Family Values

Divorce, Working Women, and Reproductive Rights in Twentieth-Century America

Isabel Heinemann, Alex Skinner

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN:
  9783111036168
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du 20ème siècle

Clashes over the American family and its values have always implicitly or explicitly addressed issues of gender and highlighted the significance of present and future families to American society. This is the insight underpinning Isabel Heinemann's groundbreaking study, which traces, over the course of the twentieth century, debates on the family and its role; the relationship between the individual and society; and individual decision-making rights as well as their denial or curtailment. Unpacking these issues in a vivid and innovative analysis, the book recounts the prehistory of current conflicts over the family and gender while illuminating the relationship between social change, normative shifts, and the counter-movements spawned in response to them.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: family values in a changing society
• 1 “Race suicide or remedy?” The debates on divorce in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920
• 2 “Scientific motherhood, reproductive morality and fitter families”: debates on eugenic family concepts and the government’s right to intervene in the 1920s and 1930s
• 3 “Working women, domesticity, and the expert”: public debates and expert discourses on women’s employment and motherhood, 1940–1970
• 4 “Black family pathologies”: the limits of the white middle-class family ideal and the debate on the structure and values of the African American family in the 1960s
• 5 “From reproductive choice to reproductive rights”: abortion, reproduction, and the role of women in family and society in the 1970s and 1980s
• 6 “Culture wars?” Debates on the American family in the 1980s
• Conclusion: Value of the family—continuity and change in the family ideal in the twentieth-century United States
• Abbreviations
• Person Index
• Subject Index