MELINDA COOPER

by Meghan McCoy (2023)

Melinda Cooper is currently a Professor of Sociology at Australian National University. She earned her bachelor’s from the University of Sydney, Australity and her master’s and Ph.D from Université Paris 8, a leading research institution in the social sciences and humanities. Her research predominantly focuses on “the interaction between neoliberal and new conservative philosophies of power” (Cooper 2023). Other parts of her work center on political theories of the resurgent far right and how this phenomena is connected to financial crises. Cooper has written a number of articles on neoliberalism, welfare reform, and crisis for various journals and anthologies including Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics and Risk, Security and Solidarity: The Rise of the Welfare State (Cooper 2023). 

Her most recent monograph and the one that I will be discussing in this essay is titled Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. Published in 2017, Family Values argues that modern-day capitalism as experienced since the 1970s has been fundamentally shaped by the twin forces of neoliberalism and the new social conservatism (referred to as neoconservatism in this essay for short). Central to Cooper’s argument is the concept of a “double movement,” or the ways in which neoliberalism and neoconservatism “matured and came together in response to the same set of events and convergent perception of crisis” (Cooper 2017: 20). As the United States faced mounting inflation during the mid-late 1970s, Cooper contends that this financial pressure, along with liberation movements refuting “the sexual normativity of the family wage as the linchpin and foundation of welfare capitalism,” were the twin drivers of neoliberalism and neoconservative’s alliance to reinvent a version of “poor-law traditions” that framed economic and moral stability as a private family responsibility and not one of the state (Cooper 2017: 21). She concludes that this hyper-focus on restoring the traditional, Fordist family by both neoliberals and neoconservatives alike is what eventually led to social and economic policies that strictly limited support for all families but especially those headed by single mothers. After discussing Cooper’s arguments in greater detail this essay will put Cooper’s work into conversation with Angela Davis’ 1981 book Women, Race and Class. 

INFLATION AND THE RESURGENCE OF FORDIST FAMILY VALUES

Although inflation and the Fordist family concept might initially seem like a strange pairing, Cooper explains why the political and moral connection of these two was critical to launching the neoliberal and neoconservative revolutions of the 1970s. She argues that while previous histories of the 1970s have seen “the politics of family values as peripheral to structural economic battles waged over . . . monetary policy, state-deficit spending, or the redistribution of wealth through taxation,” Cooper contend that family values were instead at the heart of the economic debates that re-structured entire state budgets with the hope of restoring traditional family structures (Cooper 2017: 22). Central to this notion of the “traditional” family was the social and economic concept of the Fordist family wage, which was created following the Great Depression and normatively understood as a white, married heterosexual couple that made enough money through the working man so the woman could remain at home with their children. Cooper writes that the Fordist family wage not only normalized “gender and sexual relationships,” but it also “stood at the heart of the midcentury organization of labor, race, and class, defining African American men by their exclusion from the male breadwinner wage and African American women by their relegation to agricultural and domestic labor in white households” (Cooper 2017: 8). Thus not only did the Fordist family bear the weight of moral and social responsibility, but it was also a bedrock component of the American capitalist system as well. 

Of course, there had always been people who lived outside of this system and relied on the state for additional support. Modern-day welfare programs came into being with the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, but the program that would draw the most ire from neoconservatives and neoliberals alike was Aid to Dependent Children (which eventually became Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC). While the program had enjoyed relative levels of respect during its creation in the 1930s, Cooper writes that varying social, political, and economic changes shifted the balance of program recipients from white women whose husbands had died to predominantly Black divorced, single, or unmarried mothers (Cooper 2017: 35). Concern over this perceived “affront to the ideals of white American motherhood” engendered unfortunate yet fairly predictable responses, resulting in laws such as “man-in-the-house” rules that would literally deny a woman benefits if she was in a relationship with another man, as it presumed that he would assume responsibility for the woman and her child(ren). The reason why these laws became so important by the late 1970s is because they demonstrated that “racial and sexual normativit[y] [was] truly foundational to the social order of American Fordism, determining just who would be included and who would be excluded from the redistributive benefits of the social wage” (Cooper 2017: 36). As a result of this racially and sexually defined foundation, the dramatic levels of inflation and social malaise that characterized the 1970s became the kickstart for neoliberals and neoconservatives to re-imagine the social and economic order. Their vision was one in which the Fordist family wage was reaffirmed as the center of American life and personal responsibility took the place of state support. 

But how exactly did inflation take on the characteristics of a moral crisis, one that seemed to demand a massive political and economic response from the highest levels of government? Although there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, Cooper is clear that much of the panic that enveloped welfare programs in the United States stemmed from the idea that the nuclear family was under attack and that its disintegration would be socially and economically destructive. Even though AFDC took up a very small portion of the federal budget relative to other programs, there was an undeniable feeling among New Deal-era politicians and liberal theorists that the high numbers of unwed, divorced, or otherwise single (Black) mothers on welfare was indicative of “a general crisis of the American family” (Cooper 2017: 29). They believed that welfare encouraged women to remain unmarried and thus undermined the very center of the Fordist family wage - the male breadwinner. 

