Whenever I read a nostalgic reverie for the traditional family, like the policy paper the Heritage Foundation put out in early January, I am reminded of the many biographies I have read of great American artists raised before we had anything resembling the modern welfare system. The families of origin of, for instance, Jackson Pollock, Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Plath were not the happy trad life of Heritage’s imaginings. Parents died young, and their marriages were often anything but blissful.
Pollock’s history is particularly instructive. His upbringing shows how poor many large families were before the New Deal and Great Society programs helped build our imperfect safety net. And it also shows that before divorce laws were liberalized (getting rid of no-fault divorce is one of Heritage’s hobbyhorses), some married couples were divorced in all but name only — they lived in separate houses, the men did not provide child support, and the children were raised by their mothers alone.
Pollock, the fifth of five boys, born in 1912, was raised mostly in Wyoming, Arizona and California on a series of failed farms, in poverty. Many farmers were ruined after World War I because they had ramped up production to meet European needs and were left with an excess of supply after Europe could produce its own food.
According to Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s biography of Pollock, his parents, Stella and LeRoy, didn’t have a good marriage — she was a spendthrift and he drank. He left her in 1920 or 1921, and remained distant from the family until he returned to Stella as he was dying in 1933. She struggled to make ends meet during that decade.
I have read so many stories of permanently separated spouses before state divorce laws changed in the 1960s and ’70s that I have long wondered if marital disruption and instability was far more widespread than official rates of divorce or widowhood might suggest. Divorce was so hard to come by and so stigmatized that many couples like the Pollocks probably tried to obscure their break.
As the average life span increased after the Civil War, so did the rate of marital separation — but not divorce, according to the economist Tomas Cvrcek in a 2008 analysis of marital disruption in the United States from 1860 to 1948. By the 1940s, Cvrcek estimated, the martial disruption rate — which reflects failed marriages in which the parties were informally separated — was about 30 percent. Hardly the golden age of permanent coupling that the Heritage Foundation would like you to think it was when it writes, “In past generations, if a child experienced an unstable family, it was most likely due to divorce, which was rare in the 1950s and earlier.”
As I outlined in my Jan. 21 newsletter, the Heritage Foundation is unwavering in pushing large, traditional families — even as it promotes the dismantling of the chintzy supports we have for children — based on a false fantasy about the prosperity and constancy of the past. This flight into an imagined history is particularly cruel at a time when the cost of necessities like health care and housing are becoming out of reach for the middle class. In the comments section for my article, I heard from so many readers about how different kinds of governmental support had helped them survive difficult times.
“Welfare here in 1993 allowed me to leave an abusive relationship and put me through college. Welfare paid for my child care and even my car insurance. I earned almost 2 degrees and built a successful career never to be in welfare again. Women today don’t have this kind of choice. Education investments are key to lifting single parents out of poverty,” wrote a commenter who goes by Sharkbetty Crips in Pahoa, Hawaii.
Another commenter, who lives in Wisconsin, wrote in to say, “When I was 22 I got pregnant and got married. The father proved to be a serial philanderer. When my two boys were ages 4 and almost 6, I decided I didn’t want him to be their role model and for me to basically live alone. I got divorced. I had $200.” She went on to say that thanks to student aid, the former welfare program Aid to Families With Dependent Children, food stamps and a program that helped with child care, she was able to go back to nursing school. “I worked until retirement, my children thrived and they and I never needed public assistance again. This was a success,” she said.
The reader added that she is a feminist: “The Second Wave did not destroy the family; it honored, supported and respected the women doing the hard work of parenting and keeping a family going.”
Finally, I heard, via email, from a reader named Lynn Stuart, who wanted to explain that you can do everything “right” by Heritage Foundation standards, and still be struggling. She and her husband have six children. Stuart was a stay-at-home mother who home-schooled her kids. “We struggled mightily on a single income with a large family. At various times we qualified for W.I.C., Medicaid when my husband lost his job, and had help from family,” she said.
Stuart described her life as hard, but rewarding. Her kids are all productive members of society, but she and her husband have never been out of debt, despite their concerted labor. She has had trouble finding solid work because she’s been out of the labor force for 30 years. “I have lived the reality the Heritage Foundation is championing for women and mothers,” she wrote. “Stay home and raise your kids, and then at the end of it, you have nothing to show for it. No financial security, no retirement, nothing. I often wonder how much better off we’d have been if I’d gone to work sooner.”
If the Heritage Foundation really wanted to help American families grow and thrive, it would not be so fixated on having the government provide only paltry support to families. Tax credits and baby bonuses that barely cover the costs of a month’s rent are not going to cut it. We need to learn the lessons of the past rather than have blinkers on about the real expense of raising children in the modern world.
Seven years after he left his family, LeRoy Pollock, who was more or less homeless, wrote a heartbreaking letter to Jackson: “I am sorry I am not in a position to do more for all you boys and I sometimes feel that my life has been a failure — but in this life we can’t undo the things that are past, we can only endeavor to do the best possible now and in the future.”
Those are words for all of us to live by.
End Notes
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Belle Burden’s excellent new memoir, “Strangers,” shows that even if a woman has a great deal of money and social capital, she should never be ignorant of the financial realities of her marriage. “Strangers” chronicles the dissolution of Burden’s marriage, and one of her major regrets is giving her now-ex so much power over the family purse. This isn’t a statement about being a stay-at-home parent — Burden has no regrets about spending so much time with her children as they grew. But it is a cautionary tale to anyone who leaves the labor force: Protect yourself however you can and make sure that you have a plan in case of emergency.
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Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
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