Many church members and official publications frequently speak about family values, motherhood, and fatherhood, but rarely go on to define what they mean by these terms and to illustrate the various roles that they attach to them. Although I think most people would acknowledge that, for example, motherhood is not simply an identity but a bundle of many different roles that one performs, these roles rarely enter into discussions about family values. We rely on family values as a rallying cry that all too frequently pits us against non-Mormons, but beyond agreeing that family values are good we rarely discuss what actions encompass them. What is the consequence of the fact that we speak a lot about our gender and family identities, but rarely about the different activities that these identities entail?
I think that perhaps the most significant consequence of this rhetoric is that it prevents us from shaping effective policies that could lend support to people trying to fulfill their various roles. We cannot shape policies that support an essential and abstract ideal like "motherhood," because motherhood is a fuzzy idea rather than a person. But we can pass legislation that could help people fulfill particular roles. We could, for example, promote further educational and employment opportunities for women who decide to stay home while their children are young. We could petition for quality child care or for a shorter work day. We could effectively support any number of causes that would help us fulfill the roles we value and enable us to have strong families.
Certainly, we might find that we agree and disagree about which of these roles we seek to promote, but if we began to speak in terms of the various roles we play and stopped trying to prescribe essential identities, we would be significantly farther along than where we are now in diagnosing and relieving the challenges that face the men and women trying to structure and support their families. We cannot successfully promote or defend abstract conceptions of identity. Our church could, however, become an immense force in promoting families if we stopped staking our claims on identity issues like gay marriage and began instead to diagnose and fight for what people need in order to successfully raise families and promote meaningful lives for men and women in 2007.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
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1 comments:
Natalie, do you think it's possible that the indeterminacy in our usage of the term "family values" is actually an effect of our borrowing the term from the secular realm?
The Eisenhower administration, facing the immense task of figuring out how to respond to a nuclear attack from the Russians decided on making the family the [quasi-military] unit of first response (thus the craze for shelters full of food storage, etc.). They put a new emphasis on the family, its patriarchal hierarchy, and a mode of preparation and efficient functioning that defined the 50s and produced the mythology of the perfect 50s family.
"Family Values" continued to be used as a vague shield for political issues as the 60s presented so many challenges to the widely accepted vision of national readiness and unity created in the 50s. Thus, "family values" could actually be invoked even against the civil rights movement as well as other threats to the status quo.
I wonder if this expansion and attenuation of the term in the political sphere (it is still used as a cover on issues that actually have very little to do with how an actual family functions) is part of what makes the term so vague in our use of it in the church.
If you want some reading on the subject (U.S. government use of "the family" and "family values" in political rhetoric), I would recommend: Elaine May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War, published by Basic Books and Laura McEnany's Civil Defense Begins at Home published by Princeton. Guy Oakes' The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture published by Oxford may also be helpful in tracing out the development of the use of the term "family values" in the political sphere.
I can't think of any monograph in Mormonism that similarly studies the development of our use of the term in the post-war era - perhaps the biography on President McKay by Gregory Prince and published by the U of U. It certainly doesn't focus on that issue, but it does cover the same period and may shed some light (my copy hasn't arrived yet, so I don't actually know).
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