Christopher Lasch
Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism
(1997)
(pp. 93-120)
[94] It is this undifferentiated image of the old days that I want to call into question—the impression that women's lives used to be taken up entirely by the demands of housework and motherhood. In reality, full-time motherhood—the rejection of which touched off the latest wave of feminist agitation in the sixties—was something new and historically unprecedented. It was largely a product of the rapid growth of suburbs after World War II, and the feminist revival initiated by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique originated as a direct response, often a very self-conscious response, not to the age-old oppression of women, but to the suburbanization of the American soul. Only later did the feminist movement come to understand the condition it sought to change—the division of labor that confined women to the home—as a "patriarchal" system that could be found, with minor variations, in all times and places. In the popular mind, the division of labor that prevailed in postwar suburbia thus came to be identified—with a corresponding loss of intellectual clarity—with the division of sexual labor in general.
All societies distinguish between women's work and men's work. Such distinctions are often invidious, serving to keep women in a subordinate status. It is only recently, however, that "woman's place" has been defined in such a way as to exclude her from participation in the common life beyond the household. The modern home, which presupposes a radical separation of domestic life from the world of work, was an invention of the nineteenth century. The decline of household production and the rise of wage labor made it possible—made it necessary—to conceive of the family as a private
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retreat from a public world increasingly dominated by the impersonal mechanisms of the market. The image of the family as a haven in a heartless world helped Americans to manage the ambivalent emotions evoked by the new industrial order. ... By assigning custody of "feelings" to the family, people tried to reassure themselves that values rooted in "ascription," as the sociologists say—recognition of persons that does not have to be earned but is merely bestowed—would continue to have a place even in societies governed by the principle of competitive achievement.
The nineteenth-century cult of domesticity, as historians have come to call it, revolved around a new glorification of motherhood. But the rhetoric of motherhood and domesticity cannot be taken as an accurate or complete description of women's lives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Housework and child care by no means exhausted women's energies. On the contrary, both housewives and single women threw themselves into a variety of activities that took them out of the home. They organized benevolent societies, female reform societies, and foreign missions. They put together a vast network of temperance societies. They took up charities and philanthropies of all kinds. Many of them enlisted in the antislavery crusade, the peace movement, prison reform, and of course the movement for women's rights. ...
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For historians as for everybody else, work is understood as something dignified by a salary or a wage. Uncompensated activity, though it enters the historical record under the heading of "reform," is seldom recognized as a form of productive work, even when it brought women into the public world in great numbers. The impression that nineteenth-century women were confined to the domestic "sphere" thus remains undisturbed by the record of their active participation in the "world's work," as they themselves liked to refer to it.
Women's voluntary participation in the public world probably reached its high point in the years between 1890 and 1920, the so-called progressive era, which also coincided with the campaign for woman suffrage. "Between 1890 and 1920," wrote the historian Mary Ryan, "women built a rationalized organizational network that was nearly as sophisticated in its own way as the corporate business world. ...
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The progressive era was the age of "social housekeeping," when women aspired "to make the whole world homelike," in the words of Frances Williard of the WCTU. Women demanded the vote on the grounds that maternal "influence" should not be confined to their reforming efforts; nor were they handicapped by the lack of it. Indeed there is reason to think that women were more active citizens before getting the vote than afterwards, in part because they had so much at stake in proving that they could act responsibly in the public realm. ...
Social reform was the most visible but by no means the exclusive or even the most important contribution made by women to public life. Their work as volunteers sustained a vast array of public services—libraries, hospitals, nursery schools, social settlements, parks, playgrounds, concert halls, museums.
...
