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THE JOURNAL OF FAMILY COMMUNICATION, 3(4),187-192 Copyright © 2003, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
POINT OF VIEW ARTICLE
Diversity and Communication
Values in the Family
Stephanie Coontz
History and Family StudiesThe Evergreen State College
For several years, I have assigned students to spend 1 day a week in the public schools, combining service learning work with field observations of modern child-hood socialization. In the last year or 2, they have been particularly struck with the emphasis that teachers now place on open communication about feelings. I can't count how many essays I have received arguing that the skills children are learning about how to 'communicate' their 'true emotions' will be the key to their future happiness and family stability.
Like my students, I am impressed with some of the new classroom dynamics I see, but my current research into the history of marriage makes me somewhat skep-tical about the assumption that we know what healthy communication about emo-tion is, and exactly what it contributes to the quality or stability of family relation-ships. Values about both emotions and communication, for example, have varied immensely from culture to culture, and within subgroups of any particular culture.
In some societies of the past, displays of married love were considered un-seemly. In ancient Rome, Plutarch reported that a senator was expelled from the Senate because he kissed his wife in front of his daughter. The punishment was somewhat extreme, Plutarch conceded, but of course everyone knew that it was 'disgraceful' to kiss one's wife in public (Pomeroy, 1990, p. 7).
Similarly, in traditional Chinese society, a husband who demonstrated open af-fection for his wife, even at home in the presence of his parents, was seen as having a weak character. Chinese commentators on marriage discouraged a wife from confiding in her husband or telling him about her feelings. In a good marriage, the wife treated her husband 'like a guest,' no matter how long they had been married (Ebrey, 1993, p. 156). Even today, claims anthropologist Catherine Lutz, 'the American [therapist's] 'psychological insight' is the Chinese person's 'self absorp-tion,'' (cited in Pfister, 1997, pp. 22-23).
Seventeenth- and 18th-century American lovers said they wanted 'candor' from each other. However, they did not mean by this the kind of soul-baring inti-macy that most modern Americans expect, far less the idea that in a good relation-ship you talk frankly about your disappointments with your partner and get your grievances off your chest. Instead, candor referred to fairness, kindliness, and good temper. People wanted a mate who did not pry too deeply under the surface. The ideal mate, as U.S. President John Adams put it in his diary, was willing 'to palliate faults and Mistakes, to put the best Construction upon Words and Action, and to forgive Injuries' (cited in Rothman, 1984, p. 43).
In the contemporary world, there are many regional, class, and ethnic variations in the kinds of communication that are considered desirable and healthy. Public ex-pression of tender emotions toward a lover or spouse is frowned on in many peas-ant and working-class communities, possibly because it seems to cut across the other solidarities that are needed when neighbors vitally depend on each other. Husbands and wives often relate to each other in public through a ritualized lan-guage of gender hostility, hiding any fondness they may really feel for each other. They refer to 'the old man' or, in the Cockney rhyming slang for a wife, 'the trou-ble and strife.' In such societies or subcultures, people are likely to explain their marital behavior, however exemplary it may actually be, in terms of convenience, compulsion, or self-interest, rather than love or sentiment. A Mayan husband who has lost his wife will not talk about feeling grief or loneliness, but may simply ask 'who will make my tortilla?' (McCluskey, 2001, p. 39; Medick & Sabean,1984).
Modern Americans tend to interpret such statements as denial, avoidance, or a person's inability to reach their 'true' or 'deepest' inner feelings, but many Japa-nese, according to Takeo Doi
feel that the use of words can chill the atmosphere, because those who are close to each other-that is to say, who are privileged to merge with each other-do not need words to express their feelings. One surely would not feel merged with another (that is amae), if one had to verbalize a need to do so! (cited in Morsbach & Tyler,1986, p. 290)
Anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine Lutz (1990, p. 4) suggest that 'inner truths' and emotions are just as much culturally constructed as are the be-haviors that we tend to label superficial social conventions. Some cultures see emotions as expressions of rules that govern social relationships. As such, an op-position between what you 'should' feel and what you 'really' feel may be inexplicable to them. Communication that reinforces such social 'conventions,' my own research on the history of marriage and community suggests, may in some time periods and cultures be more central to personal identity and satisfactory so-cial relationships than discussion of dyadic interactions and individual emotions.
