Family Values and Social Change – serie

The structure of the African American family has been a recurring theme in American discourse on the African American community. The role of African American mothers especially has been the cause of heated debates since the time of Reconstruction in the 19th century. The discourse, which often saw the African American family as something that needed fi xing, also put the issue of women’s reproductive rights on the political agenda. Taking a long-term perspective from the 1920s to the early 1990s, Anne Overbeck aims to show how normative notions of the American family infl uenced the perspective on the African American family, especially African American women. The book follows the negotiations on African American women’s reproductive rights within the context of eugenics, modernization theory, overpopulation, and the War on Drugs. Thereby it sets out to trace both continuities and changes in the discourse on the reproductive rights of African American women that still infl uence our perspective on the African American family today.

Claudia Roesch offers a study of Mexican American families and evolving notions of masculinity and motherhood in the context of American family history. The book focuses both on the negotiation of family norms in social expert studies and on measures taken by social workers and civil-rights activists for families. The work fills gaps in research regarding the history of the American family in the 20th century, the history of Mexican Americans, and the history of social sciences. Taking a long-term perspective from the first wave of Mexican mass immigration in the 1910s and 1920s until the new social movements of the 1970s, the study takes into account influences of the Americanization and eugenics movements, modernization theory, psychoanalysis, and the Chicano civil-rights movement. Thus, Claudia Roesch offers important new findings on the nexus between the scientization of social work and changing family values in the age of modernity.

This book discusses the history of music warning labels, specifically the Parental Advisory Label (PAL), and the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). It aims to answer these questions: How could the PMRC trigger a debate on music lyrics as a negative influence on children that led to the introduction of the PAL in the long run? What did the implementation of the PAL warning mean for musicians and how had the perception of music changed so that the advisory label was deemed necessary? The central thesis is that through the discourse on explicit lyrics, certain music was marked as an actual threat to children and society and consequently started to be perceived as such. By the way in which the discourse evolved, and how other actors conducted themselves in the debates, this understanding of certain music was repeatedly (re-)negotiated and connected to other current discourses, such as discourses on family values, sexuality, youth culture, generational conflicts and social problems. Through this, the understanding of certain music as a threat to children and society was constantly renewed.The book analyses the PMRC’s campaign on explicit lyrics and provides insights into their strategy and success from a historical perspective.