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For the workshop, "Faith and Challenges to the
Family" Organized for the Bishops of North and Central
America and the Caribbean by the Pope John Center
January 31-February 4, 1994 Dallas, Texas
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The "decline of the
family"--a phrase dismissed not so long ago as a canard of
the political right or as a uniquely "black
problem"--now has the statistical validation which passes
as the modern version of revealed truth. The bipartisan National
Commission on Children concluded in its 1991 FINAL REPORT that
the declining well-being of children in the United States could
be traced to adult irresponsibility toward marriage vows and
parenthood. More recently, Rutgers University sociologist David
Popenoe has shown that the family in America is in serious
decline in three areas:
-
As a
demographic reality, with family households decreasing in
size and as a percentage of all households and surviving
as groups for shorter times and for a shorter portion of
the average lifespan;
-
As an
institutional presence, with the average family unit
turning its last few functions (such as food preparation
and early child care) over to corporate or state
interests;
-
And as a
cultural force, with the claims of family life holding
diminishing value relative to the claims of "the
self" and of "the greater welfare."'[1]
A comparative look at family decline
in the United States, Canada, and Mexico shows both common
themes and revealing differences. Any effort to understand
"family decline," though, must logically begin with a
definition of "family." The one suggested by both the
anthropological record and the natural order becomes: a family
is a man and a woman bonded together through a covenant of
marriage to bear and rear children, to regulate sexuality, to
provide mutual care, to create a small home economy of shared
production and consumption, and to maintain continuity across
the generations.
Particularly in the United States,
popular perceptions of family strength and decline have been
strongly influenced by the peculiar social record of the 1950's,
the "Baby Boom" era. As we start, it becomes important
to separate this mid-20th century anomaly from long term trends.
The latter reveal that the family
finds a natural home in a culturally agrarian society, organized
on a householding economy embracing subsistence agricultural and
small-scale production. In this environment, production in the
household binds each family together as a "community of
work. ,[2] Gender roles are not in dispute, for wives
stand alongside husbands as coworkers in the family enterprise.
Children are welcomed into the family circle as potential
coworkers, as heirs to the family enterprise, and as a source of
security in illness and old age.
As late as the 1840's (and in some
regions much later), the United States claimed such a
social-economic structure defined by: the primacy of the
household economy ;[3] the sustained influence of
kinship ties and ethnic and religious communities over economic
life ;[4] the "child-centered use of land" to
perpetuate families on the Soil;[5] the continuing
power of intergenerational bonds, where "[t]he line was
more important than the individual [and] the patrimony was to be
conserved for lineal reasons; ,[6] and an abundance of
children, with the average U.S. women bearing seven live
children, and with half of the U.S. population age 15 or
younger.
This agrarian, householding social
order also predominated in Canada until the late 19th Century,
with particular strength in Quebec.
But modern industrialization and the
rise of the modern state worked jointly to undermine this
family-centered social order, beginning in the United States.
The rise of the factory, the office, and the impersonal employer
severed the place of work from the home, with vast consequences.
Relatively to the sweep of human social history, philosopher
Karl Polanyi labeled this one change "the Great
Transformation. ,[7] In historian John Demos' words,
"Family life was wrenched apart from the world of work--a
veritable sea change in social history." [8]Concerning
gender roles, this shift leveled the reciprocal, complementary
tasks of husbands and wives in household production, and threw
men and women into competition with each other in the sale of
their labor. Older children, as well, could forego obedience to
family and sell their labor to third parties. In short, the
autonomous, cooperative family changed into a collection of
competitive individuals. Infants, small children, and the infirm
had no immediate prospects for individual gain; the spreading
industrial system left their fate uncertain.
Judged even in secular terms, Pope
Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical RERUM NOVARUM [ON THE CONDITION OF
WORKERS] was among the most insightful early diagnoses of this
change, and the most creative blueprint for response. The
encyclical rejected the wage theories of both classical
liberalism and socialism, arguing instead for a third way,
resting on "the natural and primeval right of
marriage" and "the society of the household."
