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Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Our families, our futures (Ohio State Alumni Magazine, Essay by Faye Wattleton)
The last half century has brought huge demographic shifts in families worldwide. At the same time, a counterforce has been tugging at us: our devotion to the image, if not the reality, of so-called traditional family.
In truth, the “traditional” family probably never existed for any long period of history. And whether we like it or not, less than a quarter of American households today can be defined as traditional families, down from 40 percent three decades earlier.
Still, some people cling to that idealized vision of a family: a married couple with their own children.
Humans are not static. Neither are families. We are mobile and we are adaptive, and so must be the social structure that we define as family.
I was a World War II-era infant. Every weekday morning, my mother dropped me off at the home of a kind, elderly babysitter before she went to her job at a bullet manufacturing factory. When the men went to war, the women went to work and became heads of households. During the post-war years, many of them returned to domestic duties, but 29 percent of them remained in the workplace. Today, the Department of Labor says more than 60 percent of women are employed full time outside the home.
Women’s marital options are no longer based exclusively on financial security. In a national survey conducted by the Center for the Advancement of Women, just 66 percent of women said it is very important to have a male companion. Women said they look to their partners for the following qualities, in order of priority: to be a companion; to give love and affection; to have a family; to give physical affection; to do physically demanding work around the house; to assist with financial support; and to make major household decisions.
The philosophical ideal of family is a genie that can’t be put back into the bottle. It would be wiser to accept the reality of the ever-changing family construction that makes sense for the 21st century.
Wouldn’t a national conversation about how to help institutions support flexible family structures be more productive than the argument over who can love whom? And instead of making the generalization that African American families are in a state of collapse, wouldn’t it make sense to acknowledge that the deep scars among those families are the legacy of the short journey from slavery and the disruption of traditions and rituals?
My great-grandmother was born to a freed slave in 1862. She gave birth to a son and a daughter fathered by different men, one white and one black, neither of whom she married. She tried marriage once, but left her husband in the midst of a dispute after he dismissed her with, “Aw, Mariah. You ain’t nothing but a woman.” She was a stoutly religious, enterprising woman of uncommon gumption. Her family lineage, far from being in collapse, lives on.
Today, women are being educated in unprecedented numbers. They will not abandon the workplace. Family mobility is a fact of life. Marital options have expanded. Partners of the same gender will marry. Couples in untenable situations will continue to divorce. The shape of the American family will remain a complicated configuration of choices.
Rather than seeking to control the structure of family relationships, as some political leaders try to do, our institutions and government should be helping us address the issues with which families must contend and advocating values that support healthy human development.
We can all benefit from assistance in tracking these inevitable changes and understanding where we fit in. But it must be left to us to make our own choices about organizing our families and our futures.
--Faye Wattleton