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“Ole and Lena” are a mythical
Swedish-American couple, probably residing somewhere in Minnesota, and notable
for their remarkably dysfunctional marriage. One story goes like this:
Ole and Lena had grown
old, and one day Ole became very sick. Eventually, he was confined to his
upstairs bedroom, barely conscious, bedridden, and growing ever weaker. After
several weeks of this, the Doctor visits and tells Lena: ‘Vell, Ole’s just
about a goner. I don’t tink he’ll survive the night.’
So Lena, being a
practical woman, decides she had better start preparing for all the guests who
would be coming to the funeral. She begins to bake, starting with loaves of
limpa, a Swedish sweet rye bread. The pleasant smell of baking bread is
soon wafting through the house.
Suddenly, upstairs, Ole’s
nose twitches and his eyes bolt open. “Limpa,” he says. He jerks up into a
sitting position, swings his legs around, and climbs out of bed. It’s like a
miracle! Half walking, half stumbling, he crosses the room, enters the hallway,
and starts working his way down the stairs. “Limpa,” he says again.
He reaches the ground
floor, stumbles across the kitchen, and pulls himself into a chair by a table
where a loaf of freshly sliced bread sits. He reaches over to take a slice.
“Stop that Ole!” shouts
Lena, as she whaps his hand with her spatula. “That limpa bread is for
after the funeral.”
We can still laugh at Ole and
Lena because they are now out of time, characters from an earlier era of Swedish
immigration into America. Their “ideal type,” we might say no longer exists.
More importantly, their dysfunctional marriage also
belongs to another era. Several generations ago, when there were real
“Oles and Lenas,” divorce would have been rare in their community. For better
and worse, persons stayed in unhappy or troubled marriages, perhaps “for the
sake of the children”; perhaps for other cultural and religious reasons.
Successful jokes usually involve making fun of
institutions that are strong and stable. The “marriage joke,” a staple of
comedians during the 1950’s and 1960’s seems to be fading in our time.
Symbolically, Rodney Dangerfield, perhaps the last master of the marriage joke,
is recently deceased.
It is hard to make fun of an institution that is
battered and bruised. Such are marriage and the family in America. Marriage
rates are now at record lows in our country. The average age of first marriage
is at a record high, for both men and women. The proportion of adults who will
never marry is also at a record level. At the same time, the marital fertility
rate in America is at a record low. Meanwhile, 40 percent of all births are now
outside-of wedlock, a figure steadily climbing again. Cohabitation – “living
together without benefit of clergy,” as we used to say – grows ever more popular
as an alternative to marriage. While the American divorce rate has been fairly
stable for a decade or two, this remains at a high level. One of every two
marriages still ends in divorce. Finally, “gay rights activists” are clamoring
for the right to marry, with some – if uneven – success among the states.
There are those, such as Harvard historian Nancy
Cott, who argue that these changes simply represent the inevitable evolution
of marriage and family, a natural adaptation of a malleable, plastic-like
institution to new conditions. Industrialization, modernization, and the quest
for equality, Cott concludes, have freed marriage from the shackles of the past,
allowing it to evolve into a higher and better form.[1]
There is no doubt that the Industrial Revolution
brought new pressures to bear on what I prefer to call the Natural Family. At
the most basic level, this process severed the workplace from the home. For all
of human history before, the great majority of humans had lived and worked in
the same place: be it a small farm or an artisan’s shop or a nomad’s tent.
Under an industrial regime, though, adults would be pulled out of their homes
to labor in factories or offices. Serious complications arose over matters such
as sex or gender roles and the care of children.[2]
However, in most of Europe and North America,
families recovered a significant degree of autonomy through so-called “family
wage” regimes. Constructed by religious leaders, social reformers, and
morally-grounded labor unions, family wage systems limited the intrusion of the
industrial principle into the family circle. These systems held that the
factories could have only one person per household, normally the husband and
father; and that that person in turn should receive a family-sustaining wage.