Appealing to the natural law, the document concluded that the
principle behind all valid employer-worker contracts was a wage
payment "sufficiently large to enable [the father] to
provide comfortably for himself, his wife, and his
children." [9] Virtually alone among social
observers of that era, Leo understood that a firm boundary must
be built between the authentic "socialist" economy of
families rooted in altruism, and the inevitable competitive
world of corporations and states, and that defining and
defending that boundary from intrusion either way was a critical
moral, intellectual, and social task.
RERUM NOVARUM termed the payment of a
living family wage to male heads of-households a personal moral
obligation, which Christian employers should fulfill. Writing
for an American audience fifteen years later, Father John Ryan
shifted toward state coercion as the means to this goal. As he
explained in his book, A LIVING WAGE: "The laborer has a
right to a family Living Wage ... because [it is] an essential
condition of normal life." Since Nature and Reason had
decreed that the family should be supported by its head,
"the State has both the right and the duty to compel all
employers to pay a Living Wage."[10] This implicit
cession of both individual and institutional Christian
responsibility to the state marked a striking departure from the
older Catholic tradition that emphasized the twin powers of
Church and state, each bearing its own particular duties.[11]
State authority, moreover, was a
two-edged sword. Summoned to save the family, it stood also as a
threat to family authority and to the family economy, with a
practical interest in family decline. In the United States, the
expansion of the state into hitherto private family matters also
began near 1840, with Catholic families as a distinctive common
target.
The "child saving" or
"reform school" movement, as example, took root in New
England at this time. Behind its official purposes of
"preventing vice and immorality" and "saving
neglected and abused children" lay another agenda: an
effort by the Unitarian Yankee elite to break the hold of newly
arrived Irish Catholic parents over their children, by
restricting the moral and educational claims of families.
So-called "child protection" laws gave birth, in turn,
to the legal concept of parens patriae, or "the parenthood
of the state," through which poor, immigrant children were
commonly taken from their parents without just cause for
incarceration in reform schools. [12] The
"common" or "public school" movement, as it
took shape in Massachusetts under the tutelage of Horace Mann,
also sought implicitly to release newly arrived Irish Catholic
children from the moral influence of "parents and priests.
,[13]
After 1900, the modern welfare state
grew only as it effectively displaced the family in fulfilling
the dependency functions: namely, the care of the young, the
old, the sick, and the infirm. While the social dislocations
caused by industrialization were used, in the beginning, to
justify the institutions of social security as a
"support" to families, the process soon gained its
own, perverse momentum. Indeed, the welfare state as an
institution clearly held an interest in family turmoil: the more
that families failed, the greater the demand for state services.
As Popenoe has concluded, the very existence of the welfare
state has compromised and weakened the institution of the family
and has seriously damaged religiously-[14]grounded
voluntarism and charity as well.
This joint and mutually reinforcing
advance of corporate industrialism and state authority came at
the expense of families, and the signs of stress were soon
evident. The birth rate tumbled by two-thirds. This was a time,
I might add, well before the introduction of modern
contraceptive methods or widespread birth control propaganda.
Nonetheless, U.S. citizens still found ways to avoid bearing
children, and to reduce average family size from seven to near
two children. During the same period, the U.S. divorce rate
began a measurable advance, while the propensity to marry
declined. In short, family decline in the U.S. actually began
near 1840, and continued at an uninterrupted pace for a century.
The same developments occurred in
Canada, albeit with a time lag of about forty years. As late as
the 1880's, Canadian fertility was at a high, pre-Transformation
level, and population growth rapid. But a process of family
deterioration had set in by 1900, as the same forces affecting
the U.S.--large-scale industrialization and state
centralization--moved north.
In Mexico, a strikingly different
pattern could be found: from independence in the early 19th
century through the revolution of 1910-17 up to 1940, this
nation was locked in a pattern of high fertility tied to a high
mortality rate, a situation linked in turn to economic
stagnation. Yet during the 1940-65 period, something quite
extraordinary occurred: economic output in Mexico grew by 7.4
percent annually from the mid-1940's to the mid-1950's, and by
4.3 percent annually from the mid-1950's to the mid-1960's,
figures exceeding the growth rates of both the U.S. and Canada.
More remarkably, this sustained economic expansion was linked
not only to a decline in mortality but also to an increase in
fertility, with the average number of children born per woman
increasing 15 percent, to 6.7.
