At this moment in the early 1980s public debate about the family was dominated by the confluence of several unhappy realities: Families were breaking up. Divorce for those who bothered to get married was becoming the new normal. More and more children were born out of wedlock, and most of these kids grew up with no adult males in their homes. Single mother heads of households were said to be drifting into lives of poverty. And the cost to taxpayers of family support systems was rocketing out of control.
What could society do?
Some people claimed to have found the answer to the financial and social costs of family breakdown. Their answer picked up on trends in social thought which were well on their way to acceptance for their own reasons. The proposed answer then topped off these trends with a new twist.
All over the contemporary landscape, the role of morality in public life was under growing suspicion. In the past a result of the influence of religion on American thought was a decidedly moralistic view of certain family-related practices. Some activities were thought of as good, so were deemed worthy of encouragement. Other activities were bad and brought down chastisement on those who practiced them. Having children out of wedlock was definitely bad. The English language has an ancient and pejorative b-word name for the children of the unmarried. Traditional society had a very narrow view of the women who engaged in the ‘sin’ of bringing these so-called b–tard children into the world.
But by the 1980s these ancient attitudes were past their sell-by dates.