Economizing Family Values. (Books).

Hitting Home: Feminist Ethics, Women's Work, and the Betrayal of "Family Values"

Gloria H. Albrecht

Continuum 2002, $22.95 (cloth).

THAT CATCH PHRASE of conservative politics. "family values," has been discredited in the minds of many for its idealization of "Leave it to Beaver" culture and the apparent cynicism of well-heeled politicians who invoke it for partisan gain. By now one might think the phrase would have gone the way of Beaver's innocent misdemeanors. But the rhetoric of family values has proved remarkably resilient-morphing, as it did in the last election cycle, into localized "prairie values," "Texas values," and the even more curious, "Arkansas values."

Gloria Albrecht's new book, Hitting Home, explains the force of such rhetoric and offers a convincing counter reading of American families in distress. All sorts of American families are indeed hurting and, not surprisingly, they are grasping for political solutions. Stressed and stretched, often to the breaking point by insufficient time and money, middle and lower income families share a growing discontent. Appeals to family values affirm the plight of American households and hint at supportive public policy, though on a largely misplaced cultural front. Implied is the idea that virtually every aspect of society can be reduced to questions individual moral character and behavior. Wide social and economic tends, which extend beyond national borders, are reduced to matters of individual choice. In reality, as more women try to juggle unpaid reproductive labor at home with full-time wage labor, men's wages stagnate and dependant-care costs outpace women's contribution to family income. The stress on families is real. While some conservatives blame feminism, the media, and all things associated with the 1960S, Albrecht uncovers harsh economic realities that make the idiom of family values a cruel irony for all but the most privileged in our society.

Through a carefully documented study of women's work experience, Albrecht shows how the causes of civic and family decline are fundamentally misconstrued. At issue are underlying economic shifts in the form of globalizing markets and large-scale corporate employment practices. Labor markets have changed dramatically over the past thirty years. As manufacturing jobs have been relocated to under regulated poverty-wage nations, job growth in the United States has come in low-wage service and information-technology sectors, and most of these jobs simply do not pay living wages. Dual incomes have become increasingly necessary for family survival. Single parents and others who cannot obtain the new dual-earner ideal are subject to second jobs and working poverty. Even for the relatively affluent, extended wage hours now crowd out meaningful civic participation.

Intimate relations are profoundly affected by employment demands. Gender, family forms, and child rearing have become "sites of struggle" in response to changing economic relations otherwise beyond our personal control. As Albrecht puts it, "Families are being battered by the constant expansion of economic rationality into their lives and by the need to radically reorganize family life in response to the demands of the workplace" (8-9). Since the 1970s, American family life has undergone restructuring as middle class, particularly white married women have substantially increased their rate of full-time wage labor. With apologies to Gloria Steinem, however, women's influx into the wage labor force has less to do with feminist-inspired flight from the boredom of housework than a decline in real wages and the resulting need for women to contribute more extensively to household income. Americans now work more hours annually than citizens of any other industrialized nation. Among the data Albrecht cites is a star ting increase in the amount of time attributed to paid work. Between 1970 and 1990, the average American worker added 164 hours--roughly equivalent to one month's work--to her or his annual wagework total (104). Although changing family patterns are "not simply the natural extension of trade," Albrecht finds congruence with economic patterns that further short-term corporate profits and the interests of an affluent retainer class that can afford to shift its burden of household maintenance to poorer, often minority women. Family values rhetoric may rightly call "individuals to take up their responsibility for the quality of familial and communal life, [but] there is no parallel call to hold the political economy responsible" (22).

Hitting Home reflects a renewed commitment in Christian feminist ethics to materialist analysis and solidarity with economically poor women. Albrecht makes her case well, grounding her argument in an array of statistical data and a liberationist-Christian interpretive framework. The book will thus interest readers in social ethics, women's studies, Christian life, and all who share concern for the daily flourishing of women and families. While Albrecht explores trends in American women's work in aggregate terms, the book does not attempt much by way of women's first-hand existential experience, nor does it fully theorize the intersection of women's work in the United States and the new economics of globalization. These gaps are readily filled, however, by other recent feminist contributions like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel & Dimed and Pamela Brubalker's Globalization at What Price?

In short, Albrecht's analysis calls into question our nation's faith in unregulated markets to resolve social problems. Current crises in family and civic life are not due to disembodied values. Rather government policies promoting deregulation of industries, increased exports, and increased rates of market flexibility have restructured our life choices and placed cost savings on the backs of low-income and disproportionately poor women and their children. Policies upholding the dignity of workers and women's social equality would surely sustain truer family values.

Jane E. Hicks is Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics in the Religion, Philosophy and Classics Department of Augustana College in South Dakota.