This decidedly different course of
development rested on a far more family-supportive set of
institutional developments and policy choices. First, agrarian
reform after 1940 distributed nearly 10 million hectares of land
to Mexican peasants. While stimulating spectacular gains in
productivity and production, the program also resulted in the
resettlement of the majority of the rural population on
subsistence farms, where the family was the unit of both
production and consumption, and where the natural family economy
thrived. Extended rural families also served as the base from
which individuals were sent out in search of temporary
employment in urban centers or in the United States (through the
bracero program), meaning that economic mobility could be better
achieved through larger families.' [15]
Second, even in the cities, economic
growth occurred in a context of positive family integration. As
two development economists have explained this phenomena:
"foremost was the continuing importance of the family as a
unit of production and consumption. The family served as a base
from which to pool the fortunes of several potential earners
seeking temporary, low-wage jobs. ,[16] At the same
time, much of the new urban economic activity occurred in small
firms that were family-owned or -operated. Job allocation at
large firms also gave preference to family ties.
Third, Mexican public policy was
unusually supportive. The General Law of Population, adopted in
1947, contained measures to promote marriage and fertility. This
pronatalism drew further reinforcement from health regulations
prohibiting the sale and use of contraceptives and a criminal
code banning abortion.
Under this family-centered economic
and political regime, the Mexican population climbed from 19.7
million in 1940 to 48.3 million in 1970, a 150 percent increase
in the context of: a growing agrarian sector; an expanding,
family-oriented urban-industrial complex; a rising per-capita
income; a family-centered system of dependency and security; a
stable currency; high tariffs; and low levels of public debt and
foreign borrowing. In many respects, Mexico in this quarter
century had found a reasonably successful "third way"
of economic organization, avoiding the anti-family extremes of
both statist socialism and centralized capitalism.
In the United States, meanwhile, the
century-old unraveling of family life also came to a temporary
end, with a startling shift in all the indicators during the
1940-60 period:
-
the marriage rate climbed by 40
percent between 1940 and 1946, and remained high another
half-dozen years;
-
the divorce rate fell by over 50
percent between 1946 and 1960; the birth rate surged 60 percent,
while the average completed family size rose from 2.3 children
in 1940 to nearly 4 children in 1957.
What caused this dramatic break in
U.S. social history, where the negative family trends of a
century's duration reversed and the unique "Fifties
family" emerged in their stead?
The first factor I would cite was the
militarization of society. It was the permanent military
mobilization of the Cold War, not World War II, that helped
change America. Instead of demobilization after victory in 1945,
as had happened after all other U.S. wars, the U.S. sustained a
large peacetime standing military force throughout the 1950's
and early '60's, an unprecedented development. For a majority of
American males, military service became a common experience, and
the conformity and obedience learned there seems to have passed
over into conformity in the civilian domain, as so-called
"organization men" settled into family life; [17]
Another factor was the renewal of
"familistic" religion. The "fertility rise"
in the late 1940's was largely the consequence of new marriages
and a "catching up" on babies deferred by the war. But
something else occurred in the period after 1950: a deliberate
return of large families of four or more children. This was
particularly true among American Catholics. In 1953, only 10
percent of Catholic adults under age 40 reported having 4 or
more children, virtually identical to the 9 percent for U.S.
Protestants. By 1958, the Protestant figure was still 9 percent,
but the Catholic figure had more than doubled, to 22 percent.
More amazingly, these new large families defied a reputed law of
sociology: they were concentrated among the better educated,
with the greatest increase among Catholic women with college
degrees. The fertility increase among Catholics also was
positively associated with weekly attendance at Mass. In short,
it could be fair to label this real U.S. "Baby Boom" a
"Catholic phenomenon. ,[18]
Also sustaining the "Fifties
family" was a strengthened "family wage" culture.
Since the 1840's, as noted before, the labor unions, progressive
reformers, and Catholic theorists had sought to construct a
"family wage" economy, delivering a wage to male
heads-of-households that would, by itself, sustain a family.
