FAMILIES OF THE FUTURE
From the day that Betty Friedan’s bombshell book, The Feminine Mystique, launched the modern feminist movement in many nations, we have seen a painful struggle to redefine the roles of men and women in terms appropriate to a post-nuclear-family future. The expectations and the behavior of both sexes have shifted with respect to jobs, legal and financial rights, household responsibilities, and even sexual performance. “Now,” writes Peter Knobler, editor of Crawdaddy, a rock music magazine, “a guy’s got to contend with women breaking all the rules… Many regulations needbreaking,” he adds, “but that doesn’t make it much easier.”
Roles are shaken by the battle over abortion, for instance, as women insist that they—not politicians, not priests, not doctors or even husbands—have a right to control their bodies. Sexual roles are further blurred as homosexuals demand and partially win “gay rights.” Even the role of the child in society is changing. Suddenly advocates spring up to lobby for a Children’s Bill of Rights.
Courts are swamped by cases involving role redefinition, as alternatives to the nuclear family multiply and gain acceptability. Do unmarried spouses have to share their property after they break up? Can a couple legally pay a woman to bear a child for them by artificial insemination? (A British court said no—but for how long?) Can a lesbian be a “good mother” and retain custody of her child after adivorce? (An American court says yes.) What is meant by being a good parent? Nothing underlines the changing role structure more than the lawsuit filed in Boulder, Colorado, by an angry twenty-four-year-old named Tom Hansen. Parents can make mistakes, Hansen’s lawyers argued, but they must be held legally—and financially—responsible for the results. Thus Han-sen’s court action claimed $350,000 hi damages on an unprecedented legal ground: parental malpractice.
EASING INTO TOMORROW
Behind all this confusion and turmoil, a new Third Wave family system is coalescing, based on a diversity of family forms and more varied individual roles. This de-massification of the family opens many new personal options. Third Wave civilization will not try to stuff everyone willy-nilly into a single family form. For this reason the emergent family system could free each of us to find his or her own niche, to select or create a family style or trajectory attuned to individualized needs.
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