A temptation in our time–perhaps in every time–is the suppression of  uncomfortable truths in favor of unthreatening myths and pseudo-solutions.  We can see this process of distortion in contemporary talk about the relationship of the family to economic life.

On the political left, the dominant conversation on these matters today concerns so-called "work-family conflicts."  Authors such as Jody Heymann[1] and Theda Skocpol[2] argue that with most able bodied adults now at work, a serious "care giving deficit has emerged," with both children and the elderly abandoned to inadequate institutional care.  Largely ignoring the home, the government-centered solutions offered by these authors include more Federal subsidies for infant and toddler day care, longer school days and years, mandatory paid parental insurance, and greater funding for elder care centers.  Management professors Stewart Friedman and Jeffrey Greenhaus,[3] for their part, call for a different kind of revolution, emphasizing that "To create options that help make allies of work and family,…we need to change the traditional gender roles."  Women, they say, must be drawn more completely into "the brave new world of twenty-first century careers"; men must be retrained to perform more child and elder care; and children should be placed in "innovative summer camps" designed to create a new family order.

Among contemporary conservatives, meanwhile, there is authentic attachment to "the traditional family."  All the same, conservative efforts at welfare reform still aim primarily at putting welfare mothers to work and their children in state subsidized day care: peculiar ways to save already damaged families, I sometimes think.  And the 2000 Republican Party platform proudly embraces the once-radical feminist goal of full, government-enforced gender equality in jobs, promotions, and contracts: a process that in practice, as I will explain, has and will discourage marriage and reward divorce.

What is the truth about the relation of the family to the economy?  Any answer must start by underscoring the vast consequences for the family brought on by that event we call the Industrial Revolution.

Before the rise of modern industry, let us remember, virtually the whole of humankind lived in family-centered economies.  The family was the locus of most productive activity, whether it be on largely self-sufficient family farms or in small family shops.  In the United States of America, circa 1800, about 90 percent of the free population were farmers; most of the remaining ten percent were artisans or shopkeepers.  Even these town dwellers normally kept a kitchen garden, chickens, and a cow.  Husbands and wives relied on each other, needed each other, shared with each other, so that their small family enterprises might succeed.  They specialized in their daily tasks, according to their respective skills.  Marriage was still true here to its historic definition: a union of the sexual and the economic.  Life for these Americans was little different from that of the hundreds of generations that had gone before.  In a recent essay, anthropologist Hugh Brody ably captures the tone of this family-centric order:

A family is busy in the countryside.  Mother is making bread, churning butter, attending to hens and ducks…, preparing food for everyone.  Father is in the fields, ploughing the soil, cutting wood, fixing walls, providing sustenance.  Children explore and play and help and sit at the family table.  Grandma or grandpa sit in a chair by the fire.  Every day is long and filled with the activities of this family….The family in its farm is the family where it belongs.  A place of integration where work, play, childhood and age all share a safe and secure space. [4]

The industrial revolution of the 19^th Century tore through this settled way-of-life.[5]  There were large material gains, to be sure.  Industrial production, using an exaggerated division of labor, produced standardized goods at a cheaper price.  Inherited ways and community restraints that had limited options retreated before new understandings of freedom.

Relative to the family as an institution, though, the story was radically different.  Most dramatically, the family household was dethroned as the center of productive activity.  The process usually began with the making of cloth, as the home spinning wheel and loom gave way to water or steam powered machines in the factory.  But quickly, virtually everything once home-made followed: from shoes and furniture to vegetables, bread, and meat.  Cash exchanges displaced the altruistic exchanges of the family.  Meanwhile, education moved from home control to regimentation by the state in schools organized on an industrial model.  'Child protection,' another family function, passed to government as well. 

The formula was simple and precise: as the industrial sector grew, the family weakened.  By the end of the 19^th Century, the function-rich family had become nearly function-less.  The feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in her 1899 book Women and Economics, saw the tasks of the once productive family reduced even by then to only three: cooking; cleaning; and early childcare.  She saw no reason why these three functions could not be industrialized as well, and she proceeded–again, back in 1899–to lay out visions for a fast-food industry where people would pick up their precooked meals in bags at a window; for Kindercare at commercial day care centers; and for commercial cleaning services, a.k.a. The Merry Maids.[6]

