultimately finds that frequent church attending conservative Protestant men are, as he predicted, great fathers and husbands. At least, so Wilcox says at the end of the book. But, when you read what he has to say and scrutinize his analysis, the result is a completely different picture. In the sincerest way this is actually a compliment to Wilcox for reporting what he actually finds – by doing so he is giving critics all the evidence they need to illustrate that Wilcox is completely and totally wrong.

Review:
One of the better aspects of this book is the theoretical build-up (no sense building a house of cards on a house of cards). Wilcox explains that there are several theoretical arguments one must understand in order to address the issue of conservative protestant parenting. One theoretical position is the “family modernization” perspective which argues that “religion is becoming increasingly marginal as an influence on the culture and practice of family life” (p. 7). This is contrasted with the “gender reaction” perspective which “maintains that orthodox religionists are at war with modernity’s egalitarian and individualistic values and that the family is the primary battleground for this conflict” (p. 8). Wilcox doesn’t agree completely with either of these perspectives. Instead, Wilcox is arguing that conservative Protestants are the embodiment of the new man – they are egalitarian, though not individualistic – and that the influence of religion on the family is not diminishing. To bolster this perspective he draws upon Christian Smith’s “religious subcultures” argument. Smith basically argues that some religious subcultures “thrive on distinction, engagement, tension, conflict, and threat and that the evangelical movement’s vitality is not a product of its protected isolation from, but of its vigorous engagement with pluralistic modernity” (p. 63). In other words, conservative Protestantism is energetic precisely because it is (casting itself as being) under attack by secular society. The result is a pro-family ideology that results in healthy, happy, good fathers.

But what does Wilcox mean by “pro-family”? Or, to use his term, “familism”? “Familism is an ideology that sacralizes the obligations that individuals have toward their family members-children, spouse, and parents-and takes a highly sentimental view of family life” (p. 89). To arrive at a measure of “familism,” Wilcox created an index using seven questions. Some of the questions SEEM relevant to the issue as they measure things like the value of marriage and childbearing and the appropriateness of unhappy couples with children divorcing. Other questions are less relevant, like a measure of the importance of adult children caring for elderly parents. But the serious problem with this approach is that Wilcox is loading the dice: he measures familism in a way that is guaranteed to favor conservative Protestants. Let me give an example to illustrate. Let’s say I want to measure how intelligent my child is, but my child is an autistic savant that can do remarkable mathematical calculations in his head but can’t remember his name or tie his shoes. If I want to show that my child is a genius, I create an “IQ” test that requires people to do enormous mathematical calculations in their heads. I give the test to 100 “normal” kids and, guess what, my kids comes back looking like a genius. Wilcox did the same thing. He created this idea – “familism” – that measures people’s “commitment to family” but it does so using measures that are likely to favor conservative Protestants. A common belief (that is changing, as Wilcox notes) within conservative Protestantism is that divorce is never a good option. If you want to load the dice so conservative Protestants look more pro-family than non conservative Protestants, claim that a good measure of one’s attitude toward families is their resistance to divorce.

Wilcox claims that this pro-familism of conservative Protestants results from the ideology of conservative Protestantism, “The basic logic of conservative Protestant family-related ideology may be characterized, then, as an expressive traditionalism in which efforts to shore up the family have led to an intensive approach to family living for men and women. This leaves open the ironic possibility that in spite of their gender-role traditionalism conservative Protestant men may take an active and expressive approach to family life that makes them, in some ways, more progressive than their nonconservative peers” (p. 73). Wilcox then explicitly claims that conservative Protestantism has positive effects on the family, “In other words, at least when it comes to parenting and marriage, the soft patriarchs found in evangelical Protestantism come closer to approximating the iconic new man than either mainline or unaffiliated men do” (p. 13). This brings us full-circle in a circular argument: a pro-family measure is derived from the ideology of conservative Protestantism which makes conservative Protestantism pro-family. Isn’t that nifty!?!

Of course, Wilcox still has to illustrate that the ideology of conservative Protestantism is pro-family. To do so he reads some of the flagship magazines of mainline and conservative Protestantism and arrives at two “cultural logics”: Golden Rule liberalism and expressive traditionalism. Golden Rule liberalism is the position of mainline Protestants and Wilcox describes it as, “[combining] a progressive emphasis on tolerance of family diversity, egalitarian gender roles, and child autonomy with a familistic emphasis on a Golden Rule ethic of caring, especially in the family” (p. 25). This contrasts with conservative Protestantism’s expressive traditionalism, which “stresses the importance of patriarchal and parental authority, traditional sexual morality, and an ethic of familial duty, but softens these ideals with an expressive interpersonal ethic that suggests personal fulfillment can be found through adherence to traditional social and moral conventions. Golden Rule liberalism is more accommodating of family modernization, while expressive traditionalism is more resistant to the developments associated with family modernization” (p. 25). If you read these descriptions carefully you’ll see exactly what I described above in my discussion of familism – mainline Protestants are more accepting of family diversity (e.g., divorce, second marriages, homosexual marriages, step-kids, etc.) while conservative Protestants emphasize “familial duty.” But Wilcox isn’t done loading the dice; he still needs to teach the dice how to spin.

Having defined an ideology as pro-family if it emphasizes familial duty, Wilcox proceeds to decry the tolerance and acceptance of mainline Protestantism, “Thus, the mainline’s embrace of elements of cultural modernity-tolerance, gender equality, the impulse to inclusion, and the therapeutic ethic-has led it to reject key dimensions of 1950s familism. Its acceptance of unconditional divorce and remarriage and its affirmation of family pluralism contradict the familistic idealization of the nuclear family and lifelong marriage. The mainline positions on sex-related matters have pushed the churches in a liberationist direction that, symbolically at least, stands in tension with the familistic values of sexual restraint and, in the case of abortion, the mother-child bond. The mainline’s commitment to social justice to the exclusion of family matters, its focus on sex-related issues, and its desire to highlight its tolerant acceptance of all families have diminished its capacity to speak clearly to the everyday concerns and moral quandaries that confront all manner of families” (p. 42). Wilcox argues that secular society in general has moved this way as well (see p. 29). According to Wilcox, then, tolerating diversity is anti-family. When you look at it like that, intolerant conservative Protestants suddenly start looking very pro-family. Is your head about ready to explode, too? Hang on, though, Wilcox is just getting started…

Wilcox proceeds to argue that, while tolerance of diverse family forms is bad, one innovation of secular society is good, “The last two decades have witnessed increased public support for a “new fatherhood” ideal, according to which men take an active and expressive role in the lives of their children” (p. 97). But Wilcox claims this “iconic new father” isn’t very common, which flies in the face of the data we are seeing and even Wilcox cites, “…the amount of time fathers devote to child rearing increased 170 percent from twenty-one minutes a day in 1965 to fifty-seven minutes a day in 1998.” But Wilcox doesn’t think that is enough improvement to claim that these “iconic new fathers” actually exist because they aren’t doing as much as mothers. This, of course, is necessary for his argument because if that was sufficient, there would be no reason to argue that conservative Protestant men embody the “new men” he’s talking about. And, ultimately, that is the argument he wants to make, “conservative Protestant family ideology is connected to the warm, expressive style of fatherhood that scholars deem important to positive outcomes for children” (p. 107).

