The family as we know it in the modern West has been largely willed and reformed into existence. European culture was long distinguished by the thoroughness with which it coerced labor out of its population — slavery and industrialization, contemporary phenomena equally indifferent to such inconveniences as considerations of family, were natural extensions of feudalism, only more ambitious and ingenious in their exactions. The case has been made that childhood was invented, which it was, at least in the sense that certain societies began to feel that young children should be excluded from the workforce, and women with them, to some extent at least.
Working conditions in trades and factories were brutal into the present century. We tend to forget that women of working age were often pregnant or nursing and often obliged to leave infants and small children untended. Sometimes they gave birth on the factory floor.
Children of working age, that is, as young as five, were spared no hardship. The British documented these horrors quite meticulously for generations, and one may read all anyone could care to read about the coffles of children driven weeping through morning darkness to the factories; children lying down to sleep in the roads because they were too exhausted to walk home at night; children dismembered by machines they were obliged to repair while the machines ran; children in factory dormitories sleeping by hundreds, turn and turn about, in beds that were never empty until some epidemic swept through and emptied them, and brought hundreds of new children, orphans or so-called child paupers, to work away their brief lives. There is nothing to wonder at, that the ideal of mother and children at home, and father adequately paid to keep them from need, was a thing warmly desired, and that for generations social reform was intended to secure this object.
By comparison with Britain, America was late in industrializing, and its agricultural economy was based on widely distributed ownership of land. Nevertheless the societies were similar enough to be attentive to each other’s reform movements. The decisive innovation was the idea that one wage earner should be able to support a wife and a few children, rather than that every employable person in a household should support himself or herself and some fraction of a baby or two. The idea of the “living wage” became much more important in America, where labor was usually in demand and therefore able to command a higher price and to set other limits and conditions governing employers’ access to it. Where labor is cheap, the market is flooded with it, assuring that it will remain cheap. Other goods will, over time, be withheld if they do not command a reasonable price, but the cheaper labor is, the less it will be withheld, because people have to live, and to hedge against the falling wages and unemployment which are always characteristic of a glutted labor market. These phenomena have been observed and analyzed since the seventeenth century. Now they are recrudescent like other old maladies we thought we had eliminated.
This glut of cheap labor was the characteristic state of things in England and Europe until the postwar period — and it is increasingly important among Americans now. That is why we sometimes see such anomalies as employment and unemployment rising at the same time. The two-tier economy we are developing, with accelerating inequality between those who are trained or educated and those who are not, reflects the scarcity relative to demand of skilled labor. If schemes to educate more of our workforce are carried out successfully, the increased availability of skilled labor will lower its value, and the erosion of the prosperity of those who work will simply become more widespread.
It is because the family as we have known it in this country over the last three-quarters of a century was the goal and product of reform that a radiance of idealization hung over it, and that it was so long and so confidently invoked as a common value, as a thing deserving and also requiring political and economic protection. This has had many important consequences for policy and law. Yet for some reason we are convinced at the moment that the ways of our economy should be identical with the laws of the market, and therefore we depart resolutely from norms and customs that controlled economic behavior among us through our long history of increasing prosperity. No one is more persuaded of the rightness of this course than those who claim to especially cherish the family.
Take for example the weekend, or that more venerable institution, the Sabbath. Moses forbade that servants, even foreigners, should work on the seventh day. If their wage was subsistence, as it is usually fair to assume in premodern societies, then his prohibition had the immediate practical effect of securing for them seven days’ pay for six days’ work. He raised the value of their labor by limiting access to it. In all its latter-day forms the Sabbath has had this effect.
Now those among us whose prosperity is eroding fastest are very likely to be at work on Sunday, because they cannot afford not to work when they have the chance, and because they cannot risk losing a job so many others would be happy to take. Absent legal or contractual or religious or customary constraints, workers without benefits or job security or income that is at least stable relative to the economy have no way of withholding their labor. Now all those constraints are gone, in the name of liberalization, I suppose. I do not recall hearing a single murmur about the effect of such changes on the family, though it is always easy to find journalistic wisdom to the effect that parents should spend more time with their children. The last great Sabbatarian institution is the school system — even the Postal Service makes deliveries on Sunday — so the quondam day of rest is now a special burden for families with young children or children who need supervision.
Of course the shops must be open on Sundays and at night because the rate of adult employment is so high and the working day is so long that people need to be able to buy things whenever they can find the time. I would suggest that such voracious demands on people’s lives, felt most mercilessly by the hardest pressed, for example the employed single parent, are inimical to the family, and to many other things of value, for example the physical and mental health of such parents, though these are utterly crucial to the well-being of millions of children, and therefore of extraordinary importance to the society as a whole.
Clearly a calculation could be made in economic terms of the cost to the society of this cheapening of labor. It is no great mystery that statistics associate social problems with single-parent families. And social problems, crime for example, are an enormous expense, an enormous drag on the economy. We are conditioned to think that the issue for single mothers, say, is work or welfare. In fact the issue is decent working hours and reasonable pay. These are important people, holding the world together for children who in many instances have been half abandoned. It is grotesque that their lives should be made impossible because of some unexamined fealty to economic principles that are, if we would pause to consider, impoverishing to us all in many ways, some of them extremely straightforward.
To consider again the weekend. It is often remarked, in an odd spirit of censoriousness, that American culture was never a melting pot. We are given to know that it was wrong to have aspired to such an ideal, and wrong to have fallen short of it. There seems to me to be little evidence that the ideal ever was aspired to, at least in the sense in which critics understand the phrase. Since religion is central to most special identities within the larger national culture, religious tolerance has been the great guarantor of the survival of the variety of cultures. It was characteristic of European countries for centuries to try to enforce religious uniformity on just these grounds. If earlier generations in America chose not to follow this example, presumably they knew and accepted the consequence of departing from it, that assimilation would have important limits. This strikes me as a happy arrangement, all in all.