Family How the Family Really

Family

How the Family Really Is (and Was)

The 1950s are often depicted as a time where the American family was solid, clearly defined and well-functioning unit that formed the basis of a strong and thriving culture and society stepping cheerfully out of the previous decades of Depression and war and looking with bright eyes towards the horizon (with only a slight worry that a mushroom cloud might there be glimpsed). In reality, however, this family unit was relatively short-lived, if indeed it existed as a widespread phenomenon at all, and the stereotypical 1950s family of Mom, Pop, Brother, Sister, and ever-faithful Fido is certainly not typical of the American family in the twentieth century overall. Both before and after this first decade of the Cold War, changing gender roles, shifting concepts of morality, and a series of economic upheavals created families that were far more dynamic and changeable than the stable system of breadwinners and homemakers depicted in the sitcoms of the era.

In their perennially updated volume Family in Transition, Arlene and Jerome Skolnick assert that since the 1950s there has been a "triple revolution" concerning the move to an information society, increased life expectancy and fertility, and higher educational levels (2004, pp. 10). Women can and do wait until later years to have children, if they decide to have them at all, and this in itself has caused a major revolution in the concept of the family. Increased educational and economic opportunities for women have made it no longer necessary for the home to be the center of their existence, and this has also had an impact on marriage and divorce rates as women gained more social mobility (Skolnick & Skolnick 2004).

It has also been argued that families were never as stable and as uniform as the stereotypes of the fifties suggest, and there is some fairly compelling evidence to back up this assertion. Women had joined the workforce long before the 1950s, with dual incomes being as necessary for many families during the Depression and even through the 1940s as they are today (Coontz 2000). In fact, the emphasis that was brought to the cohesion and in many ways the isolation of the nuclear family during the first half of the twentieth century was detrimental to many aspects of the family, including its economic viability, according to Stephanie Coontz's The Way We Never Were (2000). This historian also argues that personal satisfaction and happiness suffered when they became wholly attached to the success of the family rather than being derived form individual pursuits, as was the case earlier in the nineteenth century and before (Coontz 2000). The period since the 1950s has been one of increasing individualism and self-definition outside the context of the family, which has again made familial roles both more fluid and of diminished overall importance (Coontz 2000).