Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 15, No 4
Summer 2001

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

The Challenge of Family History

Stephanie Coontz

As we have all learned, families are an emotionally charged and highly mythologized subject, and few students (or teachers, for that matter) find it easy to examine family history without favorable or unfavorable comparisons to their own family memories and ideals. It is hard enough to teach critical analysis of family history to middle-class, academically-oriented students, whose cultural relativism easily shades into romanticizing those cultures foreign enough to be "exotic," but whose ideals about individualism and equality often stand in the way of a nuanced appreciation of the gains and costs of family life to their own ancestors. But teaching family history to "nontraditional" students who often have the most "traditional" assumptions about families is a particular challenge. Many of these students' ethnic, religious, class, or regional backgrounds have taught them to treasure the role of family as a source of support and mutual aid, but simultaneously to filter both their own complicated family histories and their personal aspirations through the lens of 1950s family and gender proprieties. Getting such students to put aside that lens and examine their own and others' family histories from different and sometimes uncomfortable frameworks is often a tough sell.

I have been aware of these difficulties for years and have experimented with ways to get people to contextualize their own family histories and examine their unconscious assumptions about "good" and "bad" family experiences and relations. For example, I often ask students to interview older family members and write their life histories with two different endings: one showing how the subjects' family experiences accounted for their success in life and love, and another drawing on other experiences, or even the same ones to show how they had been prevented from achieving important and valued goals in their life. This assignment usually brings out nuances in their own family history of which students' weren't really aware.

Still, not until I began to appear on talk shows where I had to deal with larger audiences did I realize how often I was not really connecting with many of my students, and how much of it had to do with an academic approach to these topics that seemed to discredit their feelings and traditions. In 1992 my book The Way We Never Were appeared just as Dan Quayle made his famous speech denouncing TV character Murphy Brown for setting a terrible example to our nation's youth for having a child out of wedlock. This coincidence threw me into the ensuing debate over family values, giving me access to larger audiences from the Oprah show to literally hundreds of radio talk shows than I had ever before had the privilege and challenge of trying to reach. My experiences, although they may not be directly applicable to many classes and although they are based on a particular "take" on the 1950s with which not everyone will agree, made me much more conscious of how to present material more effectively that may otherwise evoke resistance in students.

The first several times I talked about the 1950s on such radio shows, I started out doing some myth-busting: Poverty rates were higher in the 1950s than today. Teens who went berserk might not have had the killing power they do today but youthful violence in the cities was more widespread, though it often went unreported because it was directed at what were then considered to be legitimate targets of attack African-Americans and Hispanics. Domestic violence was routinely trivialized. Women could not have credit cards in their own names in some states. Complaints of incest were dismissed by many psychologists as unconscious Oedipal fantasies. Teen birth rates were more than twice as high as they are today.

My radio hosts almost always enjoyed this laundry list of "surprises" about the 1950s but their audiences invariably did not, and I was surprised by the hostile tone of the calls I received. From my perspective, I was just pointing out some of the well-known problems with gender roles, family behaviors, and racial prejudices of the era and was stunned when people absolutely refused to accept the "facts" I was recounting as real. Typically the caller would launch angrily into a description of how his or her 1950s family experiences proved me wrong. And no matter how much data I threw out to refute their generalizations callers continued to discount everything I was saying.

As a teacher, one thing I've learned over the years is that if two or three students in your class do not get what you are saying that is probably their own weakness. But, if the majority of the class does not get it, then that is your own weakness. So I ordered tapes of a couple of the shows I had been on and listened carefully to what I had said and what people seemed to think they had heard. It soon became clear that what they were hearing, despite my intentions to the contrary, was an academic who dismissed both their pleasant memories of the past and their anxieties about the future as the products of ignorance and unthinking nostalgia. They heard me telling them that their most deeply held feelings were invalid. Understandably they reacted defensively and angrily.

As soon as I began to find some way of acknowledging their justifiable unease with changing family forms and gender roles without pandering to any illusions about the past, I discovered that my whole approach was backwards. The next time I was asked to talk about the 1950s, I began at a very different place. "I can understand," I said, "why people feel nostalgic for a period when the average thirty-year-old man could buy a median-priced home on 15-18 percent of his income. And as a parent I often wished to be on my kid's side against an overly restrictive popular culture, as my own mother was for me in the 1950s, rather than being forced to be the only line of defense against a violent oversexualized one. I also understand a yearning for a time when it seemed that prospects for youth were improving and community life seemed more stable."

But then I pointed out that most of the successes of the 1950s were based on the exceptional postwar prosperity of the only industrial society to have escaped massive destruction of infrastructure during World War II, combined with an extensive government support system for young families that has since been largely dismantled. I explained that forty percent of young men and a few women about to start families had GI benefits allowing them an unprecedented increase in the number of people, often without even a high school diploma, who could go to college. I discussed how government changed the funding of new homes to make them more affordable not just for veterans but for other home buyers as well and also paid ninety percent of the cost of building the highways that opened up suburbia to young families and provided unionized blue-collar jobs for new migrants to the cities

"For people who had access to these benefits, " I argued, "and also had loving stable parents, this was a very good time for family life." Then and only then did I discuss the underside of 1950s stability from the whole groups who were left out of the benefits, as with the redlining of entire neighborhoods, to the individual family dysfunctions that were ignored or covered up.

