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January 26, 1997
Splitsville By FRED MILLER ROBINSON
Two books explore the cultural and economic implications of divorce
THE DIVORCE CULTURE
By Barbara Dafoe Whitehead.
224 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $24.
THE FEMININE ECONOMY
AND ECONOMIC MAN
Reviving the Role of Family
in the Post-Industrial Age.
By Shirley P. Burggraf.
285 pp. Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. $24.
oth these very different books address the weakening of family bonds and the rising rate of divorce that have marked American life since the 1960's. Both authors can take ''family values'' seriously by removing them from the tired agendas of right- and left-wing politics and considering them in the light of the social need for parents to cooperate and raise their children. Both face squarely the fact that divorce hurts, and hurts children especially.
The differences between the books, in approach and quality, may be traced to how the authors understand ''culture.'' For Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, culture is like ideology: it advances relentlessly, then entrenches itself and seeps into our consciousness as a system of social and philosophical ''ideas.'' That is what the ''divorce culture'' has done, and what we need to do is dismantle and ''repeal'' its ''philosophy and language.'' Ms. Whitehead nods to relevant cultural forces like the emancipation of women, Social Security and technological advances, but the forces don't take hold in the discussion, so her ''ideas'' exist in a kind of historical, social and economic vacuum. Near the end she suggests that the ''pervasive decline'' in the marriage ideal has taken place within a larger cultural context, when she writes: ''In every other domain of life, Americans are moving away from lasting relationships and toward limited and contingent commitments.'' But she doesn't analyze the conditions of this context, and because she says she does not want her book to be taken ''as an appeal for a return to an earlier era of American family life,'' she shies away from articulating a counter-culture. This leaves her with the odd, and not rhetorically effective, voice of an ideologue without an ideology.
''The Divorce Culture'' might have been a work of moral philosophy that argues for the affective dimension of the structural and instrumental: for instance, the ways in which love is expressed through ''reciprocal and binding duties,'' parents being there for their children, day after day. She argues pointedly that parents' expressive need for liberation and self-fulfillment has been realized at the expense of the well-being of children. But what has created this need? Ms. Whitehead doesn't demonstrate the range or the scholarship for moral philosophy or social history. With her shallow or hidden sources, her tendency to phrasemaking and her pedestrian prose, she has produced a book on roughly the same level as the popular ''expert opinion'' and self-help books she rightly criticizes. ''The Divorce Culture'' is a sort of self-blame book.
While Shirley P. Burggraf's focus is primarily ''on the economic factors involved in commitment to family,'' she acknowledges from the outset that the family is shaped by a matrix of forces, including psychological, sociological and historical ones. She agrees, with Ms. Whitehead, that the unraveling of family ties is a central moral issue, but rather than lament the bankruptcy of current ideas about marriage and divorce, she as much as says, briskly and bracingly, that this is where we've come, it's undesirable to go back (''the lost social order . . . was essentially a gender caste system''), so let's figure out a way to literally ''reinvest'' in the family.
The central problem ''The Feminine Economy and Economic Man'' addresses is that everyone agrees how important it is to nurture children, but few are willing to put their money where their mouths are. The ''feminine economy'' -- ''the caring economy, the support economy or the family economy'' -- is only dimly reflected in economic theories and indicators because relatively low wages, or none, are paid. Yet it is essential work, with enormous ''opportunity cost.'' How then, when women are increasingly entering the marketplace, where their work is valued in pay; when commercial products displace housework; when Social Security displaces the caretaking of grandparents; when computer jobs can be done by women as well as men, ''can a market be created . . . that will send the right signals to parents about the social value of investing in children?''
Ms. Burggraf makes a series of practical suggestions, chief among them the creation of a ''parental dividend,'' mostly converted from what we pay now to Social Security, based on a joint marital tax return and distributed among the husband's and wife's parents. Doing this would re-endow ''the marriage contract with a portion of the wealth that reproduction generates,'' ''reward those who honor the obligations of marriage and family,'' encourage parental cooperation and discourage divorce, and retie the generations by privatizing Social Security. This would, in effect, rewrite a social contract, updating classic economics to include and honor the feminine economy. Ms. Burggraf also makes a clear case for raising the pay of teachers, and an interesting defense of school vouchers.
Although I cannot do justice to Ms. Burggraf's argument in this space, she has written an important work on moral economy. While her methods are practical, she aims for a ''great moral awakening'' to the importance of the family as an economic institution. ''In a world in which people are free to choose between caring and competitive roles,'' she writes, ''an economic system that disproportionately rewards the competitors and beggars the caretakers will eventually lose its ability to compete because resources are increasingly diverted away from society's basic function of providing a civilized context for human life.''
What is especially effective about her argument is that, unlike Ms. Whitehead, Ms. Burggraf is able to suggest cultural change without recourse to nostalgia. She understands that a culture is not a system of ideas but a convergence of forces that shape ideas. We have not decided to weaken our family bonds because we have lost something, but because the conditions that those bonds require have changed. Quoting Katha Pollitt, Ms. Burggraph urges that we ''adapt our institutions to the lives people actually live'' rather than the lives they should live. In so doing, she has written an exemplary work of cultural study.
Fred Miller Robinson is beginning work on a cross-cultural history of Ireland and America.
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