CONTENTS
Value Judgements
by Ellen Goodman , Associate Editor of The Boston Globe
My business is news, chronicling what is new in our society. In short, I am an observer of change. That's what journalists do, and I've spent much of my time observing the single greatest change of my adult life, what we have come to call the women's movement, and its effect on our private and public lives.
I call my talk "Value Judgments." It is, not coincidentally, the same name I gave to my most recent book. And this is how the title occurred. About a year ago, when I was wading through four years' worth of columns in order to see which ones I would use for my new collection, I came across columns about the women's movement, the resegregation of America, the search for common ground, changing family life, relationships, bioethics, public policy, and the elusive search for the holy grail of the '90s--a balanced life. I realized that if I had to put one word over all the variety of things that I had written about every day, that word would indeed be "values." And it occurred to me, moreover, that in all those areas I write about, America has been wrestling over our values and trying to make some judgments.
But for many of us that word, "values," has been loaded down with heavy moral and political implications. It is a word that was usurped by the right wing in this country, the same people who had taken possession of that other word, "family." Value judgments, it seems to me, are too often associated with commandments--ten or more. The phrase implies that clear-cut, prepackaged, one-size-fits-all set of moral strictures. When we think of value judgments, we think of knee jerks rather than of struggles. Indeed, I went to my own dictionary and discovered that it defined value judgments this way: "value judgments are an estimate made of the works, goodness of a person, action, event, or the like, especially when making such a judgment is improper or undesirable." In short, my dictionary made a value judgment against value judgments.
Well, what I want to do is to use a little bit of our time to talk about this most lethally loaded term--values--and to discuss how those of us who are progressives can take back the language and the agenda that's been usurped by the right wing in this country. To do this, I want to go to the belly of the conservative beast, if you will, and focus on the topic that is still among the hottest in public discussion these days, the one that is literally labeled "family values." I want to talk about changes in family life, our private experience in family and our public policy, the way public and private families intersect, interact, collide, and pass in the night like strangers. Family is, after all, a word that literally embraces all of us, who we are, how we are as individuals, and how we relate to each other.
I must begin by saying that while there is agreement in the country about the value of family, there is, and has been for my entire adult life, confusion, disarray, and disagreement about this phrase called "family values." This is an expression that I am afraid has come to sound either like a petit point cliché or like fighting words. I want to share some observations about where we are in a lengthy, difficult, and occasionally bizarre, but important, national discussion--a discussion which, to a certain extent, has been dictated by the Right, a discussion that those of us who regard ourselves as moderates or progressives, certainly as feminists, have had a real hard time participating in.
Let me repeat right up front my own bias--this is what we do as columnists. In the last decade, progressives have become uneasy talking about values. Yet I'm convinced that we need the common language. We need to work our way through to a new, common, moral grounding in order to hold together our increasingly fragmented society. First of all, let me say that I thought about dedicating my remarks tonight to two men who have absolutely nothing else in common except my gratitude, and they are Dan Quayle and Woody Allen, an odd couple if there ever was one. But it was the vice president and the filmmaker who offered themselves up as two bookends on the spectrum of this debate about family values. They made me think about the complex attitudes that rage along that entire spectrum.
Let me explain. Certainly one of the more bizarre footnotes in American history was recorded on the day in 1992, exactly two years ago, when Dan Quayle took on a fictional television character named Murphy Brown. He said that day, and I quote, "Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocked the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice." Well, this quote ignited an enormous uproar by and about single mothers, sex, the breakdown of family, and feminism. Now, it tells us something--I dare not dream what--when one of the deepest, serious political arguments in our country is about a sitcom character. It tells us something as well when this 40-year-old, fictional, well-paid television anchor becomes the source for anxiety about broken homes, about divorce, and especially about 14-year-old unwed mothers with no income.
One of the things that it tells us is that the expression and the debate about family values have been captured and tarnished by people who still regard feminism and family as antonyms. Let me, however, parse out what this debate raised in the public at large--where our friend Dan was right and where he was wrong in touching a social nerve, because this is the nerve that is still so exposed in our country.
