and Democrats assigning it greater than ever political value. Even when viewed narrowly, merely as part of a larger constellation of “cultural” or “social” concerns, family issues began to decisively shape nationwide and statewide electoral outcomes, also playing a steady, durable role in legislative politics.
The year 1980 was decisive to the increased prominence of family to party competition. In that year, the Republican Party launched a new ideology, a repudiation of the Democratic-led progressive agenda that had long dominated since the New Deal.4 The revised Republican ideology, which continues to prevail today, pivoted on two central themes: first, “antistatism,” through which the party highlighted local institutions and emphasized their “private-ness” in opposing the liberal state, and, second, “traditional values,” by which the party began to stress what political scientist Byron Shafer has termed “valuational” concerns, highlighting proper behavioral norms within which social life should proceed.5 Family emerged as the primary issue through which Republicans combined their longer-term antistatism, on one hand, with their newfound emphasis on traditional values, on the other.6
Democrats responded to the late twentieth-century Republican focus on families by similarly elevating family within their own policy discourse but rejecting Republicans’ antistatism and traditional values emphasis. For Democrats, “putting families first” meant more effective material/distributional benefits to encourage family strength regardless of diverse family forms and an enhanced, not reduced, state-family partnership. They claimed that families now came “in all different shapes and sizes,” yet “they all face[d] similar challenges,”7 and that the emphasis on family values by Republicans was a smokescreen masking state inaction and neglect. In this way, the late twentieth-century Democratic conception of family retained its New Deal and post–World War II focus, continuing to stress the material circumstances of families, as well as their economic stagnation or mobility, while also explicating the values underlying their economics-centered approach.
For Democrats, the family values they thus came to claim were progressive, secular-humanist values, not traditional or moral ones; these included values such as equality and equal protection, fairness, and individual self-determination. At the 2012 National Convention, First Lady Michelle Obama, for example, told a classic Democratic tale of family values when she recounted the “unflinching sacrifice,” “unconditional love,” and hard work of her father, a pump operator at a city water plant, who suffered from multiple sclerosis and often “struggle[d] to make it out of bed” but never missed a day of work. Mrs. Obama described how her father steadfastly pursued the dream of giving his children the “chance to go places they had never imagined for themselves.” “Dignity, decency, gratitude, humility, fairness and compassion,” she said, are “who we are”; they are the “values Barack and I are trying to pass on to our children.”8 On the face of it, the content of these values is not dissimilar from values often claimed and championed by Republicans, yet for Democrats alone, these values remained firmly imbricated within family economic conditions and state-regulated markets, and familiar arguments for state programmatic assistance based on family economic need were recast as programs that ensured fairness, inclusivity, and equality.
The two partisan approaches to family and their disparate alignments of values and economics align alternatively with a burgeoning “vulnerability” scholarship, most notably developed by feminist legal scholar Martha Fineman. Fineman points to five types of resources or assets that could mitigate human (including family) vulnerability and enhance resilience; these assets are identified as physical, human, social, ecological or environmental, and existential.9 These posited resiliency resources, resources by which families may successfully resist hardships that come their way, can be broadly categorized into external/material assets, on one hand, and internal/valuational or psychological assets, on the other. The two political parties have similarly largely divided over family in policy, diverging over which of the two kinds of assets are central to policy and thus to projected family success. They either focus on the external, economic resources of families, such as their income, wages, jobs, and taxes, promising to improve them in some way, or highlight the internal—valuational or behavioral—assets of a family, such as a family’s discipline, self-reliance, and responsibility. Family policy agendas thus either primarily aim at supporting the material character of families, bolstering their material resources (their Hearth), or have a more internal focus, directed at a family’s Soul, purporting instead to enhance its values resources—its self-reliance, personal responsibility, commitment to marriage, and so on.
At the core of Hearth policies is thus a Hearth family ideal that assumes that a family’s economics, its income, wages, material access to housing, health care, and such, is central to its flourishing and its values secondary, even if very important. And Soul policies assume a Soul family ideal that imagines family as essentially a valuational unit, loosely connected—if at all—to its economic circumstances. The two are poles, or central tendencies, within partisan policy framing of family, overlapping but also certainly distinctive.
This chapter analyzes party platforms and bill sponsorships to present an overview of family political development from 1900 to 2012, revealing the twists and turns of Hearth and Soul family ideals within party dialectics and demonstrating how, since the late twentieth century, there is a stronger than ever political assertion of a distinctive Soul family ideal.10 In so doing, three significant periods of family partisan development are identified: (a) the Progressive Era (1900–1920), (b) the post–World War II period (1945–1955), and (c) the late twentieth-century period to the present (1980–2012). The current chapter demonstrates that through the three periods, family steadily grew in political importance while the parties reversed their family ideologies and began to increasingly polarize over Hearth and Soul, in contrast to earlier periods such as the postwar era, when the two family ideals were more overlapping and shared across the two parties. The three identified periods are then analyzed separately, as case studies, in the chapters to follow that unpack the precise interaction of family and party in each historical phase and analyze the historically contingent conditions that shaped how the parties treated family as they did, simultaneously revealing how family, in turn, shaped party developments in each of the three eras.
The Family in Party Platforms, 1900–2012
The parties have increasingly addressed the family in their platforms. Controlling for the total number of paragraphs in each platform, three distinct periods stand out in the parties’ address of family (Figure 3): an initial period of low salience in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when both parties made reference to family in only 2 percent of their platforms on average; a second period following the Depression through post–World War II (1930s–1964), when the parties occasionally increased their attention to family, with family paragraphs forming 3 to 8 percent of their platforms; and a final period of a durable, sharp increase, starting from 1968 and extending into the twenty-first century, when the parties tripled their attention to family.
Later platforms are also distinctive insofar as more pledges were directed at family as a unit rather than targeting individuals or other collective groups. For example, the parties’ pledges on taxes moved away from solely addressing individual citizens or corporations to also focusing on families; tax pledges shifted from their previous focus on “low-income Americans” and “workers,” for example, to address “low-income families” and “working families.” Since the start of the twentieth century, the percentage of tax pledges that invoked family first doubled and then tripled, from about 6 percent between the 1940s and 1960s to 15 percent in the 1970s, further increasing to upward of 20 percent in the twenty-first century (Figure 4).
Figure 3. Family paragraphs in party platforms, as a percentage of total paragraphs, 1900–2012. N = 17,489 paragraphs.
