In Squaring Off, Zócalo invites authors into the public square to answer five probing questions about the essence of their books. For this round, we pose questions to Judith Stacey, author of Unhitched: Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China.
Last weekend, hundreds of gay and lesbian couples all over New York were finally able to say “I do,” but they were only one example of how understandings of marriage and family have changed. In Unhitched, Stacey presents stories of alternative, non-marital family models in places such as South Africa and China, challenging the belief that the nuclear family is the best way to meet our needs for intimacy and care.
1) What is the most valuable lesson we can gain from looking at “non-traditional” forms of family?
The nuclear family is not nearly as traditional, even in the U.S., as most people imagine. Until the 19th century more of the world’s marriage systems were polygamous than monogamous, and perhaps the most radical experiments with alternative family forms in the U.S., like the Shakers, the Oneida community, and the plural and “celestial” marriages of the early Latter Day Saints, took place in the 19th century.
This year, for the first time in our history, a majority of households do not include a married couple. Statistically speaking, there is no longer a normal family. But our social policies and political conversation about families lag far behind. I believe we have to “unhitch” our entrenched notions about the superiority and naturalness of the nuclear-family model.
2) The Mosuo people, an ethnic-minority culture in southwestern China, don’t practice marriage. Instead, the men live and work with their maternal families by day, and, after nightfall, they seek intimacy with any woman they desire. The women can freely refuse any visitors or invite desired visitors. Sounds radical, but you believe it works. Why?
The Mosuo family system, which has survived for more than two millennia, certainly does seem radical to most people today. The most unusual feature is that the Mosuo don’t care about biological paternity. Brothers and sisters (and grandmothers and granduncles) bring up all the children born to the women of the family. There is no divorce, no widows or widowers, and no one is single. No children are “fatherless” or “motherless.”
This system has worked for so long partly because of the Mosuo’s geographically remote, self-sufficient, subsistence economy. The women and men I met all treasured the benefits of their system but also worried that it cannot survive the disruptions of economic development. I don’t think we can transplant Mosuo family life onto American soil, but the Mosuo example does demonstrate that children can thrive in a variety of family models.
3) So you’re saying that someone who is raised by a single mom has the same shot at success as someone who is raised by a married couple? If so, why do you think most people believe otherwise?
I’m not saying exactly that. I’m arguing for something in between an “anything goes” and the popular “one-size-fits-all” family credo. Research shows that kids raised by two relatively educated parents start off with greater odds of success than kids who live in poverty or with just one parent. But it doesn’t matter if the two parents are male, female, or one of each. Also, it’s the quality and consistency of parenting, along with a family’s financial and cultural resources, that make the biggest difference.
Widely-held convictions that the married heterosexual two-parent family is best and that so-called “fatherlessness” is a major threat to children and society come from an unfortunate brew of politics, religion, cultural prejudice and misrepresentations of family research. Ever since the late Senator Daniel Moynihan issued his 1965 critique of the “tangle of pathology” in the rising incidence of black single-mother families, this has been a topic of heated political combat. Now that a majority of families do not live in Leave it to Beaver-land, I would like our society to give greater recognition and support to all our families.
4) Going back to the Mosuo people, we now know the pros of that family system. Are there any cons?
All systems involve trade-offs between individual and collective priorities. Most Westerners would chafe at the level of conformity to family and social norms that Mosuo family life demands. The Mosuo practice of night-visiting may also pose a higher risk of sexually transmitted diseases or for genetic half-siblings to engage in inadvertent incest. (Indeed, early 20th century opium traders introduced STDs into Mosuo society that depressed Mosuo fertility until effective treatments overcame the crisis.) Finally, I suspect the Mosuo courtship culture might depend excessively on physical attractiveness.
5) So statistically speaking, there is no longer a normal family. But you do argue for something between an “anything goes” and “one size fits all” model. What does that balance look like?
What counts as a successful family regime depends on the moral and social yardstick you use. Authoritarian family systems often succeed in their own terms, but that’s not the kind of success most democratic societies or individuals favor.
I think of family and kinship systems as attempts to organize desire and domesticity-two fundamental human needs that, as Freud pointed out long ago in his gloomy treatise, Eros and Civilization, are not easy to reconcile. A good balance, in my view, would start from the premise that people really are different psychologically and sexually. That’s why one flavor of family never could suit all of us.
I would like us to redefine fidelity to mean integrity rather than sexual exclusivity. Instead of urging everyone to vow to “forsake all others”-a surefire recipe for “cheating,” hypocrisy and tabloid profits, I would encourage intimates to remain faithful to vows that they mutually negotiate, and perhaps renegotiate over time. I tell stories in Unhitched of gay men who sustain very long-lasting, loving unions who do not demand or desire sexual exclusivity. I also tell stories of gay couples uncompromisingly committed to absolute monogamy. In my view, the former families are just as successful as the latter and deserve just as much social respect.
Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon
*Photo courtesy of messtiza.