Dan was right in touching our concern about the economic and psychological pain of increasing numbers of children living in single-parent homes. Everyone in this room would wish two loving, sharing, caring, and preferably solvent biological parents on every child. I, myself, have come out ardently for a three-parent family. Dan was right in touching on the sense parents have that the media, somehow or other, are presenting role models, images, messages that are not the ones we would choose to offer to our children. Whether it's Beavis and Butthead "heh-hehing" their way through life or stars getting pregnant, American parents these days consider ourselves members of the counterculture. What the media delivers to us by the mass, parents are expected to counter one by one.
Rather than having a culture that supports our values, we have one that often undermines them, although the same society may then turn around and hold parents responsible exclusively for the behavior of their children, if those children are out late at night or join a gang or skip school. Media values are rarely family values.
Well, where was Dan wrong? Here, too, there were reasons for the uproar that tell us a good deal about the arguments raging around this expression "family values." Well, Dan, it turned out, was virtually the only person who had actually never seen Murphy Brown. This is what we knew that he didn't know. That Murphy Brown was impregnated by her ex-husband, Jake, that when she told him she was pregnant, he said, sorry, he had to go off and save the world. Her lifestyle choice, as Quayle described it, was in fact a hard decision--to abort or to have a baby by herself. Indeed, the Murphy Brown story got so entwined with the abortion issue that the vice president himself started backtracking. He started talking about single mothers as saints as well as sinners.
Well, as I read the still-evolving argument about single mothers, it appears that women are saints when they are bereft, left to struggle, victims of deserting fathers, and they are sinners when they have children and make decisions. There's a good deal worth thinking about in that duality. Dan was also wrong then because he forgot about Jake. Quayle said that Brown mocked the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone. I'm afraid Jake mocked the importance of fathers all by himself. Indeed, in any discussion about family values, we must acknowledge a tremendous split in our attitudes about male roles between the much heralded new father and the ten most wanted deadbeat dads. The public knew Murphy Brown as well as they know their next-door neighbor or the woman who works in their office, and judging any life is much harder when we know the personal details as well as the statistics.
So, when we talk about family values, most Americans do know more than statistics. We may hold one attitude about single motherhood per se. We may hold quite another that comes from their stories--the single mothers, the working couples, the happy and unhappy marriages, and the children behind those statistics. I haven't begun to touch the surface of the Murphy Brown debacle. Indeed, I was fascinated last fall in watching a little-noticed Thanksgiving episode of Roseanne, the working-class heroine, whose sister became pregnant due to a condom failure. (We must explain all these things nowadays.) In this episode of our public family values media marathon, Roseanne wanted to see her pregnant sister married and the father-to-be a husband. But, as the family gathered around the dining room table, Roseanne discovered that she had been conceived out of wedlock. Her parents' own unhappy marriage had begun that way. How come that story received no notice? Are we becoming more sophisticated about sitcoms? I am afraid not. Is there a difference between our national attitudes toward working-class, Murphy Brown class, and underclass? Of course! Let me finally say that Dan Quayle was wrong, not because we aren't worrying about family, not because single motherhood isn't a cause of concern, but because when push comes to shove, he represented a constituency that defines family values in traditional and very rigid terms.
For those of you who were not, as I was, at the misbegotten Republican National Convention in the summer of 1992, the most popular button in that giant hall in Houston said it all. It said, "Dan's right. Murphy's a tramp." At root, the issue for much of his constituency wasn't family. It was sin. It wasn't a single mother. It was a single commandment.
But I have not forgotten about my other bookend. No sooner had I and many others taken Dan to task, no sooner had we barely recovered from family values night at the Republican Convention, no sooner had we recovered from hearing Marilyn Quayle, a woman who had labor induced with her first child so that she would be ready to take the bar exam, talking about the natural biological female, than along came Woody Allen. The 57-year-old filmmaker unabashedly proclaimed his love for the 20-year-old daughter of his former lover, Mia Farrow. If Dan Quayle's right wing, especially the religious Right, makes family judgments the way the knee jerks, the Woody Allen wing had no judgment at all.
