The family values movement is a conservative movement that strongly supports traditional social values. Since 1980, the Republican Party has used the issue of family values to attract voters, and such organizations as the Christian Coalition and the American Family Association have tied the movement to Christianity and thus believe that Christian values should play more important roles in everyday society. This eBook offers students an objective look at this important movement, which has wielded great influence on the political landscape as well as attracted major controversy from its critics.

Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.

The family values movement is a conservative movement that strongly supports traditional social values. This book offers students an objective look at this important movement, which has wielded great influence on the political landscape as well as attracted major controversy from its critics.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, evangelical leaders and conservative politicians developed a political agenda that thrust "family values" onto the nation's consciousness. Ministers, legislators, and laypeople came together to fight abortion, gay rights, and major feminist objectives. They supported private Christian schools, home schooling, and a strong military. Family values leaders like Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, and James Dobson became increasingly supportive of the Republican Party, which accommodated the language of family values in its platforms and campaigns. The family values agenda created a bond between evangelicalism and political conservatism. Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right chronicles how the family values agenda became so powerful in American political life and why it appealed to conservative evangelical Christians. Conservative evangelicals saw traditional gender norms as crucial in cultivating morality. They thought these gender norms would reaffirm the importance of clear lines of authority that the social revolutions of the 1960s had undermined. In the 1970s and 1980s, then, evangelicals founded Christian academies and developed homeschooling curricula that put conservative ideas about gender and authority front and center. Campaigns against abortion and feminism coalesced around a belief that God created women as wives and mothers—a belief that conservative evangelicals thought feminists and pro-choice advocates threatened. Likewise, Christian right leaders championed a particular vision of masculinity in their campaigns against gay rights and nuclear disarmament. Movements like the Promise Keepers called men to take responsibility for leading their families. Christian right political campaigns and pro-family organizations drew on conservative evangelical beliefs about men, women, children, and authority. These beliefs—known collectively as family values—became the most important religious agenda in late twentieth-century American politics.

Most histories of modern American politics tell a similar story: that the Sunbelt, with its business friendly environment, right-to-work laws, and fierce spirit of frontier individualism, provided the seedbed for popular conservatism. Stacie Taranto challenges this narrative by positioning New York State as a central battleground. In 1970, under the governorship of Republican Nelson Rockefeller, New York became one of the first states to legalize abortion. By 1980, however, conservative, antifeminist Republicans with broad suburban appeal—symbolized by figures such as Ronald Reagan—had usurped power from these so-called Rockefeller Republicans. What happened during the intervening decade? In Kitchen Table Politics, Taranto investigates the role that middle-class, mostly Catholic women played both in the development of conservatism in New York State and in the national shift toward a conservative politics of "family values." Far from Albany, a short train ride away from the feminist activity in New York City, white, Catholic homemakers on Long Island and in surrounding suburban counties saw the legalization of abortion in the state in 1970 as a threat to their hard-won version of the American dream. Borrowing tactics from church groups and parent-teacher associations, these women created the New York State Right to Life Party and organized against several feminist initiatives, including defeating an effort to add an Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution in 1975. These self-described "average housewives," Taranto argues, were more than just conservative shock troops; instead, they were inventing a new, politically viable conservatism centered on the heterosexual traditional nuclear family that the GOP's right wing used to broaden its electoral base. Figures such as activist Phyllis Schlafly, New York senator Al D'Amato, and presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan viewed the Right to Life Party's activism as offering a viable model to defeat feminist initiatives and win family values votes nationwide. Taranto gathers archival evidence and oral histories to piece together the story of these homemakers, whose grassroots organizing would shape the course of modern American conservatism.

The fascinating true story of the characters in Hulu's "Mrs. America" and a broader portrait of the two women's movements that spurred an enduring rift between liberals and conservatives. "The many admirers of 'Mrs. America' . . . will find great satisfaction in [Divided We Stand] . . . a clear, compelling and deeply insightful volume." —The Washington Post One of Smithsonian Magazine’s Ten Best History Books of the Year In the early 1970s, an ascendant women’s rights movement enjoyed strong support from both political parties and considerable success, but was soon challenged by a conservative women’s movement formed in opposition. Tensions between the two would explode in 1977 at the congressionally funded National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas. As Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and other feminists endorsed hot-button issues such as abortion rights, the ERA, and gay rights, Phyllis Schlafly and Lottie Beth Hobbs rallied with conservative women to protest federally funded feminism and launch a pro-family movement. Divided We Stand reveals how crucial women and women’s issues have been in the shaping of today’s political culture. After the National Women’s Conference, Democrats continued to back women’s rights in cooperation with a more diverse feminist movement while the GOP abandoned its previous support for women’s rights and defined itself as the party of family values, irrevocably affecting the course of American politics.

This book which has been created in the framework of the EU-funded COST Action INTERFASOL brings together researchers from 22 INTERFASOL countries, who frame intergenerational family solidarity in the specific historical, cultural, social and economic context of their own country. Integrating different perspectives from social and political sciences, economics, communication, health and psychology, the book offers country-specific knowledge and new insights into family relations, family values and family policies across Europe. Praise for Families and Family Values in Society and Culture: "This comprehensive study of families in Europe reveals the strength and variation in family solidarity and values. By drawing together detailed descriptions of continuity and change, Families and Family Values in Society and Culture provides a fascinating account of the social and cultural contexts that shape European family life. The case studies of families in different European countries compare demographic and welfare regimes to consider the challenges facing generations in Europe and responses to these. The book is an invaluable resource for researchers studying family life and inter-generational solidarity." Clare Holdsworth Professor of Social Geography Keele University "This book is based on the testimony of experts, each of them proposing analyses which are specific to their own society. It provides an opportunity for the reader to take a new look at the evolution of intergenerational solidarity in 22 countries, whose wealth, welfare systems, and demographic situations, as well as recent events (wars, migratory movements, …) offer specific challenges. It adopts the perspective of the insider to shed light not only on culture and values in each country, but also on conflicts between tradition and modernity, and between subcultures in the same society. The book thus allows better understanding of changes in intergenerational and gender relations, and the variety of solutions implemented or suggested to promote more satisfactory expressions of intergenerational solidarity for the next decade. Families and Family Values in Society and Culture provides an invaluable contribution for cross-cultural and social sciences researchers interested in understanding how different forms of solidarity arise from family and social dynamics." Anne Marie Fontaine Professor of Psychology University of Porto