1.6: A Historical Context for Today's Families

The Nostalgia Trap

In contrast to idealized images of the past, some contemporary public discourse suggests that parents are now too busy working to raise their children "properly." Commentators frequently point to children growing up without fathers due to divorce or non-marital births, as well as concerns about youth behaviors such as teenage pregnancy, substance use, or violence.

These concerns are often linked to broader social changes, including the decline of the traditional nuclear family, the increased labor force participation of women, and the growth of single-parent households. Some observers argue that mothers should reduce their work hours or leave the labor force altogether in order to devote more time to childrearing. Others express nostalgia for the 1950s, a period often remembered as simpler and more stable, when many families followed a breadwinner–homemaker model in which one parent earned wages while the other provided full-time care at home.

Families have indeed changed, but this longing for the 1950s reflects what Stephanie Coontz (2000) calls the "nostalgia trap." While 1950s television shows portrayed one version of family life, they obscured the diversity and inequalities that many families experienced at the time (Coontz, 2000). Research also suggests that changes in family structure have not produced the widespread social decline that critics often claim. Instead, many of the challenges facing families today are more closely linked to broader structural forces, including rising inequality, poverty, systemic racism, sexism, and other forms of institutional discrimination.

Preindustrial Families

In the United States, the industrial economy developed gradually between about 1750 and 1850. Before the rise of factory-based production in urban areas, many families functioned as agricultural work units in which home and work were closely intertwined. In this preindustrial context, families were often responsible for their own economic production, and household members worked together to meet basic needs.

In earlier foraging societies—often called hunter-gatherer societies—people typically lived in small kin-based groups composed of several nuclear families. These cooperative groupings helped ensure a stable food supply and collective survival. Although men often focused on hunting and women on gathering and childcare, the contributions of both were essential and generally understood to be of comparable importance for group survival.

Many Indigenous societies in North America also organized gender and family roles differently from the patriarchal models later imposed by Europeans, which emphasized male authority and systematically privileged men’s power over women and children (Quale, 1992). Some Indigenous societies, for example, were matrilineal, meaning descent was traced through the mother’s line, or matrifocal, meaning family life centered on women’s roles. Relatively few, however, were strictly matriarchal. These examples highlight the diversity of family organization prior to industrialization and challenge the assumption that the male breadwinner–female homemaker model is universal or timeless.

Family systems were also shaped by economic resources and forms of production. In some societies, families’ wealth and well-being depended heavily on fertile land and the size of their herds. Because men were often more involved than women in herding activities, they gradually gained greater authority within families, contributing to the expansion of patriarchal family structures.

The colonization of Indigenous peoples further reshaped family organization by imposing European patriarchal norms. Colonization in the United States refers to two related structural processes. The first was the colonization of North America by European powers seeking to expand their wealth and geopolitical influence. This phase culminated in the formation of the United States after the American Revolutionary War, which ended in 1783 with the incorporation of the original thirteen colonies into the new nation.

This process of colonization describes the actions taken by the colonies—and later the United States—to further expand power, territory, and economic gain. These actions included the forced displacement of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands and the establishment of boarding schools for Indigenous children that intentionally disrupted families and suppressed Indigenous languages and cultures. Although Indigenous family structures differed across societies, many Native communities were organized around strong kinship networks. Some nomadic groups tended to have smaller nuclear family households, while more sedentary groups often maintained larger extended family networks. In both cases, families were supported by broader systems of marital alliances and kin obligations, meaning that "no single family was forced to go it alone" (Coontz, 1995).

At the same time, European colonists enslaved Africans who were brought to North America against their will, treating them as property and routinely separating family members. Together, colonization and slavery profoundly reshaped family structures and social life across multiple populations. The institution of slavery in colonial North America and later the United States made it extremely difficult for enslaved African Americans to sustain legally protected family ties or long-term family stability. Enslavers frequently sold children and separated spouses, parents, siblings, and extended kin to maximize profits. In response, enslaved people demonstrated resilience by forming extended kin networks, adopting orphaned children, and incorporating non-biological individuals into family systems. These adaptive strategies helped sustain family and community ties despite the structural violence of slavery.

Industrialization and Family Change

With the rise of industrial capitalism between 1750 and 1850, many working-class families—and families of color, who were often excluded from unionized jobs or remained enslaved—relied on the labor of all household members. To survive economically, adults and children alike entered the workforce. Many family members, including women and children, worked in factories or in domestic service, often laboring for middle- and upper-class households.

Middle-class families who had inherited property and wealth—the vast majority of whom were White—generally did not require all household members to participate in paid labor. The income of the breadwinning father was often sufficient to support the household financially. These families could purchase homes, hire domestic workers, employ tutors, and send their children to private schools. Jobs that paid enough to support an entire family were sometimes referred to as "family-wage" jobs and they were more common during this historical period than they are today. As industrialization shifted households away from producing their own food and goods toward purchasing them on the market, many families experienced a decline in their overall standard of living.