Let me recap, quickly. Tolerance of diverse family forms is bad (because conservative Protestants don’t tolerate them). Being a “new man” is good (hopefully because conservative Protestants score higher here). Everybody got it? Okay, I do too. But now Wilcox throws a wrench into the works, “However, fathers are not encouraged to be warm and expressive all the time. Although in most circumstances the “framing rules” supplied by conservative Protestant ideology guide the emotion work of these parents in the direction of a warm, expressive style, in situations in which the father deems a child’s behavior unwise, immoral, or disobedient, conservative Protestant family experts exhort the father to adopt a traditional approach to discipline largely in keeping with a classical Protestant disciplinary style” (p. 108). In case you don’t see the direction this is going, I’ll give you a hint: Wilcox is setting you up for his finding that the “intolerant new men” of conservative Protestantism are more likely to beat their children and their wives. But, according to Wilcox, that’s a good thing. That is the true embodiment of familism – if you love ‘em, beat ‘em. (The idea of “fostering” obedience in children also has a nice benefit for the money-grubbing pastors of conservative Protestantism – people are less likely to question authority and more likely to continue writing checks to James Dobson and Pat Robertson. Teaching the parents to teach their children to think for themselves is a one-way ticket to honest work, and what pastor wants that? Wilcox even admits this, “Conservative Protestant family experts treat children’s disobedience with particular concern because they view parental authority as analogous to divine sovereignty, and they believe that obedience to parents prepares a child to obey God as an adult” (p. 109).)

With the ideas of conservative Protestantism toward parenting laid out, Wilcox has to make an argument that ideology actually leads to behavior. This argument is always problematic as causal direction can rarely be asserted – people with views similar to those of conservative Protestantism may join conservative denominations while conservative denominations may influence peoples’ views. It’s hard to say which direction this works (it’s probably both). But in order for Wilcox’s argument to work, it has to be ideology to attitudes and behavior, and not vice versa. This leads Wilcox to assert, “Nevertheless, my models indicate that religious factors – especially a conservative Protestant affiliation and theological conservatism – are the most important predictors of familistic attitudes among married men with children” (p. 91). Note there is no discussion of causal direction here. Also, remember what I said earlier about his measure of familism – he is basically using his dependent variable (conservative Protestant views of what it means to be pro-family) to predict his dependent variable (familism). Ironically, I think Wilcox knows this is problematic, as he basically admits it, “given that conservative Protestant institutions are probably the only major institutional proponent of gender traditionalism in the United States and that an active conservative Protestant affiliation is more strongly associated than any other sociodemographic factor with gender traditionalism, we can conclude that conservative Protestantism plays a signal role in fostering gender traditionalism among married men with children” (p. 93). In other words, he knows he is using his dependent variable to predict his dependent variable, but he thinks that is okay.

If we assume it is okay, what does Wilcox actually find concerning the attitudes and behaviors of conservative Protestants relative to mainline Protestants and the unaffiliated? Using survey data from the General Social Survey and the National Survey of Families and Households, Wilcox finds the following:

• “Both conservative and mainline Protestant fathers are more involved in one-on-one activities than unaffiliated fathers;” mainliners are more involved than conservatives (p. 113; the difference is statistically significant, but tiny and practically insignificant; see p. 115)
• “conservative Protestant fathers spend about 2.0 hours and mainline fathers about 1.3 hours more per week in youth-related activities than unaffiliated fathers” (p. 116; again, the effect sizes are tiny and only the conservative Protestant effect is statistically significant; this also includes time spent in church as time spent with children, which basically accounts for the difference)
• “conservative and mainline Protestant married men with children are significantly more likely than their unaffiliated counterparts to praise and hug their children very often” (p. 118; again, significant, but weak effect sizes)
• “conservative Protestant fathers are significantly more likely than unaffiliated fathers to resort to corporal punishment” (p. 120; the differences aren’t huge)
• “there are no statistically significant differences between unaffiliated fathers and conservative Protestant fathers or between unaffiliated fathers and mainline Protestant fathers” in likelihood of yelling at children (p. 122, though Wilcox is quick to point out that conservative Protestant fathers “are less likely to yell at their children than mainline Protestant fathers” even though it is not a significant difference)
• “The data indicate that conservative Protestant, but not mainline Protestant, fathers are 65 percent more likely than unaffiliated fathers to report that their children have a regular bedtime” (p. 126; Wilcox interprets this as good parenting, but it is, in fact, authoritarian, which translates into bad parenting when you look at outcomes)
• “conservative Protestants are increasingly likely to express egalitarian attitudes about the public, economic and political roles of women, as well as greater openness to mothers working outside the home” (p. 143; notice the framing, they are “increasingly likely,” which is to say this is not a strong point of conservative Protestants – they score lower on this than any other group)
• “conservative Protestant married men with children spend almost one and a half hours per week less on household labor than their unaffiliated peers” (p. 146) and “Husbands with the highest familism scores spend five hours less each week on household labor than husbands with the lowest familism scores” (p. 147; differences are significant)
  “the wives of both conservative and mainline Protestant married men with children are slightly more likely to report that their household labor is appreciated, compared to wives of unaffiliated family men” (p. 151; the effects are not statistically significant)
• “4.8 percent of conservative Protestant married men with children committed domestic violence in the year prior to NSFH2, compared to 4.3 percent of mainline Protestant married men with children and 3.2 percent of unaffiliated married men with children. The differences between the results for these groups, however, are not statistically significant. Once religious affiliation is broken out by church attendance, however, the differences between religious groups become statistically significant. Nominal conservative Protestant husbands have a domestic violence rate of 7.2 percent and are significantly more abusive than unaffiliated husbands” (p. 181)
• “Religious affiliation is not related to the amount of quality time husbands spend with their wives; neither does church attendance make a difference on this measure. I find no evidence that active mainline or conservative Protestant men are more involved in this way than their nominal and unaffiliated peers” (p. 183)

So, that’s actually what Wilcox finds. Now here is how he interprets his findings:

