My wife and I are living in an Ohio town this summer, talking to young people about relationships, children, and marriage. The town is small—about 4,000 people in the village proper—and has a mixture of folks from working class and middle/upper class backgrounds. Last Sunday, my wife and I visited the First Baptist Church’s Sunday evening service. After the service, they held an ice cream social in the fellowship hall, where we visited with the church members, most of whom could be considered working class.
An elderly married couple sat across from us at the ice cream social, and they described to us how, like many of their neighbors, they moved up from Kentucky when they were young, in search of better jobs (we’ll call them Bob and Kathy). Bob grew up on a small dairy farm—“we milked the cows by hand”—and his family didn’t even have electricity until he was a teenager.
The elderly married couple sitting to our right were self-described “hillbillies” from the coal mines of West Virginia (we’ll call them Ernie and Wanda). Wanda’s family in West Virginia was dirt poor: they didn’t even have a car, and her father, a coal miner, would arrive home caked in coal and take a bath in the kitchen tub (“I don’t know how he ever got clean!”).
Their humble origins notwithstanding, both couples insisted that life today is worse than it was when they were growing up. “I feel sorry for you kids, ‘cuz you don’t get to live in those good ‘ole days,” Wanda remarked.
“What were the ‘good ‘ole days like?’” I asked.
“Families were close,” Wanda remarked without a moment’s hesitation.
Kathy elaborated that “People had more time for each other,” and described how people would leave their doors unlocked and neighbors would come over to visit unannounced. Families had regular meals with each other, she said, and they sat on their front porches and visited with other families.
Now, I know it’s easy to think that they’re just romanticizing the past. Sure, there may be some of that going on, but I’m inclined to believe that they’re on to something—my wife and I have heard too many comments like this from residents age 60 and over to just dismiss them. Even though they had serious economic difficulties growing up, according to them, family life was better. Whether they’re right or not, it’s worth noting that in the minds of these village elders, hard economic times don’t necessarily equal more troubled family life.
The conventional scholarly wisdom is that marriage in working class communities is deteriorating because of stagnant wages for working class men. But how do we square that explanation with Wanda and Kathy’s insistence that family life was better for dirt-poor Kentuckians and West Virginians than it is for today’s relatively better-off working class men and women?
It reminds me of another recent conversation I had with a lifelong resident, also in her 60’s. When I asked her to describe marriage and family life today compared to when she was growing up, she said simply “They don’t marry today. They just live together…. You didn’t live with someone back then—it was disgraceful. They had morals.”
They had morals. If that sounds like old-fashioned morality from a hillbilly in Middle America, well, I say, chalk one up to hillbilly wisdom. It seems to me like a fairly succinct explanation of why, a couple generations ago, families could thrive in poverty-stricken communities of Appalachia and why they’re falling apart in a time of relative abundance. I don’t mean at all to minimize the seriousness of the Great Recession, and how it is no doubt putting a strain on working class marriages. However, at least today even many unemployed working class men have big-screen TVs with a Dish Network attached to their house—the point being, most of us aren’t living in the kind of poverty that Wanda and Kathy’s parents experienced in Appalachia. However, what many working class folks don’t have today are norms against easy divorce and having children outside of marriage. So I think my elderly friends are on to something: marriage and family life is not necessarily always at the mercy of “economic forces”—norms make a difference.
Categories: Marriage, Marriage and Money
Nostalgia is a strange thing. People wax romantic about their youth even when from any objective standard those times were very difficult and far worse than they are in the present.
In these reminiscences, they are mourning the loss of their youth. You can read memoirs of people who grew up in World War II living in London in the blitz, and they talk about how much fun they had in the good old days.
So don’t take Bob and Kathy and Wanda and Ernie’s memories at face value.
And I would question their definition of “morality.” My experience growing up as a Southern Baptist in Louisiana is that these people have very narrow ideas of morality.
My mother belongs to a very similar demographic as these people: she was trapped in a loveless and abusive marriage until she finally had enough and then was ostracized by these “moral” church-going people.
There is a lot of social pathology that informs “hillbilly wisdom.”