As inflation remained overwhelmingly negative for those who derived the majority of their wealth from financial assets instead of a physical paycheck, Cooper argues that it became increasingly clear to commentators of the time that inflation - and its concurrent problem stagflation - “was a problem because it skewed the Fordist social consensus in favor of the working class [and] threatened to undermine the normative foundations of the Fordist family wage” (Cooper 2017: 29). These simultaneous issues - that of a destabilized social and economic order represented through the nuclear Fordist family - provided an unusual middle ground for neoliberals and neoconservatives to create new policies on. They each agreed that the demise of the Fordist family wage was a negative outcome because of the perceived moral and financial impacts that would result, and the best way to counter this problem was to restrict already vulnerable people’s access to federal aid while deregulating the market and opening up access to credit. Yet for people who believed that inflation was not only bad on its own but “served to finance welfare programs ‘whose major evil [was] to undermine the fabric of society,’” such changes were not only ethically correct, they were fiscally necessary (Cooper 2017: 30).

COOPER AND DAVIS

Coercive Economics

Although Angela Davis and Melinda Cooper each wrote their respective books over thirty years apart, they are both particularly concerned with how the state is used to police, coerce, and otherwise monitor people’s behavior in favor of the dominant economic order. While Davis’ book largely centers on the experiences of Black women during slavery, much of her analysis regarding the role of coercive economics is quite applicable to Cooper’s broader argument as well. Davis writes how the abuse that enslaved Black women suffered during slavery was not solely for the purpose of punishment or torture, though it could certainly be for those reasons as well. But there was something greater at work that governed the way slaveholders treated the people they enslaved. “The special abuses inflicted on women,” Davis explains, “thus facilitated the ruthless economic exploitation of their labor. The demands for this exploitation caused slave owners to cast aside their orthodox sexist attitudes except for purposes of repression” (Davis 1983: 10). Davis is clear in this brief passage that the control slave owners had over enslaved people was predominantly for the purpose of upholding the regional - and national - economic system that depended on enslaved people’s labor. As a result, controlling (or attempting to control) enslaved women’s reproduction was part and parcel of this system. After the international slave trade was abolished domestically enslaved women were increasingly appraised for their “reproductive capacity” and “fertility (or for the lack of it).” Enslaved pregnant women might also (though not always) receive more lenient punishment, though Davis explains that this “was seldom on humanitarian grounds. It was simply that slaveholders appreciated the value of a slave child in the same way that they appreciated the value of a newborn calf or colt” (Cooper 1983: 10-11). Coercive control over people’s bodies and the economic order went hand in hand. 

When compared to processes that took place during President Bill Clinton’s now infamous promise to “end welfare as we know it,” we can see a similar logic at work. The replacement of AFDC with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was, in Cooper’s estimation, “the single most dramatic overhaul of the federal welfare system since the New Deal.” One of the most astonishing requirements that PRWORA put into place was the mandate that states “increase their efforts to police, track down, and enforce paternity obligations” regardless of whether the mother wanted to maintain connection with him or not. Furthermore, “sanctions were to be imposed on mothers who did not sufficiently cooperate in helping welfare agencies to locate the biological father of their children” (Cooper 2017: 67-68). Although PRWORA’s goal was different in that they wanted to manage, restrict, and otherwise police women who didn’t have children in traditional two-parents households, the driving motivator was the same. Cooper argues that neoliberals and neoconservatives believed that (Black) women who were irresponsibly having too many children out of wedlock and forgoing marriage because they could ostensibly abuse state support were the root cause of the country’s social and economic woes. By attempting to control their reproduction via basing their access to welfare off of the status of their sexual relationships and tracking men down to force them to pay child support, “welfare reform served to remind women that an individual man, not the state, was ultimately responsible for their economic security” (Cooper 2017: 68).   

“Appropriate Family Values”

If there was one thing that neoliberals and neoconservatives could agree on, it was that the perceived proliferation of non-traditional family units posed a moral - and fiscal - crisis for the United States. Even things as seemingly innocuous as the “diminishing impact of inheritance in shaping social mobility” was a signal that something was amiss within American families (Cooper 2017: 119). Cooper writes that in 1979 conservative legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon published an article “reflecting on the demise of the family as an economic institution.” Glendon concluded that because American families’ economic security increasingly relied on “non-inheritable forms of income such as wages and social insurance” as opposed to more traditional methods of family wealth distribution via wills, trusts, and estates, this change was “intimately, and ominously, related to the rapid liberalization of family law that had taken place in the late 1960s - a veritable legal revolution that had in short order seen the introduction of no-fault divorce, the erosion of legal distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate children and the partial recognition of nonmarital relationships” (Cooper 2017: 119-120). Essentially, Glendon and other social conservatives were in some effect convinced that changes in the laws and economics related to the family were indicative of how the expansion of welfare reform and movements like feminism, gay rights, and Black radicalism posed a direct threat to the stability of traditional family values. 