• on yelling, “consistent with the literature review, we have modest evidence that conservative Protestantism encourages fathers to approach disciplinary situations in a spirit of self-control that leads them to reject yelling as an appropriate parental behavior” (p. 122).
• on corporal punishment, “These positive outcomes may be mitigated for conservative Protestant children, who are more likely to experience corporal punishment, which research on child well-being links to social and psychological problems. On the other hand, a number of studies indicate that the negative outcomes associated with corporal punishment do not obtain when parents balance spanking with higher levels of parental support, and my findings show that conservative Protestant children do experience higher levels of involvement and positive affect from their fathers” (p. 130; yes, he just dismissed corporal punishment)
• on conservative Protestant men not doing as much housework, “Although these findings do not provide direct evidence about husbands’ displays of gratitude for their wives’ household labor, they do provide strong prima facie evidence in favor of the theory that husbands who value family life are responding to gender asymmetries in their households by displaying heightened levels of gratitude compared to other husbands. There are two alternative explanations for the results documented here. First, it could be that men who are more familistic are generally married to women who are also more familistic and who, as a consequence, have lower expectations of their husbands’ gratitude either because they derive intrinsic pleasure from household labor or because they seek to convince themselves that their husbands appreciate their household labor in order to avoid facing the fact that their husbands are not shouldering a substantial share of the housework” (p. 153; this sounds an awful lot like Stockholm syndrome to me)
• also on not doing much housework, “In sum, the results suggest that churchgoing, theologically conservative, and especially familistic married men with children-particularly those who share faith and a commitment to familism with their wives-are making a strong effort to reciprocate their wives’ “gift” of extra household work with the “gift” of displays of gratitude” (p. 154; saying “thanks” while sitting on your ass isn’t saying thanks at all)
• on traditional gender-role attitudes, “Conservative Protestant institutions also foster inequality indirectly through their support for gender-role traditionalism, which is consistently and powerfully associated with gendered asymmetries in the division of household labor. Thus, we have evidence that conservative Protestantism plays a MODEST role in fostering gender inequality at the level of practice” (p. 155; emphasis mine)

These are just a few of the interpretations (read: spin) Wilcox provides. A few are so astonishing they deserve special attention. The one that really blew my mind was this one, “None of the results reported in this chapter [the chapter in which he found conservative Protestants are more likely to beat their wives] indicate that religion and gender-role traditionalism lead to lower levels of positive emotion work on the part of married men with children or to higher levels of domestic violence” (p. 187). When I read this I seriously couldn’t believe it. Five pages earlier he said conservative Protestant men were more likely to beat their wives, but now he is denying it. He is calling black, white. Astonishing.

I also really liked this gem, “These results suggest that the future of marital quality in the United States depends in part on the extent to which both spouses embrace a familist outlook that makes the husband more attentive to the emotional needs of his wife and the wife less likely to expect a great deal of emotion work from her husband” (p. 189). Basically what Wilcox is saying is: (1) everyone should be a conservative Protestant; (2) men should let their wives talk while they sit on their asses; and (3) women should not expect men to actually be listening. You could call this “Wilcox’s three-step approach to marital happiness” (also known as the “go get me a beer while I sit on the couch and watch Pat Robertson on TV and pretend to be listening to you” approach to marital happiness).

Wilcox isn’t quite done pretending black is white, though. He actually makes a remarkable claim that I’d love to verify with his wife, “Women who are married to active conservative Protestant men probably enjoy high levels of marital quality and are less likely to experience a marital breakup, given the comparatively high levels of appreciation, affection, and understanding, and the low levels of domestic violence, they report” (p. 198). This seems absurd. But then you have to recognize the comparison group he is using, “By contrast, women who are married to nominal conservative Protestant men are likely to experience low levels of marital quality and high rates of marital breakup, given the comparatively low levels of appreciation, affection, and understanding, and the high levels of domestic violence, they report” (p. 198). This is one of my favorite approaches to altering reality. Basically Wilcox is saying, “You can’t hold frequently attending conservative Protestants responsible for the actions of the infrequently attending conservative Protestants. Those two groups of people are completely different.” If only it were so easy and you really could pick and choose which groups you want to be representative of you. Wilcox is trying to distance the “better” from the “terrible” to salvage the “better than terrible” group.

If I alter just a couple words in this concluding paragraph, I think Wilcox has provided an accurate summary of his findings, “Overall, then, these findings paint a striking picture. Churchgoing conservative Protestant family men are soft patriarchs. Contrary to [In line with] the assertions of feminists, many family scholars, and public critics, these men cannot be fairly described as “abusive” and “authoritarian” family men wedded to “stereotypical forms of masculinity.”" (p. 199). Well put, Mr. Wilcox!

Charon, Joel M., and Lee Vigilant. 2008. The Meaning of Sociology: A Reader. 9th ed. Prentice Hall.

Rating:
6

Review:
comprehensive reader

I used this as a supplement to the John J. Macionis 9th edition Introduction to Sociology text. To be completely honest I’m not sure that given similar circumstances I would use them both again. The reason being that I taught a very condensed course (17 days of class, 13 actual lectures/discussion). Because the class was so condensed I didn’t feel that I could assign the students any more reading than a chapter from the Macionis text and a reading from this reader everyday. Given a more drawn out course, say the traditional 10-week quarter, I can see where this reader would be more useful because you could assign multiple readings to each corresponding chapter in the introductory text and actually cover more than 13 of the 65 readings in the book. Because I only covered about 13 of them I don’t think I’ll use this text in this format again (too expensive for 13 readings), opting instead to create a small packet of 10 articles or something along those lines.

As for the reader itself, I would say that about half of the included readings were superb and the other half ranged between mediocre and pretty poor. For instance, most of the readings by Peter Berger (not Berger and Luckmann) were very clear, articulate, and downright humorous for a sociologist to read; I’m not sure my class found them as humorous, but they did seem to enjoy them.

I also found in discussing the articles with my class that the articles that were most well-received, despite some students not agreeing with the methods or conclusions of the articles, were the articles that applied sociological understanding to real-world problems, for example the reading ‘Fraternities and Rape on Campus’ by Martin and Hummer resulted in a very lively and heated discussion.

I can understand that Charon is trying to incorporate some more traditional readings in the reader in order to give the students a sense of what some classical sociological writing is like and also to give them an opportunity to read classical sociology. It seems like a noble goal, but I’m not sure how effective it is. Most of the excerpts he included were typically so short that they didn’t really cover enough to get a good understanding of what the author was trying to get at (the exception being ‘Human Nature’ by Cooley). For example, the excerpt by Berger and Luckmann on socialization was just a snippet from their wordy but fascinating treatise ‘The Social Construction of Reality’ and by no means gave an accurate or comprehensive understanding of what it was Berger and Luckmann were getting at. Of course, my introduction to that text was actually an entire course focused on reading just that one book, so I’m kind of surprised that Charon would think a snippet would actually be useful to undergraduate students.