[101] It took more than satire...to drive women out of the public forum, but satire must have played some part in their postwar retreat from civic causes and campaigns. In the twenties, club women, do-gooders, "upbuilders," and cultural missionaries became symbols of Victorian repression or, at best, figures of fun. The flapper, not the feminist, now served as the prototype of the emancipated woman; the battle of the sexes shifted from the lecture circuit to the bedroom; and the assertion of women's equal right to sexual pleasure absorbed energies formerly devoted to social reform and civic improvement. The professionalization of these activities further contributed to the decline of voluntary public service. Settlement houses were taken over by professional social workers, charities by professional administrators. ... Women now had to choose between a home and a career,
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and the choice had become so familiar that people soon forgot that there had ever been any other.
Volunteer work commended itself to women, in the age of its efflorescence, in part because it was easily combined with domestic responsibilities, unlike the inflexible schedules imposed by paid work. Those responsibilities, moreover, were themselves less burdensome than they subsequently became, since most women were able to count on help from domestic servants, in-laws and relatives, and their own children. ... Household tasks, including child care, were typically shared by a network of women who were in a position to make claims on each other's good will. It was precisely because this system relied on mutual trust that it worked as well as it did, according to
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Howell [Helping Ourselves: Families and the Human Network]; but it was this same element of trust and mutual obligation, in all likelihood, that eventually discredited the barter system of domestic management in the minds of people who came to experience any form of personal obligation primarily as a limitation on their own freedom. To depend on others puts us under obligation to them, whereas the impersonal mechanism of the market enables us to satisfy all our obligations by the simple act of payment. The desire to escape obligation, even more than an exaggerated respect for professional expertise, explains the professionalization of domestic services formerly carried out informally and without payment. ...
As urban sociologists have often pointed out, close-knit neighborhoods, often based on a strong sense of ethnic identity, preserved some of the features of village life in the midst of large cities. ... The "isolation of the nuclear family"—another theme of urban sociology—was qualified by neighbors' dependence on each other for all kinds of domestic services. "Isolation" was a better description of the suburban than of the urban family; and it was the rapid expansion of suburbs, beginning
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in the 1940s and 1950s, that finally destroyed the social patterns I have tried to sketch in here—the informal system of collective self-help that made it possible, together with the availability of domestic servants, for women to take an active part in civic culture—and inaugurated a new era in the history of women and the family. Suburban life, organized around the shopping mall rather than the neighborhood, eradicated the last vestiges of reciprocal obligation, neighborly or familial; and it is important to see that this is precisely what made it attractive. It was not just the lure of green lawns and open spaces that drew people to the suburbs but the dream of perfect freedom, of a world in which the demands of your relatives and neighbors would be vastly reduced (if not eliminated altogether) and your time would be entirely your own.
It is often said that people went to the suburbs in search of "community," as an alternative to urban anonymity. I think it was just the other way around. What they craved was complete privacy... Suburbs appeared to institutionalize the principle of free and unlimited choice. They were designed to exclude everything not subject to choice—the job, the extended family, the enforced sociability of the city streets.
pp. 105-107—support for this interpretation from Friedan's The Feminine Mystique
pp. 107-108—synchrony between Friedan and Goodman's Growing Up Absurd
[111] Child rearing may be an honorable calling, but many women clearly found it increasingly unsatisfactory in the fifties and sixties... Her own [Friedan's] explanation was quite consistent with Goodman's account of the corruption of work, although she made no reference to it. She pointed out that housekeeping and child care had themselves taken on many of the tell-tale characteristics of make-work. ... Like much of the work men performed in the marketplace, these duties appeared to have no other purpose than to keep
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women busy.
Stray thought: it seems clear enough from observing people today that these duties are also a form of keeping up, of conspicuous consumption, of various kinds of signaling, etc. They have become competitive status markers vis-a-vis other parents and other families, as has the mere (f)act of having a kid in and of itself. Even more clearly than the issues raised here (which do seem important), the keeping up aspect suggests that contemporary child-centeredness is in fact evolving/merging into a broader Debordian spectacle per which the needs of the children themselves are incidental, perhaps even inconvenient, and thereby giving lie to (among other things) the conceit of parenthood to betoken maturity, or perhaps actually to define the transition from adolescence to adulthood, from self-absorption to absorption in the nurturance of another and an investment in society. N. Sammond's ponderous Disney study eventually lands on this same point, seen through the lens of Media Effects research: "the child as susceptible to commodities stands in for the child as commodity-in-the-making."
