Embattled Paradise

Skolnick offers a lucid and compassionate appraisal of the crisis of the American family, arguing that while the great economic and cultural transformations of the past generation are irreversible, they need not irreparably undermine our most precious family values.

A four-year study of 300 middle-class and working-class couples, this text draws on cross-disciplinary research and debunks the myth of the overwrought working mother with her insensitive husband and neglected children.

The typical American family has changed dramatically since the days of "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Father Knows Best." Double-income families are now the rule, and fathers are much more involved in raising the children and cleaning house. Reactions to these changes have been diverse, ranging from grave misgivings to a sense of liberation and new possibility. Groups as diverse as Promise Keepers, the Million Man March, and Robert Bly's mythopoetic men's movement tell us that fathers are important. From the fundamentalist right to the feminist left, opinions about the changing nature of the family--and the consequent rethinking of gender roles--have been vehement, if not always very well-founded. In Family Man, sociologist Scott Coltrane brings a wealth of compelling evidence to this debate over the American family. Drawing on his own extensive research and many fascinating interviews, Coltrane explodes many of the common myths about shared parenting, provides first-hand accounts of men's and women's feelings in two-job families, and reveals some innovative solutions that couples have developed to balance job and family commitments. Readers will find an insightful discussion of precisely how and why family life has changed, what forms it may take in the future, and what new kinds of fathers may be on the horizon. The author firmly places these questions within a broad contextual framework. He provides, for instance, an illuminating history of the family that shows that, far from being a fixed structure, the family has always adapted to changing economic, social, and ideological pressures. And by examining how families operate in a variety of non-industrial societies, he demonstrates that our own notions of gender-specific work and parenting roles are culturally rather than biologically determined, and thus inherently flexible. And indeed these roles are changing. While contemporary American women still perform the bulk of domestic tasks, Family Man gives us decisive evidence that men are becoming increasingly involved in both housework and childrearing. Coltrane argues convincingly that this trend will continue. Given the current economic situation--with two-job households now the norm--and the gradual ideological shift away from restrictive gender roles, more and more couples will find it both necessary and desirable to share the workload. More important, Coltrane suggests that as fathers participate more fully in raising their children and performing traditionally female household tasks, men will themselves be transformed by the experience in profoundly positive ways and American society as a whole will move closer to true gender equity. Family Man succeeds brilliantly in bringing clarity, perspective, and above all hope to a discussion that is too often shrill, chaotic, and beset with the rhetoric of nostalgia. It shows us not only exactly where the family is today, but where it has been and what it may become.

In this compelling book, a well-known social psychologist asks why, in an era of great material wealth, America suffers from such a disturbing array of social problems that reflect a deep spiritual poverty. Illustrations.

A history of the shifting and conflicting ideas about when, where, and how we should touch our children Discussing issues of parent-child contact ranging from breastfeeding to sexual abuse, Jean O'Malley Halley traces the evolution of mainstream ideas about touching between adults and children over the course of the twentieth century in the United States. Debates over when a child should be weaned and whether to allow a child to sleep in the parent's bed reveal deep differences in conceptions of appropriate adult-child contact. Boundaries of Touch shows how arguments about adult-child touch have been politicized, simplified, and bifurcated into "naturalist" and "behaviorist" viewpoints, thereby sharpening certain binary constructions such as mind/body and male/female. Halley discusses the gendering of ideas about touch that were advanced by influential social scientists and parenting experts including Benjamin Spock, Alfred C. Kinsey, and Luther Emmett Holt. She also explores how touch ideology fared within and against the post-World War II feminist movements, especially with respect to issues of breastfeeding and sleeping with a child versus using a crib. In addition to contemporary periodicals and self-help books on child rearing, Halley uses information gathered from interviews she conducted with mothers ranging in age from twenty-eight to seventy-three. Throughout, she reveals how the parent-child relationship, far from being a private or benign subject, continues as a highly contested, politicized affair of keen public interest.

Richard Gelles explains why government programs designed to cure social ills don’t work in sector after sector and why they should be replaced with a universal entitlement at lower cost.

Is there life for the family in the 21st century? Pessimists view the traditional two-parent nuclear family as a relic of the past, attributing their gloomy outlook to increased demands from the workplace, rampant technological advancement, and the pursuit of personal achievement at the expense of interpersonal needs and values. Optimists, on the other hand, claim that increasing alienation and emphasis on the occupational sphere necessitate a sense of family, community, and belonging as a haven from work-related stress. This volume addresses these and related issues such as the interplay of personal versus interpersonal factors in family development, the role of the extended family, and the interface between work, community and family. The contents of this book--scholarly contributions from a unique interdisciplinary rostrum of behavioral scientists in such diverse fields as psychology, sociology, anthropology, social work, industrial management, and demography--represent the latest developments in research, theory, and practice in family studies. The reader is presented with theoretical formulations, empirical findings, and applied interventions regarding family life in different parts of the world. A systems perspective is adopted as the family is examined at its interface with individuals, community, society, and culture, with the interdependence of these different levels emphasized. In addition, an attempt is made to integrate the work of theoreticians, researchers, and practitioners in understanding the evolving family. Dreman provides a survey of family life in the international arena and finds a surprising consensus between the different disciplinary perspectives and the respective geographical arenas. He discusses life-span issues in relation to all levels of family life including the impact of increased longevity and decreased fertility in relation to topics such as individual development, parent-child and couple relationships, the workplace, and the community. This book also highlights the interplay of biological and interpersonal dynamics as in the case of spousal depression.

