On Oct. 22, the two week mark until the 2024 presidential election, Lily Geismer, professor of history at Claremont McKenna College, gave a talk titled “Politics of the Family.” The talk, hosted at CMC’s Civility, Access, Resources, and Expression (CARE) center, was the second talk organized by CMC’s Gender and Sexuality Studies department in their lunch series titled “Gender and The Elections.”
One of the organizers, CMC Associate Professor of History Diana Selig, commented on the motivations behind creating the series.
“We organized the lunch series on gender and the elections in order to spark discussion on important and timely topics,” Selig said in an email to TSL. “We aim to provide opportunities to think about how dynamics of gender and race can help us understand the current election.”
The talk began with an introduction of Geismer, a specialist on 20th-century political and urban history in the United States, especially on liberalism and the Democratic Party. Geismer centered her talk around two central questions: “What is the American family today?” and “How is it being reflected in our politics?”
“Gender has been a really critical component of the election,” Geismer said. “Not only because there is a chance of the first woman ever being elected president, but because both the Republican and Democratic Parties have posited family as a central part of their campaign.”
Geismer added that just among the two presidential candidates and their vice presidents, four distinct visions of family are represented. When she asked the audience if they felt their family composition was reflected in any of the four politicians, over half raised their hands.
According to Geismer, in the United States, more than one-third of children don’t live with two married parents, nearly one in six children live in a blended household and in 29 percent of families, both spouses earn the same salary.
“What’s odd given these kinds of statistics is that a lot of the debate in the election right now about families is actually about trying to preserve the traditional nuclear family,” Geismer said.
For the past couple of decades, according to Geismer, public policies have generally been modeled around the “white, middle-class, nuclear family.” One example she gave is that welfare and tax codes were based on a husband taking care of his family.
“This is really at the core of a lot of the public policy in the United States,” Geismer said. “This ideal of the post-war nuclear family [is at] the epitome of the American dream.”
She then went on to note a tension at the heart of American politics — since the 1960s there has been a rise of non-nuclear families at the same time as a political movement advocating for a return to them.
Audience member Maile Stoutemyer CM ’27 said that she attended the talk due to her interest in learning more about how the different family dynamics could impact voters’ choices in the future.
“I thought it was interesting to learn about the history of family dynamics, as well as how historical ideals of the nuclear family are perpetuated in our modern society,” Stoutemyer said.
Nitya Gupta contributed reporting.