That this collection of nine essays (all but one previously
published) was assembled as Lasch faced death is a tribute to his
fortitude and his enduring commitment to intellectual dialogue. His
daughter, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, has scrupulously edited the volume
and introduced it. The pieces are concerned with issues and aspects
of women's gender identity as revealed in a variety of social and
literary artifacts. From his interpretation of the conventions of
French comic and courtly love (the querelle des femmes, the Roman
de la Rose), through his reading of The Feminine Mystique as a
response "not to the age-old oppression of women, but to the
suburbanization of the American soul," the scope of Lasch's
critical apparatus is stunning - the fluency and generosity of his
scholarship and the muscularity, plasticity, and originality of his
thinking; his passionate belief in purposeful, ego-suspending
activity as the vocation of every responsible citizen of the
collective. A review of Carol Gilligan's research among
boarding-school girls gives Lasch a platform for indicting the
curricular "dogma of immediacy" that effectively alienates today's
adolescents from wider, more demanding beliefs, exposing them only
to visions deriving from their own subjective reality (e.g.,
Catcher in the Rye). Lasch is perhaps most troubled about the
"rationalization of everyday life" by the institutionalized social
disciplines (psychology, pedagogy, home economics) that began to
replace familial and communal authority around the turn of the
century. The new controls, by creating new forms of dependence,
served to isolate individuals, discouraging political participation
and a sense of community and shrinking "our imaginative and
emotional horizons" while draining "the joy out of work and play,
wrapping everything in a smothering self-consciousness." Yet
another wide-ranging, erudite challenge (after The Revolt of the
Elites, 1995, etc.) to conventional academic wisdom by a masterly
cultural historian. (Kirkus Reviews)
Christopher Lasch has examined the role of women and the family in
Western society throughout his career as a writer, thinker, and
historian. In Women and the Common Life, Lasch suggests
controversial linkages between the history of women and the course
of European and American history more generally. He sees
fundamental changes in intimacy, domestic ideals, and sexual
politics taking place as a result of industrialization and the
triumph of the market. Questioning a static image of patriarchy,
Women and the Common Life insists on a feminist vision rooted in
the best possibilities of a democratic common life. In her
introduction to the work, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn offers an original
interpretation of the interconnections between these provocative
writings.
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