Well, this time, the uproar included people who do not want to put good and evil stickers on every piece of behavior, people who believe that there are quite enough zealots in the world searching for biblical proof that spandex is a creation of the devil. But here was someone, Woody Allen, who threw a grenade into the family vortex and thought that he was as innocent of blame as that cherubic image of love and eros.
What got to me finally was the custody case, and it was the tough testimony of the psychologist at the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow custody case that really tore it. These, after all, were children who seemed to have been assigned a shrink at birth the way other children are assigned their patron saints. There was a wonderful exchange in that custody trial between the lawyer and the shrink, which I will try to excerpt for you. The lawyer asked the shrink, "Was Woody evil?" And the shrink answered, "I would say this is someone whose judgment is very impaired." The lawyer asked the shrink, "Was Woody bad?" The shrink said one could not generalize about a person. The lawyer asked the shrink, "Was Mia wrong in her outrage?" And the shrink said, "I thought that for her to see Mr. Allen as an all-bad person was an overreaction." Well, it occurred to me that the only sane person at this trial was 14-year-old Moses Farrow-Allen, who had written to his father, Woody, "Everybody knows not to have an affair with your son's sister."
Well, taking the national pulse of the Woody Allen case, in the great family values debate, it seemed to me that what tore at the people was a sense of family violation. Allen stood for the sophisticated glossy image of an unmarried couple living on either side of Central Park. He showed not the flooze that connects people but the fragility of a wildly nontraditional nonconnection. He left many wondering if this is where the over-acceptancy, the nonjudgmental, the secular, the shrink-encouraged, nontraditional image of family leads--to a man claiming the rights of fatherhood while sleeping with his children's sister, to a woman who perhaps thought she was a free, nontraditional spirit, only to find herself betrayed as lover and as mother.
Now, I hope you will forgive me for spending so much time in the wonderful world of Dan Quayle and Woody Allen, but these are what the Business School would call case studies of American attitudes. My point is this: In a time of massive change, Americans are a mass of contradictory opinions about this most intimate world called family. We are struggling with values. Americans are traditional and nontraditional. We are Murphy Browns, Roseannes, and reruns of "Father Knows Best." We are liberated and nostalgic. We are single parents and their children. We are divorced and married and worried. In this morass, conservatives continue to offer a very clear set of values and value judgments, while moderates and progressives are the ones who have been floundering, afraid to agree with conservatives for fear of being pulled backward, but unable to mark out a clear path forward and very slow at clarifying and standing up for our own values. Indeed, sometimes afraid to make judgments at all.
I am especially conscious, as many of you are, of the relationship between the women's movement--what I think of literally as the movement of women from one life pattern to many--and families. I have, after all, spent much of my adult life and my career observing the uneven, lopsided pace of social change that we call the women's movement. Because the women's movement was originally cast in terms of women's rights as individuals and as individual women, it often seemed to the public eye to have separated women and put us at odds with families, indeed even with our own families. We were the change agents, and change agents often get blamed for unsettled times. We were and are, moreover, quite properly eager to gain our own rights.
Now here too, I think, the conversation, the public dialogue of the women's movement, has to expand from a narrow language of rights to a broader vocabulary for the language of values. Women who are part of the movement have also had trouble articulating our choices and our concerns in that language, or should I say, in that voice. But we are beginning to. We all know that this has been an era in which change has been lopsided. Since the onset of the women's movement, more women have taken on the old male roles, and men have taken on the old female roles. This is not a news bulletin. I won't go back over the history of this with you because it is, after all, your history, my history, our history, but let me just remind you of the changes in images that we have gone through in my own adulthood--not the realities but the kind of mythology by which we often judge our own lives.
In my own lifetime, we have gone from the myth of Supermom to the myth of Superwoman. I don't know how many of you remember Supermom. She was the woman who always sent her children to school with pumpkin-shaped sandwiches with raisin eyes and carrot teeth. Her children always had homemade Halloween costumes. She always had something "lovin' in the oven." She was the woman that my generation carried around in our heads, just for the guilt of it.