The new industrial order also divided families into their component parts.  Mothers, fathers, and children were each pulled into the ranks of wage laborer, according to their different aptitudes.  Family bonds became an obstruction to this efficient allocation of labor.  The individual, standing alone, became the ideal worker.  In consequence, men and women, parents and children needed each other much less than before.  In the words of the English essayist, G.K. Chesterton: "[The family] is literally being torn in pieces, in that the husband may go to one factory, the wife to another, and the child to a third.  Each will become the servant of a separate financial group, which is more and more gaining the political power of a feudal group.  But whereas feudalism received the loyalty of families, the lords of the new servile state will receive only the loyalty of individuals: that is, of lonely men and even of lost children."[7]

Advertising became another vehicle for deconstructing the family economy.  It worked to whet appetites for more industrially produced goods, to imply that remaining forms of family production were inadequate, and to draw family members still further into the emerging world of consumerism.  Indeed, the measures of economic growth came to rest to a considerable degree on the steady transfer of ever more tasks from the uncounted household economy to the fully accounted industrial orbit.

Still, religious leaders, reformers, labor leaders, and working families themselves mounted a last great counterattack.  They sought to put barriers around the home, to limit the spread of the industrial principle, to preserve some domain of family autonomy in the new economic order.  This is how we should understand, I think, the old regime of the 'Family Wage.'  Under its sway, the industrial sector would be allowed to claim only one family member per household: normally the father, who would receive a family-sustaining wage in return.  Children would leave the factories, and so would their mothers, to return to their homes and salvage some aspects of family living: reproduction; child care; and shared consumption.  Under this regime, single women would obviously claim a smaller wage, suitable to one person.  Widows and orphans would be entitled to a public pension.  As the labor chieftain John L. Lewis explained the principle: "Normally, a husband and father should be able to earn enough to support his family….I am violently opposed to a system which, by degrading the earnings of adult males, makes it economically necessary for wives and children to become supplementary wage earners."[8] 

This "family wage" system, I need underscore, was also popular.  A 1936 Gallup Poll asked if wives should work if their husbands had jobs.  Eighty-two percent said "No," leading George Gallup to observe that he had finally "discovered an issue on which voters are about as solidly united as on any subject imaginable–including sin and hay fever."[9]

At a loftier level, family sociologists came to call this new system a "companionship family."  As industrially organized entities–corporate, governmental, and even charitable–completed their absorption of the old family functions of production, education, recreation, and child protection, the "companionship family" would refocus on psychological intimacy, democracy, and love, or–in the words from 1945 of sociologists Ernest Burgess and Henry J. Locke–on "the mutual affection, the sympathetic understanding, and the comradeship of its members."[10]

Did this model succeed?  For a time, roughly from 1935 to 1965, the answer could be yes.  The "companionship family," built on "the working father/homemaking mother" model, recovered a kind of division-of-labor. Men would focus on wage-earning-work outside the home.  Women would specialize in the "homemaking" tasks of child care, cooking, cleaning, and informed consumption.  As Nobel laureate Gary Becker has shown in his now classic work, A Treatise on the Family, a marriage represents real economic gain only when husband and wife specialize.  In pre-industrial, agrarian times, this specialization would normally follow that described earlier by Hugh Brody: the husband in the field; the wife in the kitchen, garden, and chicken house.  Under the "companionship model," a new balance was struck, one where the marriage would again create an economic partnership greater than the sum of its parts.[11]

This model took firmest root in the United States, encouraged in part by new governmental actions: tax measures such as "income splitting" for married couples that favored homemakers; housing policies that encouraged young couples to purchase suburban homes; and social welfare policies crafted during The New Deal that favored the "family wage for fathers/homemaking for mothers" model.[12]  The "family wage" paid to fathers actually expanded, evidenced in a widening average differential between men's pay and women's pay.  Driving this was a growing and largely voluntary job segregation by gender, where custom reserved the higher paid jobs for men with wives and children at home.[13]

And there were measurable results: where U.S. marriage and fertility rates had fallen sharply between 1900 and 1934, they began climbing again in 1935 and soared upward ten years later.  A marriage boom occurred; followed by the more famous "Baby Boom."  College-educated women, a hefty number with degrees in the popular field of "home economics," were in the vanguard of this family renewal, with their fertility more than doubling.  The creation of new family households occurred at a record pace, and the proportion of Americans living in married-couple households reached an historical high.  Between 1947 and 1960, the divorce rate reversed a hundred-year trend and steadily declined.  The average age of first marriage fell below 21 for women, another unprecedented figure, and these same women embraced domesticity and homemaking with purposeful commitment. The schools overflowed with children, and America seemed once again to be a youthful, child-centered, family-oriented land.