This long-awaited fourth edition has the same goal as the preceding editions: to understand families in terms of the kinds of interaction through which family life is constructed. The changes in the family as an institution have influenced these processes, just as they have influenced the ways we understand and write about them. But even in these "postmodern" circumstances, an underlying premise of the volume is that two partners establish a family because they have selected each other as distinctively meaningful to one another. They will affirm, modify, elaborate, or retreat from various aspects of the relationship through interaction over time and in changing circumstances. This volume contains the best available interdisciplinary work on the social psychology of the family. More than half of the selections are new to this edition, which incorporates a variety of theoretical and research perspectives that provide the reader with a range of authoritative and up-to-date sources on the family and interpersonal relations. The newer forms of family organization that have emerged in the more recent literature - specifically, single-parent families, stepfamilies, and families of gay and lesbian domestic partners - are included. Authors have been drawn from a variety of disciplines, including sociology, communication, family studies, human development, psychology, anthropology, and social work.

Many Americans hold fast to the notion that gay men and women, more often than not, have been ostracized from disapproving families. Not in This Family challenges this myth and shows how kinship ties were an animating force in gay culture, politics, and consciousness throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Historian Heather Murray gives voice to gays and their parents through an extensive use of introspective writings, particularly personal correspondence and diaries, as well as through published memoirs, fiction, poetry, song lyrics, movies, and visual and print media. Starting in the late 1940s and 1950s, Not in This Family covers the entire postwar period, including the gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the establishment of PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Ending her story with an examination of contemporary coming-out rituals, Murray shows how the personal that was once private became political and, finally, public. In exploring the intimate, reciprocal relationship of gay children and their parents, Not in This Family also chronicles larger cultural shifts in privacy, discretion and public revelation, and the very purpose of family relations. Murray shows that private bedrooms and consumer culture, social movements and psychological fashions, all had a part to play in transforming the modern family.

Beginning in 1945, America rocketed through a quarter-century of extraordinary economic growth, experiencing an amazing boom that soared to unimaginable heights in the 1960s. At one point, in the late 1940s, American workers produced 57 percent of the planet's steel, 62 percent of the oil, 80 percent of the automobiles. The U.S. then had three-fourths of the world's gold supplies. English Prime Minister Edward Heath later said that the United States in the post-War era enjoyed "the greatest prosperity the world has ever known." It was a boom that produced a national euphoria, a buoyant time of grand expectations and an unprecedented faith in our government, in our leaders, and in the American dream--an optimistic spirit which would be shaken by events in the '60s and '70s, and particularly by the Vietnam War. Now, in Grand Expectations, James T. Patterson has written a highly readable and balanced work that weaves the major political, cultural, and economic events of the period into a superb portrait of America from 1945 through Watergate. Here is an era teeming with memorable events--from the bloody campaigns in Korea and the bitterness surrounding McCarthyism to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, to the Vietnam War, Watergate, and Nixon's resignation. Patterson excels at portraying the amazing growth after World War II--the great building boom epitomized by Levittown (the largest such development in history) and the baby boom (which exploded literally nine months after V-J Day)--as well as the resultant buoyancy of spirit reflected in everything from streamlined toasters, to big, flashy cars, to the soaring, butterfly roof of TWA's airline terminal in New York. And he shows how this upbeat, can-do mood spurred grander and grander expectations as the era progressed. Of course, not all Americans shared in this economic growth, and an important thread running through the book is an informed and gripping depiction of the civil rights movement--from the electrifying Brown v. Board of Education decision, to the violent confrontations in Little Rock, Birmingham, and Selma, to the landmark civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965. Patterson also shows how the Vietnam War--which provoked LBJ's growing credibility gap, vast defense spending that dangerously unsettled the economy, and increasingly angry protests--and a growing rights revolution (including demands by women, Hispanics, the poor, Native Americans, and gays) triggered a backlash that widened hidden rifts in our society, rifts that divided along racial, class, and generational lines. And by Nixon's resignation, we find a national mood in stark contrast to the grand expectations of ten years earlier, one in which faith in our leaders and in the attainability of the American dream was greatly shaken. The Oxford History of the United States The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, a New York Times bestseller, and winners of the Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. The Atlantic Monthly has praised it as "the most distinguished series in American historical scholarship," a series that "synthesizes a generation's worth of historical inquiry and knowledge into one literally state-of-the-art book." Conceived under the general editorship of C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter, and now under the editorship of David M. Kennedy, this renowned series blends social, political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, and military history into coherent and vividly written narrative.