Well, at some time during the late '70s, certainly by the '80s, we replaced her as the dominant female image with this new, improved creature that we labeled Superwoman. I have struggled over many years to continually update Superwoman as she was presented to all of us as a viable role model, and the best that I have been able to do is to describe a day in the life of Superwoman as she has been presented by the media.
Superwoman gets up in the morning and wakes her 2.3 children. She goes downstairs where she feeds them a grade-A, nutritional breakfast, which they eat. Her children then go upstairs and get ready for school, forgetting nothing, and she goes and gets into her $900 Anne Klein suit and goes off to her $75,000-a-year job, doing work that is creative but socially useful. After work and, of course, her six-mile run, she comes home to spend a wonderful hour interacting with the children, because, haven't we all been told, "It isn't the quantity of time, it's the quality of time." After that hour, she goes in and creates a Julia Child gourmet dinner. The family sits around the dining room table discussing the checks and balances of the United States government system. Her children then go to bed, and she and her husband have time for their meaningful relationship, after which they, too, go to bed, where she is multi-orgasmic until midnight. Tomorrow is another day.
By the 1990s, I think Superwoman evolved into yet another image, known better as Superdrudge, the woman who wanted to have it all and so got stuck with it all. The change has been lopsided in part, it seems to me, because women have had more success at getting into the male world than at changing that world. To put it simply, women have had much more success not only in adapting to male life patterns but in adapting to what were traditional male values, than in getting men to adapt to what were traditionally female values. It's been, in short, much easier to win equal access to the values of achievement, power, success, and competition, than to win equal time for the values of caretaking, nurturing, and cooperation.
I think that what was for a long time seen as a conflict between men and women, a conflict between male roles and female roles, has moved on and looks quite different now. It looks like a much deeper crisis in values, between the values of caretaking and those of achievement, between family caretaking and individual achievement. There has, for a long time, been a tension in American society between these values. For a long time, we dealt with that tension by divvying up the roles. In American history, after all, women were assigned the values of family caretaking and emotional support while men were assigned those of economic support and worldly success.
But now that women are quite properly joining men in pursuing their own lives, we can't hide a fundamental split in our national psyche that is part of this great discussion about family values. We have experienced a net loss in the amount of caretaking in this country, caretaking of children, caretaking of parents, and many of us who were once working mothers are now working daughters, caretaking of ourselves, caretaking of our community. I don't think that many women can ever achieve equality on our own terms until we achieve equality for the values of caretaking and family life that we were assigned and have often held high. Those of us who are and have been a part of the women's movement have to push the initiative to bring our values with us, as we move into the public world and use our clout to push the public agenda on family and to push the private agenda, which seems to have gone onto a back burner.
The great family values discussion is taking place not just in public arenas, but in private ones. In an era when even the Pope has told fathers to pull their share at home, it should be obvious that one of the family values the progressives share and that separates us from the right wing is gender equality, but we haven't always made it clear that gender equality is a value, a family value.
Not too many years ago, there was a study out that got enormous currency in this country. It purported to show the diminishing chances of marriage for college-educated women. It said, and I quote, that "a college-educated woman over 40 had a better chance of getting killed by a terrorist than getting married." A very curious analogy. But, the message inside of this was a very old and familiar one. The not-so-subtle message being given to young women was this: Uppity women end up alone. And many women, young women, indeed, have had trouble dealing with the issue of describing to the young men in their lives what exactly it is they want, out of the fear that they will be rejected. I, by the way, prefer the saying of a friend of mine, the mother of four daughters who has told her own daughters, "Speak up, speak up, the only man you will scare off is your future ex-husband." Well, there is a lot of truth in that.
How many single mothers after divorce now say, "Well, at least I have one less child to take care of"? Or how many women regarded men as an extra burden rather than a partner? How many women feel that they have to choose between being Superdrudge or Single Mom? Much has been said, perhaps too much, about welfare replacing fathers among the poor. Much has been said about needing two incomes just to survive in the middle class. How many women who know that it takes two incomes to support one family are once again pulling back from the demands for partnership, falling into the familiar and ultimately depressing flaw of self-sacrifice?
