Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth Century America, by Judith Stacey (Basic Books, 352 pp.; $12.95, paper); Children at Risk: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Our Kids, by James Dobson and Gary Bauer (Word, 291 pp.; $17.99, hardcover). Reviewed by Margaret Koch, professor of history at Bethel College, Saint Paul, Minnesota.
In the latest works by Judith Stacey and James Dobson, we witness the two poles of the heated debate over the health of, and prospects for, the modern family. Running through Dobson’s book, Children at Risk—much of which is authored by Gary Bauer, president of the Family Research Council, the Washington office of Focus on the Family—is an unabashed nostalgia for the patterns that “served us so well … through the ‘Happy Days’ of the 1950’s.” In Brave New Families, Stacey, a sociologist at the University of California-Davis and a feminist, rejects this “mythical homogeneity” and instead accepts, with some discomfort, the “diverse, fluid, unresolved” current family patterns. While Dobson and Bauer have outlined the terms of battle in a “second civil war,” Stacey has stepped into the no man’s land to see what she might learn from the enemy.
Traditional Surprises
Christians may quarrel with some of Stacey’s presuppositions, but we should applaud the honesty and integrity of her text. Stacey represents a growing minority of feminists who do not see women’s resistance to feminist positions simply as a matter of “false consciousness.” Feminist formulations have sometimes had unforeseen, harmful consequences. And perhaps, Stacey suggests, “anti-feminist” choices empower women in ways feminists have not understood. This is courageous talk from a feminist.
Stacey set out to study “working-class family change in the Silicon Valley,” focusing on two extended family networks. It turns out that through recent conversions, many of her informants have become Christians, a number being involved in a charismatic Christian community. Religious, working-class women have been assumed to be the backbone of popular resistance to feminism. Stacey wants to know why. Though the study of approximately 30 life stories does not allow for wide generalization, the depth of the study uncovers a number of surprises.
First, she finds that feminist thinking has infused Christian ideals of marriage. Egalitarian as well as hierarchical principles are interwoven in speech. She also concludes that the equality manifested in the lived relationships eclipses the rhetoric of headship, which itself is muted by an emphasis on love, sharing, and mutuality. “Husky, unemotional, uncommunicative” Al sobs as he relates his conversion story and then explains his views of Christian marriage. He feels a responsibility to be the spiritual leader—“I’ve got to get off my duff and get my wife to go to church, and I’ve got to lead our selves in prayer.” But as he describes Christian marital goals—becoming closer and more honest, showing more love verbally and physically, having a greater concern for the other person’s feelings—Stacey comments that few contemporary feminists or other women would be likely to find fault.
Second, Stacey may be willing to fight for the full range of definitions of family, but her study points to the high cost of divorce, particularly for children. It seems odd to her that the Christian community she studies seems to accept fully the unusual kin groups configured in the aftermath of divorce. Stacey assumes, mentioning Dobson specifically, that Christians reject divorced people. That is not what she finds: In fact, the Christian community proves to be a support for strong women working to sustain extended family networks in the wake of divorce and the decline of secure, good-paying jobs in “post-industrial” America.
Stacey would like to find instrumental explanations for the faith her subjects express. But she makes no attempt to brush away the “miraculous” conversion that, by many accounts, changed passive, unresponsive Al into a committed, communicative partner.
Courageously, Stacey does not hedge away from the clear implication of several life stories: When her central informant “Pam” and other middle-aged women from 1950s’ marriages returned to college and encountered feminism, marriages were disrupted. The changes “hurtled each woman and her children precipitously down the economic pyramid,” a fall from which few would ever recover. They and their children accepted as givens the gains hard won by feminism. But many had stepped back from autonomy and were using spiritual resources to reconstruct marriages and kinship networks.
Before Christians cheer, keep reading. The marriage that feminism helped “Dottie” to leave was a life of violent battering for her and her children. Not the church, but feminists helped her to understand she was “not worthless, but devalued.” Will either have the force or concern, wonders Stacey, to help Dottie’s daughter, who is repeating her mother’s pattern?
Finally, through one of “Pam’s daughters,” Stacey stumbles into the communal households that are part of the larger charismatic community. Here again, she meets surprises. Couples and singles live together, protected against the “turbulent economic winds” of the declining Silicon Valley economy. Young, working-class adults who would otherwise be living on, or over, the edge enjoy an amazing security and emotional equilibrium with shared housing and food expenses, an informal job network, and a world view focused on nonmaterial goals. Stacey finds the benefits of communal living startling, commenting on one young mother, “I estimated that Katie received greater in-kind benefits for this labor [in community ministry], such as child care, counseling, and subsidized housing, than she would have been able to purchase with a full-time minimum-wage job.”
