Hite Report on the Family: Growing up under Patriarchy

The Hite Report on the Family will cause you to rethink your childhood, your relationships, and quite possibly your life. It is a powerful and original analysis of the changing shape of private life, a profoundly optimistic and forward-looking answer to the dangerous nuclear-family-only nostalgia for the fifties that pervades the ongoing national debate on family values. Shere Hite has listened carefully to the real stories of real people and has developed a fascinating new framework for understanding growing up, based on first-person data rather than on a preconceived model or status quo. In this book, Hite becomes the first person to give theoretical legitimacy to all of the infinite ways that we live as "families," whether as single parents, as same-sex parents, in traditional family groups, or alone.

This major study by a groundbreaking researcher has already been received with tremendous enthusiasm abroad, and Hite's books have sold over 20 million copies in 36 countries, including the United States. But with the 1987 publication of Women and Love, she became the victim of aggressive media hostility. In February 1994, Susan Faludi was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "The media practically fell all over themselves in their race to discredit Hite's . . . contrary and subversive political finding, and . . . succeeded in depoliticizing and silencing it by sweeping aside Hite's chorus of angry women and painting the bearer of the evidence herself as a long, angry woman instead."

In The Hite Report on the Family Hite challenges established views, arguing that the family is not collapsing but being democratized. Hite introduces a new theory of male eroticism by investigating why so many men and boys confuse sex and violence; she presents a lively new portrait of girls questioning their own sexual identity; and she confounds assumptions of a female "puberty" necessarily parallel to the male. Her questions are provocative and intimate: Do you know how your parents felt about having you? Did your father and mother look at pornography? At what age were your children closest to you? Do men raised by single mothers enjoy better relationships with women? Has children's respect for their mothers increased with the rise in single and employed mothers?

With The Hite Report of the Family Shere Hite lights the way to understanding change in the family as the constructive result of choice--not as a moral crisis, but as a successful evolution toward private democracy.

Although successfully published overseas, this latest Hite Report was rejected by its original U.S. publisher, ostensibly over challenges to its methodology. Now it appears from Grove and is certain to spur still more controversy. As in Hite's other books on sexuality, the data were gathered from readers' surveys (3,000 children and adults in 16 countries), and much of the book consists of the participants' musings. These meandering, abbreviated remembrances sound like Nancy Friday's correspondents on a bad day. At least Friday was clear that her purpose was to turn on her readers. Hite attempts to trod on much higher ground, even though there's plenty of semi-juicy ramblings about the erotic feelings that pervade families, sexual identities, and the relationship between mothers and daughters, daughters and fathers, fathers and sons. But it's all presented to prove Hite's thesis: that we are living through a revolution in family life, and rather than trying to reassert outmoded "family values," we should be celebrating the death of the father-dominated family--a system that terrorized all family members, each in his or her own specific way. The last quarter of the book, which presents Hite's conclusions, seems simplistic and not particularly germane to what has come before it. There has always been a fuss about Hite's methodology, but here the theorizing itself often seems shaky ("Children are sometimes better off with a single parent than with two who are unequal and thus present the child with an insoluble loyalty conflict"); at other times, Hite's findings are just old hat ("Women are `whores' or `madonnas'; there's a mind-body split"). Given the likelihood of media confrontations between Hite's feminist supporters and a wide range of skeptics, it's a safe bet that libraries will need copies to fill requests. Still, it's hard not to conclude that the book's original publisher was on the right track. Ilene Cooper