In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in a Postmodern Age - Hardcover

Stacey, Judith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807004324 ISBN 13: 9780807004326

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 1996

Synopsis

A lively and persuasive defense of family diversity and the exposure of the darker side of popular nostalgia for the 1950s family life argues that two-parent families are not necessarily superior and explores the success of gay and lesbian parenting.

About this title

About the Author

Judith Stacey is professor of sociology and women's studies at the University of California, Davis.

Reviews

A defense of the blended, extended, and amended families that have replaced Ozzie and Harriet and the Cleavers as typically American. Stacey (Sociology and Women's Studies/Univ. of Calif., Davis; Brave New Families, 1990) joins the ``family values'' fray on the side of Americans who have no leisure to debate the virtues of how a two-parents/mom-at-home family benefits children. They are too busy scrambling to earn a living; even if there is an involved father, mom can't afford to stay home anymore. In a relatively short text (there are more than 40 pages of notes and bibliography), Stacey argues that poverty and unemployment, among other social and economic forces, have driven the reshaping of the American family and that critics, whether on the right or the left, have two choices: They can accept and work with the array of families as they actually exist, or they can continue to deny conditions as they are. Moreover, she finds that reorganized families cut across economic and class lines; they are not limited to either the poor or the upper middle class. Both liberals and conservatives target the fatherless household as a prime disrupter of ``family values,'' but Stacey sees the campaign to restore the father to his supposedly rightful place as thinly disguised form of anti-feminism, racism, and homophobia. One chapter is devoted to how groups of social scientists have supported this intensely conservative viewpoint despite research to the contrary. A final chapter defends homosexual marriages and parenting practices, offering this group's flexible family arrangements as an example of new family values in microcosm. Addressed more to the author's sociologist and feminist colleagues than to the general reader. Nevertheless, some telling points are made on behalf of diverse modern families and against the organized ``family values'' campaign. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

As the male-dominated, patriarchal, modern nuclear family fragments, American society, declares Stacey, has entered the age of the postmodern family?no single pattern is dominant, and only a minority of U.S. households contain married couples with children. In a forceful, scholarly critique, she argues that much family-values rhetoric serves as a sanitized decoy for class and race prejudices, and she attacks "family-values warriors" Dan Quayle, Pat Buchanan and Jerry Falwell as antifeminist, antigay and politically reactionary. Professor of sociology and women's studies at UC Davis, Stacey (Brave New Families) charges that a right-wing, pro-family campaign, joining forces with centrist think tanks and policy institutions, has shaped the family ideology and politics of the Clinton administration. Advocating legalized homosexual marriages, she considers gay and lesbian families instructional models for meeting the challenges to flexibility, self-help and creativity that the postmodern family demands.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807004324
• ISBN 13: 9780807004326
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 194