New Deal for the Family

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,”