I think there is a lot of good scientific evidence that tight social bonds promote happiness and mental health. A sense of safety (i.e. you don’t need to lock your doors coz you know folks and they aren’t going to try to hurt you) is important too.
There is also good evidence that more economic growth is no longer increasing human happiness.
But here’s one important difference: everyone was poor. It didn’t mean you were a failure.
An villages created social norms. Under today’s conditions social norms and comparisons aren’t confined to small groups–the media transmits them into every home.
How do we recreate some of the goods–tighter social bonds, a sense of moral norms–under postmodern conditions?
We don’t really know how, but that’s the problem. And that’s what makes it not nostalgia, but a serious project.
I agree that material goods don’t create happiness. But I am suspicious of the “social norms” created by a lot of villages.
I rather doubt these norms produced much happiness, at least not for many people. The stultifying effects of small town “morality” is an abiding theme of American literature, as is the need to escape small towns and provincial attitudes in order to discover happiness.
You don’t have to be Richard Florida to know that the brightest young people feel stifled and trapped in cultural backwaters.
Take a look at some of the research about the Roseto Effect, nicely summarized in this article.
Study of the “Roseto Effect” began with a chance conversation over a couple of beers. A local physician happened to mention to the head of medicine at the University of Oklahoma that heart disease seemed much less prevalent in Roseto than in adjoining Bangor, occupied by non-Italians.
When first studied in 1966, Roseto’s cardiac mortality traced a unique graph. Nationally, the rate rises with age. In Roseto, it dropped to near zero for men aged 55-64. For men over 65, the local death rate was half the national average.
The Roseto effect is interesting, but I don’t think it says much about people enjoying “the good ole days” in rural or small-town America. At its basic, it simply affirms that people are social and need a sense of community. I think you can find a sense of community in the city as easily as in small towns, etc.
But my objection to this kind of nostalgic vision of the past, especially when it is coupled with such a subjective and nebulous concept as “morals,” is that it tends to reify some of the worst aspects of American life and history.
In general whenever people start talking about their superior morals, I begin watching my wallet because I suspect that they are either hypocrites or hucksters or both.
Believe me, lots of people subject to the social norms of 1950s small-town and suburban life were not happy.
I actually much prefer a small city than a big one. We live in a university town of about 70,000 residents. It is big enough to offer a lot of cultural opportunities, but small enough for people to know each other and to form communities of various kinds.
Jay, in some sense then, we are on the same side. The conditions of rural Ohio circa 1950 aren’t going to be re-created. But perhaps they did contain some human goods worth figuring out how to preserve, under modern circumstances.
The testimony of older people may be just dismissed as nostalgia, but isn’t it possible it contains clues pointing us to potential goods we’d like to preserve, even as we preserve other goods in postmodernity?
Rather than dismissing it, or reifying it an unalloyed truth, why don’t we investigate it?
Most of the conditions under which most human beings lived strike us now as intolerable. But many of those humans lived happy lives. Without indulging in nostalgia, isn’t there perhaps a hypothesis that needs investigating?
Maggie
Maggie, I am in favor of investigating factors and conditions that contribute to human happiness.
My fear is that when we are told that people were happy in the past because “they had morals,” that just becomes code for imposing a very straitened idea of sexual morality on other people.
I don’t think the “hillbilly wisdom” version of morality was actually very moral. I’m pretty sure it involved ostracizing everyone who didn’t conform to unsophisticated people’s notions of sexual morality, and it almost certainly included penalizing gay people, unwed mothers, divorced people, and anyone else who violated their narrow concept of morality. I suspect this “hillbilly wisdom” contributed to a lot more unhappiness than happiness.
On the other hand, the development of communities, whether based on neighborhoods, religious beliefs, professional or workplace involvement, or common interests, or whatever, is certainly crucial to happiness.
I think that is the place to start an investigation. What do people gain from these communities and networks of support? And how do we nurture them?
I am particularly interested in how gay people who have been rejected by their (biological) families create new families. I am hopeful that as gay people become more accepted in society there will be fewer instances of such rejection and therefore less need to create these family constellations.
I forgot to finish that last sentence. It should read:
“I am hopeful that as gay people become more accepted in society there will be fewer instances of such rejection and therefore less need to create these family constellations, but until then, there probably is a lot to be learned from them.”
