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Three generations of women and their children watch a civil rights march in 1965. Stephen Somerstein / Huffington Post
The Moynihan Report naturalized patriarchy and rationalized inequality. Fifty years later, it’s still doing damage.
by Daniel Geary
For half a century, the Moynihan Report has been used to justify racial and class inequality. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 government report, “The Negro Family,” argued that the “unstable” family structure of many African Americans — as reflected in high rates of female-headed families and out-of-wedlock births — was the primary barrier to attaining racial equality.
Today, on the report’s fiftieth anniversary, Moynihan’s conclusions have bipartisan support. Conservative think tanks celebrate their supposed prescience. Conservative pundits and politicians use the report’s logic to argue that the blatant injustices recently highlighted in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere result from family structure, not exploitation and oppression.
Liberals claim Moynihan for their camp, as well, correctly pointing out that he was a liberal who advocated expanded jobs measures. But in doing so, they avoid challenging his flawed understanding of racial inequality as rooted in family structure rather than in political economy and institutional racism. Contemporary liberals, concerned with fixing a “culture of poverty,” also forget that Moynihan’s assumptions were deeply embedded in mid-twentieth-century liberalism, which advocated a “family wage” for men that made women economically dependent on their husbands.
In the 1960s, many feminists recognized the flaws in Moynihan’s analysis. To African-American feminists in particular, Moynihan propagated a pernicious myth of black “matriarchy” that combined racism with sexism. They noted that many male Black Power radicals shared Moynihan’s idea that achieving racial equality required black men to be patriarchs. For instance, African-American activist Pauli Murray was outraged when she first read in Newsweek about the Moynihan Report and how it endorsed increasing economic opportunities for African-American men at the expense of jobs available to African-American women.
Born in 1910, Murray spent her career combating both the racial discrimination of Jim Crow and the gender discrimination she termed “Jane Crow.” A single African-American woman frustrated by the male monopoly of her chosen profession of law, Murray identified with “the class of unattached, self-supporting women for whom employment opportunities were necessary to survival . . . the ones most victimized by a still prevalent stereotype that men are the chief breadwinners.”
Writing to Newsweek’s editor, Murray questioned Moynihan’s assumption that black women claimed a “disproportionate share” of white-collar and professional jobs versus black men. Moynihan’s talk of African-American “matriarchy,” she complained, did “a grave disservice to the thousands of Negro women in the United States who have struggled to prepare themselves for employment in a limited job market which . . . has severely restricted economic opportunities for all women as well as for Negroes.”
Unlike Moynihan, Murray applauded African Americans’ relatively gender-equal educational attainment, particularly since so many African-American women served as heads of family. Black women’s economic achievements, Murray insisted, did not cause black men’s low economic position. “It is bitterly ironic,” she protested, “that Negro women should be . . . censured for their efforts to overcome a handicap not of their making and for trying to meet the standards of the country as a whole.”
Newsweek refused to publish Murray’s letter, and Murray’s critique of Jane Crow was largely suppressed or ignored during early public debate about the Moynihan Report. Nevertheless, Murray foreshadowed important feminist challenges to the male-breadwinner ideal stimulated by the report.
In the mid-1960s, feminists organized to demand equal access to employment, challenging systematic gender discrimination that reserved the best jobs for men on the grounds that they were the primary supporters of their families. Murray and others argued that the 1964 Civil Rights Act would only benefit African-American women if it prohibited both racism and sexism. While the act did prohibit gender discrimination in employment, feminists had to pressure the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to fully enforce it, as administrators initially focused solely on racial discrimination.
In 1966, Murray, Betty Friedan, and others founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) to push employment rights for women. Today, the mainstream feminism NOW represented in the Sixties is often regarded as elitist, solely concerned with securing rights for affluent white women, but in reality, the campaign for equal employment opportunities benefited all women workers, especially those who could not rely upon the family wage system.
Mary Dublin Keyserling, head of the Women’s Bureau in the Department of Labor from 1964 to 1969, shared NOW’s critique of the Moynihan Report and resented Moynihan’s dismissal of equal employment for women. Keyserling was part of a small network of white feminist opponents of the Moynihan Report who served in the Johnson administration. Keyserling’s roots were in a different liberal tradition from Moynihan’s — she had been integral to a circle of left-liberal feminists in the 1930s and 1940s who worked within government to combat gender inequality along with class and race inequality.
Like other feminists, Keyserling offered a different vision from Moynihan of how to help lower-class women. Instead of creating male-headed nuclear families, she believed public policy should improve women’s wages so they could better support families on their own. Though Keyserling worried about “family breakdown” among African Americans, she thought it absurd to cite the wage labor of African-American women as its cause. She believed that African-American women’s economic contributions were a “stabilizing and enriching factor” for families.