Overall I think the reader is designed to appeal to a broad array of sociology instructors by offering a little bit of everything (theory, application, critical sociology, etc.) but in so doing it becomes the task of the instructor to wade through the articles to find the ones that work for him/her. I’m not sure there is another way to do it when trying to appeal to a large and varied group of instructors, so it can’t really be honed in that sense. Nevertheless, the reader does contain a number of classical works (e.g. ‘The Saints and the Roughnecks’ among others) that are both engaging and interesting to undergraduate students and work well as supplements to an introductory text.

Ritchey, Ferris Joseph. 2008. The Statistical Imagination: Elementary Statistics for the Social Sciences. 2nd ed. Boston: McGraw Hill.

Rating:
10

Summary:
This is an introductory statistics textbook for sociology students. Perhaps uniquely, rather than begin straightaway with statistical calculations, this text begins with the theory underlying statistical analysis. In fact, a full third of the text is made up of statistical theory and basic explanations of statistical concepts.

The statistical calculations covered in the text range from basic t-tests to ordinary least squares regression (single IV variable). Each statistical test includes lengthy explanations along with an example calculation. In addition to the explanations, the book has questions and exercises at the end of each chapter as it is, of course, an introductory textbook for college students.

Review:
This is by far the clearest explanation of statistical theory (probability testing) that I have read. I would highly recommend it for basic statistical courses. It presents the tests and theory well enough that this could even work for an introductory statistical text for high school students.

There are two minor problems with the text. First, I wish it covered multiple regression in addition to single independent variable regression as the explanations in this text are very clear and I can only assume that it would help clarify the topic for those who must perform these tests (which are becoming increasingly common). Second, it is often the case that the author begins a chapter with one example then switches to another example for the second half of the chapter. While I can understand the utility in such an approach (it provides multiple examples for a single type of statistical analysis), it occasionally becomes confusing. Other than these two remarkably minor problems, the text is superb.

Two features of this book really stand out. First, the book specifically lays out when you should use a particular test. This element of the book is worth the price alone. The second element that stands out is the tone the author takes; a tone that has two elements: First, he is funny and tries his best to integrate wit and humor into a statistical text (like admitting to having been struck by lightning; p. 269). The second tone is a positive view of scientific skepticism that pervades the entire text. The author clearly lays out the value of skeptical thinking (see p. 16).

Overall, I highly recommend this text for introductory statistics courses. It is easy to understand yet does not simplify the concepts and analysis. Perhaps there are other introductory texts that do as good of a job, but I have yet to see one that comes close.

Author:
Christopher Hitchens

Publisher:
Twelve Books

Date of Publication:
2007

ISBN:
978-0446579803

Rating:
8

Summary:
I listened to this book over this past summer but haven’t had a chance to write a review of it until now. I picked it up, of course, because I am an atheist and because it was getting a lot of press.

Hitchens starts out by detailing his personal experience with religion – he was raised religious but was a skeptic early on (which is actually common for a lot of atheists; see Altemeyer and Hunsberger’s 2006 book). His skepticism led him to realize there are a lot of inconsistencies in religious dogma. By his teens he was basically a non-believer.

After describing his own experience, Hitchens jumps into his project with gusto. The first chapter explains exactly what it means to be an atheist (i.e., someone who lacks a belief in a god; every person reading this is an atheist toward one god or another, e.g., Thor). This chapter is extremely well-written and, as an atheist, I found it to be an accurate portrayal of atheism as I understand it. Unfortunately, this may be one of the strongest chapters in the book.

In the second chapter Hitchens talks about religion-inspired violence around the world. While an old argument, I have to give Hitchens credit for a new approach. Rather than point out the obvious examples of religion-inspired violence (e.g., 9/11, the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack, etc.), he frames this issue in a really intriguing way. He was asked in an interview if he would be comfortable passing a group of religious people coming out of services. His answer, for all religious groups, “No.” Why? Because, as he argues (and there is some evidence to support this; see Mark Juergensmeyer’s 2003 book on religion-inspired terrorism), religion can lead to fanaticism, fundamentalism, and black and white thinking. He has actually been in this situation before and felt uncomfortable. Hitchens, accurately, argues that he does not know of any fanatical secularists who would blow themselves up for their cause. He also makes it clear that this has nothing to do with racial or ethnic minorities, as he has been in a number of situations where he was the racial/ethnic minority and he felt comfortable. He makes a good point in this chapter about religious fanaticism, but I didn’t come away from this chapter feeling like he had won the argument decisively.

The third chapter is a bit odd as it doesn’t really attack religion so much as present one of Hitchens’s pet theories. Hitchens raises the argument that I have heard many times to explain Jewish dietary restrictions surrounding pork: pork, unless cooked very well, is a relatively dangerous meat to eat as it has a high probability of containing trichinosis. Thus, the argument goes, the ban on pork was instituted in Jewish law because it made biological/evolutionary sense to avoid dangerous meats. Hitchens, compellingly I believe, argues that this explanation doesn’t make a lot of sense considering so many other cultural groups ate pork and were just as successful (and many more successful) than Judaism (e.g., Romans). Hitchens argues, instead, that the ban may have resulted from the Jewish recognition that pigs are actually very similar to humans (they aren’t primates, but they are like humans in a lot of other ways; see basically any episode of Mythbusters that involves projectiles). Hitchens proposes that the similarity between humans and pigs led to pigs becoming sacred in a way that is similar to the sacredness of the bread and wine of Christian sacraments – the Christian sacrament is a symbolic gesture of eating one’s god. Eating a pig, Hitchens argues, was like eating a human, which could only be done under special circumstances and when accompanied with substantial ritual. It’s an intriguing argument, I’ll give him that. But I really didn’t see the relevance to religion or atheism. It kept my attention, but that may just be because, as a sociologist, I’m always looking to contextualize behavior.

In chapter four Hitchens returns to his attacks on religion. In this chapter he attacks religion for intervening in health matters. I forget all of the details of his argument (as I’m writing this six months after having read it), but the basic gist was that religious beliefs like those of Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses can interfere with modern medical care and ultimately result in serious harm. If adults want to subject themselves to these situations, I don’t think many people really care. But when adults force their ridiculous beliefs on children, seriously harming or killing them in the process, I believe most people do care. I often raise this issue in my sociology classes when talking about the “inviolate rights” of parents to raise their children how they want – should religious parents be allowed to refuse medical treatments that would save the lives of their children? People are very supportive of parents’ rights and the freedom of religion until faced with this issue… I don’t have an answer, but it’s fun to think about.

