THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE 317
The Transformation of Family Ideals and PolicyA key shift in attitudes took place in West Germany in the second half of
the 1970s as the role of marriage as an institution and goal in life was in-
creasingly called into question. At the same time, an Allensbacher survey
determined somewhat surprisingly that the family was still considered
to be a signifi cant aspect of people’s lives.^115 It showed that a growing
number of West Germans were decoupling marriage and family in their
private lives. Yet many of them broke with this new outlook that had been
articulated discursively and in praxis when it came to their own lives; the
majority still married as soon as a baby was on the way.^116 These fi ndings
indicate that the main point of reference continued to be the traditional
nuclear family.
Family policy in West Germany also refl ected this shift in public opin-
ion. Social Democrats pushed to defi ne the family according to the re-
lationship between children and parents in the 1970s. Consequently,
parenthood was supposed to be the necessary qualifi cation for a “family.”
By proposing this defi nition of the family, they sought to eliminate the
legal discrimination against single mothers with children and unmarried
couples with children. In doing so, the Social Democratic Party (SPD)
was reacting to processes of social change that had been observed, but
it continued to stick to the traditional model of married parents with joint
children.^117 During this time, the defi nition of the family was also being
discussed within the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). In
a draft of the basic party platform in 1977, for instance, single-parent
homes were still defi ned as families, but in the version that was offi cially
passed in 1978, this clause had been removed. It was not until 1994 that
the CDU offi cially changed its view on the matter, recognizing single
mothers and fathers as well as unmarried couples as families.^118
There was at least a shift in what was being said about “the family”
in West German society in the second half of the 1970s. More and more
politicians and scholars were noting that the usual terms used for other
types of families such as “half family” and “incomplete family” were nor-
matively loaded and discriminatory. Even just this shift, which occurred
over a few years, points to a fundamental change in society’s acceptance
of diff erent types of families. Regardless, however, these normative terms
by no means disappeared completely from use; academic publications,
for instance, still spoke of “incomplete families.”^119 As this all started to
change, sociologists also began looking at the increasing prevalence of
alternative forms of cohabitation. In order to assess this process using
their methods, they introduced Lebensform (essentially “way of life”) as
an analytical concept at the beginning of the 1980s. This term was used