Family Values and Social Change

Marriage counseling did not just serve those looking for advice but also performed a task that affected society as a whole. It was intended to influence ideas of order relating to the institution of marriage. Founded during the Weimar Republic, marriage counseling was expanded in the Federal Republic. The societal continuities of this period and the changes that took place were reflected both in counseling work and in its actors.

Debates about sex education, abortion, and homosexuality polarized the U.S. society in the 20th century. Using the Methodist Church as an example, Jana Hoffmann examines the “sexualization of religion”. She shows how sexuality became a distinguishing feature of religious groups and what consequences this had for ideas of family, marriage and gender.

The book Lady Astronauts, Lady Engineers, and Naked Ladies is a gender history of the American space community and by extension a social history of American society in the twentieth century during the Cold War. In order to expand and differentiate the prevalent postwar narrative about gender relations and cultural structures in the United States, the book analyzes several different groups of women interacting in different social spaces within the space community. It therewith grants insight into the several layers of female participation and agency in the community and the gender and race based obstacles and hurdles the female (prospective) astronauts, scientists, engineers, artists, administrators, writers, hostesses, secretaries, and wives were faced with at NASA and in the space industry. In each chapter a different social space within the space community is analyzed. The spaces where the women lived and worked are researched from a media, individual, and institutional angle, ultimately revealing the differing gender philosophies communicated in the public sphere and the space community workplaces by government and space community officials. While women were publicly encouraged to participate in the American space effort to beat the Soviet Union in the race to the moon, women had to deal with gender based barriers which were integral to the structures of the space community; just as they were an intrinsic component of all societal structures in the United States in the 1960s. The female space workers, who were often perceived as disrupters of the prevalent social order in the space community and discriminated by some of their male colleagues and bosses on a personal basis, still managed to assert themselves. They molded pockets of agency in the space community workspaces without the facilitation of regulations on the part of NASA that might have provided them with easier access or more agency. Thus, the space community, a place of technological innovation, was not necessarily also a place of social innovation, but a community with a government agency at its center that mainly mirrored the current (changing) social order, conventions, and policies in the 1960s as well as in the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, the women presented in this book were instrumental in advancing and consolidating the social transformation that happened within the space community and the United States and therefore make intriguing subjects of research. Thus, this systematic analysis of the connection between gender, space, and the Cold War adds a new dimension to space history as well as expands the discourse in American history about gender relations and the opportunities of women in the twentieth century.

The structure of the African American family has been a recurring theme in American discourse on the African American community. The role of African American mothers especially has been the cause of heated debates since the time of Reconstruction in the 19th century. The discourse, which often saw the African American family as something that needed fi xing, also put the issue of women’s reproductive rights on the political agenda. Taking a long-term perspective from the 1920s to the early 1990s, Anne Overbeck aims to show how normative notions of the American family infl uenced the perspective on the African American family, especially African American women. The book follows the negotiations on African American women’s reproductive rights within the context of eugenics, modernization theory, overpopulation, and the War on Drugs. Thereby it sets out to trace both continuities and changes in the discourse on the reproductive rights of African American women that still infl uence our perspective on the African American family today.

Divorce, working women, and reproductive rights radically changed family structures in the United States over the course of the 20^th century. Yet is this also true for family values and gender norms? Has there truly been a "value shift" of the family? For the first time, Isabel Heinemann examines public debate and expert discourse on the American family and its values from a long-term perspective and comes to surprising conclusions.

Andre Dechert wirft in seiner Monographie einen neuen Blick auf die Aushandlung von Familienwerten in den USA der 1980er und frühen 1990er Jahre – einen Zeitraum der US-amerikanischen Geschichte, der in der frühen Forschung zunächst allgemein als Phase einer Re-Traditionalisierung beschrieben worden ist. Erst in jüngerer Vergangenheit wird vermehrt dafür plädiert, diesen Zeitraum auch im Kontext fortschreitender Wandelsprozesse der 1960er und 1970er Jahre in den Blick zu nehmen.
Anhand von Debatten um die Vaterschafts- und Familienkonzepte der Sitcoms Love, Sidney, The Cosby Show und Murphy Brown, die in der medienvermittelten US-amerikanischen Öffentlichkeit Aufmerksamkeit fanden, zeigt Dechert auf, dass die 1980er und frühen 1990er Jahre als komplexe Phase gesellschaftlichen Wandels zu beschreiben sind. Während das Modell der Kernfamilie im Zuge sozialer Bewegungen wie dem Gay Rights Movement, dem Civil Rights Movement oder dem Second Wave Feminism herausgefordert und kritisch hinterfragt wurde, wirkte es dennoch als das weithin etablierte US-amerikanische Familienideal. Im Spiegel von Decherts Monographie erscheint nicht nur die Sitcom als bedeutender Aushandlungsort von Familienwerten, auch die 1980er und frühen 1990er Jahre erscheinen als bedeutende Phase für die Aushandlung von Familienwerten in den USA, in denen das Kernfamilienideal für Minoritäten geöffnet worden ist.

Claudia Roesch offers a study of Mexican American families and evolving notions of masculinity and motherhood in the context of American family history. The book focuses both on the negotiation of family norms in social expert studies and on measures taken by social workers and civil-rights activists for families. The work fills gaps in research regarding the history of the American family in the 20th century, the history of Mexican Americans, and the history of social sciences. Taking a long-term perspective from the first wave of Mexican mass immigration in the 1910s and 1920s until the new social movements of the 1970s, the study takes into account influences of the Americanization and eugenics movements, modernization theory, psychoanalysis, and the Chicano civil-rights movement. Thus, Claudia Roesch offers important new findings on the nexus between the scientization of social work and changing family values in the age of modernity.