The difference in audience response was amazing. The majority of callers and sometimes they sounded like the very same people who had been so angry on previous shows now said things like, "Well your guest has a good point. My family was great, but just down the block. . . ," or "you know, I got my home for a dollar down, and do you know what it's costing my son and his wife?" or, "I became an engineer on a National Defense Education Act, and those aren't around any more, are they?" In other words, once I did not seem to be dismissing their own perceptions and knowledge, they could get in touch with aspects of the past that they could not even remember when they felt attacked.

The lessons I learned from this experience have not just informed my public speaking. They have also changed my teaching methods. I am now more conscious of the ways that feelings can interfere with understanding. I have worked, with the help of many colleagues, on ways to increase students' awareness of this by separating their own experiences and reactions when listening to what an author or fellow student is trying to say.

I have found two techniques that seem especially effective. One is to spend at least the first week of every class helping people to distinguish an author's view from a reviewer's view and in turn from their own reaction to each. I do this by distributing reviews of books on family issues which will evoke strong feelings. I then ask the students to figure out what the author's opinion is or if two or more books are reviewed, what each of them argues; what the reviewer's implicit or explicit view is; and then what they think their own opinion of the book would be. It is astonishing how few students can do this on the first draft of their paper. We work together in small groups until everyone can see the difference. I then ask them to put both the author's and the reviewer's opinions into a statement that would be acceptable to each. I explain that I don't want anything there, even a single adjective or adverb, that the person they are summarizing would object to. Again it is remarkable how long it takes to get to a point where they can put every argument in the most neutral possible light. The discussions they have over this invariably enliven the class and serve as the basis for many future class conversations.

The second technique is borrowed from an "attending exercise" I learned from a student who had taken several counseling classes. In this technique every student draws a number. It is their task to explain their opinion on something we have all read to one person in the room who will have to paraphrase it for them. The trick is that they don't know who it will be and therefore cannot use the unconscious social pressure of body language and eye contact to get someone to look as if they are understanding the points. Number one makes a statement to the room. Afterwards the student who has drawn number two has to paraphrase it. At the end number one can say only "yes" or "no." No additions or clarifications are allowed. I emphasize that there is no sense being polite since it is probably your own fault for not communicating properly if the person did not get your basic point. If the paraphrase is not something you would be willing to have quoted in the local paper, you need to say "No that's not what I meant." Then number two makes his or her own statement, and number three has to paraphrase it.

This exercise always creates a lot of discussion, along with much amusement at how hard it is to say "No, that's not what I said." It seems to defuse the anxiety that students have about disagreeing with each other, while driving home to them how often we do not really understand what someone is saying. Whatever the reasons, it is so powerful I have found that it greatly accelerates the learning curve for students who started in the bottom half of the class.

These communication exercises do not necessarily slow down our entry into the subject matter of the course, because they can be used with regular readings. It is important, however, to find some controversial readings for the first weeks or readings with potentially controversial implications for this to work best. One can often segue into a deeper historical examination of the issues by spending a class period on such controversies. I ask students to work in small groups to come up with some contemporary concerns about family, life, education, youth, and so forth and to make a list of the most common competing claims they can find on these issues. I ask them to look especially for words and phrases that implicitly assume a historical comparison: "new", "unprecedented"; or conversely, "once again;" such and such is "a return." etc. Such historical claims are often made about bilingual education, state intervention into families, working women, absent fathers, non-maternal childcare, teen violence, child abuse and neglect. We then discuss what we need to know about family life in the past in order to test what is and is not persuasive in these claims. At the end of the class we go back and reexamine the debates. We use historical data, not to arrive at the "right" answer, which often involves value judgments that we cannot settle, but to discard untenable claims and arguments.

These techniques cannot substitute, of course, for the careful bibliographic and curricular choices described by other contributors to this issue. But attention to the social and political implications of issues, specifically coupled with an attempt to help people truly hear the arguments on all sides, makes it much easier to convince students that history matters. And if, as Alan Dawley has quipped, when most Americans say "that's history," they mean you can forget it, it is comforting to end the class with a group of students who think that when you say "that's not historical" it means you should forget it.

Stephanie Coontz's recent books, The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America's Changing Families and The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, have placed her at the center of the family values debate. She has testified about her research before the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families in Washington, DC, and her work has been featured in many national publications and academic journals. A faculty member at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and a former Woodrow Wilson fellow, she has also taught at Kobe University in Japan and the University of Hawaii at Hilo. She received the Dale Richmond Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1995 and the Washington Governor's Writers Award in 1989 for The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families.