Chapter four takes a slightly different approach. Rather than attack religion, Hitchens discusses evolution. He gives a very simplified version of evolution, but his version is clear and accurate (at least, from my perspective as a moderately well-educated non-biologist). The point, of course, is that evolution is a key scientific finding that makes it very easy to dismiss god (I’ve long held that many deists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries would have been atheists if it were not for the issue of creation). Hitchens makes a similar connection between evolution and religion, arguing that it undermines religious belief. There are a lot of people who readily accept that evolution is an accurate theory for understanding speciation but who also believe in a supernatural entity. Believing in evolution doesn’t mean you can’t still believe in a supernatural being (or beings), but it does mean you have to change your understanding of the characteristics of that being – no longer is that being THE CREATOR but rather THE GUIDER, which is a neutered version of traditional and orthodox understandings of god. In short, Hitchens details how just how plausible and attractive atheism becomes in light of evolution and other scientific advances.

Chapters seven and eight continue the attacks on religion, dissecting the Bible and illustrating just how idiotic it really is. Hitchens doesn’t break much new ground here; Thomas Paine tore the Bible to shreds at the end of the 18th century. That said, Hitchens’s arguments are, again, clear and very compelling. I would be interested to hear how a non-dogmatic believer in the Bible responds to these two chapters.

The next chapter (nine, I believe), moves from the Bible to the Quran and basically illustrates that it is not a step up in terms of literary quality or factuality. I really liked this chapter because it tackles an issue that isn’t often raised in Western culture as acceptance of the Quran is not nearly as pervasive as acceptance of the Bible. Hitchens goes into pretty good detail about the history of the Quran and illustrates that it is just as poorly compiled as the Bible (the central characters didn’t write these books – Moses didn’t write the Pentatuech, Jesus didn’t write the Gospels, and Mohammad didn’t write the Quran). Hitchens also points out that the Quran plagiarizes a lot from the Bible and other Arabic writings (which didn’t come as a big shock to me having read a lot of the Quran and having discovered the same is true of the Book of Mormon, which was my primary scriptural resource for the first 25 years of my life). Hitchens also attacks the claimed miracles of Islam, illustrating that they are just as much hot air as the miracles of Christianity.

The discussion of miracles leads Hitchens into his next chapter where he discusses his role in the beatification of Mother Teresa. He was actually brought in by the Catholic Church to play the role of skeptic; he had previously written extensively about how terrible a person Mother Teresa really was (for those who are unfamiliar with this argument, I suggest you read another of Hitchens’s books “The Missionary Position” as it details that she was actually more of a sadist, encouraging suffering and not relieving it). Hitchens easily illustrated that the miracles attributed to her after her death were bunk, but of course the beatification council didn’t listen to reason (not a strong point of religions) and beatified her anyway.

The next chapter roams about in discussing Hitchens’s understanding of the origins of religion (what I call misattributions or the false belief that something unexplainable is the work of supernatural powers). In this discussion he hits on things as far ranging as Polynesian cargo cults (which are remarkable to study), the experience of Marjoe Gortner, a child evangelist who was basically pimped by his parents to make money by fleecing the religious (his 1972 Academy Award winning documentary is a must see), and the LDS religion (which I’ll return to below).

The last third of the book really started to lose my attention. It’s not that it is terribly written, it’s just that Hitchens tries to develop a relatively untenable argument that I didn’t find all that compelling. A classic criticism of atheism, one recently echoed by bigoted and self-interested Pope Benedict XVI, is that it has lead to its own atrocities (e.g., Russian gulags, Chinese torture and imprisonment, etc.). Personally, I don’t think that is the fault of atheism any more than Catholics believe the Holocaust is the fault of Catholicism; the people responsible for these atrocities may have been atheists (i.e., Stalin, Mao, etc.) or may have been Catholics (i.e., Hitler), but I don’t think their religious or irreligious beliefs had anything to do with their actions. Hitler may have used Catholicism to justify his actions, but I don’t believe Catholicism inspired his bigotry toward Jews. And I don’t think Stalin or Mao ever said that the lack of belief in god justified their atrocities. In both cases it was the appeal of power that motivated these individuals and their followers to commit atrocities. I don’t think you can put that on the respective religious/irreligious belief systems.

Now, that’s not to say that religions haven’t been responsible for some atrocities (e.g., the Inquisition and the Crusades are easy examples), but even those atrocities were probably motivated, if not primarily, at least in part, by ulterior motives – power and resources. All the arguments surrounding atrocities and religion really illustrate is that religion is instrumental – it is, as Machiavelli and Marx pointed out hundreds of years ago, a useful tool for those who want power.

So, what is Hitchens’s argument here? Hitchens, wrong-headedly I believe, tries to argue that most communist countries are personality cults (i.e., they worship their dictators). As a result, they are really religions and not atheistic. While there is certainly some truth to the argument that they are personality cults (just look at the pictures of Mao everywhere in China, Stalin and Lenin in the Soviet Union pre-1989, and Castro in Cuba), personality cults aren’t religions. Regardless, this is a very tortured argument. As I pointed out above, all this illustrates is that you can manipulate people using the fundamental elements of religion (i.e., devotion to a higher cause) for your own ends.

Hitchens basically tries the “atheism leads to immorality and violence” criticism by turning it back on religion. Yeah, I can kind of see it, but in the end I don’t think either side is going to win this argument because there isn’t anything to win on this front – both need to admit that elements of religion are regularly used to manipulate followers and empower leaders. If that is an argument against religion, so be it. But I see it more as an argument against blind devotion and willful ignorance.

That basically wraps up what the book covers…

Review:
But there are a few more things I want to mention. First, Hitchens is a great writer. I don’t think anyone can really argue that. His writing is generally very clear and very engaging. And he’s witty. Two witticisms stuck out. Hitchens couldn’t help but mention the Catholic pedophilia scandal, but with a Hitchensonian twist: he calls it “No child’s behind left.” (Yeah, we shouldn’t make fun of it, but it is kind of funny.). Hitchens also skewers Mormonism, which I’m not going to argue with. He does a great job illustrating how preposterous Joseph Smith’s claims are. In the process he makes a point that can only be considered a witticism. Mark Twain called the Book of Mormon “chloroform in print” (chloroform, for those who don’t know, is a chemical that will put you to sleep). Hitchens actually says that Twain wasn’t as witty as people give him credit for – the name “Ether” is actually in the book (it’s the name of one of the alleged contributors). I hate to admit it, but I think Hitchens may have one-upped Twain.