For working-class women, “liberation” came to mean freedom from
having to work in the factories. This allowed mothers to focus on
maintaining autonomous homes and caring for children. In this way, the natural
family rooted in marriage and focused on procreation and childrearing
accommodated itself to the new industrial era.[3]
It is also true, though, that “family-wage” regimes
of this kind largely vanished during the last three decades of the Twentieth
Century, and are now mostly forgotten. Feminist historians, like Nancy Cott,
see this as an important and most welcome step in the evolution of marriage and
family. A more accurate interpretation is that the disappearance of these
regimes has been a major cause of the deterioration of marriage and family life
seen since 1965; which such systems had flaws, nothing compensated for the loss
of their strengths. Moreover, rather than being an aspect of social
evolution, this transformation of private life was the direct result of an
ideological project designed to create a post-family order.
This unique ideological project had both socialist
and feminist roots. Its clearest expression came in Sweden, the ancestral home
of Ole and Lena.
TOWARD A POST-FAMILY ORDER
The changing status of
marriage and family in Sweden over the past 100 years can be summarized through
five transitions:
• From
a regime where marriage was an open expression of Christian values with claims
of its own to a regime that is intentionally secular and designed to
protect the interests of the individual;
• From
a legal order that granted legal marriage special status to one granting
nearly equivalent rights and obligations to non-marital cohabitation;
• From
a regime that assumed a breadwinning husband/father and a homemaking wife/mother
to a regime giving priority to gender equality, universal adult
employment, and self support;
• From
a legal order that encouraged marriage as an economic partnership resting on a
vital home economy to a regime dedicated to what one analyst calls
"statisation,"[4]
where the state deliberately takes over family functions, moves
women into state employment and children into state care, encourages the
economic independence of married adults, and crafts universal
dependence on the welfare state;
• And from
a regime that presumed marriage to be exclusively heterosexual and monogamous
to one that grants nearly equal status, benefits, and obligations to
same-sex couples and—soon—to polygamous and other polyamorous arrangements, as
well.
The foundation of
Swedish law remains a vast statute called Sveriges rikes lag,
enacted in 1734 but now with innumerable amendments.[5]
Under the assumption of a "common estate," this measure long codified the
subordinate status of women relative to men in matters of income and property.
Despite some liberalization in the late 19th Century, the Swedish
husband until 1920 still held the right to control and administer the common
estate during marriage. However, reflecting the priority of land and lineage in
the old regime, the law excluded from the common estate real property acquired
before marriage or by inheritance during marriage. In the then-rare cases of
divorce, the marital estate would be divided equally, although marital
misconduct such as adultery could result in penalties imposed on the offender.[6]
In 1918-19, The
Kingdom of Sweden experienced a bloodless democratic revolution. Following mass
protests in the streets, the King surrendered virtually all of his power to
Parliament. The adoption of universal adult suffrage in 1920 extended the vote
to women. And Parliament also adopted that year a new Marriage Code.
This 1920 Code
built on the idea of the marital home as an economic partnership, with husband
and wife equal in rights but different in function. In many respects, it
strengthened the institutional nature of marriage in the context of an
emerging post-agrarian, urban-industrial society. Relative to property, the
1920 Code adopted the concept of "deferred community." The prescribed marital
property system rested on the idea of "separate administration but equal
division for one and all." The measure abolished the automatic co-ownership of
property during marriage as well as the position of the husband as the dominant
administrator. Rather, each spouse would control and administer the property
that he or she owned at the time of marriage or gained later. Notably, the 1920
Code also embraced the idea of independent liability; spouses were not
held responsible for each other's debts (except for educational expenses for
their children and certain direct household expenditures). The Code expanded
the definition of marital property to include property acquired
before marriage or by inheritance during marriage. On the dissolution of the
marriage through death or divorce or by mutual petition, all marital
property would be divided equally, although the Courts retained the power to
punish one or the other spouse for marital misconduct. Importantly, the Code
did lay upon the husband a special responsibility for economic support of his
wife and children. Overall, the 1920 Code aimed at creating a relatively simple
marital property system that minimized disputes and the use of lawyers and
encouraged gender specialization within the home. It was ideally suited to a
people committed to nearly universal marriage and the avoidance of divorce.[7]
RIVAL WORLDVIEWS
During the early
1930's, a declining marriage rate and a sharply falling fertility rate led to
calls for radical changes in the Swedish home. For example, the young socialist
intellectual Alva Myrdal—referred to earlier—generated a furor by calling for
"collectivized homes" for Swedish families, where young mothers would join
fathers in the full time labor force, with infants and toddlers cared for in
common nurseries, and with meals prepared in collectivized kitchens (and she
actually saw such a facility through to construction). With husband Gunnar
Myrdal, she co-authored in 1934 the book Kris i befolkningsfrågan
("Crisis in the Population Question"). As noted earlier, they argued that
raising the birthrate required radical changes in the natures of marriage and
family. Fathers should be freed from their distinctive "breadwinner" role;
mothers freed from "homemaking." All adults should work, and massive new state
welfare benefits funded by a “bachelor tax”—including clothing allowances,
daycare subsidies, universal health care, low interest 'marriage loans', and so
on--should pay the costs of parenthood. The marital home, under their scheme,
would largely cease to be a significant economic unit. Early and universal sex
education, freely available contraceptives, and liberalized abortion would
insure that all children in the new order would be wanted children.