Their proudest achievement was the liberation of married women
from toil in the factories, so that they might care for the home
and children and so prevent the full industrialization of human
life. To be sure, such a system did rest on intentional job and
wage discrimination against women: the accepted argument was
that women workers deserved only an "individual" wage,
since they usually had no dependents or worked only to
supplement a husband's wage.
However, U.S. wartime regulations in
1942 ended direct wage discrimination against women: equal pay
for equal work was basically achieved by 1945. But for another
25 years, "job segregation by gender" more than
compensated for this. Women workers crowded into "women's
jobs" that invariably paid less than "men's
jobs," and the so-called "wage gap" between men
and women actually grew. [19] As Nobel-prize winning
economist Gary Becker has shown, this sort of change should be
associated with more marriages and more births, which is just
what occurred.
Tax reforms in 1944 and 1948 also
created a strongly pro-family U.S. tax code. While marginal tax
rates were high, the personal exemption was set at $600 per
person, roughly 18% of median household income. In effect, the
progressivity of the Federal income tax was being offset by
family size. Congress also introduced "income
splitting" in 1948, giving a strong incentive to marriage
and placing a real financial penalty on divorce. [20]
Meanwhile, housing subsidies for
families grew dramatically. Tax benefits included the exemption
of both imputed rent and mortgage interest from income taxation.
Subsidized VA and FHA loans were restricted by custom and
regulation almost exclusively to married-couple families.
INTELLECTUALS lent their support to
the "Fifties family," as well. Harvard University's
Talcott Parsons, the era's most influential sociologist,
celebrated the "upgraded" family system of the 1950's,
which he called the "compassionate family," focused on
the "personality adjustment" of adults in the suburbs. [21] In the field of psychology, John Bowlby set the
tone by stressing the importance of a full-time mother for
children, particularly [22]infants. And the discipline
of Home Economics reached the peak of its influence, in the
effort to give content to the title, "household
engineer." [23] Finally, this family system
generally enjoyed popular reinforcement, in film and television,
and in mass magazines such as LIFE, THE SATURDAY EVENING POST,
and LADIES HOME JOURNAL.
In Canada, related external
developments--supplemented by the creation of a universal child
allowance--did not produce exactly similar results. For example,
the fall in the overall Canadian birthrate did not reverse in
the 1950's: it simply held steady for about ten years, before
continuing its downward course. Meanwhile, the fertility of
Catholics in Quebec actually fell. By 1962, Quebec's average
completed family size was 3.6 children, lower [24]than
that of all Canada (3.8) or even of Anglo-Protestant Ontario
(3.7). These developments in Canada point to the peculiarity of
the U.S. "Baby Boom" experience, and its linkage to
special circumstances not capable of reproduction in other times
and places.
Indeed, the critical point here is
that the reorganized U.S. family of the 1950's--whether in the
sociologists' image of "an organization man" married
to "a household engineer" in a "compassionate
marriage" focused on "personality adjustment" in
the suburbs or in the alternate image of the modern large
Catholic family--was a special, and partially successful effort
to restore family living in a modern, industrial environment.
But it was also fragile and time-dependent, resting on an
unusual ideological mix that cannot be recreated. Indeed,
virtually all of the forces behind the restored U.S. family
collapsed in the 1960's, and what we now call the
"traditional family" dissolved, like a sand castle
caught in a rising tide.
Statistics from the Sixties and early
Seventies tell the tale:
-
The marriage rate for women, ages
20-24, fell a stunning 55 percent; the divorce rate soared by
125 percent;
-
meanwhile, the U.S. birth rate
tumbled 46 percent; even among those births which still
occurred, a steadily rising proportion were
"out-of-wedlock": by 1993, over 30 percent.
What lay behind this rapid collapse
of the "traditional family" of the 1950's? (or, viewed
another way, this return with a vengeance of the long term
trends?):
To begin with, the conformist
America, rooted in a patriotic militarization of society, was a
casualty on the rice paddies of Vietnam.
