Release date: Feb. 16, 2006
Contact: Elaine Justice at 404-727-0643 or elaine.justice@emory.edu

American Family Myths to be Examined at Conference

Some of the nation's top family scholars will gather at Emory University March 30–31 for a public conference exploring the origins of American family myths in popular media and culture, schools, religious institutions, history, advertising and politics.

Sponsored by Emory's Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life (MARIAL), the conference will be held in the Jones Room of Woodruff Library on the Emory campus. Admission is free. Call 404–727–3440 or go to http://www.marial.emory.edu.

Speakers will address "not the family we live in, but the mythic family of expectations and ideals," says MARIAL Center director Bradd Shore. "We live in a society in which there are very specific institutions whose job it is to pump out myths. We have media. We have advertising. We have art. The idea is to survey a variety of different sources of family myths."

Noted author Stephanie Coontz, who has written five myth–busting books on family history, will participate March 30 in a panel on cultural and historical origins of American family myths. Her books include the award–winning bestseller "The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap."

Other panels will discuss how the media transmits myths, how families reconcile their experiences with notions of how an ideal family behaves, the role of religion in family myths, and how notions of the ideal American family are circulated around the world. Speakers include professors from psychology, religion, sociology, history, anthropology, journalism and business.

Mythic images of family can be positive or negative, and they change over time. "There are a wide range of images and stories about family" that distort or exaggerate the reality, Shore says. Such phrases as "family values," "quality time" and "family time" may convey a type of family life that serves a particular agenda.

Other myths relate to what constitutes a family, and whether one parent, usually the mother, stays at home while the father goes to work, says Shore. Mythic images of mothers include "supermoms," who work outside the home and still manage to keep up with housework and many other so–called traditional care–giving duties.

These mythic images are so basic to our experiences that we are often unaware of how important they are, Shore says.

The MARIAL Center is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It is one of five Sloan Centers on Working Families. The Emory Center focuses its research on the functions and significance of ritual and myth in middle-class families in which both parents work outside the home.

Emory University is known for its demanding academics, outstanding undergraduate college of arts and sciences, highly ranked professional schools and state-of-the-art research facilities. For nearly two decades Emory has been named one of the country's top 25 national universities by U.S. News & World Report. In addition to its nine schools, the university encompasses The Carter Center, Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory Healthcare, the state's largest and most comprehensive health care system.

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