But love was not enough to hold this restored family-centered world together.  Challenges grew evident in the mid-1960's; ten years later, the American family system was in full-blown crisis.  The birth rate tumbled sharply, to but half its former level.  By 1976, U.S. fertility was 15 percent below the zero-growth level.  The divorce rate climbed 150 percent in the same period, while the proportion of births outside of wedlock soared.  The marriage rate also began a steady retreat, particularly among men and women under the age of 30. 

What caused this return with a vengeance to the family disorders of the early decades of the 20^th Century?  Part of the answer lies in the continued desire by the industrial sector for women's work, as a way to expand the labor pool and hold wages down.  In 1955, for example, at the very height of the "Baby Boom" and the restored domesticity centered on the suburbs, Columbia University and the Dwight Eisenhower Administration convened a Conference on the Effective Use of Womanpower.  Speakers at this meeting called for a new agenda for women's work, including increased formal education and training, the discouragement of early marriage, and the movement of women into scientific and technical jobs.  According to the feminist historian Alice Kessler-Harris, this meeting "reflected a major turnabout in official thinking….[S]lowly a new mentality was dawning."[14]

At the same time, neo-Malthusians who looked with horror at the baby-booming suburbs plotted "large-scale attempts to manipulate family size desires, even rather stealthily."[15]  The most effective way to increase the number of sterile adults, according to one Malthusian planner, was to move women into jobs that required geographic mobility and so made a stable home and community life impossible: jobs such as airline piloting, engineering, sales, and fire fighting.  Easy divorce would also create more sterile marriages, he reasoned.[16]

In addition, U.S. Federal policy shifted strongly against the child-rich, married-couple family.  The Kennedy tax cut of 1962 violated the principle behind "income splitting" and created the first of many "marriage penalties" in the tax code.  By the late 1960's, the Federal income tax burden was rapidly shifting away from corporations, unmarried individuals, and the childless onto the backs of married couples with children.  Indeed, the larger the family, the greater the growing tax burden.[17]

Meanwhile, a curious development occurred during passage of The Civil Rights Act of 1964.  As originally crafted by The Lyndon Johnson White House, Title VII of the Bill prohibited job discrimination only in the areas of "race, color, religion, or national origin."  Everyone knew that its overriding–if indirect–purpose was to help African-American men gain better jobs, so they might become more stable husbands, fathers, and breadwinners, and so reverse the rising tide of broken homes and illegitimacy in black neighborhoods.  Yet during the heat of debate, southern segregationists–the so-called "Dixiecrats"–offered an amendment to add the word "sex" to Title VII.  They hoped, it appears, to scuttle the Civil Rights bill through this measure; or, failing that, to redirect its focus from African-American men to white women.  Enough equity feminists were on the House floor that day to join with the Dixiecrats to pass the amendment.  While hearings were never held on the purpose or meaning of this change, the "sex" amendment survived a conference with the Senate and became law.[18]

For a few years, the import of the "sex" amendment to Title VII was unclear.  But in 1967, President Johnson issued an executive order that prohibited all forms of sex discrimination in hiring and promotion among federal contractors and mandated "affirmative," "result oriented" efforts.[19]  The most important effect was to make "job segregation by gender"–the foundation of America's informal family wage regime–illegal.  Characterizations such as "men's jobs" and "women's jobs" were quickly suppressed, and the consequences soon grew apparent.  The real wages of men declined by 30 percent over the next two decades; the real wages of women rose slightly.

Overall, family households now needed two incomes to hold their own, or to show some real gain.  And this meant, in turn, that the division of labor between men and women created earlier in the 20^th Century began to crumble.  As women moved into the paid labor force on terms equal to those of men, they became more like men in function.  In consequence, the economic logic of marriage blurred.  There would be little gain from a union of equals.  While "specialization" continued its forced march through the industrial sector, it withered within the home.  A falling marriage rate, rising divorce, tumbling marital fertility, and widespread cohabitation were the predictable results.

At a still deeper level, I would also underscore that the restored family economy of the celebrated 1950's, the family of the suburban boom, was actually fragile.  With rare exceptions, few family functions lost to the industrial order during the prior hundred years were brought home.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman's list of remaining family functions from 1899–cooking, cleaning, and early child care–still held for the most part in 1957.  Nothing had been added.  While erosion of the family's economic base had been slowed, for a time, it had not been reversed, and the suburban model of the 1950's was ill-equipped to withstand the ideological challenges it faced a decade later.  As the Kentucky poet and essayist Wendell Berry has put it in his book, What Are People For?:

[W]e must be careful to see that the old cultural centers of home and community were made vulnerable to this [industrial] invasion by their failure as economies.  If there is no household or community economy, then family members and neighbors are no longer useful to one another.  When people are no longer useful to one another, then the centripetal force of family and community fails, and people fall into dependence on exterior economies and organizations.

