Report Outline
Juggling Motherhood and Jobs
Feminists Reconsider Aims
Pro-Family Politics
Juggling Motherhood and Jobs
Since the early 1970s, the abstraction that is “the family” has been beset by angry extremists. First, radical feminists reviled it as an instrument of male oppression. Then, in reaction, radicals on the political right carried it into battle in crusades against abortion and other real or perceived evils. So great was the ideological tumult that many people wondered if the venerable institution of the family were not doomed to imminent extinction, a fear that enhanced the strength of “pro-family” activists.
Yet all the while, the actual American family—all the multitudes of particular families existing and coming into existence—was doing what it has always done under the pressure of social and economic change: evolving, adapting, surviving. The result is that today's family seldom resembles the “traditional” abstraction of yesteryear that family in which father works and mother stays at home with the children. Of the 63.2 million families in America in 1985, less than 10 percent fit that description.
Increasingly, American mothers have been leaving home and children and going to work. Twenty million mothers of children under 18 years old are now in the labor force. Half of the married mothers with children under three are now working outside the home; in 1970 that proportion was only one-fourth. The change has been great and rapid. So rapid, said Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo., that “it's been hard for politicians and the country to keep up with it.” She added: “I find the people are way ahead of the politicians on this. Even my generation, when we grew up, I would say most of the middle-class [mothers] had the option to stay home a couple of years with their children.…[T]oday, when you see that just the cost of housing has doubled from '74 to '84, and people's wages didn't, it brings home that very few people have that option anymore. So to have the government continually saying, ‘We're pro-family and that means that women should stay in the home and do all these things’—that may be lovely but no one can do it,” |
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New Deal, Great Depression, and Economic Recovery |
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Feb. 20, 2009 |
Public-Works Projects |
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Jul. 25, 1986 |
New Deal for the Family |
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Apr. 04, 1973 |
Future of Social Programs |
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Nov. 18, 1944 |
Postwar Public Works |
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Apr. 12, 1941 |
Public Works in the Post-Emergency Period |
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Mar. 08, 1940 |
Integration of Utility Systems |
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Feb. 26, 1938 |
The Permanent Problem of Relief |
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Jun. 08, 1937 |
Experiments in Price Control |
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Jan. 05, 1937 |
Credit Policy and Control of Recovery |
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Nov. 27, 1936 |
New Deal Aims and the Constitution |
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Oct. 16, 1936 |
Father Coughlin vs. the Federal Reserve System |
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Sep. 25, 1936 |
Roosevelt Policies in Practice |
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Feb. 11, 1936 |
Conditional Grants to the States |
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Dec. 11, 1935 |
Capital Goods Industries and Recovery |
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Sep. 25, 1935 |
Unemployment Relief Under Roosevelt |
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Jul. 17, 1935 |
The R.F.C. Under Hoover and Roosevelt |
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Jul. 03, 1935 |
Six Months of the Second New Deal Congress |
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Jun. 04, 1935 |
The Supreme Court and the New Deal |
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Mar. 05, 1935 |
Public Works and Work Relief |
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Feb. 16, 1935 |
Organized Labor and the New Deal |
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Dec. 04, 1934 |
Rural Electrification and Power Rates |
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Oct. 26, 1934 |
Federal Relief Programs and Policies |
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Jul. 25, 1934 |
Distribution of Federal Emergency Expenditures |
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Jul. 17, 1934 |
Debt, Credit, and Recovery |
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May 25, 1934 |
The New Deal in the Courts |
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Mar. 27, 1934 |
Construction and Economic Recovery |
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Mar. 19, 1934 |
Price Controls Under N.R.A. |
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Feb. 15, 1934 |
Federal Promotion of State Unemployment Insurance |
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Jan. 10, 1934 |
Government and Business After the Depression |
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Jan. 02, 1934 |
The Adjustment of Municipal Debts |
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Dec. 12, 1933 |
The Machine and the Recovery Program |
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Dec. 05, 1933 |
Winter Relief, 1933–1934 |
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Nov. 11, 1933 |
Power Policies of the Roosevelt Administration |
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Oct. 28, 1933 |
Buying Power under the Recovery Program |
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Oct. 19, 1933 |
Land Settlement for the Unemployed |
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Sep. 20, 1933 |
The Capital Market and the Securities Act |
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Jul. 18, 1933 |
Public Works and National Recovery |
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Jul. 01, 1933 |
The Plan for National Industrial Control |
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May 03, 1933 |
Economic Readjustments Essential to Prosperity |
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Apr. 26, 1933 |
Government Subsidies to Private Industry |
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Mar. 25, 1933 |
Rehabilitation of the Unemployed |
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Feb. 17, 1933 |
Federal Cooperation in Unemployment Relief |
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Nov. 16, 1932 |
Systems of Unemployment Compensation |
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Nov. 09, 1932 |
Policies of the New Administration |
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Aug. 18, 1932 |
Emergency Relief Construction and Self-Liquidating Projects |
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Dec. 28, 1931 |
Relief of Unemployment |
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Aug. 01, 1931 |
National Economic Planning |
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Jul. 20, 1931 |
Dividends and Wages in Periods of Depression |
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Feb. 19, 1931 |
Insurance Against Unemployment |
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Jan. 19, 1931 |
Business Failures and Bankruptcy Administration |
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Jan. 01, 1931 |
Federal Subsidies to the States |
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Dec. 08, 1930 |
Federal Relief of Economic Distress |
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Sep. 25, 1930 |
The Extent of Unemployment |
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May 16, 1930 |
Politics and Depressions |
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Dec. 20, 1929 |
The Federal Public Works Program |
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Jun. 08, 1929 |
The Federal Reserve System and Stock Speculation |
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Apr. 14, 1928 |
The Federal Reserve System and Price Stabilization |
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Feb. 25, 1928 |
The Federal Reserve System and Brokers' Loans |
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