Flat, Fixed Targets
Several times in her book Stacey points to Dobson as the epitome of patriarchal, “traditional” views. It is an unfair reading of Dobson, in whose views of marriage can be found the emphasis on mutuality, communication, and compatibility Stacey hears in the Christians she studied. At the same time, by choosing to identify with the right-wing agenda Gary Bauer outlines in the book, Dobson is prevented from exploring family relationships with the kind of thoroughness and honesty that characterize Stacey’s study.
In the first 100 pages of Children at Risk, Dobson introduces what the authors call the “assault of secularism” on American values, and thus on American children. In question-and-answer format, Dobson introduces many of the themes that Bauer explores in subsequent chapters.
Formerly serving as undersecretary in the U.S. Department of Education and later as senior domestic policy adviser in the Reagan administration, Bauer is introduced as a “good friend” who was willing to risk losing the privileges of chauffeur, oak-paneled office, and power in the “highest levels of government” to defend passionately the family. Bauer’s section of the book begins by recounting his own disheartening experiences as a conservative in a Washington out of touch with the concerns of average America.
The book’s subsequent chapters attempt to synthesize a wide spectrum of issues that concern many conservative Christians. Chapters address topics such as day care, abortion, the entertainment industry, “nihilistic” art supported by public funds, and multiculturalism in education, in each case laying out the ways in which secular, value-relative contemporary American culture negatively impacts our children.
Which of us does not wish parenting could involve less time processing with our children realities we would rather they had never encountered? Bauer is convinced that if ordinary Christians reassert a commitment to “American values” of an earlier age, the culture can be changed to reflect more Christian understandings. Government can be wrested from the liberals who have stolen our heritage.
It is easier to hit a fixed target. The targets at which Bauer aims seem both flat and fixed. If Stacey does an injustice to Dobson by dismissing him as merely patriarchal, Bauer is also guilty of oversimplifying matters. The whole list of problems that confront Christians in contemporary American society—violence on TV, the tensions of family life in a fast-paced society, the secular underpinnings of public education, and so on—are all traced to a common root: “secular humanism in the hands of big government.”
Identifying a common enemy serves the immediate purpose of fashioning a call to battle in the “second great civil war.” But because of this ideological focus, crucial realities facing families drift out of sight. American families have not only been shaped by “secular humanists,” but also by other major forces and events: the industrial and postindustrial revolutions, social mobility on an unprecedented scale, materialism at all social levels, the power of mass media in our lives—to name only a few. Dobson’s long-term commitment to helping families requires that he consider these troubling realities, even if things are not tidy.
Date rape, for example, is discussed as a product of secular sex education. No reference is made to the way our broader cultural images of men and women feed into these distressing statistics. Do Dobson and Bauer really think the problems facing American inner-city families are the effect of the “anti-family, ‘liberation’ philosophy”? Bauer mentions that not all families are like his own, in which one salary supports the family. But the authors do not address the complex problems most people face as they try to support and nurture a family in a society where most new jobs being created offer low pay, few benefits, and little security.
This is not a small oversight in a book that suggests that one of the goals of secular humanists has been to “increase the tax burden on families, forcing more women into the work force and their children into childcare facilities.” Is this really the major economic problem facing families?
With insufficient attention to the real problems facing families, some proposed “solutions” only offer hope to the few. The one economic proposal offered in the book is a $7,000 tax credit for each dependent. On one level, it is a lovely idea: giving economic rewards to important work that has been devalued since the industrial revolution. But a $7,000 tax credit to a family making $60,000 is worth several thousand dollars. To a family making $25,000 it is worth no more than a few hundred. Does this help the women and men who need it most to have genuine choices about the kind of work they will do?
Stacey may start at the wrong point, but she is aware that something has been missing in feminist analyses. As she listens to the wrestlings of clearly flawed Christians facing job losses, rocky marriages, and troubled children, Stacey finds something appealing in their human strength, resourcefulness, and vulnerability.
Somehow, the reality of Jesus seems stronger in Stacey’s account. In a fallen world, we see through a glass darkly. Dobson and Bauer suggest they have seen clearly, and that the enemy is outside the Christian community. It will not be their book that gives the creative, resilient Christian women Stacey writes about a thorough understanding of the problems buffeting their families.