When it comes to marriage, our contemporary values about what and how to com-municate are shaped by two historical developments. One of them is a long-term trend that to a greater or lesser degree affects people of almost every race, ethnicity, and region in the modern economy. That is the erosion of traditional ways of organiz-ing and sustaining personal intimacy. The second, however, is much more race, class, and gender specific, and it has created a culture-bound way of defining and ex-pressing intimacy that is often falsely presented as a universal family need.
The first trend cuts across race, class, and ethnic lines. For thousands of years, marriage was the main mechanism for consolidating or transferring property, con-trolling social and sexual affiliations, constructing political alliances, establishing social support networks, redistributing resources to dependents, and organizing the division of labor by age and by gender. The most important function of commu-nication in marriage was to coordinate work and to confirm shared values about the household's place in the larger social order. The glue of a marriage was provided by the pressures of kin and community, the inability to exist without marriage, and the unequal power relations between men and women.
Between the late 18th and the mid-20th century, a series of social and economic changes eroded the old necessities for marriage. The eclipse of kinship as a major political and economic force lessened the incentive of parents to dictate their chil-dren's marriage choices, whereas the rise of new work opportunities freed many young people from parental controls. The spread of banks, schools, foundations, hospitals, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and pension plans slowly but surely eliminated many of the roles that marriage had traditionally played in orga-nizing wealth transfers and social welfare measures.
Although status considerations and practical necessity still compelled most peo-ple to marry, courtship and marriage increasingly became an individual decision that could be made independently of family and community pressures. The growing role of personal attraction and compatibility in organizing marriage was reinforced by socioeconomic changes that elevated family relationships over other interpersonal ties-with neighbors, peers, patrons, or friends-that had formerly been every bit as emotionally central in people's lives as marital and biological ties.
Under these conditions, love and companionship became not just the happy out-come of a successful family enterprise, but the essential ingredient of marriage in the eyes of society. Many couples found new satisfactions and pleasures in both courtship and marriage itself, including new sexual compatibility. And undeniably, the spread of this ideal led to a democratization of ideas about personal identity and sensibility. But this change also meant that people began expecting more of mar-ried life (and less of community life) than ever before in history-at the very same time that older methods of organizing and stabilizing marriages were ceasing to work.
The result was a heightened interest in ways of creating intimacy and sustaining love, an increased emphasis on communication and companionship as the new glue of marriage, and a preoccupation with the individual, idiosyncratic, unique, and pri-vate experiences and feelings of each partner. Since the early 20th century, there have been many changes in ideal patterns of communication and companionship as fam-ily life has become less authoritarian and women have gained more economic clout within marriage. All these changes have understandably directed our attention to-ward ways of improving communication and deepening interpersonal intimacy.
The trends making family life more voluntary and requiring greater negotiation among family members affect all classes and racial-ethnic groups, and it is there-fore reasonable to argue that good communication patterns will continue to grow in importance as a determinant of family success, and that many of these will have to do with disclosure of intensely personal feelings. Despite differences in class and culture, all types of families have found that communication becomes ever more important in maintaining marriage as compulsion, coercion, and conve-nience become less significant. And in an increasingly diverse society, the search for identity and connection through the exploration of individual feelings-as op-posed to the confirmation of social conventions-will undoubtedly continue.
However, it is important to remember that much of what mainstream American culture sees as healthy communication and companionship came out of a very spe-cific mix of class, race, and gender expectations that emerged in the 19th century and has since been somewhat naively universalized into an overarching definition of intimacy. For example, the definition of what sorts of topics and activities foster 'open' communication and familiar companionship has its origins in a 19th-cen-tury opposition between private life, family ties, sexuality, and personal identity on the one hand, and public life, work, and politics on the other, an opposition that was pioneered by the White, native-born, Protestant middle class of Western Europe and America. The first set of topics (private life, family ties, sexuality, and personal identity) is today considered more 'real,' more 'authentic,' and more intimate, than the second.
