The Real-Life Myth of the American Family

“Congratulations on becoming a family,” an old friend wrote to my wife and me after the birth of our daughter in 1999. Though well-intentioned, those sentiments irked me then, and they still grate on me today. I considered us a family before our daughter was born. To our friend, though, the idea of a childless couple as a family clearly lacked legitimacy.

When it comes to family portraits in the US, legitimacy occupies a narrow band with little room for deviation. It is not so much discussed as assumed that a family is supposed to be a variation on a productive marriage that features a husband, a wife, and children. That model long ago became a highly coercive ideal. Entering through the portal of collective imagination, the idealized family permeates all aspects of the nation’s social life. It also penetrates shared structures of thought. I have found in my own work that the idealized family is like a weed that covers everything and gets in everywhere. It’s hard to get far enough away from it to view it clearly.

Stephanie Coontz’s The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (1992) is a historical weed-whacker. Coontz received a lot of notice for her recent book, Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (2005), but her resourceful scholarly contrarianism started much earlier. The Way We Never Were subjects the prevalent myths surrounding “family values” to a sustained and well-deserved historical assault, and that makes the book terrific popular history. Perhaps the greatest scholarly value of The Way We Never Were lies in the way that, by exposing the myths of the American family, Coontz uncovers the assumptions that guide and sustain those myths. By pulling the weeds, Coontz allows those who follow her to examine their tangled roots.

1. Separate Myths, Separate Facts

Coontz yanks aside the family fantasies surrounding more than two centuries of American life. The last half of the twentieth century serves as her locus classicus, when Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, and Betty Crocker provided the visuals for some of the most enduring iconic family portrayals in US history. Television, whose early executives decided to appeal to the widest single swath of the public rather than to its diversity, led the rest of 1950s mass media to the homogeneous apotheosis of the American imaginary family. But Coontz does not limit herself to the 1950s by any means. She shows the origin and pre-television development of what would later become the Ozzie and Harriet mythology, and she tracks numerous other threads through the 1960s and 1970s into the Reagan and Bush years. Some lead to gauzy portraits of family bliss, others to gothic threats of family destruction.

Coontz historicizes love. Given our romantic view of the subject, that’s hard to do, because imaginative reconstructions get in the way of the historical past. Coontz dedicates herself to no-nonsense readings of the dreamscape, and that effort marks the through-line that links all of her work. In one of the most interesting strands of analysis in The Way We Never Were, Coontz shows how the 1950s stereotype of a housewife who brims with both mother-love and romantic attraction to her husband conflates two separate myths that existed at different times in American history: the mid-nineteenth-century maternal ideal, and the 1920s vision of the romantic, sexually receptive wife (9). The Victorian ideal privileged mother-child bonds and same-sex friendship over heterosexual romantic love. During the 1920s, on the other hand, there was a complex “sexualization of interpersonal relations”—the first sexual revolution, which included the invention of dating—and these changes led to a new ideal of companionate marriage and a shared vision of continuing romance between husband and wife (195). In this latter case, child care lost its exalted position. The 1950s housewife and mother thus embodies not one but two demanding domestic ideals—no wonder she’s...