The disappearing nuclear family

In 1950, four million adult Americans lived alone. Today, thirty-one million do: "In 1949, the Yale anthropologist George Peter Murdock published a survey of some 250 'representative cultures' from different eras and diverse parts of the world. He reported, 'The nuclear family is a uni­versal human social grouping. Either as the sole prevailing form of the family or as the basic unit from which more complex familial forms are compounded, it exists as a distinct and strongly functional group in every known society. No exception, at least, has come to light.' ... "During the past half century, our species has embarked on a re­markable social experiment. For the first time in human history, great numbers of people—at all ages, in all places, of every political persuasion—have begun settling down as singletons. Until recently, most of us married young and parted only at death. If death came early, we remarried quickly; if late, we moved in with family, or they with us. Now we marry later. (The Pew Research Center reports that the average age of first marriage for men and women is 'the highest ever recorded, having risen by roughly five years in the past half century.') We divorce, and stay single for years or decades. We survive our spouses, and do whatever we can to avoid moving in with others—even, perhaps especially, our children. We cycle in and out of different living arrange­ments: alone, together, together, alone. ... "Numbers never tell the whole story, but in this case the statistics are startling. In 1950, 22 percent of American adults were single. Four million lived alone, and they accounted for 9 percent of all households. In those days, living alone was by far most common in the open, sprawl­ing Western states—Alaska, Montana, and Nevada—that attracted migrant workingmen, and it was usually a short-lived stage on the road to a more conventional domestic life. "Today, more than 50 percent of American adults are single, and 31 million—roughly one out of every seven adults—live alone. (This fig­ure excludes the 8 million Americans who live in voluntary and non­voluntary group quarters, such as assisted living facilities, nursing homes, and prisons.) People who live alone make up 28 percent of all U.S. households, which means that they are now tied with childless couples as the most prominent residential type—more common than the nuclear family, the multigenerational family, and the roommate or group home. Surprisingly, living alone is also one of the most stable household arrangements. Over a five-year period, people who live alone are more likely to stay that way than everyone except married couples with children. "Contemporary solo dwellers are primarily women: about 17 mil­lion, compared to 14 million men. The majority, more than 15 million, are middle-age adults between the ages of thirty-five and sixty-four. The elderly account for about 10 million of the total. Young adults be­tween eighteen and thirty-four number more than 5 million, compared to 500,000 in 1950, making them the fastest-growing segment of the solo-dwelling population. "Unlike their predecessors, people who live alone today cluster to­gether in metropolitan areas and inhabit all regions of the country. The cities with the highest proportion of people living alone include Wash­ington, D.C., Seattle, Denver, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Chicago, Dallas, New York City, and Miami. One million people live alone in New York City, and in Manhattan, more than half of all residences are one-person dwellings." author: Eric Klinenberg title: Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone publisher: Penguin date: Copyright 2012 by Eric Klinenberg

The unifying purposes of America

Jane Jacobs, the brilliant historical analyst and author whose work Death and Life of Great American Cities revolutionized urban planning, postulates that there have been four great central, unifying cultural purposes in American history. In succession, these have been independence, manifest destiny, reform, and—after the trauma of the Great Depression—full employment: "In the founding period of the United States, a time when the Copernican, Newtonian, and Cartesian Enlightenment had succeeded both medievalism and the Renaissance, the cultural purpose became independence. Not for nothing was the charter of reasons behind the war of separation from Britain called the Declaration of Independence, and July Fourth called Independence Day. An accompanying cult de­veloped around liberty, as symbolized by both the Liberty Bell and the aims of the French Revolution. Independence and liberty were succeeded by the related freedom, indeed by two conflicting versions of freedom: the political freedom of states' rights, offshoot of independence, and the social free­dom of abolition of slavery, offshoot of liberty. "In the decades after the Civil War, and the bloodletting that seemed briefly to resolve the conflict between concepts of freedom, there was no obvious American cultural consen­sus on the purpose of life, although there were contenders, such as the Manifest Destiny of America's push westward, which had already risen to its height in the 1840s with the Mexican War, the annexation of Texas, and the purchase of California and New Mexico. Manifest Destiny was extended at the turn of the century by President Theodore Roosevelt to the Caribbean and the Pacific with the Spanish-American War, which was taken by Americans to mean American rule over the Western Hemisphere. "The start of the twentieth century and the decades imme­diately before and after were a time of reforming ferment as Americans sought to perfect their society by eliminating child labor, extending the vote to women, combating corruption and fraud, embracing public health measures and their enforce­ment, prohibiting the sale of alcohol, outlawing monopolies as restraints on trade, initiating environmental conservation through national parks (a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt's), improving working conditions and protecting the rights of labor, and pursuing many other practical reforms into which their proponents threw themselves with ardor as great as if each of these aims were indeed the purpose of life. "The reforming spirit carried into the Great Depression years, with President Franklin Roosevelt's promotion of the Four Freedoms, linking economic aims (freedom from want) to human rights (freedom from fear) and his practical mea­sures for making the links tangible, among them his success­ful advocacy of collective bargaining under the Robert F. Wagner proposals that became the National Labor Relations Act, and his institution of a regulatory Securities and Ex­change Commission (SEC), making rules for public corpora­tions' disclosures and reining in speculative manipulations in corporate stocks. Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin's wife, for her part, channeled her lifelong experience with smallish reform movements into advocacy of the United Nations and, most notably, into that body's formulation and acceptance of a declaration of universal human rights, her chief legacy and monument. Among all these and other contenders for the American purpose of life, one seemed to win out, less with fanfare than with simple quiet acceptance: the American dream, the ideal that each generation of whites, whether im­migrant or native-born, was to become more successful and prosperous than the parent generation. ... "After the war was over, during the euphoria of victory and the minor booms of the Marshall Plan and the Korean War, a consensus formed and hardened across North America. If it had been voiced, it would have gone something like this: 'We can endure meaningful trials and overcome them. But never again—never, never—will we suffer the meaningless disaster of mass unem­ployment.' ... "From the 1950s on, American culture's gloss on the purpose of life became assurance of full employment: jobs. Arguably, this has remained the American purpose of life, in spite of competition from the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and maybe even from the War on Terrorism, in which postwar reconstruction was linked with contracts for American compa­nies and hence jobs for Americans." author: Jane Jacobs title: Dark Age Ahead publisher: Random House date: Copyright 2004 by Jane Jacobs pages: 55-57