Early and Mid-20th-Century Families

Medical, automotive, and other technological advances contributed to increasing numbers of women entering the workforce in the 1920s, most often in clerical and office positions. The economic pressures of the Great Depression in the 1930s pushed even more women into paid employment outside the home.

During the 1940s, World War II created significant labor shortages in shipyards, factories, and other industries as men enlisted in the military. In response, the federal government and private industry launched national campaigns encouraging women to join the workforce to support the war effort and the broader economy. Women responded in large numbers and many remained employed after the war ended. One of the most enduring symbols of this period is Rosie the Riveter, the iconic figure from a wartime advertising campaign designed to recruit women into defense industry jobs (figure 1.6.2). This popular poster exemplifies the power that women experienced and demonstrated during World War II.

As men returned from military service in Europe and Japan, popular media—including books, magazines, and newspapers—encouraged women to marry and have children. Birth rates rose sharply, people married at younger ages, and the now-famous Baby Boom generation emerged.

The postwar national economy expanded rapidly as automotive and other manufacturing jobs multiplied, enabling many families—often for the first time—to purchase their own homes. Suburban communities grew quickly, and many primarily White middle-class families moved into them (Skolnick, 1991).

Even so, fewer than 60% of American children in the 1950s lived in breadwinner–homemaker nuclear families (Coontz, 2000). Teenage pregnancy rates were roughly twice as high as they are today, although many pregnant teens were already married or married in response to the pregnancy.

Although less publicly discussed at the time, problems such as alcoholism and family violence were present in many households. Historians have also documented that many women were dissatisfied with the limitations of full-time homemaking. This dissatisfaction challenged what would later be termed the “feminine mystique”—the cultural belief that women could and should find complete fulfillment through marriage, motherhood, and homemaking (Friedan, 1963).

The widespread availability of the birth control pill beginning in the early 1960s also reshaped family life. More reliable contraception gave many women greater control over the timing and number of pregnancies, making it easier to delay marriage and childbearing, pursue education, and participate in paid employment. In turn, these changes contributed to shifting expectations about gender, marriage, and motherhood. Access to contraception was not equal, however. Low income women, women of color, unmarried women, and women living in more socially conservative communities often faced greater legal, financial, medical, and social barriers to obtaining birth control. As a result, the expansion of reproductive autonomy benefited women unevenly across race, social class, marital status, and place.

By the 1970s, economic conditions had begun to deteriorate for many families. Home prices and college tuition rose much faster than household incomes, prompting increasing numbers of women to enter the labor force out of economic necessity, as well as for personal fulfillment. As a result, working motherhood became far more common. By the late 1970s, more than 60% of married women with children under age six were in the labor force, compared to fewer than 19% in 1960 (Coontz, 1997). Working mothers were no longer a rarity but an increasingly typical feature of American family life.

The highly gendered nuclear family model popularized in the 1950s is better understood as a historical exception than as a long-standing norm in U.S. family life. Prior to industrialization—and for many families even afterward—women as well as men engaged in paid and unpaid labor to sustain the household. As Coontz (1995) observes, "American families always have been diverse, and the male breadwinner–female homemaker nuclear ideal that most people associate with ‘the’ traditional family has predominated for only a small portion of our history" (Coontz, 1995). From this perspective, the 1950s should not be viewed as the final era of family "normality." Instead, the 1950s family form represented a departure from the long-standing pattern of family diversity in the United States (Skolnick, 1991).

Open Content, Shared Previously

Adapted by Sarah Earl-Novell from 1.3: A Historical Context for Today's Families in Contemporary Families in the US: An Equity Lens 2e by Elizabeth B. Pearce, licensed under  CC BY 4.0.

Changes by Sarah Earl-Novell include remixing, editing, contextualization, and original additions. 

References

Coontz, S. (2000). The way we never were: American families and the nostalgia trap. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Coontz, S. (1997). The way we really are: Coming to terms with America’s changing families. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Coontz, S. (1995, Summer). The way we weren’t: The myth and reality of the “traditional” family. National Forum: The Phi Kappa Phi Journal, 11–14.

Friedan, B. (1963). The feminine mystique. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Gottlieb, B. (1993). The family in the Western world from the Black Death to the industrial age. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Quale, G. R. (1992). Families in context: A world history of population. New York, NY: Greenwood Press.

Skolnick, A. (1991). Embattled paradise: The American family in an age of uncertainty. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Smith, D. 1993. “The Standard North American Family: SNAF as an ideological code.” Journal of Family Issues 14(1): 50-65.