Working through The Royal Population Commission of 1935 and the Swedish
Parliament's Women's Work Committee, the Myrdals enjoyed a remarkable influence
for the balance of the decade.[8]
By 1940, however,
their ideas were in retreat. The onset of World War II and Sweden's perilous
position as a "neutral" nation surrounded by Nazi German conquests encouraged a
conservative nationalism. Relative to the family, an alternate worldview found
in the labor unions—namely that "women were to be liberated from the
labor market rather than liberated to participate in it" and that men
deserved to earn a living "family wage"—gained popularity. Sometimes called
“maternalism,” this attitude saw Alva Myrdal’s egalitarian feminism as part of
the problem, not the solution. Capitalists, this socialist claim went, should
not be allowed to control the mothers, wives, and daughters of the working
class. The labor unions, collectively organized as the LO [Lans organization],
negotiated in 1938 with employers the historic Saltsjöbaden
agreement, which crystallized job segregation by gender, reserving the better
industrial jobs and the higher wages for the unions’ male members.
Some feminist analysts label
the consequent 1939-67 period as "the era of the Swedish housewife." Public
policy encouraged the full-time care of small children at home. The marriage
rate climbed, while the average age at first marriage fell. Fertility also
rose: Sweden's mini-Baby Boom. As late as 1965, only three percent of
all Swedish preschool children were in some form of non-parental day care. The
so-called "traditional Swedish family," encouraged by The Marriage Code of 1920
and by popular values, seemed solid.[9]
Indeed, feminist historians quietly acknowledge that as late as the mid-1960’s
there was no pressure for change from young Swedish housewives and
mothers.[10]
“RED SWEDEN”
Yet the late 1960's
experienced new waves of radicalism. So-called "Eurocommunism" was on the
march, while Red Brigades terrorized Italy and West Germany, and France was torn
apart by the New Left riots. Meanwhile, Christian values--summarized by one
analyst as "responsibility, sacrifice, altruism and the sanctity of long-term
commitments [such as marriage]"—began to give way rapidly across Western Europe
to a militant "secular individualism" focused on the desires of the self.[11]
Sweden also entered
into what a leading feminist historian, Yvonne Hirdman, calls its "Red Years,"
1967-1976.[12]
At their heart was a massive so-called "gender turn" that would radically alter
the nature of marriage in Sweden. In 1968, a joint report by the Social
Democratic Party and the LO abandoned the “family wage” ideal and concluded that
"there are…strong reasons for making the two breadwinner family the norm in
planning long-term changes within the social insurance system."[13]
The next year, Alva Myrdal chaired a major panel, "On Equality," for the Social
Democrats. Its report concluded that “[i]n the society of the future,…the point
of departure must be that every adult is responsible for his/her own support.
Benefits previously inherit in married status should be eliminated." The Myrdal
Report insisted that true “natural” differences between women and men should
pose no barrier to reform. State action should make such innate distinctions
insignificant. The Report also called for a tax policy based on individual
earnings, without preference for any "form of cohabitation," Myrdal’s new
and deflating term for marriage.[14]
Accordingly, in
1969 the Swedish government resolved to reform fundamentally its marriage law.
