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Will the Postfamily Culture Claim America?
- The University Press of Kentucky
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WILL THE POSTFAMILY CULTURE CLAIM AMERICA? Allan Carlson Ole and Lena are a mythical Swedish-American couple, probably residing somewhere in Minnesota, notable for their remarkably dysfunctional marriage. One story goes like this: Ole and Lena have grown old, and one day Ole becomes very sick. Eventually, he is confined to his upstairs bedroom, barely conscious, bedridden, and growing ever weaker. After several weeks of this, the doctor visits and tells Lena:“Vell, Ole’s just about a goner. I don’t tink he’ll survive the night.” So Lena, being a practical woman, decides she had better start preparing for all the guests who will be coming to the funeral. She begins to bake, starting with loaves of limpa, a Swedish sweet rye bread. The pleasant smell of baking bread is soon wafting through the house. Suddenly, upstairs, Ole’s nose twitches and his eyes bolt open. “Limpa,” he says. He jerks up into a sitting position, swings his legs around, and climbs out of bed. It’s like a miracle! Half walking, half stumbling, he crosses the room, enters the hallway, and starts working his way down the stairs. “Limpa,” he says again. He reaches the ground floor, stumbles across the kitchen, and pulls himself into a chair by a table where a loaf of freshly sliced bread sits. He reaches over to take a slice.“Stop that, Ole!”shouts Lena, as she whaps his hand with her spatula.“That limpa bread is for after the funeral.” We can laugh at Ole and Lena because they are now out of time, characters from an earlier era of Swedish immigration to America. Their “ideal type,” we might say, no longer exists. More importantly, their dysfunctional marriage also belongs to another era. Several generations ago, when there were real Oles and Lenas, divorce would have been rare in their community. For better and worse, couples remained 80 Allan Carlson in unhappy or troubled marriages, perhaps “for the sake of the children ,” perhaps for other cultural or religious reasons. Successful jokes usually involve making fun of institutions that are strong and stable. The “marriage joke,” a staple of comedians during the 1950s and 1960s, seems to be fading in our time. Symbolically, Rodney Dangerfield, perhaps the last master of the marriage joke, died recently. It is hard to make fun of an institution that is battered and bruised. Such are marriage and the family in America. Marriage rates are now at record lows in our country. The average age of first marriage is at a record high, for both men and women. The proportion of adults who will never marry is also at a record level. At the same time, the marital fertility rate in America is at a record low. Meanwhile, 40 percent of all births are now outside of wedlock, and this figure is steadily climbing. Cohabitation—“living together without benefit of clergy,” as we used to say—grows ever more popular as an alternative to marriage.While the American divorce rate has been fairly stable for a decade or two, it remains at a high level: one of every two marriages still ends in divorce. Finally, “gay rights activists” are clamoring for the right to marry, with some—if uneven—success among the states. There are those, such as Harvard historian Nancy Cott, who argue that these changes simply represent the inevitable evolution of marriage and family, a natural adaptation of a malleable, plastic-like institution to new conditions. Industrialization, modernization, and the quest for equality, Cott concludes, have freed marriage from the shackles of the past, allowing it to evolve into a higher and better form.1 There is no doubt that the Industrial Revolution brought new pressures to bear on what I prefer to call the Natural Family. At the most basic level, this process severed the workplace from the home. For all of human history up to that time, the great majority of humans had lived and worked in the same place, be it a small farm or an artisan’s shop or a nomad’s tent. Under the industrial regime, though, adults were pulled out of their homes to labor in factories or offices. Serious complications arose over matters such as sex or gender roles and the care of children.2 However, in most of Europe and North America, families re- [35.172.110.179] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:24 GMT) Will the Postfamily Culture Claim America? 81...