The Challenge of Family History

Abstract

At Evergreen State College, where I teach, almost all classes are team-taught, coordinated studies that the . students for sixteen credit hours per quarter. This means that we do not have to compete for students' time and attention, so we can assign an entire book to be discussed at one three-hour seminar. It also means we have to be much more conscious about integrating the teaching of writing and other skills into our programs. For these reasons, little of what I do in family history programs could be adapted by teachers in more classroom settings. However, I have found that my experiences in discussing family issues in the public arena have caused me to rethink my teaching in ways that might at least generate some useful discussion among other historians. As we have all learned, families are an emotionally charged and highly mythologized subject, and few students (or teachers, for that matter) find it easy to examine family history without favorable or unfavorable comparisons to their own family memo ries and ideals. It is hard enough to teach the critical analysis of family history to middle-class, academically oriented students, whose cultural relativism easily shades into romanticizing those cultures foreign enough to be exotic, but whose ideals about individualism and equality often stand in the way of a nuanced appreciation of the gains and costs of family life to their own ancestors. But teaching family history to nontraditional stu dents, who often have the most traditional assumptions about families, is a particular challenge. Many of these students' ethnic, religious, class, or regional backgrounds have taught them to treasure the role of family as a source of support and mutual aid, but simultaneously to filter both their own complicated family histories and their personal aspirations through the lens of 1950s family and gender proprieties. Getting such students to put aside that lens and examine their own and others' family histories from different and sometimes uncomfortable frameworks is often a tough sell. I have been aware of these difficulties for years and have experimented with ways to get people to contextualize their own family histories and examine their unconscious assumptions about good and bad family experiences and relations. For example, I often ask students to interview older family members and write their life histories with two different endings: one showing how the subjects' family experiences accounted for their success in life and love, and another drawing on other experiences (or even the same ones) to show how they had been prevented from achieving important and valued goals in their life. This assignment usually brings out nuances in their own family history of which students weren't previously aware. Still, not until I began to appear on talk shows where I had to deal with larger audiences did I realize how often I was not really connecting with many of my students, and how much of this had to do with an academic approach to these topics that seemed to discredit their feelings and traditions. In 1992 my book The Way We Never Were appeared just as Dan Quay le made his famous speech denouncing TV character Murphy Brown for setting a terrible example to our nation's youth by having a child out of wedlock. This coincidence threw me into the ensuing debate over family values, giving me access to larger audiences?from the Oprah Winfrey show to literally hundreds of radio talk shows?than I had ever before had the privilege and challenge of trying to reach. My experiences, although they may not be directly applicable to many classes and although they are based on a particular take on the 1950s with which not everyone will agree, made me much more conscious of how to effectively present material that may otherwise evoke resistance in students. The first several times I talked about the 1950s on such radio shows, I started out doing some myth-busting: Poverty rates were higher in the 1950s than today. Teens who went berserk might not have had the killing power they do now but youthful violence in the cities was more widespread, though it often went unre ported because it was directed at what were then considered to be legitimate targets of attack?African Americans and Hispanics. Domestic violence was routinely trivialized. Women could not