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This policy is in effect for the following document: NO FURTHER TRANSMISSION OR DISTRIBUTION OF THIS MATERIAL IS PERMITTED IN THE NAME OF THE FAMILY Rethinking Family Values Also by Judith Stacey in the Postmodern Age Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth-Century America Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China Judith Stacey -:::> /"' ,r ""\ I""' I (_, '~/ ?-~:·::- ....:.:;; U l_:;> ·.!;) .. .( (' I ' '._) /' I / <J :.7 <:~ Beacon Press Boston \. To Jake and inclusive social values Beacon Press 25 Beacon Street Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892 Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. © 1996 by Judith Stacey All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Text design by Nancy A. Crompton Libra·ry of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data can be found on page 196. An earlier version of chapter one, "Backward toward the Postmodern Family," first appeared in America at Century's End, Alan Wolfe, ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Chapter two, "The Family Is Dead; Long Live Our Families" revises an essay commissioned and published by Sociology Database, Craig Calhoun and George Ritzer, eds. McGraw Hill, 1994. An early version of Chapter three, "The Neo-Family-Values Campaign," first appeared in Social Text n. 40 (Fall1994). Chapter four, "Virtual Social Science and the Politics of Family Values" is a revised version of a chapter originally prepared for inclusion in Critical Anthropology in Fin-De-Siecle America: New Locations, Non-Standard Fieldwork. George Marcus, ed. Santa Fe: School of American Research, forthcoming. Chapter five, "Gay and Lesbian Families Are Here; All Our Families Are Queer; Let's Get Used to It!" is a version of a chapter commissioned for publication in The Evolving American Family. Steven Sugarman, Mary Ann Mason, and Arlene Skolnick, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. ~ CXJ ---.3 ~ 16 IN THE NAME OF THE FAMILY and courage-ones from which all contemporary families and com­ munities could learn and benefit. Perhaps their example could in­ spire others to accept the burdens, the paradoxes and the possibilities of"what our families are like now." In the name of all of our families, I have written this book with such a vision in mind. CHAPTER 1 Backward toward the Postmodern Family The extended family is in our lives again. This should make all I ' ~ the people happy who were complaining back in the sixties and seventies that the reason family life was so hard, especially on mothers, was that the nuclear family had replaced the extended family .... Your basic extended family today includes your ex­ husband or -wife, your ex's new mate, your new mate, possibly your new mate's ex, and any new mate that your new mate's ex has acquired. It consists entirely of people who are not related by blood, many of whom can't stand each other. This return of the extended family reminds me of the favorite saying of my friend's extremely pessimistic mother: Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. Delia Ephron, Funny Sauce In the summer of 1986 I attended a wedding ceremony in a small Christian pentecostal church in the Silicon Valley. The service cel­ ebrated the same "traditional" family patterns and values that two 17 _ ... ~ 18 IN THE NAME OF THE FAMILY Backward toward the Postmodem Family 19 years earlier had inspired a profamily movement to assist Ronald lord, the modern middle-class family, a woman's domain, soon was Reagan's landslide reelection to the presidency of the United States. sentimentalized as "traditional." At the same time, however, the pastor's rhetoric displayed substantial It took most of the subsequent two centuries for substantial num­ sympathy with feminist criticisms of patriarchal marriage. "A ring is bers of white working-class men to achieve the rudimentary eco­ not a shackle, and marriage is not a relationship of domination," he nomic passbook to modern family life-a male family wage. 2 By the instructed the groom. Moreover, the complex patterns of divorce, time they had done so, however, a second family revolution was well remarriage, and stepkinship that linked the members of the wedding underway. Once again, middle-class, white families appeared to be party and their guests bore far greater resemblance to the New Age in the forefront. This time women were claiming the benefits and extended family satirized by Delia Ephron than they did to the image burdens of modernity, a status that could be achieved only at the of traditional family life which arouses widespread nostalgic fantasies expense of the "modern" family itself. Reviving a long-dormant fem­ among religious and other social critics of contemporary family prac­ inist movement, frustrated middle-class homemakers and their more tices. Serving as the wedding photographer was the bride's former militant daughters subjected modern domesticity to a sustained cri­ husband accompanied by his live-in lover, a Jewish divorcee who ,, tique, at times with little sensitivity to the effects our anti-modern hoped to become his third wife. All of the wedding attendants were family ideology might have on women for whom full-time domes­ stepkin or step-in-laws to the groom: two daughters from the bride's ticity had rarely been feasible. Thus, feminist family reform came to first marriage served as their mother's bride matrons; their brother be regarded widely as a white middle-class agenda, and white, joined one daughter's second husband as ushers for the groom; and working-class families its most resistant adversaries. the proud flower girl was a young granddaughter from the bride I shared these presumptions before conducting fieldwork among matron's first marriage. At least half the pews were filled with mem­ families in Santa Clara County, California-the "Silicon Valley"­ bers of four generations from the confusing tangle of former, during the mid-198os. This radically altered my understanding of the step-, dual, and in-law relatives of this postmodern, divorce-extended class basis of the postmodern family revolution. Once a bucolic family. I: agribusiness orchard region, during the 196os and 1970s this county i became the global headquarters of the electronics industry and the Family Revolutions and Vanguard Classes world's vanguard postindustrial region. While economic restructur­ ing commanded global attention, most outside observers overlooked Two centuries ago leading white, middle-class families in the newly the concurrent gender and family changes that preoccupied many united American states spearheaded a family revolution that gradu­ Silicon Valley residents. During the late 1970s, before the conserv­ ally replaced the diversity and fluidity of the premodern domestic ative shift in the national political climate made feminism a de­ order with a more uniform modern family system. 1 But "modern rogatory term, local public officials proudly described San Jose, the family" was an oxymoronic label for this peculiar institution that county seat, as a feminist capital. The city elected a feminist mayor dispensed modernity to white, middle-class men only by withholding and hosted the statewide NOW convention in 1974- Santa Clara it from women. Men could enter the public sphere as breadwinners County soon became one of the first counties in the nation to elect and citizens, because their wives were confined to the newly priva­ a female majority to its Board of Supervisors. In 1981, high levels of tized family realm. Ruled by an increasingly absent patriarchal land- feminist activism made San Jose the site of the nation's first sue- ....... _ :ill 21 20 IN THE NAME OF THE FAMILY Backward toward the Postmodem Family cessful strike for a comparable worth standard of pay for city em­ spring of 1987, I conducted a commuter fieldwork study of two ex­ ployees.3 tended kin networks composed primarily of white, working people During its postindustrial makeover, the Silicon Valley also be­ who had resided in Santa Clara County throughout the period of its came an avant garde region for family change, where family and startling transformation. My research convinced me that white, household data represented an exaggeration of national trends. For middle-class families were less the innovators than the propagandists example, while the national divorce rate was doubling after 1960, in and principal beneficiaries of contemporary family change. :II II Santa Clara County it nearly tripled. "Non-family" and single-parent households grew faster than in the rest of the nation, and abortion Remaking Family Life in the Silicon Valley rates were one and one-half the national figures. 4 The high marriage casualty rate among workaholic engineers was dubbed "the silicon Two challenges to my class and gender prejudices provoked my turn syndrome,''5 and many residents shared an alarmist view of family to ethnographic research and the selection of the two kin groups who 8 life captured in the opening lines of an article in a local university became its focus. Pamela Gama , an administrator of social services magazine: "There is an endangered species in Silicon Valley, one so for women at a Silicon Valley anti-poverty agency when I met her in precious that when it disappears Silicon Valley will die with it.