A renowned professor and author highlighted the fallacies of family-values rhetoric in a speech Friday night.
Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State University and author of the bestselling book, "The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap," delivered the keynote address in a weekend symposium to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Office of Continuing Education.
Americans hold a "manic-depressive, schizophrenic view of the American family," Coontz said, citing statistics that show a sharp increase in the number of Americans who believe that family values are the most important issue facing our nation today.
However, Coontz said that blaming family values as the core of our nation's weaknesses only serves to direct attention away from the country's true ills and to separate family values from related areas of domestic policy.
"To counterpose family values with areas such as the economy constricts our ability for economic change," she said. "Family values are not a substitute for a social program -- it's ridiculous to say that marriage is a form of antipoverty program. It's a cheap and easy substitute for the hard political and economic decisions that need to be made."
Practicing family values does not guarantee economic or social improvement, Coontz said. For example, family values advocates claim that episodes of domestic violence would decrease if "traditional families" remained intact.
Coontz said the problem with such a presumption is that it fails to explain historical data. Specifically, Coontz said the family values advocates' presumption ignores the facts that national murder rates were higher during in the 1930s, when more families stayed together, than in the 1980s and that spousal rape and physical abuse were legal in most parts of the country until the 1970s.
Coontz also pointed out some of the myths about suburban life in the 1950s.
"The sitcoms of the 1950s are the equivalent of today's beer ads," she said. "These shows said to us, `If you buy this Hotpoint [appliance] and organize your gender roles this way, and organize your division of labor this way, everything will be great.'"
Although both the Bush and Clinton administrations have emphasized the importance of family values as a way to remedy the problems of inner-city life, Coontz said the government has never countered these problems with economic programs. For example, the federal government gives out $29 billion a year in agricultural subsidies to rural farmers and $51 billion dollars' worth of direct cash giveaways to businesses, but only $25 billion a year is earmarked for food stamps, Coontz said.
"There is actually a welfare for the rich and one for the poor," Coontz said. "The only difference is that one is nonstigmatized, more generous and under the table."
Such a disparity has existed for decades, Coontz said.
"1950s suburbia was subsidized heavily," she said, often at the expense of inner cities and neighborhoods. "The federal government subsidized highways 90 percent for the blue-collar workers to travel to work, [and] created long-term mortgages with low down-payments for people to buy houses. Meanwhile, not a dime was given to urban transportation."
Such economic practices have led to a society sharply divided by class, Coontz said.
"We are a society that tolerates the gap between rich and poor more than any other industrialized country," she said, noting that the combined income of the top 1 percent of the United States population equals that of the bottom 40 percent.
Although the morals behind family values are not necessarily to be scorned, Coontz said that they cannot be used as the final measure of the quality of our society.
"Family values are supposed to mean fidelity, no divorce, no premarital sex and putting your kids first," she said. "But by that definition, Mafia families could serve as exemplary families."
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