As part of their ongoing assault on monogamous marriage, the Democratic Party and their media allies constantly try to undercut the primacy of the nuclear family as the fundamental building block of American society.
Take New York magazine’s family life columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton, who recently accused conservatives of “raging nostalgia for a fake past.” “They’re not nostalgic for the ’50s as it actually was,” Jezer-Morton writes, “but the ’50s as it exists in the imaginations of many white Americans: as the peak of ‘normal’ white American culture. This is where our ideas about what a ‘typical American family’ looks like tend to originate.”
Jezer-Morton goes on to quote Dr. Stephanie Coontz, who argues in her book The Way We Never Were that the nuclear family of the 1950s was a historical “aberration” and is therefore an unfit model for modern families. Coontz instead celebrates the single-parent families and “consensual open marriages” as the wave of the future. “Date nights are the worst marriage advice that I’ve ever heard of,” Coontz tells Jezer-Morton.
But as I detail in my book, Sex and the Citizen, Coontz’s history of marriage is fundamentally wrong. The nuclear family had always been the norm, right up until the 1970s:
“For some historians of the American family, the 1950s are portrayed as a departure from traditional American norms. ‘The family of the 1950s is not a model we should try to recreate,’ Evergreen State history professor Stephanie Coontz writes in her book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, ‘but a historical aberration that we should try to understand.’
“In a narrow sense, Coontz is right. There are some elements to the typical 1950s married family that are slightly different from what came before. Prior to the industrial revolution, most men were either self-employed farmers, proprietors of small family businesses (such as butchers, blacksmiths, or bakers), or the unpaid sons of farmers and small business owners. The wives and daughters of these farmers and business owners also worked with their husbands and brothers. University of Minnesota history professor Steven Ruggles calls this family structure the ‘corporate family’ since the family operated as one economic unit.
“It took time for the male children of these families to either save up enough money to start their own farms or family businesses or wait until their father died so they could inherit the family property. Because of this delay the average age of first marriage before the industrial revolution was comparatively high. Young couples usually waited till they could form their own household before tying the knot. In these pre-Industrial Revolution times, the average first-time groom was about twenty-six while the average first-time bride was about twenty-two.
“This began to change as the Industrial Revolution created manufacturing jobs in America’s rapidly growing cities. Young men taking these high paying manufacturing jobs could afford to rent an apartment in the city much earlier than they could afford to buy their own farm. By the end of the 1950s, the average ages of newlywed couples had fallen to a little over twenty-two for men and just under twenty for women.
“So, on two points, Coontz is correct: the average family of the 1950s was slightly different from the average American family of the generation before.
“First, instead of husband and wife working together as self-employed farmers or small business owners, now husbands worked outside the home for wages while the wives worked part-time at most and maintained the family home.
“Second, because of tight labor markets, these families were slightly younger since the availability of good wages enabled men and women to establish new households earlier.
“But those two slight deviations hardly make the typical family of the 1950s ‘a historical aberration.’ From the founding of the Republic through the 1960s, the married household was the foundational unit of society. Numbers from before the Civil War are spotty, but from the Census of 1860 through 1960, 80 percent of all American households included a married couple.”
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Far from being some invention of marketers in the 1950s, the nuclear family was always at the core of the founders’ vision for their republic. As the second president of the United States, John Adams, explained, “The foundations of national morality must be laid in private families. In vain are schools, academies, and universities instituted if loose principles and licentious habits are impressed upon children in their earliest years.”
The problem with modern family life isn’t some misguided effort to recreate a past that never existed, it is a denial of our true past and the crucial role the married household played until the 1970s.