Just as patriarchy does not actually mean a great time for the vast majority of men, so the child of filiarchy may rule its subjects without gaining any real privilege whatseover, and in too many cases suffering outright abuse and neglect in spite of its place at the proverbial center of its parents' universe. In researching for Totem and Taboo, Freud found anthropologists of his day reporting that tribal kings-to-be were often pummeled nearly or even fully to death as a matter of course before officially ascending to the throne. The empty-nester sarcasm by which recently-emancipated children become known as "the prince[ess]" thus suggests a difference in degree rather than kind between post-industrial and pre-industrial societies.
Child care, moreover, was important only if it was connected with larger public purposes. Goodman himself conceded the substance of this point when he noted—though only in passing—that when adults devoted themselves exclusively to the child's world, "there isn't much world for the child to grow up into in the next stage." In order for a father "to guide his growing son," it was "necessary for him to have a community of his own and be more of a man." But the same thing was surely true of women. That this obvious point should have escaped attention until Betty Friedan made it inescapable shows why the feminist revival was necessary in the first place. ...Well, you know...anybody could make that mistake.
But Friedan's analysis was one-sided in its own right without the kind of corrective provided by Goodman. His account of the world of work should have forewarned women that they would not gain much simply by entering the work force and achieving equality with men. Once women had rejected the "feminine mystique," it was tempting to think that professional careers would solve all their problems. ... [They] began to demand access to the allegedly "creative," "fulfilling" work enjoyed by men. ... They expected professional careers to bring them emotional fulfillment. If Goodman was right, however, they would find no more meaning than men did in careers the structure of which was governed largely by the requirements
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of commodity production. Goodman's point was not the conventional one that most jobs involved too much drudgery and routine and thus provided an inadequate outlet for "creativity." His point was that they did not produce anything of importance and were therefore dishonorable and demoralizing. From this point of view, a career as a highly paid lawyer, advertising executive, broadcast journalist, or college professor was even more demoralizing, if it served only to maintain the "organized system," than a job...which did not even pretend to be useful. This was an argument women very much needed to hear; otherwise they too would fall into the careerist trap. They needed to be reminded that good work was useful work, not glamorous or "stimulating" or "creative" work, and that its usefulness, moreover, could not be measured by a wage or salary.
... One of the surprises in store for anyone who returns to Friedan's best-seller today is how little she was inclined to identify the work women ought to be doing with highly paid professional careers. No doubt she was too quick to characterize the kind of work she had in mind as "creative,"
...but at least she did not confuse "creativity" with payment. ... What mattered was a "lifelong commitment," not a career as such—a commitment to "society" at that.Indeed, I have often gotten the impression that the "choice" in "pro-choice" is not if but when to have kids. The still serviceable arrangement of childlessness is not served at the buffet of choice.
...
[114] Because the women's movement—the movement Friedan helped to launch—has repudiated volunteer work as the very epitome of female slavery, it is easy to miss her emphasis on citizenship and "commitment." In the sixties and seventies, this way of talking about women gave way to an ostensibly more radical, hardheaded idiom. Women could never be free, feminists argued, until they were able to compete with men in the job market, and successful competition appeared to require institutional reforms...that went far beyond the modest reforms advocated by The Feminine Mystique. ... In light of the subsequent radicalization of the women's movement, [this book] is usually read (when it is read at all) as the first halting step down the road since traveled by an army of more militant women. But it may make more sense to read it, alongside Goodman's book, as an attempt to mark out a road that was later abandoned.
...