Hitchens is also insightful. He made a few points that I had not heard others make before. For instance, Hitchens says at one point, “Who but a slave thanks his master for telling him what to do without consulting him?” If you think about that for a second, the idea is intriguing. Would you thank someone for telling you what to do without consulting you? Or would you take affront? Hitchens argues that religious people regularly shower their god/s/esses with praise for telling them what to do without consulting them. Basically, they are exhibiting a slavery mindset, which may not be a disorder in the DSM, but probably should be. I have to point out there are two ways of interpreting this, one of which is even more intriguing. The first interpretation is more in line with what Hitchens was saying as religious people often are subjected to the will of others who they believe receive revelations on their behalf (e.g., Catholics, Mormons, and even other less hierarchically structured religions that have pastors who make pronouncements a la Pat Robertson). It is really in this sense that people accept “divine” edicts without having been consulted and do so gratefully. As Bob Altemeyer has argued for years now, this is not healthy (he calls it right-wing authoritarianism and has shown that it is associated with bigotry, dogmaticism, fanaticism, and all sorts of problematic behaviors and beliefs). The second interpretation is more intriguing to me: When it comes to personal “revelation” – when an individual believes he/she is receiving direct revelation from god – their god is, in fact, consulting with them. In a very Durkheimian way, people in that situation are their own god – they are holding a conversation but they are the two participants. I think you can generally see this in personal “revelation” as people generally tend to get the message from their god that they should do what they wanted to before consulting with their god. So, only in the dictatorial sense are people slaves to their gods and religious devotion; in the personal revelation sense, people are slaves to themselves… Trippy, huh?

So, what’s my recommendation? I highly recommend this book, but with a caveat – you don’t have to read the last third. The first two-thirds are insightful, witty, well-written, and compelling and well worth reading. The last third, well, do with it what you will.

(Note: I listened to this book on my iPod.)

Author:
Stephanie Coontz

Publisher:
Basic Books

Date of Publication:
1992

ISBN:
0465090974

Rating:
10

Summary:
I picked this book up both because it looked very intriguing and because I was working on a project on changes in gender and sex roles in the U.S. since the 1950s. What a find! This book looks, in depth, at many of the myths surrounding changes in the families since the 1950s. If ever there was a sociological book designed to debunk widely held beliefs and myths about a social phenomenon, this book is it. It quite literally takes myth after myth and destroys them. Some of the myths covered in the book include:

