This Noble Land (13 page)

I
n one of the planks in their platform for changing the character of America, the young Republicans in Congress and their colleagues on the religious right are spectacularly correct: the American family
is
in disarray and crying for help.

I am a devoted supporter of a constructive family life. In research for my books I have had to analyze the behavior of families dating back thousands of years and have been especially a student of family patterns in the United States. In the prehistoric period, insofar as we can reconstruct it, the family unit of a male, a female and their children had been established very early and was even then seen as the practical solution to the problem of how the race was to safeguard its future and ensure that infants would become responsible adults.

I am sure that some human aboriginals must have wondered why it was that so often in the animal kingdom a newborn infant could begin to function ably almost at birth, while the human child required about one and a half years to become minimally self-sufficient. Nothing can be more remarkable than the baby giraffe with its spindly legs able to walk erect the first day, or more mind-boggling than the newborn kangaroo, no bigger than a mite, who without assistance can make its way around its mother’s body to the comforting pouch in front in which it matures. But the
human young requires years of patient nurturing by both mother and father. The concept of the human family, for the purpose of providing care for children, has remained vital in our society.

I must assume that through the millennia the prototypical family existed and flourished in response to some deep human need. If it has persisted for so long, its worth has been fully tested, and I think it deserves our unqualified support today.

This chapter focuses on the American family as a worthy social agency in deep trouble, and on what political changes should be initiated to give it assistance. First, I discuss, as background, the characteristics of the American family starting in the early 1600s in New England and Virginia and continuing into the first half of this century. Second, the focus is on the assaults that have been made on the traditional family since World War II, particularly through changing sexual mores, alterations that have occurred in the traditional forms of courtship and marriage, the growth of nontraditional families, and the difficult problems experienced by older married couples. Third is the difficult question of what political steps should be taken to provide the family with additional support. I shall also digress upon a particular interest of mine: How can young women of superior training, character and skills find young men to marry? (The surprising success of recent motion pictures like
Little Women
and those based on the Jane Austen novels that deal with husband hunting prove that the subject is still of importance to young people today.)

T
he early American family.
In both New England, as in the Plymouth Colony, and in Virginia at Jamestown, the frontier family was almost rigidly defined, with each member assigned tasks that he or she had to perform without complaint. The father cleared his property of trees, a job requiring long hours and backbreaking toil.
He was also expected to build the log cabin to house his family. And when this was done, he had to till the soil and plant his crops. He commonly died in his late forties, an old, worn-out man.

The colonial wife worked equally diligently. Her tasks required less heavy physical labor but were just as exhausting as those performed by her husband: spinning wool into thread, endless sewing and patching by hand, churning milk to make butter, tending to household chores, planting and cultivating a garden, often assisting her husband to sow his fields with grain and harvest it when it ripened and, of course, raising the family’s children. She too died young in her early forties after bearing six or seven children, at least several of whom died in infancy.

The young boy and girl also had well-defined tasks; they helped their parents by doing various chores, such as chopping wood for the fireplace, learning to spin and sew if you were a girl, helping with the garden and, most demanding of all, mastering the school lessons on which their futures depended. At night, by the light of the fireside, they read either their next day’s lessons or one of the precious books obtained by their parents.

As the children reached age sixteen or seventeen, they became attracted to the young neighbors of the opposite sex, and by eighteen or nineteen the young people would marry and start families of their own. I have never seen a reliable study of how the young men and women who did not find partners in those early years of courtship existed in a frontier society. Their lot could not have been enviable, but in the early literature of our nation we do find examples of the unmarried aunt who remained with her sister or brother when either of them married, so perhaps that was the norm. But a good deal of active family planning and devising occurred in the effort to find a husband for the unmarried daughter or niece. I have a less clear picture of how the unmarried man survived.

So in the colonial family everyone knew his or her place and what was expected, and deviation was neither allowed nor forgiven. Inevitably there was deviation, as Nathaniel Hawthorne showed with such compassion in his novel
The Scarlet Letter
, in which Hester Prynne was caught in adultery and paid a terrible price for it. And there was always the risk for an older woman living alone that she would be accused of being a witch and condemned to be submerged in water after being strapped into the ducking stool or even be hanged.

