Family Values question

Leighton left a question in my comments. Streak's Blog: I think I get depressed every January: "So here's a question for someone who actually studies history: at what point did an obsession with marital fidelity become part-and-parcel of the family values package? I want to say it's been around since at least the fifties, but I don't really know. One thing that makes me wonder is that quite a few of my conservative peers who are roughly as old as I am were first 'politically awake' during the Clinton administration, and their preoccupation with adultery is one very clean, convenient a posteriori way to demonize Clinton and idolize Bush. They sure as hell didn't care what married people do on their own time before the Lewinsky fiasco."

Good question and one I will continue to mull over. Family values is a touchy issue and I think you are right that this current obsession is a relative new thing. The emphasis on fidelity has a long life, however, and I don't think that many of the religious right just realized they didn't like adultery when it was Clinton. No doubt, they have been rather selective in who they demonize--even going after some people for being divorced, but loving Ronald Reagan. But they made family values a big deal well before Clinton--remember the Gary Hart fiasco?

But the broader question of family values is an interesting one. I remember one historian commenting that when students asked her about family values, she responded with "depends on which family you are talking about." Conservatives like to see family as a concrete and consistent institution that is only recently under attack, but it--like every other institution--is constantly in flux. Flash back 200 years and marriage is more an economic than emotional union. Kids are a potential work force, and are hardly doted on.

I think the modern obsession with family starts during the Progressive era. It is during this time that immigration, industrialism and the advent of some modern birth control produced a tremendous anxiety about family. It is here, I believe, that we see the disparaging of feminist womens as being gay. Normal women were not supposed to question the family. New industrial occupations and economic fluxuations push more and more women into the work force and change the way that economic unit begins to function. The 1950s increases all of this anxiety, by increasing the emphasis and obsession with children and their nurturance. Suburbs allow the facade of moral values families, but we see the tremendous upsurge of self-medication during this same decade. Alcohol and new tranquilizers become used in huge numbers by these suburban women.

The 1960s probably just exacerbates all of this. For many conservatives, the conflation of anti-war, counter-culture, racial hostility, and feminism represent all that is bad about America. Many of them have been working to reverse those changes ever since. The irony is that both Clinton and Bush represent that decade.

I am not sure this answers any of Leighton's question. As he notes, many of his contemporaries are responding to the more recent iteration of this family values crusade. I think the conservatives have triumphed in many ways, simply by repeating some things until they become accepted as truth. They repeat over and over that the American family is under attack, but rarely if ever question either their assumption or their possible contribution.