Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty

Book Overview

Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty was written by Arlene S. Skolnick and published in 1993. The book offers an optimistic yet realistic account of the evolution of the American family alongside broader revolutions in society. Drawing on deep longitudinal research tracing families from childhood years in the 1920s, the work is both objective and well-informed, written with a social scientist's rigor and an eloquent, accessible voice.

Skolnick's Central Arguments

Skolnick reasons that the American family has not been devastated. Countering the political right, she asserts that changes in American family life reflect and resonate with sea changes in society. In her words, "Changes in our hearts and minds are responses to large-scale social change, rather than a fall from moral grace." Skolnick firmly grounds the changes she discusses in history, economics, politics, feminism, technology, divorce, and sexual mores, extending her timeline from the Victorian era — when the family was seen as the very foundation of social structure — to a phenomenon she coins "psychological gentrification." The deluge of self-help books that flooded the literary market from the 1960s onward perhaps best illustrates this concept.

One contemporary attribute of family life in America, according to Skolnick, is the longevity revolution. She argues that longer life spans are a substantive variable in the recontouring of the American family. In practice, she insists, the pressing needs of elder care now extend across several generations, such that care of aged parents and even grandparents may displace the anticipated time and connection between grandparents and grandchildren.

Skolnick finds reductionist the widespread claim that every social problem of the twenty-first century — abortion, poverty, single parenthood, lesbian and gay relationships, feminism — can be attributed to the decline of the American family. What is really at play, she asserts, is an overarching desire to return to a nostalgic place that existed only on our television screens. Media has played a strong role in casting the American family within certain parameters and expectations — it is, according to Skolnick, a Hollywood creation, and those who have believed it to be real have set themselves up for profound disappointment. A very real difficulty arises when these unrealistic, non-existent family forms are exalted as the ideal of American society. Families will and are reshaping themselves, Skolnick reports — and the family forms that survive may be more humanistic and honorable than anything Hollywood could have conjured.

Sociological Commentary

Skolnick's work comprehensively addresses the complexities of social change. Her work is informed by literature from not only sociology, but also economics, politics, psychology, theology, and history. The themes of the book are soundly grounded in the corpus of sociological literature, yet the book is written to appeal to the thoughtful general audience as well. From a sociological lens, we know that families do not exist outside the context of culture and society. Skolnick does an excellent job of explaining how this is true, and further — in the manner of Stephanie Coontz — she gently but firmly dismantles the enduring myths surrounding the American family.

Explicitly, Skolnick explains that having women become major breadwinners for their families has been less disruptive than having to discard a false ideal about what the American family should look like. Women have fundamentally always been part of a breadwinner family — perhaps with the exception of the brief respite afforded by the Victorian era, at least for women from well-to-do families. In the late 1950s, however, there was a "democratization of personhood" in which people could make a serious effort to develop themselves as individuals. It is this change that people often mistake for narcissism, holding it up as the reason why American families are falling apart. The myth has certainly taken hold with the conservative right, and Skolnick carefully explains how this viewpoint became dominant. Her theories are strengthened by the body of academic research on families covered in the broader scholarly literature.

Conclusion

As with much of life, I concede that there are no perfect solutions — that moving life forward is often about tracing an arc rather than slicing a straight line to a certain bull's-eye. Given this perspective, I am able to embrace most of the ideas that Skolnick puts forth. If I grasp her points, mark those I believe to be true, and pull back for perspective, I find that I can clearly see the arc — where it begins and where it ends. All points in between remain open to debate.