Middle-class American Families Research Articles

Reaching for the Sky and Beyond: Middle-Class American Families and Their Everyday Overwork

Reaching for the Sky and Beyond: Middle-Class American Families and Their Everyday Overwork

OBJECTIFICATION OF INFANTILE BODIES: UNDERSTANDING THE BIOPOLITICS OF ANTEBELLUM AMERICA THROUGH BABY SHOWS

The purpose of this study is to examine the function of baby shows in antebellum America in instigating binary logic of gender in family, child rearing, objectification of both infantile and maternal bodies; all of which are closely tied to the biopolitics of the antebellum America. This study will first look at the biopolitical aspects of the first baby shows organized as part of agricultural fairs in 1854 by focusing on the coverage of such events by newspaper articles. Then it will follow Phineas Taylor Barnum’s re-introduction of baby shows along with his freak shows in 1855 for commercial success. In Barnum’s shows, this study finds, the reproduction of properly bred white American babies is promoted through questionnaires and examinations of doctors in the evaluation of babies as well as the mothers to instill a eugenic normalcy with regards to determining the qualities of the best American baby. Lastly, the juxtaposition of the abnormal “freaks” and “oddities” with “cherubic” babies is realized through Barnum’s American museum which, as this study will argue, serves as a heterotopia in the sense that Barnum’s museum attempts to establish and thereby instigate a discursive historical truth of the proper middle-class American family in the form of a myth by exercising the power/knowledge over the American family as a heterotopian authority.

A Trajectory of Billboard Poetry in America: From “Burma-Shave”-Roadside Advertisement to “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri”

This essay applies a Cultural Studies-approach to the multi-facetted relationship between poetry and advertisement as it emerged in the first half of the 20th century in the United States and as it became visible on billboards by the roadside. Somewhat paradoxically, public poetry in advertising appeared all across the United States (predominantly along highways in rural areas) around the time that much of modernist American poetry was being declared a highly elitist and urban centric affair in the orbit of new criticism-scholarship at universities. My first case study addresses the iconic Burma-Shave Billboard Poetry Campaign (1929-1963) and its long-lasting influence on American (popular) culture – in literature, music, visual art. Prior to this campaign as well as on the heels of it, billboards and billboard poetry were taken up to a minor extent in poetry circles and literary criticism (where they continued to be mostly viewed with disdain) and to a larger extent by conceptual artists who used billboard aesthetics, slogans, and short (poetic) texts in installations mimicking and critiquing consumer culture. One of the most aesthetically innovative recent ‘returns’ of billboard poetry, however, is the one employed intra-diegetically in the Hollywood film “Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri” (2017), my second case study. Here, the writing on the billboard-walls make those aspects explicit that have been submerged in the earlier rhymes by the roadside: While the playful, optimistic lines of advertisement imply, time and again, a happy white middle-class American family with a sober and well-shaved patriarch behind the wheel and thus gloss over the disavowed underside of mobility, the film makes the latent manifest and points to systemic / structural violence, such as a pervasive American rape ‘culture’ which is linked to the car and the mobility it offers. The film uses the billboard and its inscription as foil and as catalyst to address and to protest this and other forms of violence and thus presents an activist intervention in order to ask for more than merely poetic justice.

Absorbing Waste, Displacing Labor: Family, Environment, and the Disposable Diaper in the 1970s

Abstract Between 1965 and 1980, disposable diapers became the norm among middle-class American families, altering resource flows as they became more popular. Diapers crafted from wood and water of the United States, primarily from the South—rather than that region’s cotton—covered infant bottoms. The turn to single-use diapers also transformed knowledge production. For the first half of the twentieth century, women had carried out the interrelated tasks of making diapers, caring for children, and laundering diapers. This work informed women’s understandings of children’s bodies and the material world. By the 1950s, pre-folded diapers and home washing machines simplified the acts of diaper creation and maintenance and associated this work ever more strongly with the household. In the 1970s, economic pressures and feminism prompted families to rethink the way they cared for infants’ wastes as disposable diapers simplified household work, and shifting cultural norms encouraged their adoption. Thus, families embraced them. The work of maintaining diapers was replaced with the work of disposal. This history of the disposable diaper centers on reproductive work, tracing the tasks inherent in diapering as well as the shifting social norms and codes that legitimized disposable diapers. Ultimately, the disposable diaper not only offers lessons about the costs of a disposable society but also new insights about changing dynamics of family life and their impact on the environment in the 1970s.

THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH

THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH

A Qualitative Synthesis of the Effects of Rising Cost-Sharing Requirements in the United States

In diesem Beitrag evaluiere und synthetisiere ich Ergebnisse aus zehn Jahren qualitativer Forschung zu den Effekten steigender Selbstbeteiligungsanforderungen in der Gesundheitsversorgung. Wahrend das Gros an Forschung in diesem Feld quantitativ ausgerichtet war und ist, will ich mit meiner Analyse dazu beitragen, die Perspektiven und Erfahrungen der Patient/innen und der Dienstanbieter/innen nachzuvollziehen. Ein Ergebnis ist, dass steigende Selbstbeteiligungsanforderungen viele Amerikaner/innen veranlassen, auf Gesundheitsdienstleistungen zu verzichten. Dies gilt auch fur medizinisch erforderliche Behandlungen fur sie selbst und fur ihre Familienmitglieder, und zwar auch im Falle von der Mittelklasse zugehorigen Familien, bei denen Angehorige in regularen Arbeitsverhaltnissen stehen und versichert sind. Zweitens zeige ich, dass diese Anforderungen zu Konfusion, Sorge, Stress und einer allgemeinen Angstlichkeit aufseiten der Patient/innen beitragen. Meine Befunde sind komplementar zu denen aus dem RAND Health Insurance Experiment, einer grosen experimentellen Studie zu Gesundheitskosten und der Nutzung von Gesundheitsdienstleistungen, die von 1974 bis 1982 durchgefuhrt wurde, um die Effekte von Krankheitsfolgekosten nachvollziehen zu konnen. Diese Befunde sind kritisch, weil aufseiten einiger politischer Entscheidungstrager/innen eine weitere Steigerung der Selbstbeteiligung unterstutzt wird. Ich diskutiere auch Grenzen und mogliche Folgerichtungen solcher Untersuchungsansatze.

“Happy Together?”: Envisioning the American Family in the Long 1950s

As nuclear, middle-class American family reached its apotheosis in what I call the Long an almost mythical period of post-war national prosperity, it became bedrock of Cold War consensus, charged with political and symbolic values that were often at odds with its realities. This paper first analyzes forces at play in shaping myth of family as happy home corporation in America, which included media pressure, changing social, demographic and economic conditions as well regressive views of gender and sexual roles, especially as emerging from bestselling marriage and child-care manuals. It then looks at way in which dissenting evidence from those Long 1950s, especially in area of sexual behaviors as well as juvenile rebellion, showed American family caught in a state of flux, which was at odds with imperatives of Cold War consensus.

The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life by Margaret Guroff

Reviewed by: The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life by Margaret Guroff James Longhurst The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life. By Margaret Guroff. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. 280 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 cloth. Once again, the bicycle is back in the American story. After more than a century of alternating obsession and obscurity, the two-wheeled conveyance has returned. In their own generations and for their own purposes, Americans had previously turned to bicycles: thrill-seeking upper classes in the nineteenth century, turn-of-the-century bike mechanics with aspirations of powered flight, and fuel-sipping environmentalists in the nadir of the 1970s. In the twenty-first century, congested cities, unhealthy populations, and underemployed millennials have once again taken to the wheel. How can the long history of this everyday object help us to understand the nation's story? Margaret Guroff's book offers a bright and accessible overview that is still rooted in scholarly work—particularly cultural history. The Mechanical Horse is a part of the "Discovering America" series; editor Mark Crispin Miller notes that the intent is to "offer fresh takes on events and people we thought we knew well and draw unexpected connections that deepen our understanding of our national character." Guroff's contribution to that mission is a readable, carefully contextualized and sprightly tour of a topic that most Americans have dismissed as unserious. Overcoming that perception, The Mechanical Horse successfully shows that the bicycle is a central thread running through much of the national narrative. As Guroff puts it, "much of American history cannot be told as it happened without the bicycle leading the way" (2). The text is filled with stories that place the bicycle in context with the society and culture around it. Choosing two from countless examples, the personal freedom that women of the 1890s experienced on the bicycle is described as "bolster[ing] scientists' then-radical argument that what is good for one human body is just as good for another" (49). Elsewhere, bicycling is related to the history of the family: "As children moved from the periphery to the center of the middle-class American family . . . the bicycle became an indispensable accessory for them, an emblem of parental love" (114). In all instances, this contextualization cites relevant scholarly research. The Mechanical Horse is more of a guided tour of history than it is original research. Nor is it especially focused on the Great Plains, though it does successfully avoid an exclusive focus on the East Coast. But it is an exceptional example of an empathetic historical imagination, and fantastically good at making history accessible to all. Just like the bicycle. [End Page 433] James Longhurst Department of History University of Wisconsin–La Crosse Copyright © 2018 The Center for Great Plains Studies and The University of Nebraska Press

