For the past decade the battle cry of the right wing, in both religion and politics, has been; " return of Family values". Every Reform or Tory politician raises the banner of the Family as the solution to the social problems of their own creating. While the business agenda has been to make Alberta and Canada a lean and mean competitive economy modeled after the United States and wrapped in the rhetoric of laissez fair capitalism, free trade and survival of the fittest. The apologists for the ensuing unemployment, poverty and destruction of social programs hearken back to some golden age of the family as the solution to all our problems.
If the issue is declining education, the solution isn't better funding or ending cutbacks, the solution is the family, giving money to parents to fund their child's education. If John or Jane aren't doing well in school its because they aren't being taught traditional family values.
If there is crime and poverty its probably because of the insidious machinations of the left wing to steal children from their parents and put them into day care centers. If there is unemployment its probably because there are too many women in the workforce, or taking advantage of that insidious day care, and its all the fault of the government which has failed to support the Family.
The assorted Byfields of Alberta Report newsmagazine regularly lament the loss of family values and Christian morality as the basis for our current social ills. The various Tory back benchers echo this in the Legislature as do the braying followers of Preston Manning in Ottawa.
Canada and Alberta would be a better place if we all returned to the industrious traditions of family values. If we had these values, say its proponents, those lazy bums would get off welfare, the other lazy bums would find jobs and quit draining UI and women would return to their proper place; the home. But whose family values are these that we are assailed with in the Hansard, on the Talk Back radio shows and in the letters and editorials of the newspapers? Are these the family values of the First Nations? The extended families of Canada's aboriginal peoples? Are these the family values of the farm families of immigrant Canadians from before the depression? Are these the family values of the post war era and the nuclear family of mom and pop, two point five kids, a dog , a cat and a two car garage? Are these the family values of the extended families of recent immigrants who come from non European non Christian backgrounds? Are these the family values of the single mother or the gay family?
No this family is the social creation of the Canadian and American middle class. It is a family whose values are thrift, self-help, charity not welfare, pick yourself up by your bootstraps and get the job done, mom in the kitchen, the pleasant patriarchal father and the well behaved children out of the Dick and Jane reader. This family is a myth, a useful political tool of the right wing to blame social problems on us as individuals rather than blaming the capitalist system.
This myth arose in the 19th century and was deliberately created as both America and Canada began to develop their own indigenous middle class. Professor Stephanie Coontz in her landmark work covering women's, working-class and Black and Native American social history; The Origins of Private Life, clearly shows that there were diverse and different family structures in North America prior to the Industrial Revolution of the 1880's.
She begins her work looking at the First Nations and the role of the family in Native American culture. She then moves on to the Colonial period, and describes how prior to the American Revolution the family was the integral part of community life, that all members of the family maintained social roles that were reflected in society and the home.
After the Revolutionary War in America, the family changed, as did the nature of politics and community life. Women's roles began changing in the period of the Revolutionary war for the better, as did workers lives. In fact the development of democratic culture in the United States, hinged upon the idea not only of individual rights but of citizenship, or group rights. Foremost in the battles for greater citizens rights were active movements of women, artisans and Afro-Americans. These battles for greater recognition of workers, women's and blacks rights as citizens would coalesce in the American Civil War when women organized for abolition of slavery as well as for universal suffrage. As industrialization of North America challenged the traditional agrarian family and economy, greater emphasis was placed on ones community and political involvement as citizens than on the role of the family.
In fact capitalism itself was one of the main reasons that the 'traditional family values' disappeared. The market economy fosters individualism, an " I got mine Jack and I'm alright" attitude that is contrary to the social responsibilities of close knit families working together for the common good. As capitalism developed in larger urban areas, this lead to the collapse of the traditional farm economy as well as to the traditional crafts and artisan trades. The rise of new technologies such as sewing machines, lead to the end of small craft shoe making and textile industries that saw both husband and wife working together out of the home. Instead now unskilled workers who left the countryside for the city were forced to work in sweat shop factories on large scale machinery. As cheaper labour displaced the old crafts and trades, the family became displaced as well. Its roles changed as men, women and children were forced to eke out a marginal and impoverished existence in the new American cities.
But there were also those who profited from the industrialization. The increase production of cheap goods, increasing world markets for those goods as well as the growth and boom of the city life lead to the development of an native American Middle Class. As industrialization happened it created a change in the power structure between the new wealth and the old mercantile and land owning family interests. In fact in Lynn Massachusetts between 1820-1860, saw the biggest growth in entrepreneurs as the city changed from craft based shoe making to factory based shoe making. This would not be repeated ever again.
The creation of a new middle class of businessmen, landlords and merchants also meant that the social and gender roles in society changed. The expectations of the men and women and the work that they did and their roles in the family changed. Women not only were employed in greater numbers as a form of cheap labour, but traditional work such as being household servants began to decline. this is not to say that there were less women servants in the home, in fact there were an increasing amount of domestic workers being hired, but now their jobs varied. Instead of having a servant family attached to the traditional middle class family home, the new middle class sent their laundry out to be done, had a servant girl come to the house at set hours and do the house work, and had another do various other chores such as shopping or child care. Like the industrial society the middle class family began to demand that its workers become specialized.