[115] Perhaps the most revealing commentary on the new order of the suburbs, an order based on a strict separation between the home and the workplace and a strict division of sexual labor, was that each sex envied the lives led by the other. Men envied the domestic security supposedly enjoyed by their wives; women envied the exciting careers supposedly enjoyed by their husbands. As for their children—supposedly the ultimate beneficiaries of suburban life, whose needs the whole system was intended to serve—their aimless, pampered existence had come to be regarded as a national scandal.
...
[117] The feminist movement, far from civilizing corporate capitalism, has been corrupted by it. It has adopted mercantile habits of thought as its own. Its relentless propaganda against the "traditional" family is of a piece with the propa-
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ganda of commodities, which encourages the consumer to discard arrangements that are still serviceable only because they are said to lag behind the times. Like the advertising industry, the women's movement has taken "choice" as its slogan... In fact, however, the movement recognizes only one choice—the family in which adults work full-time in the marketplace.
[120] By rejecting "progress," of course, it [feminism] would put itself beyond the pale of respectable opinion—which is to say, it would become as radical as it now merely claims to be.
(pp. 137-152)
[146] The "colonization of the life-world," as Jürgen Habermas calls it, meant that nothing was to be exempt from pedagogical or therapeutic mediation. Informal, customary and morally regulated conduct was to be organized on a new basis and administered by experts equipped with the latest technologies of the self. If the "life-world" represents the "totality of what is taken for granted," in the words of Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, then the determination to take nothing for granted, least of all the "socialization" of the young, exposed it to the steady encroachment of organized expertise in the irresistible form of money and power.
These developments undeniably expanded the horizon of human understanding and fostered a critical spirit, but in everyday life they were more likely to be experienced as a subjection to routines that drained the joy out of work and play and wrapped everything in a smothering self-consciousness. Surely it was this feeling of suffocation, much more than the need to prove something about masculinity, that explains the idealization of the strenuous life at the turn of the century: the attraction of imperialism and war, the long-
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ing for wide-open spaces, the new interest in the primitive and exotic, the nostalgia for simplicity and lost innocence.
Men were not alone, after all, in their dissatisfaction with a social order in which everything was organized down to the last detail. The rationalization of daily life had similarly depressing effects on women, even though it was often held up as the means of their emancipation from domestic drudgery.
Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)
[197] In theory, it should be possible for feminists to advance beyond the present stage of sexual recrimination by regarding men simply as a class enemy, involuntarily caught up in the defense of masculine privilege and therefore exempt from personal blame. The symbiotic interdependence of men and women, however, makes it hard to attain such intellectual detachment in everyday life. The "class enemy" presents himself in ordinary existence as a lover, husband, or father, on whom women proceed to make demands that men usually fail to meet. According to the feminists' own analysis of the way in which the subjection of women damages women and impoverishes the emotional life of men, men cannot possibly meet the full erotic demands of women under the existing sexual arrangements; yet feminism itself gives...
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those demands the strongest ideological support. It therefore intensifies the problem to which it simultaneously offers the solution.
[205] Whereas the resentment of women against men for the most part has solid roots in the discrimination and sexual danger to which women are constantly exposed, the resentment of men against women, when men still control most of the power and wealth in society yet feel themselves threatened on every hand—
Hmm...once again this seems like the colloquial misconstrual of patriarchy as men ruling over women, though Lasch himself has not actually used the p-word here...
intimidated, emasculated—appears deeply irrational, and for that reason not likely to be appeased by changes in feminist tactics designed to reassure men that liberated women threaten no one. When even Mom is a menace, there is not much that feminists can say to soften the sex war...
...well no, because really patriarchy is a very few men ruling over all the women and over the vast majority of the other men too. So, the explanation for the above is (deceptively?) simple, and also some long ways short of deeply irrational: the vast majority of the other men in fact control zero power and wealth; they hardly have any control over the course of their own lives, let alone someone else's; and they couldn't get a mate's attention if they literarlly donned peacock's plumage and strutted around in public. Dare I say this is indeed fertile ground for resentment.
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