did not use birth control, so their families tended to be larger than those of the Protes-
tant immigrants, who did practice birth control.
But the contemporary family is also the result of deliberate social policies begin-
ning in the first decades of the twentieth century. These policies held up a specific
model as normal and natural and then endeavored to fulfill that vision by prohibi-
tions on women’s entry into the workplace or pushing them out once they found their
way there, ideologies of motherhood and birth control to limit family size, a “eugen-
ics” movement that demanded that all new immigrants conform to a specific stan-
dard of marriage and family, and a new educational and child-rearing ideology that
specified how parents should raise their children. American families have always been
subject to deliberate policies to encourage certain types of families and discourage
others, a process that continues today.
The end of World War II saw the largest infusion of government funding toward
the promotion of this new nuclear family—the interstate highway system that pro-
moted flight to the suburban tract homes, the massive spending on public schools in
those suburbs, and policy initiatives coupled with ideologies that pushed women out
of manufacturing work and back into the home, while their veteran husbands were
reabsorbed into the labor force or went to college on the GI Bill.
The family form that finally emerged in the 1950s—idealized in classic situation
comedies of the 1950s and early 1960s like Father Knows BestandLeave It to Beaver
on that newly emergent and culturally unifying medium, television—was far less a
naturally emergent evolutionary adaptation and far more the anomalous result of
deliberate social planning.
The Native American Family
Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, most Native Americans lived in small villages
where extended families dominated; you could trace a blood relationship with almost
everyone you knew, and most social interaction—from food distribution to village
government—depended on kinship ties and obligations. Strangers were considered
enemies unless they could be somehow included in the kinship network (Wilkinson,
1999). One of the primary means of creating kinship alliances was exogamy, the
requirement that people marry outside of their clan. Marriages created allies, which
were useful in any disputes with other clans in the tribe.
Native American families are, themselves, quite diverse. Most marriages are
monogamous, but some tribes permitted polygyny, and a few permitted men to sleep
with other women when their wives were pregnant or lactating. Many tribes, such as
the Zuni and Hopi in the Southwest and the Iroquois in the Northeast, were matri-
lineal. Hopi children were raised by their mothers and uncles (and, to an extent, their
fathers). Girls continued to live with their mothers throughout their lives. When they
married, they brought their husbands home with them. When boys entered puberty,
they moved into the men’s ceremonial house. Eventually most of them married women
of other clans and moved in with their wives’ family.
The father had limited authority in the family: He was considered a guest in his
wife’s home, and her brothers or cousins made all of the major economic and child-
rearing decisions. Children went to their uncle, not their father, for approval of their
life choices.
Still, children—especially boys—learned a lot from their fathers. Although uncles
had the greatest authority over their life decisions, their biological fathers taught them
their occupational skills, hunting, herding animals, or growing crops.
Native American family and kinship systems were developed to provide for
people’s fundamental needs, such as producing enough food and defending against
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