However, this is a very culture- and class-bound conceit. In ancient Greece, for example, discussions of sexuality and love were often 'really' about what many Greeks considered more important matters of self-definition and happiness: poli-tics and power. When I taught in Japan several years ago, similarly, I was struck by how many passionate feelings about interpersonal relations were expressed in sto-ries about aesthetics and taste-stories that many Americans would dismiss as in-tellectualizations or rationalizations of people's 'real' emotions. A recent compar-ison of perceptual habits of Japanese and American students found that the Japanese depended far more than the Americans on contextual clues and relation-ship to a larger environment to accurately describe a single object, a difference in viewpoints that leads to different priorities and techniques of communication (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001).
The 19th-century model of intimate relations also posited a sharp divide be-tween public and business modes of communication (the realm of men) and pri-vate, familial ones (the realm of women). Today's conventions about what consti-tutes 'good' communication and loving companionship are very much skewed to the female side of this 19th-century division of labor and emotion. As Francesca Cancian (1986) has pointed out, American middle-class culture identifies love with emotional expression and talking about feelings, aspects of love that most contemporary women prefer and in which women tend to be more skilled than men. At the same time we often ignore the instrumental and physical aspects of love that men prefer, such as providing help, sharing activities, and sex (p. 692).
But, of course, this feminine expertise in 'feeling work' is itself a product of a distinctive historical mix of race and class dynamics. In particular, it seems to be associated with the gender relations that predominate in the White middle class. Affluent people are more likely than poor folk to see 'real' love as something that has to be communicated in words, whereas poorer people and many racial-ethnic communities see practical help and financial aid as a surer sign of love. And the White middle class is also more likely to see personal insecurity, sexual tensions, and family conflicts as the most 'meaningful' topics of discussion. This has been a trend in the United States since the early 1920s, when privatized and sexualized notions of identity began to replace more collective and political sources of satis-faction and self-definition.
Studies of communication that ignore these class and ethnic differences can lead to the idea that White, middle-class Americans have more psychological 'depth' than other social groups. As Joel Pfister (1997) argues, 'What still needs to be investigated is the degree to which ... modern 'therapeutic' discourses [and modes of communication], while often presuming to fathom and repair universal 'human nature,' have in fact contributed ideologically to the normative racial con-struction of whiteness' (p. 36)-and, I would add, to the destruction of rich work-ing-class traditions of achieving self-affirmation and intimacy through collective expression of shared values (Cancian, 1986).
REFERENCES
Abu-Lughod, L., & Lutz, C. (1990). Introduction. In L. Abu-Lughod & C. Lutz (Eds.), Language andthe politics of emotion (pp. 1-23). England: Cambridge University Press.
Cancian, F. (1986). The feminization of love. Signs, 11, 692-709.
Ebrey, P. B. (1993). The inner quarters: Marriage and the lives of Chinese women in the Sung Period.Berkeley: University of California Press.
McCluskey, L. (2001). 'Here our culture is hard:' Stories ofdomestic violence from a Mayan commu-nity in Belize. Austin: University Press of Texas. Medick, H., & Sabean, D. (1984). Interest and emotion: Essays on the study offamily and kinship. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Morsbach, H., & Tyler, W. J. (1986). A Japanese emotion: Amae. In R. Harré (Ed.), The social con-struction of emotion (pp. 289-307). Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell.
Nisbett, R., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic ver-sus analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 108, 291-310.
Pfister, J. (1997). On conceptualizing the cultural history of emotional and psychological life in Amer-ica. In J. Pfister & N. Schnog (Eds.), Inventing the psychological: Toward a cultural history of emo-tional life in America (pp. 17-62). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Pomeroy, S. (1990). Plutarch's advice to the bride and groom and a consolation to his wife. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rothman, E. (1984). Hands and hearts: A history of courtship in America. New York: Basic Books.