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"Q&A" with Professor Edward
Thompson
By Jack O'Connell '81
 Professor
Ed Thompson of the sociology and anthropology department
is an expert in the sociology of the family. A recipient
of the A.H. Schubert Fellowship in the Humanities and Social
and Behavioral Science, Thompson served as research director
for Mental Health Rehabilitation and Research in Cleveland
before coming to Holy Cross
in 1977. Jack O'Connell recently discussed with Thompson the changing face of
the American family.
Q: Can you tell us how
you became interested
in studying families?
A: I took an undergraduate course called "Sociology of the Family," and it was
the turning point that convinced me to major in sociology. The issues were thought-provoking.
When I left Sacramento State to begin graduate work at Case Western Reserve University,
there were two strong graduate programs in the country that emphasized family
studies-CWRU and the University of Minnesota. At CWRU the faculty was internationally
recognized in three domains: family sociology, medical sociology, and gerontology.
Today I, too, work in all three of these areas, with my research examining family
caregiving and the experiences of elderly men as men. Simply answered, I evolved
to become a family scholar as a result of an impressive faculty member, Dr. David
Kent Lee. Studying families is an area that has remained intriguing. When I was
first studying family issues, it was the mid-'60s
and early '70s, and there weren't as many political agendas or scholarly debates.
Now it's one of the more controversial social institutions.
Q: What has changed about family over
the last few decades?
A: I think the biggest change is the "loss" of the ideal-that idealized family
of the '50s and early '60s that was experienced in the suburbs and visually homogenized
with the emergence of television. Television attempted to echo the wonderfulness
of everyday life during this "great American
barbecue" period, and it helped construct the idealized reality of what was in
fact a more diverse post-World War II America. With the economic boom of the
postwar years, a generation of families built suburbia. New towns blossomed with
single-family homes, lawns, and modern, new schools. Kids rode off on bicycles
to Frank Lloyd Wright prairie-style elementary schools or boarded bull-nosed
yellow school buses. The multi-family homes and multi-storied brick schools were
back in the cities. What also happened was the redevelopment of what family sociologists
call "separate spheres." Men were able to meet the expectation to be successful
in the work force and to retake ownership of the public domain. Women were, in
turn, expected
to be "at home" managing the private sphere, caring for the hard-working husband
and her children, and displaying his earning power.
But this wasn't a genuine picture. In truth, the 1950s had a huge number of blue-collar
families with wives working lower-end service jobs, a great number of poor families
who never saw the suburbs, and a separate, less equal dream if you were a racial
minority. The '50s had
two families-the idealized suburban family barbecuing with neighbors, and a larger
number of families that weren't making it. We ignored them. On
TV we saw Ozzie and Harriett, Father Knows Best, Life of Riley, Donna
Reed, and Leave it To Beaver. That kind of patriarchal family starts
to become extinct with the social changes that occurred in the '60s
and '70s, when the nature of the economy changed and the many different civil
rights movements altered the social world. Middle-class women with grown or nearly-grown
children wanted something challenging, and women more easily entered the labor
force as we shifted toward a technological/informational economy. Once you have
many more women participating in the public domain, suddenly you have real confusion
as to what it is to be a man. And, aren't
women "supposed" to be at home raising the children? And, men of color
are able to get union work! I think most people understand
the "loss" of the rosy-colored patriarchal ideal. It's certainly a conservative
ideal. No longer at the end of 30 minutes do the TV-families solve their private
troubles; rather their troubles are common problems and ongoing and part of everyday
life.
Q: What did all these postwar societal
changes do to our extended families? I'm thinking about
people knowing their grandparents, their aunts and uncles?
A: That's a great question. Face-to-face contact has been partly replaced with
telephone calls, and driving to a family dinner has become flying in for a
several-day visit. The generation of young couples of the 1950s moved geographically
away from their kin group by moving into the 'burbs, and they became socioeconomically
mobile, too. Fifties and '60s families were no longer located where their family
history was. They began to make their own traditions. Their children soon moved
geographically and socioeconomically, to college or employment in other states.
Research shows that elders are in frequent contact with their adult children,
but much less so with their grandchildren. Ironically, elders prefer maintaining
relations with friends than kin.
Q: What effect did mobility and the "cutting of tradition" have?
A: Well, that is the great debate. There's a family decline perspective ...
Q: Do you subscribe to it?
A: No, I don't. I subscribe to the opinion that family change
is inevitable. The perspective of family decline is a perspective
that looks at social change and, I think, is horrified by
the so-called "losses"-full-time mothers, fathers as sole
breadwinners, workplaces that ensure men a family wage.
Q: So it's something of a political
perspective?
A: I think, it's a moral/political perspective. Unquestionably,
it's
about the definition of what is "good." For a perspective that sees the
family in decline, our current condition isn't good.