Jay says: “I don’t think the “hillbilly wisdom” version of morality was actually very moral. I’m pretty sure it involved ostracizing everyone who didn’t conform to unsophisticated people’s notions of sexual morality, and it almost certainly included penalizing gay people, unwed mothers, divorced people, and anyone else who violated their narrow concept of morality. I suspect this “hillbilly wisdom” contributed to a lot more unhappiness than happiness.”
I hear you about how the old-fashioned morality of small-town America can produce hateful attitudes towards gay people. But insofar as they had stigmas against having children outside of marriage and easy divorce—I actually suspect that it contributed to more happiness than unhappiness.
Take a couple I was talking to tonight, high school sweethearts who married in the late 1960’s at the tender age of 18. The norms their culture passed down to them meant there was no way they were going to have children outside of marriage or get an easy divorce. Well, now they’re boasting about celebrating 42 years of marriage—and they particularly credited it to “the values” that they grew up with. Meanwhile, we could walk five minutes to another block in town and talk to about a dozen young single mothers who inherited a culture that said it’s fine to have children outside of marriage. Now they’re alone with their children, working third shift jobs, just trying to make ends meet.
So who’s happier?
Norms exist precisely to help people live happy lives. Of course, we shouldn’t shun single mothers and tell them how awful persons they are. Nor should we stigmatize women who divorce husbands because of abuse. But that also doesn’t mean we should pretend that it’s okay to have children outside of marriage or to get a divorce because you’re tired of the other person. Stringent norms and compassion can co-exist peacefully, and in fact must co-exist if we are to have a thriving society.
David, of course people are happier if they don’t have children out of wedlock or enter into marriages that turn sour.
But if history has taught us anything, it is that, contra your nostalgic purveyors of hillbilly wisdom, many people who lived in the judgmental hothouses of small-town and rural America in the 1950s were miserable, and were made so by the stigmatizing attitudes that you apparently wish would return.
You could, no doubt, walk down the streets of San Francisco and talk to people who would tell you that they achieved happiness precisely by escaping the kind of “values” that your Southern Baptist hillbillies extol.
I dispute your contention that “Norms exist precisely to help people live happy lives.” Often, norms exist simply to impose someone else’s idea of a happy life on others. Not all “norms” are worth preserving and not all “norms” are appropriate for everyone.
One problem is that the “norms” you are celebrating, even the ones I agree with, are so tied up with ignorance, hypocrisy, and hatred, that it is hard to take them seriously. They have been besmirched by being captured by right-wing ideologues who are more interested in manipulating people than improving the lives of even those they manipulate.
Perhaps when the “morals” your hillbillies wax nostalgic about are no longer so intwined with the hatred of gay people and invoked as an excuse to deny marriage equality, then maybe they can once again be considered afresh. Until then, the arguments against bearing children out of wedlock or divorcing precipitously must be made on the grounds of logic rather than anecdotes about the “good ole days.”
I could not agree with you more that many people in conservative, small-town America should adopt more charitable attitudes towards gays and lesbians. However, your argument appears to be the following:
A lot of people in small-town conservative America hate gays and lesbians.
A lot of people in small-town conservative America have norms against children outside of marriage and easy divorce.
Therefore, norms against children outside of marriage and easy divorce are bad.
That argument suffers from the logical fallacy of “poisoning the well”: declaring that something is bad because the person who said it has done this or that other awful thing.
It seems like we both agree that norms against having children outside of marriage and easy divorce are good for individuals and good for society. The older folks of this town seem to be telling me, in their own way, how–despite their poverty–family life in their childhood days was better because of those norms. And rather than dismissing them as “nostalgic purveyors of hillbilly wisdom,” I think, in light of the suffering single moms and fatherless children on the nearby block, that we would do well to listen more closely to what they’re saying about how “families were closer” in “the good ‘ole days.”
No, David. You misrepresent what I have said. The false syllogism that you construct has no relevance to either what I believe or what I said.
I dispute the idea that you accept uncritically that the “good ole days” were really “good ole days.” Every generation waxes nostalgic about the past. What your hillbilly informants are doing is not providing accurate information about the past, but mourning the loss of their youth.