The ultimate digital picture frame

Some 20 years ago, Bill Gates was the king of computing, and not above boasting about his new high-tech house. In his book The Road Ahead he described how large monitors in the house would display great works of art, changing every day. These digital art frames could even react as you walked past, no button pushing required. Now that, I remember thinking, is something I would like. . Gates predicted that the day would come when almost any middle-class American family could enjoy this kind of technology. Recently I decided to find out whether that day has arrived. . The impetus to build my own digital art frame came from my mother, Sylvia Gibbs, a professional artist. Over the years I have framed and hung quite a few of her paintings. But as I was straightening up a closet this spring I found a portfolio full of prints and drawings she had given me years ago. They are terrific; I'd love to put them up. But it would cost thousands of dollars to have them all professionally framed. And I don't have enough wall space to hang them.

Beyond transmission: intergenerational patterns of family formation among middle-class American families.

Research about parental effects on family behavior focuses on intergenerational transmission: that is, whether children show the same family behavior as their parents. This focus potentially over emphasizes similarity and obscures heterogeneity in parental effects on family behavior. In this study, we make two contributions. First, instead of focusing on isolated focal events, we conceptualize parents' and their children's family formation holistically as the process of union formation and childbearing between ages 15 and 40. We then discuss mechanisms likely to shape these intergenerational patterns. Second, beyond estimating average transmission effects, we innovatively apply multichannel sequence analysis to dyadic sequence data on middle-class American families from the Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSOG; N = 461 parent-child dyads). The results show three salient intergenerational family formation patterns among this population: a strong transmission, a moderated transmission, and an intergenerational contrast pattern. We examine what determines parents' and children's likelihood to sort into a specific intergenerational pattern. For middle-class American families, educational upward mobility is a strong predictor of moderated intergenerational transmission, whereas close emotional bonds between parents and children foster strong intergenerational transmission. We conclude that intergenerational patterns of family formation are generated at the intersection of macro-structural change and family internal psychological dynamics.

Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction (review)

Reviewed by: Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction Wendy Kline Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction. By Amy Laura Hall. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2008. In this ambitious intellectual study, Amy Laura Hall tackles the historical tensions between Protestantism and science in the realm of reproduction. Her focus is on the fraught relationship between religion, science, and consumer culture, questioning why twentieth-century white middle-class American families welcomed rather than resisted an ethic of parenthood that differentiates between the "wanted" and the "unwanted." Buying into the consumer ethic of progress, these families implicitly rejected the moral basis of their religion and its emphasis on redemption. Perhaps more surprisingly, they were guided into this ethic of progress by the church itself, beginning in the mid-twentieth century. Ministers stressed that Christian couples were "morally obligated to plan" their families [End Page 147] in order to strengthen the community (13). Hall contrasts this religious promotion of a controlled, planned, ideal (white, middle-class) family with the model of irresponsible, unhealthy, out-of-control (non-white, poor) family denigrated by eugenicists, advertisers, and others. With this increasingly visible and pronounced dichotomy of good vs. bad, healthy vs. unhealthy, productive vs. dependent family types, it is not surprising that so many religious consumers bought into this notion that their own families should adhere to a particular size and standard. Hall mines Christian journals, sermons, hymns, popular magazines, and eugenics archives to present a multi-dimensional portrait of prescriptive parenthood. Perhaps most interesting and entertaining of the many images included in her book are advertisements urging mothers to consider science and technology in their parenting decisions, whether it is for Lysol, baby formula, televisions, or ADHD medications. Such variety, however, also serves to weaken her argument. Hall finds prescriptive parenthood almost everywhere, and at times her book resembles a catalog of promotional material rather than a historical analysis of parenthood or Protestantism. Part of the problem stems from a somewhat disjointed narrative, as Hall skips from 1950s Methodist magazines to twenty-first-century pharmaceutical campaigns for ADHD and back again without hesitation. One paragraph on the eugenics movement jumps from World War II to 1926 to 1968 and back to 1953, for example (283). As a self-proclaimed pro-life feminist, minister, and professor of theological ethics, Hall is unabashed about the prescriptive nature of her work, hoping that it will help to reform mainline Protestantism. Families need to rethink conceptions of parenthood, she argues, in order to combat the efforts of those seeking to eliminate genetic "imperfections." Her passion and concern spill out from the pages, which may inspire some readers to question the status quo. Her approach, however, obscures the complexities of twentieth-century reproductive history. There is little room for agency in her story (resisters to this prescriptive literature are limited to the book's final pages) and little differentiation between ideas promoted by Nativist ministers in the 1890s, 1950s advertisers, and twenty-first-century scientists researching ADHD. Nevertheless, this is a thoughtful and provocative study on this history of procreation and parenthood in twentieth-century America. Wendy Kline University of Cincinnati Copyright © 2011 Mid-America American Studies Association