Q: Can you give me some examples?
A: All right. If you look at our social world from a family
decline
point of view, you're going to see horrific outcomes more often than the new
opportunities change creates. The rise of divorce, for example, suggests that
marriage is not revered and a family is vulnerable to the chaos of individual
choice. Research augments this interpretation, because it points out that the
divorce rates are still increasing, and kids who grow up in divorced families
have more personal problems than others do and they do not do as well academically.
The decline perspective also can point out the number of children who are growing
up without a father present. Currently, about one out of three births is to unmarried
mothers.
Q: If divorce is our most prominent
deficit, what would be some of the positive sides of change?
A: I read a new statistic the other day that for one-half
of the new marriages, one of the partners had been married
before. To me, what that statistic means
is that people are still interested in marriage, enamored by the personal benefits
marriage provides, and they're going to retry it if the first marriage ends.
Q: So we're making adjustments? The institutions of family
and marriage aren't necessarily crumbling?
A: Not at all. Let me paint a very general example. In the
early 1900s, you typically hoped to outlive your youngest
child's exit from the home, and statistics
reflect one of two adults died before age 55. By the 1990s people can live
longer as married couples than people lived their entire lives! The number
of people who are in long-term marriages of 50 years and more is growing every
single year. Not surprisingly, then, the odds of divorce have increased markedly.
When you emphasize divorce as evidence of family decline, what you miss is
its historical and social contexts. I look at divorce figures, and they inform
me that people are not willing to remain in empty marriages or abusive ones.
But people are still very interested in marriage, and they remarry.
Q: What are some of your working definitions
of family? Clearly, we have a broader palette of definitions
today than
we did 40 years ago.
A: We built an idealized definition of one family in the '50s, which positioned
the father as the breadwinner and center of authority, the mother as the primary
nurturing person and responsible for providing moral direction. Today I think
the concept of family no longer underscores a singular, idealized interpretation.
We make visible the many types of families that were hidden in the '50s or '20s
but are readily visible in the '90s. For me, a "family" involving a remarried
couple who adopts children is as much a family as a gay father with a teenager,
or two working parents juggling family and work responsibilities.
Q: Can you tell us what factors are
necessary to call a unit of people a "family?"
A: First, I make a distinction between marriage and family.
For me, someone can be married, but without the presence
of children, it's not
a family. It's a marriage. Sociologists also make a distinction between
the "family of orientation," which is the family we grow up in and which gives
us a sense of history and identity, versus the "family of procreation," which
is the family we construct when we raise children. The notion of family ties
together these two units as well as the families we inherit when we marry. It
yields a sense of belonging and, often, a sense of security. Family has to do
with a sense of connectedness. Being together and connected
doesn't necessarily mean being physically together; rather it emphasizes emotional
togetherness. What you now can see is people maintaining their connection with
family members-e-mail and photo-streaming over the Internet assist family members
to remain engaged. I bet our Holy Cross students have more exchange with their
family than you and I had when we went to
college.
Q: Can there be a conflict between
marriage and
family?
A: Absolutely. Couples' needs for time and energy to maintain their marriage
generally conflict with children's needs. What is the priority? Whatever
the answer, there is a basis for a moral/political debate. Think about this,
too: Some people now want children without the marriage, and this certainly triggers
public debate. Divorced fathers want to be part
of their children's lives or control their ex-wife's life; many unmarried young
mothers do not want anything to do with their child's biological father; adult
children can return home. Each case reveals a conflict between
marriage and family.
Q: Here at the College we often refer
to ourselves as a family. Do you think this is an appropriate
usage?
A: In a way. It is a "fictive" family. If families provide a sense of connectedness,
offer companionship, produce a core identity, nurture children's development,
and establish a collective history, being a member of the Holy Cross community
is much like being part of a large, fictive family. The blood turns purple.
Alumni do reach out to mentor recent graduates. Close, lifelong relationships
are born from four years of companionship and sharing and competing like siblings.
I think the Holy Cross experience fosters more of a sense of "family" now than
it did when it was a "fraternal club." But that is a moral/political
opinion about what family means.
Professor
Thompson recommends
the following books on the changing
American family:
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia
Trap by Stephanie Coontz. (Basic Books, 1993)
The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with
America's
Changing Families by Stephanie Coontz. (Basic Books,
1998)
In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in
the Postmodern Age by Judith Stacey. (Beacon Press,
1997)
Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood by
William Pollack. (Owl Books, 1999)
She Works/He Works by Rosalind Barnett & Caryl
Rivers. (HarperCollins, 1996)
Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence that Fatherhood
and Marriage are Indispensable for the Good of Children
and Society by David Popenoe. (Harvard University Press,
1999)
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