It is no accident that the ancient Greeks could never specify when the Golden Age of Arcadia actually existed: it was always in the past, in the “good ole days,” and since then things had always gone from bad to worse. This habit of romanticizing the past has very deep roots in the human psyche. One of the rites of passage of growing older is reaching that point where one tsks, tsks about the behavior of the “younger generation.”
We disagree on this crucial point: you seem sincerely to find your purveyors of hillbilly wisdom credible sources that things were much better in a simpler time when people had “morals.” In contrast, I don’t think these people are credible and I suspect that their version of morality is crabbed and narrow.
There is lots of evidence that many people living in small-town and rural America when social norms were rigidly enforced were miserable: you seem to disregard that evidence in favor of the reminiscences of random people you run into at Southern Baptist church socials.
I agree that people would be better off not having children outside of marriage and not precipitously divorcing. I would like our society to embrace these ideas and behave accordingly.
What I have qualms about is how one establishes (or enforces) “norms” against people having children outside of marriage or divorcing precipitously.
I am not in favor of returning to the stigmatizing tactics of the 1950s, especially as practiced in small towns.
I should add that I am not condescending toward rural folk. I live in IOWA, one of the most rural states in the union, and my husband grew up on a farm. (A very large one, but a farm nevertheless.) I know that many rural people have good values and good instincts and good hearts and strong morals.
My husband’s family is practically a walking advertisement for wholesome farm life. His parents produced 8 children, all of whom graduated from college and are now married, and not a divorce among them.
Anyway, my argument with you, I think, is that you seem to believe a solution to the problems of fatherless children and divorce is a return to 1950s-style “morals” and I don’t.
I agree that these are serious issues that desperately need addressing for the good of individuals and of society, but I don’t think “hillbilly wisdom” is the answer.
Thanks, Jay, for your insight. It is great to have some pushback to our initial thoughts and impressions as we live here in Ohio. We don’t want to make judgments based on our random encounters with people (we’ll have to see what emerges as we talk to more and more people in a variety of places), but neither do we want to completely dismiss a sentiment that we have heard from just about everyone we’ve met so far. I am sure there is some romanticizing going on, but it seems a bit presumptious to chalk it all up to that, at least before investigating further. I mean, how do we know that we are not just suffering from the psychological tendency of the younger generation to reject the advice of the older generation?
So in the spirit of learning more about small town values and how they affected the people who lived in these towns, do you have some books and sources that you would recommend? I must admit that I’m ignorant of the studies about this, only aware of American literature that portrays the struggles of creative types boxed in their small town worlds (which doesn’t speak to the experience of the majority of people, only to the experience of a certain type of person). Thanks!
You’re probably right in locating as one of our biggest disagreements the question of whether the older folks in this town are credible sources of information about what the “good ‘ole days” were like. I’m not as confident as you are that “What [my] hillbilly informants are doing is not providing accurate information about the past, but mourning the loss of their youth.”
Again, I look at the happily married couple who waited to have children until marriage and I look at the young single mothers just trying to get by, and I say, “Maybe our grandparents’ were wiser and happier for having a norm against having children outside of marriage.”
I agree with Maggie’s comment on this one:
“The testimony of older people may be just dismissed as nostalgia, but isn’t it possible it contains clues pointing us to potential goods we’d like to preserve, even as we preserve other goods in postmodernity?”
David and Amber, I think if you are really interested in investigating ways to improve family life, you should abandon the notion that the deterioration of family life has anything to do with “morals.”
In the first place, the term is too slippery and alienates anyone who is not a right-winger. The Christian right has made the term tendentious, simply a club with which to beat people who fail to conform to their narrow notions of what is moral.
Family life changed in the 1960s not because of a failure of “morals” but because of such influences as the sexual revolution, the rise of feminism, and the changes in the economy that made it more difficult for families to live on a single salary.
These factors had profound effects on family life, some positive and some negative. The challenge is to discover ways to remediate some of the negative effects on family life while preserving the positive aspects of the momentous changes that took place then.
David and Amber, I should add that I appreciate your engagement and responsiveness and thoughtfulness.