The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America's Changing Families.

• Author: Baskin, Martha

Who makes up "the family" is a political question. If you ask the Christian right, the Victorian heterosexual marriage with its separate spheres for men and women -- or maybe Ozzie and Harriet of the 1950s TV series -- constitutes the "traditional family." No one else need apply. No dual-earner couples. No single fathers. No unwed moms. No gay parents. No stepmothers.

Enter Stephanie Coontz, family historian and author of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, which caused an uproar when it came out in 1992, the year "family values" was born. Whereas her 1992 volume argues that the "traditional family" is a historical construct, a brief aberration in the varied life of the American family, her new book offers a realistic antidote to the destructive myths surrounding the family. In nine chapters with titles such as "Getting Past the Sound Bites: How History and Sociology Can Help Today's Families," "Putting Divorce in Perspective," and "Working with What We've Got: The Strengths and Vulnerabilities of Today's Families," Coontz takes a close look at the complicated state of modern American families and shows why one-size-fits-all solutions often do more harm than good.

"The new consensus blamed all of America's social and economic ills on people who failed to maintain this `unified model,'" writes Coontz. But "there is an on-the-ground consensus that is quite different from the one up in the rarefied atmosphere occupied by politicians and the think tanks. It's about getting down to cases. What is really going on, and what does it mean for my family? How does it apply to my divorced sister who doesn't have health insurance and needs food stamps? ... How do the issues facing families in our community differ from those in other cities, suburbs, or farms?"

Coontz talks about "the incredible revolution that's been going on in family life." Take working women. Three-quarters of all married women with children and an even larger proportion of single mothers work outside the home. Women with kids are the fastest-growing component of the female labor force.

In reaction, family-values proponents have begun a new offensive on such mothers who "selfishly" choose to work. David Blankenhorn of the Institute for Family Values believes that men are unlikely to commit to marriage in the first place unless a woman validates the man's identity as primary breadwinner. David Popenoe of the Council on Families in America suggests that the...