Steven Mintz

Regulating the American Family

The article offers an interpretive synthesis of recent scholarship on family law and government regulation of the family. It traces changes in family law from the colonial era to the present and concludes with an analysis of family law as a discourse involving four broad themes: the laws social functions; the social values upheld by law; the relative responsibility of private individuals and the larger society for enforcing values; and the ways in which the law intervenes in family affairs.

Comments on “Race and the Family in the United States: The Other(s)”: Rethinking Narratives of Race and Family:

In their articles, R. Todd Romero, Edward B. Rugemer, and Dylan Penningroth attempt to revise and refine dominant narratives of race and family. I use the term narrative quite deliberately: I am not simply referring to the repeated calls we have heard for a quarter century for a return to narrative history—the omniscient, purportedly objective forms of storytelling that earlier historians used to recount past events. Rather, I refer to both the overarching narratives that we use to think about familial, societal, and cultural change, and the personalized, emotive expressions and interpretations of history, the emotionladen life stories, which ordinary individuals use to make sense of past experience. Narratives, in the latter sense, are the vehicles through which individuals understand their own and other people’s motives, interpret memories, frame meanings, define a distinctive identity, and construe change throughout time. The narrative turn has arisen in response to two conceptual challenges. The first is a response to the postmodernist claim that historical reality is unknowable, that all we have are conflicting accounts of the past. One way to accommodate this postmodern claim has been to self-consciously scrutinize the way that individuals and groups conceptualize change across time. The second challenge is to the crude behaviorism that focuses on behavior but not on ideas. By recognizing that people have minds and act on the basis of their perceptions, emotions, fantasies, aspirations, anxieties, and understandings, it has become more important than ever to examine conceptual frameworks used by individuals and by historians themselves. Dynamic, unstable, and often inconsistent, personal and cultural narratives, like their fictional counterparts, are replete with gaps, ambiguities, and contradictions. Constantly reinvented, reordered, and revised, narratives are multiple and contested. They are also functional: sometimes, they are instrumental in practical and pragmatic terms; often, the functions are psychological. Rather than viewing this focus on narratives simply as a form of memory or myth making or mere meditations on the past, narratives are the ways that historians and ordinary people alike conceptualize and

Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W. E. B. DuBois, and: In Pursuit of Liberty: Coming of Age in the American Revolution (review)

days, feminists have concluded that film images are rarely, if ever, entirely positive or negative, and Hollywood in particular is adept at luring audiences in with fantasy bribes only to recuperate this progressivity for patriarchy by the film’s end. Thus, film images represent a complex negotiation between competing ideological positions. To defend Disney films as Davis does is really only to foreground their progressive elements and minimize regressive aspects. So many problems with Disney film portrayals of girls and women emerge from Davis’s analysis that it is difficult to see how she can possibly conclude that the image of women presented is “largely positive in its overall make-up.” Female characters are almost always placed in competition with each other or even worse are presented as bitter enemies with one woman out to destroy the other. Women act with men and for men; female goodness is consistently identified with female beauty; the ugly villainesses are more seriously evil than male villains, who usually have a comic side; and these villainesses are not just viciously evil, but usually presented as insane. Whereas girls are allowed to accompany boy heroes on their adventures, as women they must settle back into their traditional domestic roles by the film’s end. Are these really what Davis sees as “largely positive” images? Davis can defend Disney’s animated heroines as strenuously as she wishes and perhaps “hysterically” attack the nameless critics who point to flaws in Disney’s characterizations of women, but the mixed nature of the characters she examines tells the real story. Armstrong Atlantic State University Karen Hollinger

The American family : historical perspectives

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