Women and the Common Life

by Lasch, Christopher; Lasch-Quinn, Elisabeth

• ISBN13: 9780393040180
• ISBN10: 0393040186
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-01-01
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc

Summary

A controversial work exploring the true history of love, marriage, and feminism from ancient and medieval times into modernity and speculations on the future. Christopher Lasch has examined the role of women and the family in Western society throughout his life as a writer, thinker, and historian. The impact of politics and economics on women and the family, with a special emphasis on the lives of children, was a strong and enduring concern of his. Questioning a static vision of patriarchy, this book starts in ancient Greece and moves through England to America to explore the variety of shapes women's experience has taken and why. An introduction by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn puts these writings on women and the family into the context of Christopher Lasch's oeuvre and lays out their connections to one another.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii	(2)
Introduction	ix
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
Part One: Manners and Morals	3	(90)
1. The Comedy of Love and the Querelle des Femmes: Aristocratic Satire on Marriage	3	(29)
2. The Mysteries of Attraction	32	(7)
3. The Suppression of Clandestine Marriage in England: The Marriage Act of 1753	39	(28)
4. Bourgeois Domesticity, the Revolt against Patriarchy, and the Attack on Fashion	67	(26)
Part Two: From Patriarchy to Neopaternalism	93	(94)
5. The Sexual Division of Labor, the Decline of Civic Culture, and the Rise of the Suburbs	93	(28)
6. Gilligan's Island	121	(16)
7. The Mismeasure of Man	137	(16)
8. Misreading the Facts about Families	153	(8)
9. Life in the Therapeutic State	161	(26)
Index	187