Scents, Scholars, and Stigma: The Revisionist Campaign for Family Values

Abstract

cloying aroma of values is in air. While most Americans no longer want to live in Ozzie and Harriet families, now we can smell as if we do. Vanilla Fields, Angel, Escape for Men, the trendiest perfumes of current era according to a New York Times style commentator, are family values in a bottle-olfactory comfort foods, ripe with scentmemory of childhood, redolent of sweet smells of mother's kitchen.' Thanks to perfume industry's market response to gnawing gap that exists between realities and values in U.S. today, Hilary Clinton can conduct public policy work from West Wing of White House smelling as if she had finally learned to bake cookies. In November 1992, there seemed impeccable cause to imagine that U.S. wars were about to abate. extent and irreversibility of change, assisted by Murphy Brown, Republican convention fiasco, and Year of Woman, seemed to have vanquished familyvalues brigades, while the economy, stupid lured many Reagan Democrats back from their costly supply-side fling. Who would have predicted that even liberal media would scramble to rehabilitate Quayle's image before Bill and Hilary had survived their blistering first hundred days? Yet that is exactly what happened. Dan Quayle Was Right, blared April 1993 cover of Atlantic, a magazine popular with very cultural elite whom former vice-president had blamed for decline of Western civilized life. Far from withering, a revisionist campaign for values has flourished under Democratic skies. While Clinton's job stimulus package suffered a silent demise, pro-family-values stories mushroomed in magazines, newspapers, on radio and TV talk shows, and in scholarly journals. Atlantic cover story by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead2 ignited the single strongest public response to any issue ever published by Atlantic since at least 1981, and was recycled from sea to rocky sea.3 A New York Times op-ed, The Controversial Truth: Two-Parent Families Are Better, by Rutgers University sociologist David Popenoe, also enjoyed acclaim, with retreads and derivatives appearing from Chronicle of Higher Education to Santa Rosa (Calif) Press Democrat.4 In winter 1992-93 American Scholar, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a founding father of post-World War II family-crisis