From Our Family to Yours: Rethinking the “Beneficial Family” and Marriage-Centric Corporate Benefit Programs (2017)

In his Father Knows Best world, Jim Anderson was accustomed to clarity. Each week the show conveyed the message that the Andersons had found the most social formation in which to live: one comprised of a breadwinner and homemaker mother in a nuclear family, living in a middle-class, suburban dwelling. (1) The Andersons inhabited a 1950s television world filled with upper-class, white-collar fathers, stay-at-home wives, and two or three children, and offered a comforting unified vision of the American family. (2) Given his title character status as the father who knows best, Jim Anderson would expect that the way he lived would be accepted by the majority of Americans as the most advantageous way to do so. (3) Corporations registered their approval of the consumeristic suburban way of life that the Andersons and their beneficial model represented by sponsoring 1950s television sitcoms about such consumeristic nuclear families. (4) Long after these 1950s television programs have stopped being part of networks' scheduled programming, corporations continue to reward nuclear families that fit the narrow beneficial (5) mold in their benefits programs, largely dismissing nonnuclear family structures as nontraditional outliers undeserving of recognition and protection. (6) This preference prevails regardless of the fact that the beneficial model, comprised of a consumeristic nuclear family, is not the predominant family model. (7) Despite media images to the contrary, the nuclear family is only one of many different and valuable family models found throughout the United States and the world. (8) Nonnuclear family units such as extended family, kinship networks, and friends-as-family are often wrongheadedly referred to as nontraditional, despite centuries of enduring existence. (9) This Article traces the history of how corporations have propagated cultural messages about the benefits of a monolithic conception of the ideal American family unit. (10) In relation to this dissemination, the Article focuses in particular on the implications of corporate sponsorship of programming at the 1939 World's Fair (11) and on 1940s and 1950s radio and television. (12) Given their role in standardizing the beneficial ideal, 1950s family television shows and the particular programming and sponsorship choices that produced the dominance of the suburban family sitcom will be analyzed alongside the earlier programming and sponsorship choices that made the 1939 World's Fair a testing ground for the dissemination of this ideal. This discussion establishes that during the mid-twentieth century, the corporate order underwrote a version of consumer citizenship, branding the ideal American social and consumer unit as a white, middle-class, nuclear family, independent of and isolated from extended family and other social support mechanisms. (13) Through their sponsorship of these television shows and fair displays, corporations conveyed the message that, in contrast to other existing family models, nuclear family formations were the most to individual family members as well as to the nation as a whole. (14) Corporations in the 1950s adopted this kind of beneficial rhetoric to represent themselves as caring providers of the best products and jobs. (15) After exploring this cultural context, the Article examines the ongoing role of law in extending and sustaining privileges to the nuclear family. (16) Today, legal protections and their attendant economic benefits continue to be aimed at propping up the beneficial model at the expense of the growing numbers of nonnuclear household units made up of traditional extended family and kinship networks, as well as blended families, life partners, and friends-as-family. (17) Consequently, few corporate benefits programs truly meet the needs of many of their employees, as these policies still premise the allocation of resources on an idealized nuclear family model, (18) a family type that more closely resembles the fictional 1950s television family than the diversity of households that actually characterizes the country today. …