Turning specifically to education, Berry continued: "The local schools no longer serve the local community; they serve the government's economy and the economy's government."[20]

In short, I have a troubling and difficult message to deliver to you:  marriages will not be strengthened on a society wide basis, nor will families, unless the economic logic for entering a marriage and rearing children increases.  This might be called an economic "fact of life," which no amount of wishful thinking, self-deception, or mass-deception can overcome. 

Moreover, it is highly unlikely that something approximating the family order of the 1935-65 era could be reconstructed.  To phrase it mildly, there is no popular consensus today in favor of a "family wage" regime resting on job segregation by gender, which served as the economic foundation for that social order.  Just as important, the family system of those "Happy Days" was–despite some signs of strength–vulnerable, something of a one-generation wonder.  We need to do better.

Toward that end, I want to suggest three alternate strategies for renewing the family economy in the early 21^st Century.

The first strategy is the creative use of tax policy.  "Income splitting" for married couples should be restored as the law-of-the-land; measures adopted in 2001 to tackle the "marriage penalty" were but tentative first steps here.  The relatively new child tax credit, which will slowly rise over the next several years to $1,000, should be increased instead to at least $2,500 per child and indexed to inflation.  Currently phased out as children reach age 16, it should be continued through age 18.  The existing income limit for eligibility should be scrapped as well.  Meanwhile, the Dependent Care Tax Credit–now available only to working parents who place their children in substitute commercial care–should be transformed into a universal "preschool" credit fixed at an extra $2500, and available to all parents with children under age 5, most especially including parents caring full time for their small children at home.  If these tax cuts required off-setting "revenue enhancements," somewhat greater progressivity gained through extra tax brackets would be an acceptable "pro family" strategy; under "income splitting" it turns out, progressivity actually favors the married couple household.[21]  Taken together, these changes would encourage marriage, specialization within households, and the birth of children without violating the contemporary legal imperative of gender equality.

The second strategy for renewing the home economy is to bring important family functions, lost in the past to outside agency, back within the family circle.  The model for doing this is home schooling.  Found thirty years ago in only a relative handful of households, the number of home educated children in America today may be as high as two million.  This revolution in education began for varied reasons: some parents were disturbed by the regimentation of conventional schooling, based as it was on an industrial model; others by the moral vacuum growing within the public schools.  Viewed historically, though, home schooling represents the return of a vital family function to its natural sphere.  While the educational results for children can be impressive, the effects on the family as an institution are more important.  Once begun, home schooling inspires a complete reordering of family relationships.  Priorities change in profound ways.  Relative to the economic issues I have described, home schooling encourages and rewards specialization by husband and wife, which strengthens the marriages involved.  These "refunctionalized" families do, indeed, grow stronger as a result,[22] and they commonly look for other functions to bring home, such as vegetable gardening or a small family business.

The third strategy for renewing the home economy is the building of intentional communities.  To convey my meaning here, I want briefly to tell you the story of one such community.  In 1973, a pair of young Southern Baptist pastors from Texas went to New York City and started a storefront church in "Hell's Kitchen," one of Manhattan's seedier neighborhoods, characterized by prostitution, drugs, and crime.  Over the next ten years, these pastors pulled together a diverse congregation: white, black, Latino; lapsed Catholics and Protestants; the never-churched; and converted Jews.  They taught the virtues of self-reliance, and the members of their congregation turned, in succession, to home births, breast feeding, home schooling, home churches, and urban gardens.  In the early 1980's, they resolved on the need for more space.  About 150 moved to a beautiful Colorado valley.  Reaching into their Anabaptist heritage, they sought lessons from the Amish on how a community might master or control the pressures of industrialization.  Husbands and wives specialized in their daily work according to their gifts.  Learning to use work horses, they farmed some of their land as a group, not because it made good sense from a strict calculation of efficiency, but because it made them better neighbors.  About a dozen years ago, the community moved to central Texas, settling on land along The Brazo de Dios, or "Arms of God," River.  Taking the name Heritage Homesteads, this religious community now numbers about 700 on this land, with thousands of associates in the Austin area and Monterrey, Mexico.[23]  While the details will necessarily vary, this is a model of economic cooperation that can be, and is being, replicated in other places throughout our land.  There is one qualification, though: the American experience strongly suggests that only those communities resting on a vital religious faith have a real chance of success.

Creative tax policy; bringing vital tasks or functions home; creating intentional communities: it is in these ways that we might, in our time, succeed in taming the industrial impulse so that it becomes the servant, not the master, of families.

Endnotes: