Welcome to the ‘Good Old Days’; Now Go Back to Reality

The pictures make us sigh:

A Puritan family gathered hearthside in prayer . . .

a Victorian family sharing a hearty meal . . . a 1950s couple and their children enjoying a drive to the beach . . .

Ah, the good old days for families, when life was simple and sweet. Doting parents nurtured their children, who were obedient and well-behaved. Spouses maintained their vows of lifelong fidelity. Families celebrated their closeness.

Did such a golden past really exist?

“People don’t realize that in ages past, life was constant work,” says Deborah Kennel, a UCLA historian. Adds social commentator Barbara Ehrenreich, the traditional family “was not one with a single breadwinner, but a family that worked together--husband, wife and children side by side. Household and industry were not separate.”

Indeed, from the earliest records of civilization, we know that humankind did not isolate “work” and “home,” as we do today. Families awakened before dawn to toil in the fields, hunt and fish before returning to their shelters at sunset. In biblical times, women raised children while managing elaborate households and vineyards while their husbands communed in public meeting places.

Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, this family-work arrangement persisted. Women sold wares from their homes, ran inns and worked as shoemakers, tailors, hat makers, bakers, beer brewers and fish sellers alongside their husbands, and their children apprenticed in the community, before joining the family business.

Centuries later, in Colonial America, Puritans worried that their harried New World lives were keeping them from properly supervising their children and causing a rise in juvenile delinquency. They gave their children arduous work responsibilities. Families were very large--the average Puritan woman bore seven “prospective laborers,” nearly one every two years.

Death, not divorce, loomed large over Early American families. Only one marriage in three lasted as long as 10 years. A woman could expect to be widowed by 52 and die before her last child left home, if she were lucky enough to survive her childbirth ordeals. Nearly 50% of children by age 9 had lost one or both parents; many would be raised by relatives or sent away to live with other families.

On the plains, settlers worked from sunrise to sunset, and their wives “were not much better than slaves,” wrote one contemporary diarist. “It is a weary, monotonous round of cooking and washing and mending, and, as a result, the insane asylum is one-third filled with wives of farmers.”

The Industrial Revolution created a separation of work and home spheres for modern families. Beginning in the 1830s, men were summoned to factories daily to work long hours in filthy, airless rooms. For the first time, clocks rigidly dictated family time and, according to social historian Jessie Bernard, “each sex had its own turf.”

Men were now classified as “breadwinners.” Their wives became domestic nurturers. But this new restructuring bore little import for the working poor. Husbands, wives and children--mostly immigrants--toiled in sweatshops to earn subsistence income.

African American families, particularly those in the antebellum South, suffered some of the most severe hardships of the era. Because Southern courts did not recognize slave marriages or African Americans’ rights to family unity, plantation owners were free to sell husbands, wives or children--and they did, separating about one-third of all slave families.

African American slave women eventually formed mutual support networks, tending to one another’s children, doing one another’s sewing, cooking and laundry.

The Victorian era heralded an increased rigidity of sex roles. Father became the familial patriarch whose word was final. Mother was his domestic helpmate, who, during the course of her day, washed clothes by hand, ironed with heavy stove-heated irons, filtered oil lamps, washed lamp chimneys, beat rugs, made beds, emptied ashes from stoves, dusted, swept, scrubbed, shopped, baked, mended clothes, cooked three meals a day, washed windows and cared for sick children and elderly family members.

“The paramount mission and destiny of women,” wrote the Supreme Court in 1873, after affirming the University of Illinois’ right to exclude women, “are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.”

Childhood, for the first time in contemporary history, began to be celebrated as a special stage of life. Children were given toys and sent to schools, instead of work, for formal education. In 1890, 203,000 children attended public high school; 30 years later, 2.3 million would do so.

Only 6% of married women worked outside the home during this time. And though the Victorian period is fondly remembered as an era of familial happiness, it was fraught with its own crises. Average life expectancies remained below 50 years. Growing alienation between the sexes led to increases in alcoholism and “poor men’s divorces”--desertions that forced unskilled mothers to seek jobs that paid as little as $1.56 a week for 70 hours of labor. Upper-middle-class women, who were confined to their homes, also seemed discontented, seeking treatments for hysteria and other “women’s diseases,” as Sigmund Freud soon observed.

Even in the 1930s, 82% of Americans disapproved of married women working, according to a Gallup Poll. Twenty-six of 48 states instituted laws prohibiting them from doing so. But America’s entry into World War II suddenly created a domestic labor shortage.

As GIs fought overseas, their wives toiled as “riveters, lumberjacks, welders, crane operators, keel benders, tool makers, shell loaders, cowgirls, blast-furnace cleaners, locomotive greasers, police officers, taxi drivers and football coaches,” according to one account. Americans cheered the efforts of these Rosie Riveters, but gave little thought to the need for child-care support.

Children were left unattended during their mothers’ eight-hour war plant shifts. Some roamed the streets, others attended all-day and all-night movies. In one Los Angeles war plant zone, a social worker counted 45 infants locked in cars at a single parking lot. Juvenile delinquency, venereal disease and teenage pregnancy rates soared: arrests for boys increased 55%; arrests for girls, many for prostitution, skyrocketed 355%. By 1944, 3 million youths between the ages of 14 and 18 were back at work.

Little did American women realize that, when the war ended and their GI husbands returned home to reclaim jobs, America would reembrace domesticity. As a new era of prosperity dawned in the 1950s, Rosie the Riveter was quietly replaced by her younger, more attractive sister, Kitchen Kitty.

The golden 1950s were proclaimed by McCall’s magazine in its Easter 1954 issue (and ratified by advertisers, media and clergy) to be “The Era of Togetherness.” Each family was to be a perfect kingdom, with a working-hero husband and domestic-nurturer wife. The lure of marital bliss became epidemic--the average age people got married fell to 20; 14 million girls became engaged by 17; 60% of women dropped out of college to marry; and America’s birth rate rivaled India’s.

Automation made the housewife’s work easier. Yet despite her “all-electric home” filled with appliances, a 1965 Survey Research Center study showed that she was spending 55 hours a week doing household chores, more time than her predecessors in 1925 had. Standards had definitely risen. Magazines and books now offered her detailed instruction in decorating, cleaning, laundering, entertaining and meal planning.

Meanwhile, television--the most important electronic home addition--was born. In 1945, only 5,000 American households had televisions. By 1955, 30.7 million households owned sets. Family sitcoms, such as “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver,” showed America what family life should be like.

Beneath the warmth and fuzziness of the family togetherness era were undercurrents of maladaptation and discontent. Many working-class families were unable to afford to maintain the 1950s image of togetherness: Husbands and wives both had to toil to make ends meet. Ethnic discrimination was rampant and a growing tide of enforced conformity swept the land, as did increasing paranoia about national security and mounting personal debt from out-of-control consumerism.

Housewives, claiming vague symptoms of fatigue, were visiting doctors in droves, seeking pills, tranquilizers, vitamins, anemia injections and low-blood pressure cures to relieve their malaise. Some were turning to alcohol and sleeping pills. Others, like their Victorian predecessors, were fearing that they were losing their minds.

The wall cracked in 1963, when Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique.” “As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut-butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night--she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question--’Is this all?’ ” wrote Friedan.

Men and women began to question their roles. However, the golden era of togetherness was not ended by the burgeoning women’s movement; it was slain by economics. Declining median wages, increased global competition and technological inventions that replaced blue-collar workers’ jobs led to “stagflation” (high unemployment, high inflation) in the 1970s.

“The Ozzie and Harriet households were thrown into turmoil,” says former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. “For now, a large proportion of females found themselves doing two jobs--working and raising kids.”

Thus began the “superwoman squeeze” of the 1980s, when, according to a Worldwatch Institute report, working wives and mothers “retained an unwilling monopoly on unpaid labor at home.” As advertisers trumpeted “You can have it all!” frazzled women tried--and mostly failed.

The 1980s also saw the popularization of the “mommy track,” in which women temporarily abandoned the workplace to nurture young families, then returned once their children were older. By 1990, 66% of all mothers worked. According to a 1991 study by Wisconsin-based Family Service of America, by 2000, 80% of mothers with preschoolers will be working.

Today the American family struggles with pressing challenges. Corporate downsizing in the early ‘90s eradicated job security. Child care remains prohibitively expensive and difficult to arrange. “Family time” is achingly limited as couples put in longer, less predictable work hours.

According to clinical psychologist Mary Pipher, author of “The Shelter of Each Other” and “Reviving Ophelia,” parents now spend 40% less time with their children than parents did in the 1950s.

“The kids I saw 20 years ago struggled with perfectionism, obsessiveness and living up to parents’ expectations,” says Pipher. “Today, I’m seeing more kids who are unsocialized, antisocial, impulsive or who have [attention deficit disorder]. Kids hear 400 ads a day. The effect is that they yearn for instant gratification, suffer dissatisfaction, become more impulsive and narcissistic and are more vulnerable to addictions.”

So is the family dying? As it has since humankind’s inception, the family is evolving. Its issues today may differ from those of families in eras past, but its needs--for love, compassion, wellness, safety and a sense of community--remain.

“We should hold no illusions that lives were better in prior eras,” says Kennel of UCLA. “What’s different now is that people are concerned about their children’s parenting. But we are asking the right questions--’How can we attend to this?’ and ‘Who can fill the cracks when parents can’t?’ ”

Susan Vaughn is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.