In the course of my research on the settlement of Colorado I read scores of journals of the families who in the 1840s made the covered-wagon trek from New England or Pennsylvania clear across the continent to California or Oregon. The travail that this involved is staggering for the modern reader to imagine: broken wheels, dead oxen, cholera sweeping the entire trail like a plague, being snowbound in blizzards, diminishing food supplies and death en route. It was a wonder anyone made it to his or her destination, but most did.

Motion pictures and television, not satisfied with the dangers listed above, have added the inevitable attack by Indians in which the trekkers bravely fight off the savages. Pure bunk! The record is that almost never did the Indians attack a wagon train; they watched from afar. If the would-be settlers fired at them because they felt threatened, the Indians did retaliate, but never in large numbers or with much effectiveness.

Out in the West the general characteristics established by the colonial family persisted, for when the travelers reached their western goals, the husbands still had to clear the fields and build the cabins and the wives had to spin and weave and make a home. The children, too, had the same tasks their predecessors had been saddled with two hundred years before. Of course, crude machines were slowly being invented to help in everyday
work, but the basic, conservative threads of American family life were honored and firmly ingrained in American behavior. It was found to be a pattern that men and women violated at great risk.

This pattern proved so viable and productive that it prevailed through the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. In the 1920s, when I began to consider patterns of family life, I accepted the established form with never a question as to its efficiency as a way of ordering male and female relationships. I not only approved of what I saw but also became an ardent advocate of the system. My strong adherence to the traditional American family is curious, since during my early years I never lived in a house occupied by a husband or any other man. I was raised solely by women, and because I was aware of what I was missing I still feel that I was in some ways deprived.

A
ssault on the family as World War II begins.
With the dislocations imposed by the war, including not only the shipment of our men to Europe and the Pacific but also the influx of women into the factory workforce, old patterns of life underwent such radical change that the traditional family was assaulted from every side. Indeed, well-authenticated data from the Census Bureau and other equally qualified sources present a portrait of family life today that is vastly different from what it was only a quarter of a century ago.

The number of divorced persons in the United States has nearly quadrupled, from 4.3 million in 1970 to 16.7 million in 1993, representing 9 percent of all adults aged eighteen and over in 1993. One study projected that of every thousand marriages that took place in the United States in 1985, 516 would end in divorce, with the wife and sometimes the children being abandoned.
The proportion of men and women aged thirty to thirty-four who have never married has tripled since 1970. For women, the proportion has grown from 6 percent to 19 percent; for men, the proportion has increased from 9 percent to 30 percent between 1970 and 1993. Obviously, many American men have become afraid of marrying.

What is fueling the attack on the traditional patterns of family living can best be studied on three different levels, dictated by the ages of the participants. First is the radically changing sexual behavior of young people in the thirteen–twenty age group. Second is the altered courtship behavior of those in the twenty–thirty-five age group who are seriously looking for a mate. Third are the couples already married who face new problems in trying to keep their marriages functioning.

Assault on the family: the sexual behavior of youth.
I am shocked when I read reports based on thorough research that many American children are engaging in sexual activity in their earliest teens or even at eleven or twelve. Government data in 1990 show that 41 percent of all teens aged fifteen to seventeen had experienced full sexual participation. This premature adventuring does not necessarily lead to a satisfactory later married life, and the practice has become so widespread that I doubt it can be reversed.

The persistent pressures of our society, especially those advanced by television and advertising, provide such a constant barrage of sexual images and suggestive behavior that young people are invited to start their sexual lives at increasingly younger ages.

The shocking advertisements of one manufacturer of blue jeans for adolescents were such blatant invitations to engage in sexual behavior that the public was vocal in its outrage, and the ads had to be discontinued. But others took their place, providing a constant show of sexual titillation.

Society has become almost indifferent to the fact that babies are born to thirteen- and fourteen-year-old mothers, and that young fathers accept no responsibility for the child rearing.

Teenage pregnancy has become so common that schools across the nation have found it necessary to offer special classes for high school girls and even grammar school girls who bring their babies to school. Today’s young women beyond school age face no social ostracism if they have babies outside wedlock. Cohabitation is so common among all classes that illegitimacy naturally follows, and the added difficulty young women face in trying to find husbands makes it fashionable for women of strong character to have babies whether or not they have husbands. The insouciance with which attractive professional women have babies outside wedlock makes the practice seem almost the norm.