In This Issue

In This Issue

Changing American home life: trends in domestic leisure and storage among middle-class families

This study of middle-class American families draws on ethnography and urban economic history, focusing on patterns of leisure time and household consumption and clutter. We trace how residential life evolved historically from cramped urban quarters into contemporary middle-class residences and examine how busy working families use house spaces. Our ethnographic sample consists of 24 Los Angeles families in which both parents work full time, have young children, and own their homes. Formal datasets include systematically timed family uses of home spaces, a large digital archive of photographs, and family-narrated video home tours. This analysis highlights a salient home-storage crisis, a marked shift in the uses of yards and garages, and the dissolution of outdoor leisure for busy working parents.

The Laramie Project: Western Pastoral

All of the people above were murdered — murdered because of their sexual orientation. Yet probably only one name is widely familiar: Matthew Shepard, the young, gay, university student who was tied to a fence, beaten, pistol-whipped, and left to die in the cold. Why did Shepard, in particular, become the focus of enormous mainstream media and popular attention, including that of the White House? Doubtless, the violence and context of the crime are partly the cause; yet the other victims suffered equally horrendous deaths. Matthew's race, class, and age may have had much to do with the public interest in his story: he was white, attractive, middle-class — he could have been the college aged son of any stereotypical middle-class American family. However, the other primary factor involved has to do not so much with Matthew himself as with the location of the crime — the West.

Household Risk Management and Optimal Mortgage Choice

The portfolio of the typical American household is quite unlike the diversie ed portfolio of liquid assets discussed in e nance textbooks. The major asset in the portfolio is a house, a relatively illiquid asset with an uncertain capital value. The value of the house generally exceeds the net worth of the household, which e nances its homeownership through a mortgage contract to create a leveraged position in residential real estate. Other e nancial assets and liabilities are typically far less important than the house and its associated mortgage contract. The importance of housing in household wealth is illustrated in Figure I. This e gure plots the fraction of household assets in housing and in equities against the wealth percentile of the household. Poor households appear at the left of the e gure, and wealthy households at the right. Data come from the 1989 and 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances. The e gure shows that middle-class American families (from roughly the fortieth to the eightieth percentile of the wealth distribution) have more than half their assets in the form of housing. Even after the expansion of equity ownership during the 1990s, equities are of negligible importance for these households. 1

Subabusive Violence in Child Rearing in Middle-class American Families

This article will summarize the results of our recent study of subabusive violence in child rearing in middle-class families, and will then discuss the implications of the findings for the questions before us—"What are the short and long term effects of corporal punishment of children?"; "Should we try to reduce its use?"; "If so, can we be advised by these results on how to accomplish that?" Subabusive violence against children1 consists of those ordinary, everyday acts of violence—spanking, hitting, slapping, etc—that do not rise to the common definitions of abuse. Most parents accept these as proper acts of discipline in the children's best interests. The pervasiveness of subabusive violence in child rearing is not in doubt. It is rooted solidly in American traditions2 and is supported by commonly held religious beliefs.3 Surveys4-6 indicate that some 90% of parents use corporal punishment in child rearing, and its continued use in public schools has been well-documented.7 Although its pervasiveness is not in doubt, there are questions about its effects on children—intended and unintended, positive and negative effects. Is it an effective set of disciplinary tools? Does it harm children? Do its costs outweigh its benefits? There is no doubt that abusive violence against children has harmful effects, but what about subabuse? It has been argued that subabusive violence may have direct negative effects on child development, may be a risk factor for abuse, may escalate to abuse under some still unknown conditions, may violate humanitarian values, and may contribute to maintaining a general culture of violence.1

Evolutionary competence in the postmodern family: An idealized design approach

Abstract The complexity of postmodern life simultaneously intensifies our need for meaningful family relatedness and makes it harder to achieve. Families need new images to guide them toward coherence and effectiveness given the multiplicity of postmodern demands and opportunities they face. Idealized family systems design (IFSD) is described as a promising means by which individual families can create such images to guide their own evolution. The experiences of eight middle class American families who undertook IFSD are described.

