All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s. Robert
Self. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012. pp. Vii, 518, photographs, bibliography,
notes, index. Cloth $30.00).
Reviewed by Chris Ramsey
Robert Self's new monograph
is an ambitious attempt to interweave the histories of postwar liberalism,
conservatism, gender, and sexuality from the Lyndon Johnson administration to
the present day. Self argues that white,
patriarchal assumptions about the postwar family headed and provided for by
husbands dictated the nature of the programs of the Great Society, an ethos he
terms “breadwinner liberalism.” The
numerous social movements of the late 1960s, including the New Left, the
antiwar movement, black power, gay rights, and feminism all “challenged the
liberal version of the idealized nuclear family by demanding rights not
imagined by existing legal and political institutions” (5). While all these movements scored notable
victories by the mid 1970s, particularly in the realm of privacy, their efforts
to provide alternatives to the dominant social norm of the lone male provider
galvanized an anti-feminist, conservative resistance that saw the sanctity of
the family – and the nation's morality – as under siege. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the
New Right created a more exclusive definition of the male breadwinner ideal,
one buttressed by traditional conservative principles of free market ideology,
fundamentalist Christianity, martial readiness, and heterosexuality. Self presents a stimulating, but also
convincing, thesis through meticulous research, nuanced analysis, and clean
prose. By incorporating gender and sexuality with the traditional political and
economic narratives of the modern United States history, All in the Family
is a welcome addition a growing body of scholarship that challenges the notion
of the postwar conservative revival as a mere backlash to the social welfare
state and civil rights.
The first three chapters of All
in the Family evaluate how the Left attacked the “core norms of
masculinity” (8) that served as the basis for the model liberal father during
the late 1960s. The Johnson
administration targeted young men for its antipoverty programs in order to
groom them for a future of household
leadership based around an idealized form of white fatherhood. Women academics and unionists criticized the
state for not formally acknowledging the growing contributions of a wife's
labor and wages to a family's sustenance.
Black power activists, most notably Huey Newton and Malcolm X, advocated
for a more self-reliant black manhood and fatherhood instead of programs that
chastised African-Americans for not modeling themselves after white
families. Conservatives used the
struggle to define the American family between leftists and mainstream liberals
to attack the welfare state, pointing to the Moynihan Report as proof that
Johnson's policies encouraged a pathology of black male abandonment. For proponents of breadwinner liberalism,
military service as an important crucible for turning boys into responsible
men, and Self notes that the Johnson administration revised draft standards to
force a disproportionate amount of urban black men to fight in Vietnam
(52). Consequently, antiwar activists sought to redefine American
masculinity by elevating draft dodging to a civic duty that led to its own
sexual award (“Girls say yes to boys who say no”). Self also describes how gay men challenged
the breadwinner ideal by protesting the notion that heterosexuality was a
prerequisite to citizenship and respectability, through the courts, their own
print culture, and the public sphere (the Stonewall Rebellion).
Self rightfully points out
that breadwinner liberalism rested on prescribed women's roles, social standards that idolized domesticity at
the expense of educational attainment or careers. Although race, class, ideology, and sexual
preference kept the feminist movement splintered, Self states that the movement
successfully “advanced women's position in the marketplace” (106). Unfortunately, the relative disunity, combined
with conservative entrenchment, meant efforts to address the gross structural
inequalities that plagued the poor and minority women failed. In part two, Self uses the example of the
women's movement to emphasize one of the book's critical themes: the debate
over the meaning of the family and citizenship in the past four decades
affirmed an individual's privacy and choice at the expense of socioeconomic
parity. American courts upheld “negative rights,” particularly an individual's
freedom from governmental restraint, yet these same legal institutions rarely
addressed “positive rights,” which Self defines as using the government to
guarantee that discriminated or disadvantaged groups can effectively exercise their
personal liberties. Self concretely
elaborates on this line of thinking in the fifth chapter about reproduction
politics. While feminists successfully
fight for the right for women to have legal abortion and greater control over
their bodies, anti-feminist women and conservative politicians repeatedly check
attempts to provide federal funding for abortion procedures. Left to the dictates of the free market, only
women who could pay for an abortion could actually use the legal protections
afforded by Roe v. Wade.
Self then describes the
inability of the Democratic Party to synthesize the efforts by leftist social
movements to formulate a more inclusive version of the liberal family. As a result, while formerly marginalized groups
on the Left – African Americans, women, homosexuals, and students – made their
voice heard at the 1972 Democratic National Convention, the only thing held in
common was ambivalence about McGovern's nomination. Worse, the heightened visibility of these new
constituencies alienated the Democratic Party's traditional base: white, male,
blue collar, Catholic union workers, whose noticeable lack of enthusiasm
contributed to McGovern's landslide defeat to Richard Nixon. Well before the “Reagan Revolution,” Self
argues that conservatives exploited the Democratic Party's new vulnerability on
the family to devastating effect in the late 1960s and 1970s. Evolving cultural mores that permitted men
and women to openly express sexual pleasure outside of heterosexual marriage
alarmed religious fundamentalists and right-wing voluntary associations such as
the John Birch Society. As early as
1968, the John Birch society launched a decency movement that sought to ban sex
education in public schools on the basis that it interfered with “the family's
moral responsibilities and rights...a government invasion of the private family
sphere” (200). The Nixon
Administration's law and order mantra extended to the family, viewing the New
Left, black power, gay men, lesbians, and feminists as emblematic of a
deteroriating democracy that only could be corrected through a stricter
upbringing that stressed faith and traditional values.
