Gordon article

If you happen to look at this before you start reading . . . the Gordon article is a bit denser than I remembered. You don't need to pay too much attention to all of the reformers, their social positions, etc. that fill up the first pages - instead focus on the part of the article towards the end when she gets to the family ideals supporting welfare policy in the early days.

What assumptions are going into welfare policy? How are welfare laws shaping marriage, or vice versa?

Welfare (and more!) Reading for next week

Next week's reading is a bit of a hodge-podge, but I think we'll be able to draw some intersecting lines, or at least we'll look towards Beth and Bailey to do it for us.

The Coontz chapters move us forward from the 1950s to the 1990s with an examination of the feminist movement, the resulting "culture wars" of the 1980s and 1990s, and the gay marriage issue.

The Gordon article ("Social Insurance and Public Assistance") takes us back to the origins of the welfare state; the Mink article ("The Lady and the Tramp (II)") fast-forwards to the so-called end of welfare in the mid-1990s.

The Kunzel article fits in between the Gordon and the Mink. It takes a more intricate look at the psychological analyses of marriage, race, and motherhood - connecting us with Romano's Race Mixing as well as with this week's welfare discussion.

The Personal is Political?

One of the interesting themes I noticed in Romano's "Race Mixing" is her analysis of interracial marriage as a political act. It seems that in the earlier period of her book (1940s and 1950s), whites considered interracial marriage political, but by the late 1960s, it was the Black Power supporters who saw such marriages as inherently political.

How do you think Romano's subject matter (and time period?) gives her a different understanding of the political framework of marriage from the more metaphorical politicization of marriage that we've talked about in relation to Republican wives, monogamy, consent laws, etc.?

Related: Where do you think American ideas about the right to privacy come from?

Nostalgia for 1970s girlhood?

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/seventies-something/

Judith Warner's column and blog in the New York Times has an interesting article on why we need to return to the "girlhood" of the 1970s, as well as various entries on modern marriage.

How did the 1950s family become "traditional?"

Building off of yesterday's class: how did the media, sociologists, and others construct the ideal family model of the 1950s and how did this model become what we think of as the "traditional" family, even as it bore little resemblance to families of the 1800s, 1700s, etc.?

Ways of Writing History

So far, we've talked about American History through marriage. This week, we read about the rise of Modern America, through the lens of Modern Marriage. Do changes to marriage always parallel the mainstream narrative of history?

As a thought experiment, think about how you would construct a narrative of the United States without marriage, and then how that story is altered when you interject marriage into it. Does what we are doing illuminate the past, give new insights, or is it separable from real "History?" Just curious to hear your thoughts . . .

"Adam's Rib"

The movie showed us two different marriages under stress:

1) a working-class couple dealing with infidelity and a reversal of the typical "jealous husband murders wife's lover" story discussed in Hartog's eighth chapter.

2) a upper-class couple facing the challenges of the 1930s "new woman" (following suffrage in 1920) and sexual equality in the workplace as well as the home.

What scenes from the movie developed the personalities and conflicts of these two married couples?

How is the film addressing and working out larger social problems of this period of transition?

Also, related to a gendered analysis, if not to marriage: the Bonner's neighbor, Kip, is a classic example of how gay men were common to romantic comedies of the era, even though their sexuality is obviously hidden. Yet Kip (with his avant-garde and primitive art collections and work as a show business pianist/composer) clearly signals to the audience that he is not a real threat to the marriage of Adam and Amanda. Such "codes" also allowed gay and lesbian audience members to recognize these characters as gay, even if straight viewers did not always see them as such.