Davis details a similar connection in her discussion on the emancipation of Black people and the propagation of the “Black male rapist” myth. She writes that following the Civil War, rape - that which was committed against Black women by white men and the false accusation of rape against Black men - was a tool used to control not only the actual labor of Black people but to reassert the social norms of white supremacy and white patriarchy within the home (Davis 1983: 107-109). Violence, in the form of rape against Black women and lynching against Black men falsely accused of rape, was a continued denial of Black family formation begun during slavery. The logic of slavery posited that because Black men and women weren’t considered full humans in the same way that white people were then it was impossible for them to also be husbands, wives, and parents. This attitude was of course an attempt to justify the forced separation of partners and families from each other, but it also reinforced the white family as the norm and white male parentage as the only acceptable form of parenting. We can see, then, how the idea of “appropriate family values” based on that of the white, heterosexual, two-parent household to neoliberals and neoconservatives of the late twentieth century would have seemed like it was under attack. Thus the twin forces of coercive economics and traditional family values were a potent force that drove neoliberals and neoconservatives to advocate for policies that policed welfare recipient’s morality and attempted to control how  they achieved (or didn’t) economic security. 

CONCLUSION

Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism is a deceptively compelling book. When one begins reading it, there is the initial thought that the ideas in the book are a little too complicated and not thought out quite well enough. However, once you get into the heart of the book the importance of what Cooper is arguing becomes clear. Her focus on what brought neoliberals and neoconservatives together despite their contradictions is a necessary point to understand if we are to fully grasp both the historical changes of this period and their present-day consequences. While Cooper doesn’t go so far as to say this explicitly, I would contend that the massive levels of income inequality, banking shocks and failures that threaten to or actually do bring down the economy, and the absolutely corroding ethos of “personal responsibility” that is the hallmark of neoliberalism are chronic symptoms of an illness that began during the 1970s and took off during the late 1990s. 

One excellent piece of Cooper’s book is that she also shows how neoliberalism and neoconservatism rejected and appropriated the more radical demands of the New Left and stretched the boundaries of “private family responsibility” to “include the non-normative subjects who were once radically excluded from the Fordist family wage” (Cooper 2017: 313). Many neoconservatives were people who were committed to the “New Deal welfare state, the civil rights movement, and even some of the interventions carried out under Johnson’s Great Society,” but when it came to changes that seemed to threaten the stability of the (white) male-headed nuclear family and economic structures that came with it that neoliberals and neoconservatives balked together (Cooper 2017: 313). 

An additional strength of Cooper’s book is her adeptness at explaining quite complicated economic processes and connecting them back to her original thesis. Chapter six, “In Loco Parentis: Human Capital, Student Debt, and the Logic of Family Investment” details how something as seemingly banal as student debt is in fact an outgrowth of the social and economic changes that began during the 1970s. Today, student debt is increasingly a “family affair, binding generations together in webs of mutual obligation and dependence that are quite literally unforgiving” (Cooper 2017: 217). This situation was not the case during the 1960s, when more women and people of color were entering college than ever before because growing federal investments in higher education made such decisions possible. Cooper deftly argues that what changed was the burgeoning sense among neoliberals and neoconservatives that the “rising militantism of the student movement” was causally connected to free or affordable public education (Cooper 2017: 217-218).

An aspect of Cooper’s book that I think could be improved is adding an explicit treatment of intersectionality as Patricia Hill Collins argues for in her book Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Much of Cooper’s argument is an intersectional one but that point is never fully stated nor expounded upon. Family Values would benefit from this treatment because it would better explain how gender, race, and class are embroiled within the social, political, and economic changes that characterize the transition from 1960s radicalism to neoconservatism and neoliberalism of the 1970s onwards. Furthermore, an intersectional perspective would help readers grasp how the problems that the United States faces today are the outgrowth of roots that were set down fifty years ago that continue to manifest themselves in racial, class, and gender disparities. 

These small criticisms aside, Family Values is more than a worthwhile book for anyone interested in learning about how neoliberalism and the new social conservatives of the 1970s united over the shared concern of “family values” to re-shape the distribution and access to welfare as we know it. Beginning with rising inflation and its transformation from an economic to a moral problem, Cooper demonstrates that what we typically think of as “concerns of the market” are actually profoundly personal aspects of people’s lives. Changing welfare rules to account for whom a woman was in a relationship with to tying generations of family members to mounting student debt are really reflections of what people think is moral and ethically right behavior, not (only) what is purportedly best for the economy or the country. Neoliberalism and neoconservatism continue to have significant influence on the social, political, and economic direction that the United States takes, and thus it is vital that scholars and policy makers alike understand how they formed and continue to maintain an unlikely alliance today.

REFERENCES 

Collins, Patricia Hill. 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 

Cooper, Melinda. “Professor Melinda Cooper.” Australian National University, School of Sociology. Retrieved May 11, 2023. https://sociology.cass.anu.edu.au/people/professor-melinda-cooper 

Cooper, Melinda. 2017. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books. 

Davis, Angela. 1981. Women, Race and Class. New York, NY: Random House.