• Myth: Women and children in “traditional” two-parent families do not and did not experience poverty.
  Au contraire! From page 4, “Budget studies and medical records reveal that women and children in poor families of the past were far more likely to go without needed nutrients than were male heads of families. Poverty has always been feminized…”
• Myth: Divorced men are less likely to support their children today than they used to be.
  Au contraire! From page 4, “Modern statistics on child-support evasion are appalling, but prior to the 1920s, a divorced father did not even have a legal child-support obligation to evade. Until that time, children were considered assets of the family head, and his duty to support them ended if he was not in the home to receive the wages they could earn.”
• Myth: The disintegration of the modern family has resulted in an increase in child abuse.
  Au contraire! From page 4, “As for child abuse, it has far too long and brutal a history to be blamed on recent family innovations.”
• Myth: Children, today, just need to be put to work to stop them from engaging in delinquent behavior.
  Au contraire! From page 5, “While overpermissiveness may create problems among some modern youth, overwork was responsible for the prevalence of delinquency and runaways in the late nineteenth century. Today’s high school dropout rates are shocking, but as late as the 1940s, less than half the youths entering high school managed to finish, a figure much smaller than today’s.”
• Myth: The use and abuse of alcohol and drugs is more widespread today than it ever has been.
  Au contraire! From page 5, “Alcohol and drug abuse, similarly, were widespread well before modern rearrangements of gender roles and family life. In the 1820s, per capita consumption of alcohol was almost three times higher than it is today, and there was a major epidemic of opium and cocaine addiction in the late nineteenth century. On a per capita basis, narcotic abuse was certainly as bad and probably worse then as it is today. Many middle-class women were addicted to patent medicines that contained powerful drugs; pharmacists routinely dispatched young messenger boys to people’s homes with vials of morphine.”
• Myth: The nuclear family protects people from poverty and social disruption.
  Au contraire! From pages 5 and 6, “Although there are many things to draw on in our past, there is no one family form that has ever protected people from poverty or social disruption, and no traditional arrangement that provides a workable model for how we might organize family relations in the modern world.”
• Myth: There was a golden age of the family.
  Au contraire! From page 9, “Like most visions of a “golden age,” the “traditional family” my students describe evaporates on closer examination. It is an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never co-existed in the same time and place. The notion that traditional families fostered intense intimacy between husbands and wives while creating mothers who were totally available to their children, for example, is an idea that combines some characteristics of the white, middle-class family in the mid-nineteenth century and some of a rival family ideal first articulated in the 1920s. The first family revolved emotionally around the mother-child axis, leaving the husband-wife relationship stilted and formal. The second focused on an eroticized couple relationship, demanding that mothers curb emotional “overinvestment” in their children. The hybrid idea that a woman can be fully absorbed with her youngsters while simultaneously maintaining passionate sexual excitement with her husband was a 1950s invention that drove thousands of women to therapists, tranquilizers, or alcohol when they actually tried to live up to it.”
• Myth: Authoritarian, extended families result in better outcomes for children.
  Au contraire! This kind of depends on your notion of what “better outcomes” is, but here’s a quote from page 9 that addresses this myth, “Similarly, an extended family in which all members work together under the top-down authority of the household elder operates very differently from a nuclear family in which husband and wife are envisioned as friends who patiently devise ways to let the children learn by trial and error. Children who worked in family enterprises seldom had time for the extracurricular activities that Wally and the Beaver recounted to their parents over the dinner table; often, they did not even go to school full-time. Mothers who did home production generally relegated child care to older children or servants; they did not suspend work to savor a baby’s first steps or discuss with their husband how to facilitate a grade-schooler’s “self-esteem.” Such families emphasized formality, obedience to authority, and “the way it’s always been” in their childrearing.”
• Myth: Families in the past were extremely independent and autonomous.
  Au contraire! Families of all stripes have benefited from various and sundry government handouts, from homesteaders to farmers to railroad tycoons. Here’s one example of a particularly hypocritical Republican Senator, Phil Gramm, from page 69, “Sen. Phil Gramm, for example, co-author of the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings balanced budget amendment, is well known for his opposition to government handouts. However, his personal history is quite different from his political rhetoric. Born in Georgia in 1942, to a father who was living on a federal veterans disability pension, Gramm attended a publicly funded university on a grant paid for by the federal War Orphans Act. His graduate work was financed by a National Defense Education Act fellowship, and his first job was at Texas A&M University, a federal land-grant institution. Yet when Gramm finally struck out on his own, the first thing he did was set up a consulting business where he could be, in his own words, “an advocate of fiscal responsibility and free enterprise.” From there he moved on to Congress, where he has consistently attempted to slash federal assistance programs for low-income people.”
• Myth: Women did not work outside the home prior to the 1960s and 1970s.
  Au contraire! From pages 155 and 156, “The first point to make about the growing participation of women in the work force during the twentieth century is that their nineteenth-century separation from productive work was itself a new-and, it turns out, transitory-state of affairs. The factory system established a more rigid division of labor and location than had previously existed between household production and production for the market. Middle-class families adapted to this division by putting men on the market side of the line and women and children on the household one, while working-class families assigned only married women to the household side, sending men, unmarried women, and youngsters out of the household into paid work. The result was a decline in the number of women, especially married ones, who produced goods and services for circulation beyond the household… By 1870, women comprised only 16 percent of the labor force, and as late as 1900 a mere 5 percent to 9 percent of married women worked for wages. These figures underestimate the real contributions wives made to household income: Much paid work, such as taking in boarders or selling homemade items, was unreported; census calculations of the labor force did not then count, as they now do, persons who worked fifteen hours or more a week as unpaid laborers in a family business… every decade after 1880 saw an increase in women’s representation in the labor force…”
• Myth: Parents should bear the sole responsibility for raising their children.
  Au contraire! From page 210 and pages 287 and 288, “I will argue later that the rest of American culture should adopt standards of childrearing that do not confine responsibility to parents, and I will show that many modern discussions of maternal employment, day care, divorce, and single parenthood are distorted by the myth that parents can or should be solely responsible for how their children grow…” “…the historical evidence does suggest that families have been most successful wherever they have built meaningful, solid networks and commitments beyond their own boundaries. We may discover that the best thing we will ever do for our own families, however we define them, is to get involved in community or political action to help others.”
• Myth: The consumer expansion of the 1950s trickled down to all families.
  Au contraire! From pages 29 and 30, “A full 25 percent of Americans, forty to fifty million people, were poor in the mid-1950s, and in the absence of food stamps and housing programs, this poverty was searing. Even at the end of the 1950s, a third of American children were poor. Sixty percent of Americans over sixty-five had incomes below $1,000 in 1958, considerably below the $3,000 to $10,000 level considered to represent middle-class status. A majority of elders also lacked medical insurance. Only half the population had savings in 1959; one-quarter of the population had no liquid assets at all. Even when we consider only native-born, white families, one-third could not get by on the income of the household head.”
• Myth: Women turned willfully and happily to housewifery in the 1950s.
  Au contraire! From pages 31 and 32, “Women’s retreat to housewifery, for example, was in many cases not freely chosen. During the war, thousands of women had entered new jobs, gained new skills, joined unions, and fought against job discrimination. Although 95 percent of the new women employees had expected when they were first hired to quit work at the end of the war, by 1945 almost an equally overwhelming majority did not want to give up their independence, responsibility, and income, and expressed the desire to continue working. After the war, however… management went to extraordinary lengths to purge women workers from the auto plants, as well as from other high-paying and nontraditional jobs. As it turned out, in most cases women were not permanently expelled from the labor force but were merely downgraded to lower-paid, “female” jobs. Even at the end of the purge, there were more women working than before the war, and by 1952 there were two million more wives at work than at the peak of wartime production. The jobs available to these women, however, lacked the pay and the challenges that had made wartime work so satisfying, encouraging women to define themselves in terms of home and family even when they were working.”
• Myth: Women loved being housewives in the 1950s.
  Au contraire! From page 35, “Beneath the polished facades of many “ideal” families, suburban as well as urban, was violence, terror, or simply grinding misery that only occasionally came to light. Although Colorado researchers found 302 battered-child cases, including 33 deaths, in their state during one year alone, the major journal of American family sociology did not carry a single article on family violence between 1939 and 1969. Wife battering was not even considered a “real” crime by most people. Psychiatrists in the 1950s, following Helene Deutsch, “regarded the battered woman as a masochist who provoked her husband into beating her. Historian Elizabeth Pleck describes how one Family Service Association translated this psychological approach into patient counseling during the 1950s. Mrs. K came to the Association because her husband was an alcoholic who repeatedly abused her, both physically and sexually. The agency felt, however, that it was simplistic to blame the couple’s problems on his drinking. When counselors learned that Mrs. K refused her husband’s demands for sex after he came home from working the night shift, they decided that they had found a deeper difficulty: Mrs. K needed therapy to “bring out some of her anxiety about sex activities.”"
• Myth: Giving teenage girls with children welfare checks acts like a reward and encourages the behavior.
  Au contraire! From pages 82 and 83, “The image of teenage girls having babies to receive welfare checks is an emotion-laden but fraudulent cliche. If the availability of welfare benefits causes teen pregnancy, why is it that other industrial countries, with far more generous support policies for women and children, have far lower rates of teen pregnancy? Welfare benefits do seem to increase the likelihood of unmarried teen mothers moving away from their parents’ households, hence increasing the visibility of these mothers, but they bear little or no relation to actual birth rates for unmarried women. Harvard economists David Ellwood and Mary Jo Bane compared unmarried women who would be eligible for welfare if they had an illegitimate child with unmarried women who would not be eligible: Even by confining their analysis to states that gave the most generous welfare benefits to single mothers, they found no difference in the rates of illegitimacy between the groups. Mississippi, with the lowest welfare and food stamp benefits for AFDC mothers in the entire country (only 46 percent of the federal poverty guidelines), has the second-highest percentage of out-of-wedlock births in the country; states with higher AFDC benefits than the national average tend to have lower rates of illegitimacy than the national average. Sociologist Mark Rank finds that “welfare recipients have a relatively low fertility rate” and that the longer a woman remains on welfare, whatever her age, the less likely she is to keep having babies. Mothers on AFDC have only one-fourth the number of births while they are on welfare as do mothers who are not on welfare.”
• Myth: Mother’s Day originated as a holiday to celebrate mothering.
  Au contraire! From page 152, “The fact is that Mother’s Day originated to celebrate the organized activities of women outside the home. It became trivialized and commercialized only after it became confined to “special” nuclear family relations. The people who inspired Mother’s Day had quite a different idea about what made mothers special. They believed that motherhood was a political force. They wished to celebrate mothers’ social roles as community organizers, honoring women who acted on behalf of the entire future generation rather than simply putting their own children first.”
• Myth: The media played a large role in the “decay” of the nuclear family.
  Au contraire! (Well, sort of…) From pages 174 and 175, “But the world view imparted by such television shows did not derive from the nontraditional or antifamily values of liberal writers and producers, as conservatives claim. Advertising departments in the mass media refer to the content of their various productions as the “wrapper” for the real product, the ads themselves. Once we understand that the primary driving force behind most editorial or programming decisions is what attracts advertisers, we can see why the eclipse of traditional family themes in the media during the 1970s and 1980s was pioneered by the same forces that first marketed such themes in the 1950s. The 1950s family, supposedly the peak of tradition, was in many ways’ simply the “wrapper” for an extension of commodity production to new areas of life, an extension that paved the way for the commercialization of love and sex so often blamed on the 1960s. The “wholesome” television serials that some people confuse in memory with actual 1950s life were early attempts to harness mass entertainment to sales of goods. With only three to five channels for viewers to choose from, a show that hoped to be competitive had to attract approximately 30 percent of all viewers. Consequently, advertisers favored shows that presented “universal themes” embodied in homogenized families without serious divisions of interest by age, gender, income, or ethnic group. The hope was that everyone could identify with these families and hence with the mass-produced appliances that were always shown in conjunction with the mass-produced sentiments: Ozzie and Harriet, for example, had some of their most heartwarming talks in front of the Hotpoint kitchen appliances that the show was supposed to help sell. Once the market for such big-ticket family items began to slow, the next growth area had to be the individual: a Hotpoint range for the family, but “A Sony of My Owny.” Radio pioneered “micromarketing,” but television soon got into the act, partitioning the mythical family of the 1950s into as many different varieties and subsets as possible. The modern media has not become antifamily, it has simply become more sophisticated in targeting distinct audience segments-preteens, yuppies, buppies, swinging singles, alienated youth, seniors, and working parents-and wooing their dollars by emphasizing the differences that require separate images and their own products.”

