If Moynihan Had Only Known: Race, Class, and Family Change in the Late 20th Century

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If Moynihan Had Only KnownRace, Class, and
Family Change in the Late 20th Century

• Frank Furstenberg
• University of Pennsylvania

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Outline of the Paper

• Introduction
• If Moynihan had Structured His Argument
  Differently, he might have not only been
  prescient about changes in the black family, but
  also anticipated what was to happen among
  lower-income whites (and Hispanics)
• Moynihan chose to privilege race (over class) in
  his interpretation of black family change which
  shaped both scholarship and public policy in the
  ensuing decades

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Moynihans Analysis in Historical Context

• Moynihan influenced by the Parsonian functional
  analysis of the 1950s and early 1960s
• Family as a haven in a heartless world
• Family rooted in the gender-based division of
  labor that predominated in the post-war era
• The family that we now love to love (or hate)
• The de-institutionization of marriage among
  blacks seemed deviant from the mainstream
• In essence, the Negro community has been forced
  into a matriarchal
• structure which, because it is so out of line
  with the rest of American
• society, serious retards the progress of the
  group as a whole, and imposes
• a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in
  consequence on a great
• many Negro women as well
• (Quoted from Rainwater and Yancey, 1967, p. 29)
  

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Moynihans Evidence

• Quoted liberally from studies that had been done
  by prominent scholars (Franklin Frazier in
  particular)
• Assembled Voluminous Statistics to make his
  case
• However, there was a long tradition of research
  on the black family going back to E.W. Dubois
  that pointed to powerful class differences within
  the black community and even comparative work
  across racial groups that Moynihan ignored
• Moynihan focused on race-specific differences all
  but ignoring inter and intra-racial comparisons

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A Century of Qualitative Research on the Black
Family

• Drake and Cayton (1945)
• all serious students of Negro communities
  since Dubois have been concerned with the nature
  of social stratification among Negroes.
• Class Differences within the black community
  The Hazards of Marriage
• Powdermaker, Johnson, Lewis, etc.
• Hyman Rodman the lower-class value stretch
• lower-income blacks aspired to but couldnt
  attain marriage as the preferred family form

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The Moynihan Report Changed the Discourse on
Black Families

• Before and After the shift toward studying
  lower-income black families in isolation
• Two decades of ethnographies in the wake of the
  Moynihan Report Jeffers, Liebow, Hannerz,
  Rainwater, Ladner, Stack
• Wilson tries to resolve the debate over the
  culture of poverty thesis

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Teenage Childbearing in the Wake of the Moynihan
Report

• My study in Baltimore began the year that the
  Moynihan Report was published
• My findings strongly supported his intuitions
  about the de-institutionalization of marriage
• The black/white differences were very sharp
  black teens were twelve times as likely as whites
  to have a child out-of-wedlock in the late 1960s.
• A decade later the picture changed dramatically
  and the convergence has been remarkable since
  then. By 2004, this ratio dropped to two to one
  (6 percent of blacks and 3 percent of whites)

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Racial Differences in Non-marital Childbearing
Among Older Women

• In fact, teenage childbearing has become a
  smaller component of all non-marital
  childbearing.
• This need not change the racial distribution, but
  in fact, there has been a large shift in the
  racial composition of non-marital childbearing
  among older women.

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Figure 1.0
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Figure 2.0
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Figure 3.0
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The Shift in Racial Composition of Non-marital
Childbearing

• We dont really know the reasons for the shift
• Scott South has examined the historical trends
• His analysis shows that it is largely occurred
  among lower income whites
• May be related to shift in the alternatives to
  marriage
• Ellwood and Jencks, Goldstein and Kenney
• The postponement of marriage among more and less
  privileged has different source.
• Is marriage becoming a luxury good?

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Conclusions

• First part of paper Moynihan could have know
  from existing literature that family life was
  highly structured by social class among blacks
• His decision to ignore the existing literature
  had powerful consequences for both research and
  policy.
• But, data suggests that blacks were the leading
  edge of a trend that was far more general than
  Moynihan envisioned