"After the 2000 presidential campaign, strategists for President Bush came to a startling realization: Democrats watch more television than Republicans.

...The Republicans' data, compiled by Scarborough Research, a leading market research firm, showed that nationally, Democratic voters were 15 percent more likely on average to be watching television than Republican voters.

...The data also yielded unexpected insights. One of the shows most popular with Republicans, especially Republican women ages 18 to 34, turned out to be 'Will & Grace,' the sitcom about gay life in New York. As a result, while Mr. Bush was shoring up his conservative credentials by supporting a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, his advertising team was buying time on a program that celebrates gay culture."

(Source: Katharin Q. Seelye, "How to Sell a Candidate to a Porsche-Driving, Leno-Loving Nascar Fan," The New York Times, December 6, 2004; http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/06/politics/06strategy.html?th .)

"Though Mr. Crystal's politics clearly shade more toward blue than red, '700 Sundays' is the most unabashed paean to family values outside of a Hallmark shop. (Mr. Crystal has been married to his first wife, Janice, for 34 years, which makes him a museum-worthy rarity among Hollywood stars.) 'Heroes don't have to be public figures,' he says. 'They can be right in your family.'"

(Source:  Ben Brantly, "My Family Values, City Slickers," [Theater review of "700 Sundays"] The New York Times, December 6, 2004; http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/06/theater/reviews/06sund.html?th .)

Believing that the family ideal of the 1950s - where the father is breadwinner and the mother manages the household and the children - is a twentieth-century construct, many sociologists welcome the movement of mothers into the paid laborforce, thinking that it represents a recovery of a pre-industrial model of the family where husband and wife shared joint economic roles.

However, Birgit Pfau-Effinger of the University of Hamburg argues in The British Journal of Sociology that the development of the "housewife family model" in Western Europe was not as uniform or as tied to industrialization as sociologists presume. In her comparative study of three countries, she finds that the breadwinner/homemaker model never emerged as a cultural norm in Finland during industrialization and emerged only "after a certain delay" of industrialization in Germany. But in Holland, the model was the culturally dominant family norm as early as the seventeenth-century, "long before there was any question of a transition to industrialization." Even before the model had become the norm, its roots date back, she claims, to the fifteenth century.

The early appearance of "the male breadwinner marriage" is not the only thing that impresses Pfau-Effinger about Holland. "This model was applied in broad sections of the [Dutch] population, in cities as well as rural areas, with the exception of the poorer sandy regions. It had become firmly established here much earlier historically and more profoundly than in any other country ... and it was accompanied by the separation of gainful employment and housework."

Believing that urbanization, especially the rise of the bourgeoisie, is more responsible for the housewife family model than industrialization, the researcher links its prominence in Holland to the country's economic prowess. "In the seventeenth century, the Netherlands was the most important and richest trading nation in the world. It had thriving towns where a broad urban bourgeoisie set the tone and achieved social and cultural hegemony." She therefore concludes: "It appears that the achievement of a certain general societal prosperity was important, by which it was possible to 'free' one member of each family from income-generating duties."

While the German professor doesn't make this call, her research suggests that the family and economic achievements of seventeenth-century Holland should be celebrated, not lamented. Furthermore, her study suggests that the contemporary push to return mothers to income-generating duties turns back the clock, as feminists are want to say, much further than most Americans realize.