This is just a sampling of the many myths Professor Coontz addresses in the book. Professor Coontz opens and closes the book with the same argument concerning families and family forms, “To say that no easy answers are to be found in the past is not to close off further discussion of family problems, but to open it up. To find effective answers to the dilemmas facing modern families, we must reject attempts to “recapture” family traditions that either never existed or existed in a totally different context. Only when we have a realistic idea of how families have and have not worked in the past can we make informed decisions about how to support families in the present or improve their future prospects.” (pp. 5-6).

Review:
The only criticism I have of this book is that it is often so detailed in its treatment of the different myths surrounding families and family structures of the past that it is occasionally hard to wade through all of the evidence debunking these myths. Other than this one, minor criticism, this book does an absolutely superb job of providing empirical evidence to indicate there was no “golden age” of the family.

This is already a rather lengthy review, but there are a few additional points the author makes that warrant mention. For instance, the author notes on page 21 that, “Although two-thirds of respondents to one national poll said they wanted “more traditional standards of family life,” the same percentage rejected the idea that “women should return to their traditional role.”" There really does seem to be a rather schizophrenic view of family values in the U.S.: Everyone seems to have “family values” but not want “traditional family values.” The “family values” people have seem to be: close-knit, happy families with low divorce rates, good sex, lots of money, happy kids, and a quiet little place in the suburbs. While that “ideal family” never existed, people also don’t seem to realize what came with the times when that “ideal family” seemed approximated: the oppression of women, racial prejudice, and distant fathers.

Professor Coontz hits another point quite hard, arguing that it is changes in the economic system of the U.S. that have played a large role in changing the family. For instance, she argues that the mass production of the industrial revolution resulted in increases in marketing, which resulted in the rampant consumer culture of the U.S. today. It’s an intriguing argument, “By the late nineteenth century, political economists realized that the ethic of hard work and self-restraint that helped to industrialize America had serious drawbacks now that most industries had the capacity for mass production. If everyone deferred gratification, who would buy the new products? Between 1870 and 1900, the volume of advertising multiplied more than tenfold. Giant department stores were built to showcase new consumer items for urban residents, while rural residents were exposed to the delights and temptations of mail-order catalogs. The word consumption increasingly lost its earlier connotations of destroying, wasting, or using up, and came instead to refer in a positive way to the satisfying of human needs and desires.” (pp. 169-170)

I also like Professor Coontz’s realistic understanding of parenting, “Parenting is both easier and harder than many researchers and self-styled family experts admit: easier because, as we will see, children are resilient enough to survive many of our mistakes, and even to benefit from them; harder because some forces affecting children are simply too complicated for parents to control.” (p. 225) There is no easy recipe for parenting, but, as luck would have it, children don’t need perfection – a good effort generally works.

One last thought before I wrap things up. Professor Coontz does talk at length about different cultures and their approaches to parenting. This story and its implications stood out the strongest to me, “If recent trends and research are not enough to demonstrate the danger of overemphasizing parents’ exclusive responsibility for their own children, it might be worth listening to the views of people with far older and quite different family traditions. When Jesuit missionaries from France first encountered the Montagnais-Naskapi Indians of North America in the sixteenth century, they were impressed by the lack of poverty, theft, greed, and violence but horrified by the childrearing methods and the egalitarian relations between husband and wife. The Jesuits set out to introduce “civilized” family norms to the New World. They tried to persuade Naskapi men to impose stricter sexual monogamy on the women of the group and to moderate their “excessive love” for children by punishing them more harshly. One missionary spent an entire winter in a Montagnais lodge, recording in his journal both his efforts to impart these principles and the unsatisfactory responses of the Indians. At one point, having been rebuffed on several occasions, the missionary obviously thought he had found an unanswerable argument for his side. If you do not impose tighter controls on women, he explained to one Naskapi man, you will never know for sure which of the children your wife bears actually belong to you. The man’s reply was telling: “Thou hast no sense,” said the Naskapi. “You French people love only your own children; but we love all the children of our tribe.” That may be the best single childrearing tip Americans have ever been offered. Unless we learn to care for “all the children of the tribe,” then no family, whatever its form, can be secure.” (pp. 230-231)

Let me conclude by, once again, quoting the author, as she summarizes her main point once again, “The problem is not to berate people for abandoning past family values, nor to exhort them to adopt better values in the future-the problem is to build the institutions and social support networks that allow people to act on their best values rather than on their worst ones. We need to get past abstract nostalgia for traditional family values and develop a clearer sense of how past families actually worked and what the different consequences of various family behaviors and values have been. Good history and responsible social policy should help people incorporate the full complexity and the tradeoffs of family change into their analyses and thus into action. Mythmaking does not accomplish this end.” (p. 22)