From Empty Nest to Crowded Nest: The Dynamics of Incompletely-Launched Young Adults

This paper concerns problems in the successful transition to adulthood for young people in middle-class American families. We call the most obvious symptom of this problem the returning young adult syndrome. We argue that this symptom points to broader questions of young adults' (YA) deviance from parental expectations of the YAs' autonomy, parental anomie, erratic performance by YAs in adult roles, and substantial intrafamilial conflict. We argue that the issue has emerged from separation-individuation tensions and the YAs' ambivalence about their capacity to play adult roles, coupled with more volatile causes, including postwar nurturance of children's rights, more recent legitimation of parents' rights to develop themselves, and the still more recent contraction in the opportunity structure for young adults. Two likely outcomes are increased YA capacity to play modified adult roles and decreases in parents' expectations about YAs' performance.

The Middle-Class American Home of the Fifties: The Use of Architecture in Nicholas Ray's "Bigger than Life" and Douglas Sirk's "All That Heaven Allows"

Certain traditional genres in the American cinema are more or less definable in terms of the time and place of their settings. A clear example is the Western, where the is the landscapes and towns comprising the frontier of White American civilization during its movement West over a period of time in history. Films about contemporary middle-class families can be seen as emerging in the form of a genre (including both comedies and melodramas) in Hollywood during the forties and fifties-a genre clearly defined by its being set in and around the middle-class American family home. Just as in the Western the as an actual historical-geographical place is transformed, through the behavioral patterns of its inhabitants, into an ideologically laden cultural phenomenon, so in the middle-class family genre the family, as an actual category of people inhabiting a collection of dwellings across contemporary America, becomes a generic subject of ideological significance. A discussion of the use of domestic architecture is as integral to the dominant directorial styles of Ray and Sirk as, say, the use of landscapes to those of John Ford and Anthony Mann. As with landscapes in certain Westerns, the homes in Bigger Than Life and All That Heaven Allows provide an interesting locus of thematic and stylistic approaches to the American middle-class family as the subject matter of a genre. The particular conceptions of architecture in the two films (and in the two directors' work generally) are in a certain way diametrically opposed. Within the context of the middle-class family film, they can be seen as providing opposite poles or coordinates between which the films of other practitioners of the genre-Minnelli, Kazan, Cukor, etc.-can be located (cf. Ford's and Mann's conceptions of the landscape of the West). In essence, the difference is that Ray conceives of architecture as architecture whereas Sirk uses architecture as a tool. In Bigger Than Life the expressive role of architectural features invariably depends on their specific architectural functions, while in All

Family History and Oral History

For three years I have been using family history in my women's history classes. I ask students to use oral history techniques and interview the oldest women in their families. We tend to have three groups of women to study--those born at the end of the nineteenth century, those born in the early twentieth century, and those born after World War I. The class breaks down into small groups according to these age divisions, so that students can compare cross-cultural differences. Then we come back together to pick out parts of our collective histories for further examination and analysis. Here at New Mexico State University students are approximately 20 percent Chicano, 3 percent Native American, 2 percent Black, and 75 percent Anglo. The women's history class tends to have about the same proportions. Most of the students come from working-class or lower middle-class families. They have begun to impress their families (and themselves) with the importance of knowing and understanding their cultures and have begun to talk to each other about the difficulties their families have had working to survive, instead of being embarrassed that their families did not fit into some abstract ideal of the middleclass American family. For students, studying family history brings history down to a very personal level. It encourages contact with older women and an understanding of their lives. It also allows students to see how an individual family was organized, how persons interacted within it, and particularly how the women functioned within it--what their status, duties, and powers were within the household. The student can see how these family relations changed over time. Each woman participates in at least two, or even three generations-her mother's, her own, and possibly the next generation. What she remembers of her own mother's life as she was growing up and how she relates this to her own childhood and youth may then be contrasted with her own adult life and perhaps to her children's experiences. The intersection over time of one woman's life with a family reveals important ways in which women react to change and how change affects their lives. These lives can then be contrasted in the classroom with larger generalizations about women's lives during the period to see how they differed. Oral history is the core of all family history. By utilizing oral history in the classroom, students can learn to use it self-consciously as a method rather than as just a means to gather content. Family history provides an easy access to the experiences of women. Through this process, students can learn about and practice oral history skills with a woman who is known and special to them. Their work often results in precious tapes and biographies which are passed on to other family members and preserved for later generations. In fact, the response of the students to these family history projects has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. For some granddaughters, it has been the first real contact with the lives of their grandmothers. Mothers and daughters have talked about women's role in their families and about family problems which they had avoided discussing before, sometimes because they did not know quite how to raise the subject with each other. The