The Minister of Justice created a Committee of Experts and issued his
Directives. The Committee was to consider whether there was still even a need
for marriage law and, if so, how it should be reconfigured. It was to assess
the "clearly anachronistic" nature of community property, based as it was on the
now-to-be-discarded Christian notion of "one flesh." The Committee should also
consider the diminished importance of marital status in Sweden, the new
imperative of "personal fulfillment," the rising demand for divorce, declining
public interest in material property in favor of pensions, annuities, and other
claims on the welfare state, and the elevation of gender equality into the
cornerstone of Swedish social policy.[15]
In this spirit,
Sweden's Parliament approved in 1971 a fundamental reform of the income tax. It
abolished the taxation of households through the joint income tax return
premised on "income splitting" by married couples. Instead, all persons would
henceforth be taxed as individuals, without attention to marital status,
dependents, employment, or income of a spouse. This gave Sweden the most "fully
individualized taxation system" in the developed world. In the context of high
marginal tax rates, this change also greatly benefited the two-income household
and penalized the traditional one-income breadwinner family.[16]
Analysts of modern Sweden are nearly unanimous in viewing this shift from
"joint" to "individual" taxation as the most sweeping social change in Sweden
over the last 40 years, for it "more or less eradicated" the traditional home.[17]
As the feminist analyst Annika Baude concludes: “If I were to choose one reform
which has…done the most to promote equality between the sexes, I would point to
the introduction of individual income taxation.”[18]
On the basis of the
Family Law Reform Committee's work, Parliament approved two years later (1973) a
new measure governing marriage and divorce. Access to marriage actually
expanded. Most legal impediments to heterosexual marriage disappeared: even
half-brothers and half-sisters could marry, as could aunts and nephews, uncles
and nieces. Only siblings and persons related by blood in unilinear descent
faced prohibition; bigamy and polygamy remained banned. The minimum marriage
age for both spouses became 18. Premised on the idea of marriage as a
voluntary union, it was—in one advocate's words—“only natural that if one of the
spouses is dissatisfied, he or she may demand a divorce." In effect, this 1973
law held that the community or state no longer had significant interests in the
preservation of a marriage. "Fault" would no longer be considered, nor would
marital misconduct have any bearing on the division of property. This latter
change ripped both “adultery” and “fidelity” out of marriage’s institutional
construct. If both husband and wife agreed to the divorce, it would be
immediately granted. If one spouse objected or if there was at least one child
under age 16 in the home, the new law fixed a mandatory reconsideration period
of six months. "Separation" no longer had legal status. The measure assumed
adult self-support and largely ended the concept of alimony (except in limited
cases where "maintenance" payments for a set time might be required).[19]
THE PALME ERA
In 1972 a new
Social Democratic prime minister came to power, Olof Palme. Alva Myrdal joined
his cabinet as minister of disarmament and Church affairs. Under her open
influence, Palme addressed the women of the Party that year, declaring an end to
the maternalist order. “In this society,” he said, “it is only natural for both
parents to work. In this society it is evident that man and woman should take
the same responsibility for the care of the home and the children.” He added
that “[i]n this society…the care of these future generations is just as
naturally the responsibility of us all.”[20]
A true revolution
began. The Party abolished its Women’s League, long the bastion of the
homemakers. Women would now be “real members” of the Party, Palme said, dealing
with “common issues” alone. New policies made employment nearly mandatory for
all women in their twenties and thirties. Surviving homemakers would pay dearly
through heightened marginal taxes on their husbands. Small children now moved
massively into daycare: 460,000 held places in 1995, compared to only 23,000
three decades earlier.[21]
Yvonne Hirdman
correctly gauges the sweep of change here. She notes that women’s work in this
new Swedish order took on a peculiar quality. In the fields of agriculture and
forestry, the number of working women actually declined, while in private
industry it grew only modestly. However, in the service sector (heavily
governmental in nature), the number of working women rose from 269,000 in 1950
to 819,000 by 1990; in the education and health care sectors (exclusively
governmental), the number of working women rose nearly three fold, from 282,000
in 1950 to slightly over 1 million by 1990. In a nation of only 8 million
people, these were large changes. In the words of two Israeli sociologists who
have studied this change, the Swedish welfare state “channel[ed] women in
disproportionate numbers into feminine occupational niches” such as child care,
elder care, nursing, and elementary education. Swedish women still do “women’s
work,” but now they do so for the government, rather than for their own
families.[22]
Put another way,
Sweden successfully socialized “women’s work,” and the labor of women
themselves. The goal of socialism had always been to eliminate the family as a
meaningful economic and social unit, where husband would no longer be dependent
in any way on his wife, nor a wife on her husband, nor young children on
parents, nor elderly parents on grown children. All would be equally dependent
on the comprehensive welfare state. Pointing specifically to the experience of
Alva Myrdal, Hirdman adds triumphantly:
New
ideas of gender replaced old-fashioned ideas about the couple. We witness
[here] the birth of the androgynous individual (and I speak about the explicit
ideal) and the death of the provider and his housewife. We thus witness old
ideas popping up, ideas that had been buried for decades—but ideas that very
quickly found their advocates and became developed: people, men and women, eager
to speak the new tongue of gender.[23]
The Parliament
approved The Joint Homes Act in 1987. This new measure governing "relationships
similar to marriage" rested on "the principle of neutrality toward family
form." As legal analyst Ulla Björnberg explains:
The
principle states that individuals are free to develop their personal lives at
their own will, to choose a living arrangement and
ethical norms for their family life. The role of family law is restricted
to providing solutions to practical problems and to formulate
rules of a kind that can be accepted by almost all individuals.[24]
Still, the Joint Homes Act
did not quite equate "cohabitation" with "marriage." Specifically, cohabitators
did not gain the equivalence of "marital property rights" in inheritance or a
right to claim “maintenance” after separation. Rather, the rules in this
measure applied only to the equal splitting of a dwelling and household goods
acquired for joint use.
