The Family in the Modern Age: More Than a Lifestyle Choice

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Summary: Capturing the Higher Ground on Family Policy
Review: Not long after politicians discovered opinion polling did they find that there was political capital to mine from the votes of women. This was based on the observation that more single women vote liberal and, more intriguingly, tend to vote more conservatively once they have a family and children. In 1983 sociologist Brigitte Berger wrote a prescient book about the politicization of the family entitled The War Over the Family: Capturing the Middle Ground. Her recent 2002 book The Family in the Modern Age: More than a Lifestyle Choice is an apparent sequel to her earlier work. Berger, perhaps the most apolitical of all the social scientists of the family, says in her new book that the war against the family is effectively over, as both political parties in the U.S. have tried to capture the middle ground of the "family values" issue. The family may have won the political war, but, if recent literature is any indication, the ideological battle continues to be lost in academia and in the clinics of most family therapy experts. Berger finds four distinct camps battling for the "hearts and minds" of the family: the radical, the conservative, the mainstream, and the postmodern. The radical Marxist attack on the bourgeois (i.e., affluent father-mother-child) family has lost its ideological momentum or gone underground. Perhaps Sylvia Hewitt and Cornel West's The War Against Parents (1999) can be seen as an attempt by the radical wing to co-opt the political capital to be found in the family values debate. The conservative camp can be found in such books as Cameron Lee's Beyond Family Values (1998) and James Dobson's Bringing Up Boys (1999). The mainstream view is epitomized in James Q. Wilson's more recent The Marriage Problem: How our Culture Has Weakened Families (2002). The postmodern view has found a recent voice in sociologist Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheims's advocacy for family diversity titled Reinventing the Family: In Search of New Lifestyles (2002). Berger's apolitical book is a counterpoint to Beck-Gernsheim's view that families should serve political ends. Beyond the ideological and academic debates, Berger's book contains many sound sociological postulates for family policy making. Berger's sociological postulates could even make a sound basis for "family therapists," although Berger seems to avoid any sort of prescriptive advice giving. If you believe that it is critical for the family to continue to carve out an apolitical cultural sphere in society, and if you are skeptical of any grand intellectual or therapeutic prescriptions for the family, Berger's book may be for you. On the other hand, if you are looking for a book to resonate with your political views or agendas, perhaps you should look elsewhere. For another book in the Berger genre one might also see Richard T. Gill's Posterity Lost: Progress, Ideology, and the Decline of the American Family (1999).