INTRODUCTIONS are often better placed at the end of a book; in this case the one written by Elisabeth Lasch Quinn in her father's collection of essays should have been omitted. Rather than enlighten the reader, its dense, academic prose tends to obscure a book that is eminently accessible.
Women and the Common Life is the last book by Christopher Lasch, the controversial American historian who died in 1994. It is a collection of essays (some published previously) which hop scotch around the centuries seeking an historical context for feminism. This is not a drawback because the great value of Lasch's ideas are that he looks at situations with unconventional wisdom.
Moreover, he uses the word feminism with admiration, although in his historical overview he has seen the term denigrated in every age by those who choose to see it only in its most extreme and strident forms.
His contention that domesticity never clipped the wings of any woman could make modern hackles rise. He claims that in the 19th century women's gift for domesticity "created an obligation to put domestic virtues at the service of society as a whole. They took part in, and often initiated, all kinds of reform movements concerning children, poverty, working conditions, and many others, and sustained a vast array of public services", thus, he says, hastening the development of feminism. (No mention of the vast numbers of domestic servants)
Lasch does not subscribe to the idea that women are nicer than men, and supports his thesis with a quote from Elizabeth Fox Genovese: "Those who have experienced dismissal by the junior high school girls' clique could hardly, with a straight face, claim generosity and nurture as a natural attribute of women.
Coming to modern feminism, Lasch rightly maintains that the housewife in Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, imprisoned in her home with "the problem that has no name", was a post second World War phenomenon of middle class, suburban America. However, he is wrong to say that Friedan was not inclined to urge women into highly paid professional careers, but laid special emphasis on volunteer work. Friedan wanted women to use their abilities, not to waste their education, and to do useful and challenging work; she believed that volunteer work did not satisfy their "psychological need to be economically productive".
A previous reviewer described - Lasch's ideas as half Tony Benn and half Margaret Thatcher, a description borne out in these essays. The welfare state, he says, has forsaken its original purpose of the redistribution of wealth and is now engaged in the regulation of moral obligations. He is opposed to state and professional intervention in the affairs of the family, where women, he says, buoyed up in domesticity, could fulfil many of these needs.
He is also highly critical of the American consumer economy which turns out "commodities that nobody really needs, with no other purpose than to keep people at work"; an economy where workers have no pride in their work or in the products they are required to sell. In this "new world of make work and planned obsolescence", he says, people become cynical and time serving.
From the springboard of Betty Friedan's analysis, women went on to challenge male monopoly of jobs in this commercial and professional world. Here, Lasch believes, feminists made a mistake: "A strategy more consistent with the original aims of the feminist movement... would challenge the separation of the home and the workplace... would insist on a closer integration between people's professional lives and their domestic lives and would seek to remodel the workplace around the needs of the family... Instead of seeking to integrate women into the existing structures of the capitalist economy, it would appeal to women's issues in order to make the case for a complete transformation of those structures.
A thought for the new millennium?