Still, the measure
did affirm that parenthood in consensual unions would involve rights and
responsibilities equal to those in marriage. Unmarried fathers must register
with the state. Joint custody of children after separation would be the
assumption for both cohabitating and married couples. A novel development in
the 1987 measure, though, was that it applied to both unmarried heterosexual
and homosexual couples.[25]
I would underscore that this latter innovation came near the end of the
de-institutionalizing project, not at its beginning.
In 1995, the
Swedish Parliament expanded on this change and approved a law granting same-sex
couples the right to form a "registered partnership." This represented a civil
contract providing rights and responsibilities nearly identical to those of
conventional marriage. The few exceptions involved adoption, joint custody, and
artificial insemination. "Registered partners" gained rights to "deferred
community property."
In 2000, the
government severed its official ties to the Lutheran Church of Sweden. This
brought a symbolic end to “Christian Sweden,” although the country had been
effectively de-Christianized some decades earlier. The same year, the Swedish
government extended the "registered partnership" option to foreign nationals
residing in Sweden for at least two years. In 2002, gay and lesbian couples
gained the right to adopt children (although during the first year of this law's
operation, none did so). Recent Swedish Court decisions have also given legal
recognition to polygamous marriages among immigrants from Muslim countries. An
association of informal Swedish polygamists predicts full recognition of plural
marriages and other polyamorous relations in their land, perhaps during 2010.[26]
IN AMERICA?
Has this same post-family culture, built on
socialist and feminist assumptions, made any progress in America? Have we
Americans also learned how to speak “the new tongue of gender” and accommodated
ourselves to the vast expansion of government which it seems to require? It
has, although in more convoluted and less obvious ways. The Swedes, at least,
debated these issues more or less in the open. Our debates have rarely
been as clear and focused. All the same, key changes have included:
1)
In July, 1964,
the U.S. House of Representatives voted to add the word “sex” to Title VII of
the proposed Civil Rights Act, the section prohibiting discrimination in
employment. The Amendment was actually offered by a curious coalition of Dixiecrat segregationist and Republican feminists. The former hoped to use this
amendment to kill the whole measure; the latter group saw an opportunity to tear
down the American family wage regime. A few pro-family voices warned of dire
consequences, yet this curious coalition carried the day.[27]
Starting in 1969, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission moved aggressively
– and successfully – to eliminate the American family wage. Indeed, between
1970 and 1990, the real wages of men fell by twenty percent, pushing more women
into the labor market, simply to make ends meet.[28]
2)
Also in 1969,
the U.S. Congress approved a major Tax Reform bill. House Ways and Means
Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills, responding to criticism from singles that the
tax code favored marriage, successfully ended the practice of “income
splitting.” The tax burden carried by married couples rose, and the “marriage
tax penalty” – which still haunts us today – emerged.[29]
3)
In 1973, the U.S. actually came within a hair’s breadth of creating a
massive federal “child development” entitlement. Fortunately, President Richard
Nixon vetoed the measure. In a statement reportedly drafted by his aide Patrick
J. Buchanan, Nixon said the bill would have committed “the vast moral authority
of the federal government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing as
against the child-centered approach.” Alas, Congress turned around and quickly
approved several other measures providing day care grants to the poor and
child-care tax credits for the middle and upper classes.[30]
4)
The broad results in America have also been in the same direction as
Sweden. It is true that our welfare state still remains somewhat limited; our
voluntary religious and charitable sectors are still relatively vital; and the
accelerated flow of American women into the labor force has been more complex
and pluralistic than in Sweden. All the same, government transfer payments to
individuals – a reliable measure of welfare state activity – have grown from
$263 billion in 1980 to $1.548 trillion in 2006; even after taking
inflation into account, the number has nearly tripled. Also, much like in
Sweden, the great influx of women into the workforce has been channeled heavily
into the governmental sector.[31]
And three out of every four American pre-school children are also now in
non-parental daycare, all federally subsidized.
In short, tasks that had formally been performed by
families in their own homes – primary health care, infant, toddler, and
after-school care, maternal nursing, and so on – have been substantially turned
over to the state or to state-funded entities: “public patriarchy,” some
feminist theorists label it. Higher taxes, which have fallen with particular
force on remaining one-income homes with three or more children, helped pay the
cost. Achieved incrementally and with few open ideological clashes, it might be
called the Swedish “post-family” model via the American plan.
A series of Federal Court decisions since 1965
reinforced the process. In Griswold v. Connecticut,
the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a state law prohibiting the possession and use
of contraceptives. While cleverly appealing to the “sacred precincts of the
bedroom” and to the nearly “sacred” nature of marriage, the Court here used a
new “right to privacy” to sever the presumptive linkage of marriage to
procreation.[32]
Seven years later, the Court struck down a ban on the use of contraceptives by
the unmarried, as well. Now arguing that “the marital couple is not an
independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of two
individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional make up. This
decision in Eisenstadt v. Baird not only dismissed
talk about the sacred nature of marriage; by equating unmarried and married
couples, it also shattered the presumptive licit monopoly of the married state
over sexuality.[33]
Other Court decisions weakening the legal standing
of the family followed. In 1976, the Supreme Court used the right of privacy to
strip the father of an unborn child – whether married or not – of any right to
affect a mother’s decision to have an abortion.[34]
A year later, the Court also stripped parents and state governments of any
controls over the possession and use of contraceptives by minor children. Here
again, “privacy” trumped family autonomy, with the court ruling that “it is
clear that among the decisions that an individual may make without justified
interference are personal” ones, including the use of birth control.[35]
A 1971 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a state law that placed
financial requirements on indigent persons seeking divorce, turning a “freedom
to marry” into a “freedom to divorce without cost.”[36]
In the celebrated case of Marvin v. Marvin, the
California Supreme Court ruled that cohabitating couples could claim some of the
legal financial obligations formerly attached only to marriage. In effect, the
distinction between marriage and non-marriage diminished again.
The overall effects of these and related decisions
was to push America toward the same deconstruction of marriage and the
institutional family as seen in Sweden. What began as an institution focused on
procreation, fidelity, permanence, and social order had become instead a highly
personalized extension of the welfare state.
All the same, there
are important pockets of resistance: and all of them are growing.
Most dramatically, home-school families have
mobilized to defend the integrity of their home economies by focusing on the
most important of family responsibilities: education. Emerging in the face of
state hostility, they have won legal recognition across the country and are
producing a disproportionate number of the nation’s morally grounded and
creative young adults. They are a special embarrassment to public schools,
which have been operating on a socialist industrial model for over a century,
with ever more discouraging results.[37]
Some American religious groups have done a solid job
in building new affirmations of the natural family. Under the leadership of
figures such as Paige Patterson and Albert J. Mohler, for example, the Southern
Baptist Convention is developing a powerful new pro-family apologetic.[38]
The Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, provide an important contemporary example of
how – in the face of cultural turmoil – a denomination can foster and maintain
its own “culture of marriage,” with measurable positive results.[39]
I also find reason for optimism in the growing
number of home businesses in America. In 2005, there were 21.5 million sole
proprietorships in America, an increase of 50 percent since 1990. Taking
advantage of new technologies such as the home computer and the economic
democracy of the internet, they are powering a new age of family
entrepreneurship. More importantly, from a world-historic perspective, they are
beginning to heal the great breach between work and home; a divide exploited by
the advocates of the post-family order.
Ronald Reagan understood what was at stake. He
noted in 1984 that throughout American history “we’ve relied on the family as
the principle institution for transmitting values.”[40]
From 1986 to the end of his presidency, Reagan gave mounting attention to
strengthening the nation’s family system. “The family provides children with a
haven of love and concern,” he told the Student Congress on Evangelism. “For
parents, it provides a sense of purpose and meaning in life. When the family is
strong, the nation is strong. When the family is weak, the Nation itself is
weak.”[41]
He raised up the example of the Hispanic casa, or home, for all
Americans, calling it “the almost mystical center of daily life, where
grandparents and parents and children and grandchildren all come together in the
familia.[42]
And, in a speech given in Chicago in 1988, he said:
[T]he family is the bedrock of
our nation, but it is also the engine that gives our country life…. It’s for
our families that we work and labor, so that we can join around the dinner
table, bring our children up the right way, care for our parents, and reach out
to those less fortunate. It is the power of the family that holds the Nation
together, that gives America her conscience, and that serves as the cradle of
our nation’s soul.[43]
So true. And in their better
moments, even Ole and Lena would agree.
Endnotes:
[1] Nancy F. Cott,
Public Vows: A History of
Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001).
[2] See: Karl Polanyi,
The Great
Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944), p. 39.
[3] Allan Carlson,
Third Ways: How Bulgarian
Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created
Family-Centered Economies – And Why They Disappeared
(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007): 35-60.
[4] A term used in D. Bradley, "Marriage, Family,
Property and Inheritance in Swedish Law," International and
Comparative Law Quarterly 39 (April 1990): 380.
[5] Michael Bogdan and Eva Ryrstedt, "Marriage in
Swedish Family Law and Swedish Conflicts of Law," Family Law
Quarterly 29 (Fall 1995): 675-76.
[6] See: Bradley, "Marriage, Family, Property and
Inheritance in Swedish Law," pp. 373-74.
[7]
Ibid., pp. 373-78.
[8] Alva and Gunnar Myrdal,
Kris i
befolkningsfrågan (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1934); and more broadly:
Allan Carlson, The Swedish Experiment in Family Politics: The
Myrdals and the Interwar Population Crisis (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction, 1990): chapters 3-5.
[9] Yvonne Hirdman, "The Importance of Gender in the
Swedish Labor Movement, Or: A Swedish Dilemma." Paper prepared for the
Swedish National Institute of Working Life, 2002: 3-5; and Ann-Katrin
Hatje, Befolkningsfrågan och välfärden: debatten om familjepolitik
och nativitetsökning under 1930-och 1940-talen (Stockholm:
Allmänna förlaget, 1974).
[10] Dorothy McBride Stetson and Amy Maxur, eds.,
Comparative State Feminisms (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, 1995): 241.
[11] Ron Lesthaeghe, "A Century of Demographic and
Cultural Change in Western Europe: An Exploration of Underlying
Dimensions," Population and Development Review 9 (1983):
429.
[12] Hirdman, "The Importance of Gender in the
Swedish Labor Movement."
[13] From: Jane Lewis and Gertrude Åström,
"Equality, Difference, and State Welfare: Labor Market and Family
Politics in Sweden," Feminist Studies 18 (Spring 1992):
67.
[14] Alva Myrdal, et al.,
Toward
Equality: The Alva Myrdal Report to the Swedish Social Democratic Party
(Stockholm: Prisma, 1972 [1969]): 17, 38, 64, 82-84.
[15] Fariborz Nozari, "The 1987 Swedish Family Law
Reform," International Journal of Legal Information 17
(1989): 219-20; and Bradley, "Marriage, Family, Property and Inheritance
in Swedish Law," pp. 378-81.
[16] Irene Dingledey, "International Comparison of
Tax Systems and Their Impact on the Work-Family Balancing," at
http://www.latge.de/ak tuellveroeff/am/dinge100b.pdf (11/05/2003).
[17] Anne Lise Ellingsaeter, "Dual Breadwinner
Societies: Provider Models in the Scandinavian Welfare States,"
Acta Sociologica 41 (#1, 1998): 66; Sven Steinmo, "Social
Democracy vs. Socialism: Goal Adaptation in Social Democratic Sweden,"
Politics & Society 16 (Dec. 1988): 430; and Maud L.
Edwards, "Toward a Third Way: Women's Politics and Welfare Policies in
Sweden," Social Research 58 (Fall 1991): 681-82.
[18] Annika Baude, “Public Policy and Changing
Family Patterns in Sweden, 1930-1977,” in Jean Lipman-Blumen and Jessie
Bernard, eds., Sex Roles and Social Policy: A Complex Social
Equation (Beverly Hills: SAGE, 1979): 171.
[19] Bogdan and Ryrstedt, "Marriage in Swedish
Family Law,"pp. 678-79; Nozari, "The 1987 Swedish Family Law Reform,"
pp. 220-23.
[20]
SAP Congress Minutes, 1972; p.
759; in Hirdman, “The Importance of Gender in the Swedish Labor
Movement,” p. 6.
[21] Anita Myberg, “From Foster Mothers to Child
Care Center: A History of Working Mothers and Child Care in Sweden,”
Feminist Economics 6 (No.1, 2000): 15-16.
[22] Hadas Mandel and Moshe Semgonov, “A Welfare
State Paradox: State Interventions and Women’s Employment Opportunities
in 22 Countries,” American Journal of Sociology III (May
2006): 1913, 1916.
[23] Hirdman, “The Importance of Gender in the
Swedish Labor Movement,” p. 10.
[24] Ulla Björnberg, "Cohabitation and Marriage in
Sweden--Does Family Form Matter?" International Journal of Law,
Policy and the Family 15 (2001): 352-53. Emphasis added.
[25] Björnberg, "Cohabitation and Marriage in
Sweden," pp. 350-62.
[26] See: Karl-Göran Bottwyk, “Polygamy in Sweden”
at:
http://www.nccg.org/fecpp/sweden.html (5/16/2005).
[27] See: Paul Adam Blanchard, “Insert the Word
‘Sex’ – How Segregationists Handed Feminists a 1964 ‘Civil Rights’
Victory Against the Family,” The Family in America 12
(March 1998): 1-12.
[28] Donald Allen Robinson, “Two Movements in
Pursuit of Equal Employment Opportunity,” Signs: Journal of Women
and Society 4 (No. 3, 1979): 42.
[29] See: Allan Carlson,
Fractured
Generations: Crafting a Family Policy for Twenty-First Century America
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2005): 96.
[30] Carlson,
Fractured Generations,
p. 48.
[31] See: Francis Fox Piven, “Ideology and the
State: Women, Power, and the Welfare State,” in Linda Gordon, ed.,
Women, The State and Welfare (Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1990): 251-64.
[32]
Griswold v. Connecticut,
381 U.S. 486 (1965).
[33]
Eisenstadt v. Baird,
495 U.S. 438, 453 (1972).
[34]
Planned Parenthood of Missouri v.
Danforth, 428 U.S. 52, 69 (1976).
[35]
Carey v. Population
Services International, 431 U.S. 679 (1977).
[36]
Boddie v. Connecticut,
401 U.S. 371 (1971). See also: Carl Anderson, “The Supreme Court and
the Economics of the Family,” The Family in America 1
(October 1987): 3.
[37] See: Mitchell Stevens,
The Kingdom of
Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
[38] See the 1998 SBC Resolution on the Family
Foundation
http://www.bsc.org/synod/resolutions/062_18.html.
[39] See: The First Presidency and Council of the
Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “The
Family: A Proclamation to the World,” September 23, 1995; at
http://lds.org/library/display/0,4945,161-1-11-1,00.html [20 February
2010].
[40] Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at a Presentation
Ceremony for the 1983 Young American Medals for Bravery, August 28,
194,” in Public Papers of the Presidents: Ronald Reagan, 1984
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1985): 1202.
[41] Ronald Reagan, “Remarks to the Student Congress
on Evangelism, July 28, 1988,” in Papers: Reagan, 1988-89,
p. 992.
[42] Ronald Reagan, “Remarks on Signing the National
Hispanic Heritage Week Proclamation, September 13, 1988,” in Papers: Reagan, 1988-89, pp. 1158-59.
[43] Reagan, “Remarks at a Luncheon with Community
Leaders in Chicago, Illinois, September 30, 1988,” in Papers:
Reagan, 1988-89, p. 1252.
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