Those who assemble publicly under the family values flag are often, as I have said, upholding a traditional, role-divided view of the home that is defined and unequal. But those who shy away from the language of values have their own ideal of a nontraditional family of adult partners and equals.
To understand just how much of a debate this remains after 20 years of feminism, you only have to look at the First Family. For nearly two years, Hilary Clinton has been a surrogate for a debate about the changing roles of women in this country. Those who liked her during the 1992 election thought she should run for the Senate. Those who didn't like her thought she should shut up. But she's been a surrogate especially, it seems to me, for the changing roles of wives and mothers, women in families. After all, in America, we have always known what it means to be a wife. We know what that word means with all of the traditional baggage that it comes with, and in the last two decades, we have learned what it means to be an independent woman, but we are still wrestling with what it means to be an independent wife, to be an individual and yet be connected.
These are questions that hold much anxiety, especially for the next generation of young women, just now making decisions about marriage and motherhood and asking themselves, "Can I be a mother and remain an equal partner?"
Well, I have not talked much about children, but it seems to me they are at the heart of this conversation. We are at long last, and far too late, worrying about children in America, about children in violence, about children in poverty, about children in abuse, about children in the future, but the family values discussion often swerves onto the moral byways, avoiding the major highways. We worry too much about Murphy Brown's son or about the children of gay parents or some other moralistic category, while we throw up our hands at the fate of children of poverty or even the children of the middle class.
We divide so easily into opposing teams--one side calls for parental responsibility while the other side calls for government programs--as if there were not some common ground to be established. How many parents, after all, are suffering simply from the old, familiar tugs of time in a work world that requires more and more productivity from every worker, a work world that regards family as a leisure-time activity and deals with leisure as a luxury. These are family values that do not divide into left and right. These are some of the values that form a common ground: the disappearing dad, the disappearing income, the need for equality at home, the need for a workplace that supports rather than undermines family life, the need for a culture that parents don't have to censor, the need for a community that is attentive to children. These are just a few of the values on which we create common ground where currently the Left and Right argue.
I've talked very little about family policy. Too often, it seems to me, we talk about policy and not about the values on which it is or should be based. This is true whether we are trying to end welfare as we know it, in the administration's words, or trying to renew health care, or thinking about the new workplace and what work means to family.
At root, the essential family value is this--to value families. But that is at once the most simplistic slogan and the most difficult backbone of policy-making. For a long time, America has been pulled between the values of individualism and those of community, between the "I" and the "we." We've been through a period of great, excessive emphasis on individualism. Now we are again talking about the ways in which we connect, about community, especially that intimate community of families. Perhaps, in this way, the debate about family values is also a debate about the place of the family in the world--the family, a private haven in our heartless world. Are children the property of parents who are solely responsible for them and to them, or do children also belong to the community? "If it takes a village to raise a child," as Marian Wright Edelman likes to say, "are we willing to enlarge our sense of family to become members of that village?" Are these the values of family that we are talking about?
Many of us, moderates, progressives, feminists--many of us who broke or drifted away from traditional values ourselves--are people who see the world in complex or personal terms, and we are still afraid of that word "values" and especially of that term "value judgment," but judgment isn't the opposite of understanding or even of compassion. To be valueless is not a compliment. Family is just one way to understand the difficult discussions that we are having in our country. But I'm convinced that to give up the language of values is to leave a powerful vocabulary to others, whether we agree with their definition or their views or not, it is also to abandon the argument and the struggle to mark out common ground in this splintered country.
So, we have to take on the terms of the argument, to allow people to use this language and to wrestle with the demons and the hard questions that face us in public and private life. In short, this is a period of enormous change. We all know that. Many of us are struggling to rewrite a value system based less on rules than on relationships, less on certainty than on shifting economic and human ground. We hold two sets of moral attitudes in America. One is essentially about obeying commandments, the other is essentially about relationships. The first is the straightforward sin. The second is as complicated as human feelings. In such an atmosphere, we can't leave the discussion ground. Finally, one last word to any apprentice family judges. We should make value judgments the way porcupines make love--very, very carefully.
CONTENTS