As the new middle class secured its position in society and reflected the industrial change from which it arose and from which it benefited, it began to enunciate its own set of values. Charity versus welfare, self-help versus solidarity, thrift versus sharing, these values began to be preached in the pulpits and the press. As well women's roles were seen as being all important in what Coontz describes as the "Cult of Domesticity". Middle Class women were very busy, they were the overseers of an efficient household, they were the fore-women of a large staff of domestic servants, servants drawn from the working class. It is at this time that we begin to see both a religious revival and an increase glorification of the home in American culture. The middle class home as a safe haven from the world of work and the ideal of the gentle sex waiting there were part and parcel of the middle class response to the absence of fathers busy making a fortune in the outside world. Increasingly the middle class women left with time on their hands, began to engage in social reform and charitable work. The charitable work again reflected their values, that those that worked were shiftless and lazy otherwise they wouldn't be poor.
The working class family on the other hand developed its own gender roles and divisions of labour. "Working-class gender roles were not always as clearly divided, nor were they defined along the same lines, as middle class ones...Home remained a center of important productive activity and of mixed-gender leiseure activity for both men and women. the earliest working class taverns were often located in private homes and up through the 1870's much drinking remained rooted in the kitchen grog shops...Working-class men and women blamed the capitalist, not the woman, when married women had to work. Few derogatory comments about the lack of femininity of women workers, no matter how dirty or arduous their work, are to be found in working-class writings."
Men were expected to help take care of the house work and the children in working-class families. If a woman had to work the household chores were the mans responsibility when she was away. there were no servants for them. As capitalism went through its cycles of recession and depression, men would be put out of work, and their wives would pick up the financial slack. One of the demands made at this time was not only the call for an eight hour day but for a family wage. A wage that would ensure that the man could make enough to support his family, without the wife working.
Working-class family life reflected that pre-industrial ideals of community. While the middle class lived in closed isolated homes, the working class lived on the streets. The neighborhood and front porch were scenes of much socializing and communing in working class neighborhoods. Street fairs, markets and parades were common sights here, and what appeared to the middle-class observers as a tenement or ghetto was alive with the communal smells and sounds of a vibrant and boisterous cultural life. "The working-class pioneered what has become the modern split between personal life and work activities...In important ways, working-class personal life ignored time discipline, downplayed private accumulation and rejected the division of life into separate areas of work and play, effort and relaxation, competition and cooperation, amateur and expert. the divorce of personal life from work principles raised the possibility that working women could claim a share of personal life; and a mixed sex leisure culture could claim a share of personal life.."
This leisure time was often over drinks, and as Coontz pointed out earlier, part of that activity was the kitchen grog shop and the saloon. Ironically as middle class women and evangelical reformers fought to halt the spread of alcohol, working class women not only provided it, but used the saloon as a source of culture, holding meetings and dances and performing dramas in the working class saloons. During the day the saloons were used by the men as job sites, much like union halls are today, to check on what work was available for the day.
The leisure on the streets and porches and during the parades also showed less of a sex role division between working-class men and women than did the activities of their middle class counterparts. In fact there were less dividing working-class men and women in their social activities in this time in history than ever since. The later developments of women's only or men's only sports or recreational leagues are a development of middle-class culture of America in the 1920's.
" If working-class manliness meant, as in the middle class, the ability to work hard to support a family, it also meant meeting one's responsibility to the labour movement and standing up for workers rights. If working-class womanliness meant- as in the middle class- being a good wife and mother, it could also mean being a dedicated 'union girl'. The female members of the New York Knights of Labor, in a nice blend of gender and class solidarity, passed this resolution:...whenever the Knights of Labor girls went to a picnic or ball they were to tell all the brother Knights that none of the latter were to walk with a non-union girl in the opening promenade so long as a union girl was without a partner. Should any Knight violate this rule, all the girl Knights are to step out of the promenade and boycott the entire crowd."
The Origin of the Family , as Frederick Engels pointed out
over 100 years ago, is in private property. To understand the
different kinds of families, and their class nature it is important
we understand their property relations. There are no neutral family
values. All values and roles reflect the very material reality
from which they originate and which they reproduce. The so called
"traditional family values" being extolled today are
the middle class values of Dickensian world of dog eat dog. These
are not, and never have been, the values of the working class.
Our values reflect the traditions of mutual aid and solidarity,
values that are not found in the world of high finance or the
back benches of the Klein Government.
Originally published in Labour News
Whose Family Values? The Clash Between Middle Class and Working Class Families is the work and sole property of Eugene W. Plawiuk.
All rights are reserved. Except where otherwise indicated it is © Copyright 1996 Eugene W. Plawiuk.
You may save it for offline reading, but no permission is granted for printing it or redistributing it either in whole or in part. Requests for republication rights can be made to the author at:
"ewplawiuk@geocities.com"
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