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In Defence of “Family Privilege”
I USED TO SNIGGER at the sort of conservatives who upheld “the family unit” as the “foundation-stone of our society”. On the one hand, it was tantamount to asserting that the Law of Gravity draws all things towards the centre of the Earth. On the other, it was conservative code for cracking down ruthlessly on the contraception and abortion services that allowed women to commit carnal sins with impunity. More simply: it was either a statement of the bleeding-bloody-obvious, or a declaration of reactionary intent.
That dismissive reaction was, however, elicited from me a long time ago. The so-called “Culture Wars” have been raging since the 1960s; in the sixty years that have elapsed since the contraceptive pill became readily available, and in the forty years since abortion laws were liberalised, Western societies have changed dramatically. When biology ceased to be destiny, the rigidly gendered societies made feasible by biological determinism found themselves without a convincing raison d’être. When promiscuity could no longer be held in check by pregnancy, well, that’s when all the cultural bets were off.
So much of the glue that held western societies together was dissolved by the technological fix of reliable contraception. The sacred way to marriage and children could now be bypassed. The parental shotgun gathered dust in a corner. The timing of reproduction, becoming much more precise, allowed careers to be pursued without unplanned interruptions. The horizons of female aspiration grew ever wider. Before the cultural bulldozer of feminism all the other impediments to women’s liberation: divorce law, contract law, male privileges of all kinds, were soon swept ruthlessly aside. Patriarchy may not have crumbled – but it wobbled.
There were problems, of course, lots of them. Demolishing a system of socio-sexual relations which had existed for more than three millennia was unlikely to be cost free. Patriarchy not only controlled the lives of women but also shaped the lives of men. The template of masculinity changed much more slowly than the laws and institutions which had formerly dictated its shape. Boys became men according to the old rules, only to discover that the people they’d become were singularly ill-suited to prospering under the new socio-sexual conventions. Girls were told they could do anything, while men struggled to do anything that wasn’t immediately condemned as “sexist”.
Keep this pot bubbling for two or more generations and whatever you’ve got inside is bound to change. The human family, certainly, along with the children it continues – for better or for worse – to nurture. The number of single-parent families has grown tremendously. So, too, has the number of “blended” families: products of a society in which one out of three marriages ends in divorce and, increasingly, men and women have one, two, many spouses – picking up their new partner’s offspring along the way. Cohabitation as a permanent arrangement has, similarly, become much more common – along with the legal reforms required to protect the rights of its unwed participants.
Which is not in any way to suggest that marriage has become unpopular. On the contrary: the institution’s boundaries have been widened to include anybody and everybody hankering to exchanges vows with the love (or, at least, one of the loves) of their life.
There was a time when the lesbian and gay community looked at the “straight” world with a mixture of scorn and pity: seeing the men and women enmeshed in the institution of marriage as hopeless prisoners of unyielding and profoundly damaging gender stereotypes. How things have changed! Now the LGBTQI+ community is positively queuing-up to plight their troth. What’s more, the hapless, doctrinally compromised, Christian churches are expected to bless such unions. Not even Christian wedding-cake bakers are entitled to refuse those whom God has joined together. And do not for one moment assume that such families must, perforce, be childless – not when the technological fix is in!
All this familial shape-shifting was bound to attract the attention of those same cultural revolutionaries who have drawn a bead on every other social manifestation of patriarchal capitalism. The same subversive intent that gave us Friedrich Engels’s “The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State” (1884) had, by the year 2015, morphed into a Washington DC-based NGO calling itself “The Family Story Project”. In August of 2019, the Project posted an interview with Bethany Letiecq, associate professor in the Human Development and Family Science program at George Mason University, under the heading: “What Is Family Privilege?”
That’s right! Alongside “White Privilege” and “Male Privilege” and “Heterosexual Privilege” and “Class Privilege” you can now set “Family Privilege”! What is it? Professor Letiecq is happy to explain:
“Family privilege recognizes that some families are the beneficiaries of unearned or unacknowledged advantages in our society simply based on how they are configured. For example, our society values and privileges heterosexual marriages over other relationships, including couples who live together, raise children together, and choose not to marry.”
But wait, there’s more. Professor Letiecq is something less than a fan of what she calls the Standard North American Family (SNAF) which she describes as “a romantic family ideal consisting of a White, married, opposite-sex, monogamous couple who embodies traditional gender roles while raising their biological children in the home they own in a middle-class neighborhood. Proponents of SNAF perpetuate the notion that a White, heteronormative family experience is best for children and society and that everyone should aspire to this romanticized ideal.”
Those on the left who struggle to understand how someone like Donald Trump can attract the support of so many Americans should ponder the effect of Professor Letiecq’s words on middle-class White Americans who have toiled their entire lives to “do the right thing” by themselves, their partners and their children. They should then ask themselves how such people are likely to respond to being told that all their hard work; all the many sacrifices they have made; all the things they have gone without over the years to make sure that their family was kept warm and safe and happy; was nothing more than the unacknowledged accumulation of “family privilege”. And that such “advantages” as they have come to enjoy are “unearned”.
The defence of the family, and of the “family values” it embodies, may have been a reactionary call fifty or sixty years ago, but today I’m not so sure. If the instinctive mammalian urge to protect and preserve one’s mate and his/her offspring is a reactionary urge, then I, for one, struggle to understand what a “progressive” urge might be. It would seem that among all the statues of soldiers and statesmen being toppled across America, we must now expect to find the torn fragments of Norman Rockwell’s artistic tributes to the “romanticized ideals” of the “privileged” American family.
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