Notes on Lasch and Women
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/hidden-open-thread-1505/comment/10545728
TLDR; Is there a potential alternative model to the housewife/career dichotomy for women in the 1880s-1920’s domestic yet highly politically and charitably engaged women’s culture? Does anybody have further details or reading on this period?
So I recently read Christopher Lasch’s “Women and the common life”, I took two things from it, and one of them is amenable to factual historical analysis so I’d like to bring it up for comment and see if anybody can expand on it, as Lasch’s book is a bit of a skeleton, a collection of essays written around his death about a book, I think, he saw as far too ambitious and grand to actually write properly.
As an aside, if you want to read it, the essays in the beginning and end are much weaker than the middle and each essay can be read independently, although they do flow a bit. I recommend reading “The Sexual Division of Labor, the Decline of Civic Culture, and the Rise of the Suburbs” and “Bourgeois Domesticity, the Revolt against Patriarchy, and the Attack on Fashion”. If you dig these two, the rest of the book is worth a read but if these two don’t click with you, I can’t imagine the rest of the book appealing to you.
The first point is a value thing. Basically, Lasch posits that modern feminism has a huge problem because middle class women in the 1950’s were unhappy in the home and decided to get jobs, more for personal fulfillment than financial need. This has turned out badly, because 80% of jobs suck and are unfulfilling, leaving many women with neither fulfilling careers or stable families. He does this by pointing out the great irony of Friedman publishing “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, just as the hippies and culture at large were pointing out how much work sucked. In my experience, either you dig this kind of analysis or you don’t. If you do, you’ll love it.
But the factual and historical argument actually comes a bit earlier, chronologically. Lasch does not see a history of patriarchal authority in the US. He seems to buy the modern feminist critique of patriarchy, of women being pretty faces and sex objects, for rich nobles but he seems deeply convinced that his is not at all how bourgeois women acted, or ever considered proper. The shopkeepers wife, the yeoman farmer’s wife, or the private doctor’s wife were never idle, they constantly assisted their husband in his essentially small private business. To put word’s in Lasch’s mouth, rich women have always partied and poor women have always worked in the fields but the rise of the bourgouis brought in a new, highly influential group of women with a very different lifestyle and we’ve been struggling with their social role ever since. Too rich and influential to work in the fields, too poor and protestant to laze around like their aristocratic forebears.
Which brings us to the 1880’s, the famous heyday of progressive women and muckrakers, founding and running a host of political organizations throughout the country with some failures, like Prohibition, but also a wide range of successes, like child labor laws. I’ll include some quotes from Lasch below but he makes a decent case that not only was this common but it was “the thing” that proper middle and upper middle class women did, the same way that a career is “the thing” that most middle class and upper middle class women focus on now.
And this grabbed me for two big reasons:
1) It’s this weird alternate history, this other path that history could have taken. A lot of sex/gender discourse feels very binary, like women are either housewives or career women or desperately juggling both but there was this long period, an entire generation, where that binary just doesn’t fit. They were clearly much more than homemakers and careers weren’t even an option because, well, mass wage labor was just being invented. In fact, Lasch pretty much blames wage labor and it’s strict time requirements for killing this way of life. But if you’re dissatisfied, for whatever reason, with modern gender relations and marriage structures/roles, it’s always cool to find these little alternate societies, so different yet close to our own.
2) It seems to fulfill the main complaint of Betty Friedman’s “The Feminine Mystique”, basically that homemaking is a waste of women’s talents and they get bored. But a life of public service, of charitable work and volunteering for things that matter deeply to you, that sounds a lot more personally fulfilling than any career could be. And, quite frankly, conservatives need to face the fact that most modern women don’t find returning to the 1950’s marriage model terribly appealing and need to start looking for alternatives and this seems like a potential one. And I think many women in their careers are aware of how pointless and soul crushing it can be and there’s traction there, if nothing else.
But Lasch is hardly the most authoritative source I’ve ever read and this time period is not one I’ve read up on in depth, especially not from a gender perspective. For those with more background on this period, how accurate is Lasch and is there any further reading you’d recommend?
A few Lasch quotes:
“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 century. 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…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 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.”
“The progressive era was the heyday of the “city beautiful” when American cities built public facilities and amenities designed to bring culture to the masses and to encourage widespread participation in civic life. The reformer Frederic C. Howe spoke for his entire generation when he preferred to the city as the “hope of democracy”…These impressive resources, the foundations of which were laid down for the most part in the great age of American urbanism, were largely sustained, I suspect, by the unpaid labor of women, who raised the money, performed the daily drudgery and furnished much of the moral vision behind the civic renewal of the early twentieth century.”
“The barter system presupposed the existence of stable urban neighborhoods, in which long-time residents knew enough about their neighbors to trust them, to call on them for help, and to build up reciprocal obligations of their own. The proximity of relative and in-laws, another prerequisite of any system of unpaid exchange, was another feature of such neighborhoods…and it was the rapid expansion of suburbs, beginning 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 familiar; and it is important to see that this was 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 damnds of your relative sand neighvors would be vastly reduced (if not eliminated altogether) and your time would be entirely your own…It was in the suburbs, much more than in the city, that women became full-time mothers and homemakers. The traditional family, so called, where the husband goes out to work and the wife stays home with the children, was not traditional at all. It was a mid-twentieth-century innovation, the product of a growing impatience with external obligations and constraints.”