Self emphasizes that the
transformation of “breadwinner liberalism” to “breadwinner conservatism” was
not only engineered from the top – the
New Right would have been impossible without robust grassroots support. The Equal Rights Amendment and the legality
of abortion mobilized anti-feminist housewives across the nation to create organizations
that pledged to defend traditional motherhood in order to save the family. Several years before the prominence of the
Moral Majority, groups such as Women Who Want to Be Women invoked Biblical
justifications for upholding traditional gender roles and patriarchy. Anti-feminist leaders, most notably Phyllis
Schlafy, linked the “rights of parents” to the conservative principle of small
government by accusing feminists of wasting tax payer money to ruin families
(313). Self argues the appeal of
breadwinner conservatism transcended regions: even the Deep South re-calibrated
their opposition to civil rights by appealing to patriotism, God, and the
family instead of violent racial antipathy.
Self states that the growing ability of the Right to define the
normative American family sealed the fate of liberalism in the Democratic Party
by 1976: President Carter moved the party rightward by ignoring feminist
demands, reducing government expenditures, and embracing neoliberal economic
polices. By the end of the decade, the
emergence of national evangelical political activists such as Jerry Falwell and
Oral Roberts, concerned that an expansive federal government limited their
quest for patriarchal Godliness, spread the message of breadwinner conservatism
through their congregations in mega churches, on radio airwaves, and on
Christian television programs.
The election of Ronald
Reagan, if not a true revolution, placed feminists and other liberals on the
defensive. This limited the
possibilities for political action on the left: American feminists spent much
of the past three decades working to preserve the personal freedoms they won
during 1960s and 1970s but largely abandoned efforts to expand the social
safety net to allow for disadvantaged women to share in those freedoms. Although the Right has not gotten everything
they wanted – such as the Human Life Amendment – they successfully made many
Americans scrutinize and question the necessity and extent of government
services in every-day life through appeals to family values. The virtuous white, Christian, family of the
1990s, led by a responsible, hard-working and dutiful father-provider, did not
require nor desire government assistance, only privacy from an amoral
secularist state whose meddling might squander their tax dollars on feminism,
abortion, and obscene sexualities.
Self points out the irony in the
current ideal of breadwinner conservatism: the transition to a deregulated
service-sector economy and growing socioeconomic inequality made such
households nearly impossible for most Americans, but the aspiration to become
such a family motivates many right-wing sympathizers living in the exurbs, the
South, or the countryside.
Self addresses a wide
breadth of topics in this book, chronicling how African Americans, feminists of
all races and classes, gays, lesbians, antiwar activists, and grassroots
conservative movements all competed to redefine the model American citizen and
family. Each of these topics are already
responsible for extensive scholarship in their own right, and Self's ability to
create a coherent central narrative incorporating all these movements over a
forty year period is a testament to his skill.
Self's consistency in providing complex, nuanced evaluations of these
variegated movements' struggle with breadwinner ideology constitutes the book's
greatest strength, especially given the scope of his study. For example, in the first chapter, Self
points out that one of the proponents of breadwinner liberalism, Daniel
Moynihan, and one of its notable critics, Malcolm X, both called for black men to exercise greater
influence and control over their households.
Likewise, Self's analysis of how both feminists and their opponents rely
upon a vocabulary of “choice” and “privacy” to achieve their legal and social
goals makes for compelling, thought-provoking reading. Self is also commended for keeping his
narrative focused on overarching thesis.
While the nature of his study lends itself to a dense book full of
numerous organizations, political leaders, legal cases, and events, Self
evaluates all of his myriad subjects' relationship to breadwinner liberalism
(or in later chapters, breadwinner conservatism) at the end of each
chapter.
The book's shortcomings are
minor. At rate times, Self's terminology
creates ambiguity. For instance, Self
argues that “ordinary women” contributed to the change in American sexual
attitudes, a category he invokes multiple times throughout the chapter on the
evolution of sexual culture, but he never clearly defines who an “ordinary
woman” was in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Furthermore, academic audiences might quibble with the book's broad
focus: scholars who specialize in the history of feminism, civil rights,
sexuality, liberalism, or conservatism might become frustrated in the wayAll in the Family overlooks
the research in the past twenty years that delineates all of these movements'
deeper roots.[1] In fact, any reader hoping for Self's take on
relevant historiographical debates will be disappointed: there is no place in
the book reserved for such a discussion.
Finally, despite the title, most of the book is dedicated to chronicling
the evolution of the breadwinner ideal during the 1960s and 1970s; readers more interested in post-Reagan
developments may be disappointed.
The publication of this book
is timely and invites discussion on whether or not the recent presidential
election represents a reversal of the trend Self identifies. Barack Obama's re-election means a black
family continues to serve as the First Family for the United States, and the
critical and commercial success of shows such as Modern Family
represents a wider acceptance of “alternative” (inter-ethnic and gay)
households. Likewise, a new wave of
successful of gay marriage referendums in Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota also
undermines the breadwinner ideal that fueled the New Right and the center-right
consensus. All in the Family
provides valuable historical context to help any reader, academic or not, to
process and understand the ongoing evolution of the American family and its
crucial place in the nation's political consciousness.
[1] A brief sampling of these wider
historiographies on liberalism, feminism, and sexuality: Thomas Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics:
Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North,
1940-1964,” Journal of American History Vol. 82 No. 2 (Sept. 1995):
551-578; Chauncey, George. Gay New
York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of a Gay Male World, 1890–1940
(New York: Basic Books, 1994); Rupp, Leila and Taylor, Verta. Survival in
the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945-1960 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Chris Ramsey is a Ph.D.
candidate in United States History at Loyola University of Chicago. His
research interests focus on race, gender, and ethnicity in postwar urban
America, and his dissertation (in progress) studies the evolution of white
attitudes to racial attitudes on the Southwest Side of Chicago from the end of
World War II through the election of Mayor Harold Washington in 1983. He
can be reached at cramsey1@luc.edu.
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