|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Families and the State: What's at Stake in Current Debates?
| Article
# : |
10382 |
|
|
Section : |
Modern Thought
|
| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1986 |
5,894 Words |
| Author
: |
Jean Bethke Elshtain
Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Centennial Professor of Political
Science and professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University.
Author of several books, she is the editor of The family in
Political thought and coeditor of Women, War and Feminism. She
is the author of over a hundred essays in scholarly journals
and journals of civic opinion. She has been a fellow at the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a scholar-in-
residence at the Bellagio Conference and Study Center,
Bellagio, Italy and is currently a Guggenheim Fellow at work
on an intellectual biography of the Addams. |
Over the past several years, the family debate has become more and more acrimonious. Whether the family is falling apart and is doomed unless we engage in a dramatic act of restoration or simply reconfiguring itself and such changes are often dislocating initially, depends upon the reading one gives the situation. For example: As more and more mothers go back to work, often when their babies are a few months old, are we witnessing a salutary act of individual choice and change or a sad commentary on the relentless individualism and materialism of American life? Stark opposites are posed. It is often difficult to carve out critical and political space between such warring parties as fundamentals who urge a return to the good--or at least better--old days of traditional family roles and, say, radical feminists for whom the old days are a bleak picture of female slavery in the phony guise of marital interdependence.
The debate really heats up in the matter of social and state policy toward the family. Those dubious about the family and its social relationships celebrate more intervention in order to shape the family in line with some abstract vision of what they believe it ought to be. Their worry is not family autonomy but social justice and control. Others, and they are a very mixed group, find nothing new and certainly nothing wholly benign about advocating policies that bring more and more people under the wing of client-provider relationships, hardly models of democratic equality. Family imagery figures importantly in our social and political symbols and slogans; permeates our most deeply rooted aspirations, fears, resentments and hopes; and runs like a rich current in and through American fiction. But we seem to have made it almost impossible for families to flourish. The crisis of the family has become a constant feature of contemporary social reality.
There was a time in America when the family was part of a larger network of kin ties and communal links. Communities and families were composed of intergenerational groupings. The family was imbedded in the community, yet extended itself out into the wider social network. This wider network, itself in part an extension of the family, also permeated each family's inner workings by helping to engender self-reliance and self-respect and to serve the emotional as well as physical needs of a family's children. Family members, for the most part, were born into, grew up, lived, worked, and died within their communities. Jobs were most often in or near homes and neighborhoods, though even before World War II demographic shifts were beginning to break up this somewhat idealized
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
