Changes to the American Family - 19 January 1990

Not a bad start to make, at looking over the social changes that affected American life in the 1980s, would be with the language.

I see that the Oxford Dictionary over the decade of the 1980s added 30,000 new words, most of them American, which must be an unprecedented number. Could be, of course, that the editors were more hospitable than usual to new words. But it must mean also that there was a rush of new experiences that had to be described, for that is the main job of language.

The English of England and the English of America began to grow apart, not as everybody thinks, in his or her own lifetime, but as soon as the first settlers landed on the American shore, over 350 years ago.

They saw animals they'd never seen before, a possum, turkey is in the Oxford and has a note "origin, America". Plants and vegetables they had no words for, but the Indians did, hence, tobacco, succotash, a dish of green maize combined with lima beans. The landscape had odd features that called for either a revival of old words like tidewater or for naturalising foreign words like "canyon" and "arroyo".

In time, the Dutch, the Germans, the Russians, the Scandinavians, the Italians, the Jews, from all the countries of southern and eastern Europe brought in their habits and their foods till every American, of whatever origin, knows what the stoop of a house is, and goes into a coffee shop today and doesn't think twice about ordering a cruller or a goulash or a bagel. How did we get by for so long without "teenager" and "baby-boomer" and "yuppie"?

Well, the mention of that vast, new vocabulary will simply indicate that in the 1980s, the life of this country changed at a furious pace. We can only touch on one or two glaring changes that confront us now as social problems.

And here, I don't think we can make too much of the effect of television in acquainting us every night with social problems that must have been there for centuries but which the great majority of us didn't get worked up about because we didn't see them.

A few people might choose to read about them in radical weeklies. Visitors to New York or London, in Victorian times, or in the 1920s, did not make a point of plunging into Hell's Kitchen in New York's '50s, or to the stewing slums of the East End. But those places undoubtedly had their legions of battered wives and sexually abused children. As for the homeless on the streets of London, Manchester, New York, Chicago – nobody kept count.

About a year ago, I came on a television docudrama about a noble event in Canadian history that I'm afraid, like most events in Canadian history, is all but unknown to Americans. Or, for that matter, to Britons.

In 1869, a young English woman, Susan Rye, started something I don't believe had occurred to anybody else, an attempt to deal with one frightful consequence of the success of the Industrial Revolution. The throwing out of work of thousands of hand labourers, their retreat to the cities to swell the population of the unemployed and to double or triple the population of small children who couldn't be cared for and who, if they were lucky, went into the workhouses, but mostly were abandoned to the streets.

The government, local or national, did next to nothing for them. The Methodists did their best with small orphanages. Susan Rye had the idea of taking small children, literally, off the streets. Fumigating them, clothing them, herding them and accompanying them on ships to Canada to place them with farming families.

Of course, thousands were left behind, but Miss Rye started, in 1869, with 68 aboard one ship and stayed at it, sailing back and forth, on a continuous commute for 45 years during which time she took over 100,000 London and Manchester street urchins to Canada.

They were known, and are known, to Canadians as the "Home" children. Every sort of good and dire fortune happened to them. They remain a Canadian legend, but unlike the legend of our own, huddled masses, it's a legend that has not been sanitised and sentimentalised.

Today, no problem is more incessantly televised than the plight of the homeless, as much a feature of London life as it is of New York. And it suggests the radical changes that have happened to the family. Ever since radio came in in the 1920s, and then on television, the American family, in commercials, has been more or less constant – a white family, husband off to work after fortifying himself after a magical new cereal, happy young wife at home with two adorable children (white, also, I hope I don't need to say) helping Mum with this wonderful new cleaning fluid that keeps Dad's shirts from having a ring around the collar.

I mean no malice when I say this was the Reagan American family, the one that his warm and sincere memories of small-town Illinois idealised as what every American family ought to be. It was perhaps out of nostalgia for it, out of a secret hope that it might go on being the typical American family, that so many millions voted for it. But the actual American family, as it has been changing since the early '70s, is a very different unit.

First of all, its composition, by way of race, marriage, fertility, is such that in 30 years' time one American family in three will be non-white. The advertisers are, of course, sufficiently aware of the now considerable population of blacks who have moved into the successful middle-class to feature black homes, similarly entranced by breakfast foods, new dishwashers and television sets.

Outside the television ads, what we see every night on news programmes or follow-up documentaries and discussion programmes, is the now typical black family. Sixty-five black families in 100 have one parent, almost always the mother.

If she stays home to look after her children, she has no money coming in and goes on welfare. Chances are that if she goes out to work, the small wage she earns – less what she will have to pay for some rudimentary day-care – will not be as much as her monthly welfare cheque. So she's trapped in what every politician is worried about, a growing underclass of blacks and Hispanics, with more and more children who meet, or don't meet, the lowest standards in school, and, in alarming numbers, drop out and take to the streets. At worst, take to using or selling crack.

The most striking social fact about the black population in the 1980s was this widening gap, this split, between a half to two-thirds of the black poor and the one third that has, by talent and luck, made the most of the 35-year-old black revolution which began with the Supreme Court's integration decision of 1954.

So that now – equally unthinkable 20 years ago – we can point to the first black governor of a state in history, the first black mayor of New York City, the highest-ranking soldier in the land, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, a black general.

Now, the white family, especially as it constitutes the inhabitants of a single house, or home, has undergone radical change. And the moving force this time, I think, was the feminist movement launched by Betty Friedan, 25 years ago. By now, more than 50% of all young wives have joined the workforce, with the husband at work too. A problem came up, never foreseen by women's lib, the daily care of the children.

We are now at the point which I think is common to all the western industrialised countries where the combined salaries of husband and wife, very impressive on paper, is invaded by the hefty sum they have to pay out for the care of the small children. The two main issues which the voters have forced on to the new incoming Congress are drugs and day care.

Two other novelties occur to me which have greatly changed the life, the expectations, if you like, of the young. One is the pill and the other is the microwave oven. Now the microwave oven would seem, at first mention, to be a merely useful or frivolous or unnecessary gadget. Well, offhand, I can't think of a domestic invention, since the telephone or the motor car that has had such a dramatic effect on that part of the economy that has to do with food, the preparation of it, the distribution of it, the selling of it, in restaurants.

Why should 74% of American homes now have microwaves? It's a consequence of the working mother and father who, before the microwave, grabbed a snack, or, if they were childless, had their dinners out. The restaurants never had it so good. Since the microwave took over, another unpredicted consequence, is the marked decline in the number of solvent restaurants.

The pill has had obviously tremendous effects on the private lives of young women on the population, on whole ways of life. One effect is not often mentioned. Thirty years ago, young working women automatically shared digs, flats, apartments. The pill has seen to it that many of them want to have their own place.

The result has been an enormous strain on available housing, most noticeably available for the poor. It has greatly increased the value of houses and apartments, it has led to a landlord's dreamland, to the present, preposterous, rents in every city for a studio, a loft, a one-room apartment.

There's just a final note that might be of interest, whenever you hear about the great surge of what we call the ethnic minorities, which here means Hispanic and Asian. I happen to belong to the tiniest ethnic minority in New York City. We, once, two centuries ago, ran the city. The WASPS – the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. We are now exactly 6.2% of New Yorkers.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC.

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.