Word: meads
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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AMERICA'S families are in trouble?trouble so deep and pervasive as to threaten the future of our nation," declared a major report to last week's White House Conference on Children. "Can the family survive?" asks Anthropologist Margaret Mead rhetorically. "Students in rebellion, the young people living in communes, unmarried couples living together call into question the very meaning and structure of the stable family unit as our society has known it." The family, says California Psychologist Richard Parson, "is now often without function. It is no longer necessarily the basic unit in our society...
...experts have their way, the nuclear family can be further strengthened in the future. Margaret Mead, for example, believes that many bad starts can be avoided if marriages can be postponed. She proposes a kind of universal national service that will take adolescents out of the nuclear home (where they apparently do not fit in), train them and keep them occupied until they are more mature. "We need something to allow those people who don't go to college to grow up without committing themselves to a marriage...
Instead of traditional marriages, Mead would also encourage a "two-step marriage" for young people. During the first phase, which would, in effect, be a trial marriage, the young couple would be required to agree not to have children. If a stable relationship developed and the couple decided to have children, a second license would be obtained and another ceremony performed...
...Mead proposed an alternative life style to that of isolated nuclear families: "clustering residential communities," which would include people of all ages, married and unmarried, who would have access to one another and share in a community. "There just aren't enough options for anyone today," she said...
...Mead said that marriage in itself should not be a goal, nor should women be forced to take their husband's names. "But at Harvard, you can't get a degree with your own name if you're married," she said...