Many research papers discuss the importance of family. This topic can bleed into various types of papers that range from sociology, psychology and even English literature. The importance of family can be a theme within a literary work or it can be studied as a scientific fact.
The importance of family is for many writers what marks their writing, characterizing their themes and driving the narratives. This is especially true of two African American writers, Maya Angelou, and Antwone Quenton Fisher. Angelou’s growing-up years were marked by the tumult and upheaval of moving across the country numerous times to live with relatives and with the tragedy of being raped at age eight. The man was later brutally murdered by vigilantes seeking justice in a system that did not deal with blacks equitably. Maya’s family was both the source of much of the tumult as well as the source of her stability and love. Her writings, both poetry, and prose reflect her connection to family and express her undying belief that family is the wellspring that nurtures the soul and the body.
Angelou’s journeys began when she was just three and her brother Bailey was four. The brother-sister team was forged in the fire of their love for and dependence on each other, as well as the desperation of their circumstances. Maya and Bailey were like twin flames on the same candle. He gave her a sense of herself that would sustain her for the rest of her life. As she writes in Singin’ and Swingin’, “My brother Bailey…had drummed in my youthful years, ‘You are as intelligent as I am and beautiful. You can do anything’”. He was her protector and guide. Their mother, having divorced their father early on, sent them from California by train to Stamps, AK to live with their paternal grandmother. For five years the children lived in the embracing love of Grandma Henderson, called Momma. This is what she remembers: “She would put her hands on me—it seemed to me her hands were big as heaven itself—and she’d rub me, my arm, my back, my hair, my face, hug me to her talcumed bosom…and I healed”. Later, as a grown-up, Angelou would remember many things that her granny taught her. In Singin’ and Swingin,’ Angelou recalls, “Courtesy cost nothing as long as one had dignity. My grandmother, Annie Henderson, had taught me that”.
In sharp contrast to the families pictured on fifties sitcoms, today’s typical family is as likely to be headed by a single mom as a hardworking, successful dad. In the house down the street, two women in a life relationship may run the household, or, two men. In another house around the corner, the husband is the one responsible for cooking, cleaning, and caring for the children while the wife is the one earning the family income. Over the last several decades, the idea of the “perfect family” has undergone a transition of major proportions, as has the society in which the new family lives.
While most associate the “ideal family” with a loving and housekeeping mother and a breadwinning father, economic realities and changing values merged to make this American ideal more of a rarity than a norm.
- During the 1960’s, more and more women left the role of housekeeper during the day in order to help support the family in a manner that allowed them to keep up with the Jones’s next door.
- As the pressures of two-parent working families caused stress within the immediate home, the divorce rate sky rocked.
- Suddenly, what was once a social stigma became nothing more than a solution to a domestic problem.
- Now women worked because they had to in order to pay the bills.
- As the number of fathers who refused to take responsibility for their children increased, so too, did the numbers of single-parent families living at or below the poverty line.
As the structure of the traditional family changed, so too, did many of the values it was based upon.
In today’s society, the norm is what each individual makes of it. For some, this still means holding true to the traditional values of the working dad and stay at home mom, for others, it may mean any two loving adults of any sex who share a commitment and a desire to make a family work. Along with these two examples, there are still others who prefer to enter parenthood with no partner, and some who prefer to restrict their family to two adult members as a partnership rather than a marriage arrangement. In many circumstances, grandparents are the ones left to fill the parenting role.
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