More importantly, Christianity failed
in its family-sustaining tasks. Not only did sermons on
"chastity" and "fidelity" disappear from
Protestant pulpits. But "Mainline" Protestant
leadership also went on the attack, with a National Council of
Churches panel in 1961 labeling marriage an "idolatry"
and embracing the "sexual modernist" agenda of
opposition to population growth, readily available abortion, and
the promotion of contraception. [25] The Roman Catholic
laity, meanwhile, grew disoriented after Vatican II, opening
fissures on family and sexual issues that have still to be
closed. Given the widely publicized divisions among theologians
over sexual issues, it appears that the laity simply followed
the easiest of several disputed paths of obedience. [26]
In their detailed study of Catholic reproductive behavior in the
state of Rhode Island, demographers Leon Bouvier and S.L.N. Rao
have traced the collapse of the unique "Catholic
Fertility" to the years between 1967 and 1973. Average
expected family size among Catholics fell from 3.3 to 2.8
children in that short period. Among Catholic women with some
college education, the decline was even more dramatic: from 3.7
to 2.7 children. Moreover, frequency of attendance at Mass no
longer proved to be related to fertility. Even the large family
ideal vanished. In 1967, 28 percent of "devout" Rhode
Island Catholics planned to have five or more children; by [27]1971, less than 7 percent did.
For a time, American Mormons--or
Latter-Day-Saints--seemed to be an exception here. While
fertility tumbled elsewhere in the U.S. during the "baby
bust" of 1965-80, the birth rate actually rose in
Mormon-dominated Utah, along with average completed family size.
Doctrinal constancy relative to [28]procreation and
the desirability of large families appears to have been the
cause of this divergence from the U.S. norm. However, after
1980, Mormon fertility began to fall, a shift apparently linked
to the flow of wives and mothers into the paid labor force.
Large families could no longer be sustained on one income, while
the two-career family could scarcely accommodate a large number
of children. [29]
Public policy changes further eroded
the 'Fifties family.' The addition, as an afterthought, of the
word "sex" to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of
1964, became by 1970 the chief tool in eliminating job [30]segregation
by gender, so ending the nation's informal "family
wage" system. Viewed philosophically, this development
marked the nearly complete victory of liberal feminists, who
emphasized the radical equality of men and women, over the
social feminists, who emphasized women's distinctions and unique
gifts.
From the Tax Reform Act of 1963
through the Tax Reform Act of 1986, Congress and the Presidency
dismantled the pro-family/pro-marriage tax code created in the
late 1940's, sharply increasing the relative tax burden of
married-couple families with children. Government welfare
programs, in effect, also transferred income from families based
on marriage to families created through "out-of-wedlock
births." Meanwhile, regulatory changes stripped federal
housing subsidies of their pro-marriage/pro-family biases, in
favor of "non discrimination." By the early 1980's,
there was even evidence suggesting that Federal housing
subsidies now encouraged divorce and discouraged children. [30]
A legal revolution also commenced in
the U.S. Courts, where the "rights" of individuals
triumphed almost completely over duties toward family and
community, a change summarized by labels such as "no fault
divorce," "children's rights," and "abortion
on demand."
During the 1960's, the leading
intellectuals turned on the suburban "compassionate"
family, labeling it "narrow," "distorted,"
even "fascist." As fear of global overpopulation
increased, U.S. political leaders mobilized support for
restrictions on fertility. The 1972 Presidential Commission on
Population Growth and the American Future, in effect, declared
war on the U.S. "three child family," with a tacit
anti-Catholic undertone.[31]
Finally, television began to explore
new avenues of comedy, starting with the widowed father of
"My Three Sons," quickly reaching complex cohabitation
in "Three's Company," moving to "Murphy
Brown", and then well beyond. It is now conventional for
the U.S. networks to depict girls in their early teens with the
sort of carnal knowledge once confined to prostitutes.
