Those Who Work, Those Who Don't: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America by Jennifer Sherman

Those Who Work, Those Who Don't: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America by Jennifer Sherman

Author:Jennifer Sherman [Sherman, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2009-10-22T00:00:00+00:00


What Family Values Aren’t

I was never going to be dependent on a man. I watched my mom get beat up once a week because she didn’t want to leave him. She didn’t think she could support us, she didn’t think it was good for us not to have a father. She was wrong! (Angelica Finch, 38-year-old school administrator and married mother of three)

As several quotations in the previous section suggested, the concept of family values and tradition extends beyond dictating a focus on family togetherness. While it is normative in the positive sense of suggesting what kinds of behaviors a good parent and good family should engage in, it also has a clear negative normative value. Certain behaviors are excluded from the definition of traditional and family-oriented, despite the fact that many of the subjects I interviewed had been raised in families in which these specific behaviors were prevalent and considered normal, if not necessarily healthy. The current definition of family allows individuals and the community to protect women and children somewhat from many of the most destructive behaviors typically associated with poverty. For women, it allows them to refuse certain forms of male abuse while still conceiving of themselves as moral, traditional, and family focused. It has allowed them to rewrite certain gender scripts without having to acknowledge any kind of gender or feminist awareness that might threaten their idea of themselves as traditional, feminine women. Thus, to fully understand the meaning of family values in Golden Valley, it is also necessary to understand what they are not and which behaviors are excluded from the definition that is so central to social life in the community.

Although separate gender spheres and the homemaker/breadwinner divide were the only real attributes common to most of my subjects’ “traditional” natal families, these separations and the need for a man to be working no longer define the traditional family in Golden Valley. The most significant way in which the definition of the traditional family has changed is that it no longer clearly excludes out-of-work men. Chapter 2 explored the ways in which a man can still be perceived as hardworking in the absence of paid work. Chapter 4 will look in depth at the ways in which masculinity and fatherhood are adapting to the new labor market conditions in the post–spotted owl period. Much previous research has explored the ways in which fatherhood and masculinity are tied to working and providing, particularly for working-class American men.29 In Golden Valley, the ideal family myth still assumes a working husband. However, it no longer strictly excludes a man who does not have a job or who cannot support the family on his own. Instead, the behaviors that are currently considered antithetical to family values are those that are considered most inconsistent with the values of hard work identified in chapter 2: namely drug and alcohol use and the domestic abuse that often accompanies it.

As discussed in chapter 2, in the days of the mill and the



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