Similar developments affected Canada,
this time with the same results: mounting family instability;
fewer marriages and more divorces; dramatically fewer children;
and rising levels of social disorder.[32] Signs of
decline were particularly sharp in Quebec, where, according to
one study, "the influence of the Catholic church declined
drastically and strict adherence to Catholic prescriptions was
no longer the norm." At the same time, the structure of
French Canadian education shifted from "a traditionally
classical one" to "a professionally oriented
one," a change directly linked to family decline.[33]
In Mexico, meanwhile, the political
class brought an arbitrary end to that nation's unique
family-centered economic order, leaving unresolved the question
of whether it could have continued. Starting in the late 1960's,
the government sharply cut back land distribution to family
farmers, and restructured land sales, subsidies, and regulations
in favor of industrialized farms. Under pressure from the World
Bank and other external authorities, the Mexican government
rejiggled incentives elsewhere in favor of large, multinational
corporations. As a result, "small, family-based enterprises
lost ground to the extending reach of large modern
businesses."[34] Again under internationalist
pressures, a Constitutional amendment and revisions of Mexico's
Law of Population took effect in 1973. They aimed at limiting
population growth through state birth control propaganda and
expanded contraceptive usage. The construction of thousands of
state health clinics proved to be the Mexican government's
principle weapon in this quasi-war against rural fertility.
Sterilization emerged by 1982 as the leading form of Mexican
contraception, with 70 percent of sterilizations being performed
in state clinics or hospitals. At the same time, authorities
extended government old-age pensions to rural communities,
consciously aware that this action would "encourage
fragmentation of the extended family.[35]
The results of these changes were
dramatic. The nation's crude birth rate tumbled 38 percent
between 1970 and 1988. The proportion of married Mexican women
using contraception climbed from 29 percent in 1976 to 48
percent a mere six years later. Evidence also showed that the
introduction of state old-age pensions in rural Mexico had
"a significant negative effect on fertility. ,[36]
Massive permanent emigration to the United States began in the
late 1960's, further disrupting extended family bonds. In the
end, Mexico followed the lead of the United States and Canada in
favoring the expansion of the international corporate sector and
the state, at the expense of a family based economy, community,
and nation. In a sense, the recent ratification of the NAFTA
Treaty sealed this common rejection of a family-centered
"third way" on the North American continent.
What, then, are the common lessons
from these tales?
The first is that the family unit can
never be "at home" in an individualist, industrialized
society. Tension between the "corporate state" and the
"family state" will always exist. As G.K. Chesterton
put the matter, earlier in this century: "From its first
days in the forest, [the family] had to fight against wild
monsters; and so it is now fighting against these wild machines.
It only managed to survive then, and it will only manage to
survive now, by a strong internal sanctity."[37]
The second lesson is that
governmental policy, particularly through differential taxation,
can have a positive influence on family living. More common,
though, are efforts by the "abstract" state to
suppress its principal rival, the family, and the negative
consequences--unintended or not--of state intervention to
"save the family."
The third lesson is that religious
and cultural structures are the most effective tools in crafting
"shelter" for family living in a competitive,
industrial sea. In its adoration of a 'Holy Family' of child,
mother, and father, Christianity offers a unique power and
meaning to the human family of father, mother, and child.
Religious devotion, however, cannot serve as a substitute
economy. The family's survival depends as well on a rightly
ordered economic sphere, a "third way" where the
autonomous family unit is protected from the misapplication of
both market-driven individualism and coercive statist
collectivism.
The fourth lesson is that a
"third way" in a modern, progressive environment is
possible. The Mexican record between 1940 and 1965 suggests that
a family-centered system resting on agrarianism, small-scale
enterprise, private forms of security, and an openness to
children, can be successfully reconciled with a market system
based on free exchange and real per-capita economic growth. On a
much more limited scale, the successful expansion of the Amish
community in the United States (from 5000 members in 1900 to
150,000 members in 1990) and of Hutterite communities in the
U.S., Canada, and Mexico offers a similar lesson: we are not the
captives of blind economic forces; we do have real alternatives
to the centralized "corporate state" that are
compatible with liberty and family life.
In this disordered time, it falls to
the larger religious bodies to take up the task of rebuilding
family-centered communities, where the natural human economy can
operate again. Means include: parish-level support for family
scale enterprises; the creation of Christian communities linking
faith, work, and residence; new emphasis on defending and
expanding Christian rural life; and a recommitment by councils
of Christian employers to their personal moral obligation to pay
a living family wage.
Relative to individuals, lay men and
women are both called home to rebuild families with an inner
sanctity, to relearn the authentic meanings of the ancient words
husbandry and housewifery, and to exercise the natural family
functions of education, the care of the weak, charity, and a
common economic life.
FOOTNOTES
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