Going Towards a Postpatriarchal Family :: Philosophy Hochschild Women Papers

Going Towards a Postpatriarchal FamilyOurs is a time of dramatic and confusing transformations in everyday life, many of them originating in the favorable enfranchisement of women that has occurred over the past twenty-five years. Sociologist Arlie Hochs tyke demonstrates a widespread phenomenon of work-family imbalance in our society, experienced by people in legal injury of a time bind, and a devaluation of familial relationships. As big poesy of women have moved into the workplace, familial relations of all sorts have been annex by what Virginia Held critically refers to as the contractual paradigm. Even the mother/child relationship, representing for Held an alternative feminist paradigm of selfhood and agency, has been in large part outsourced. I believe that an Arendtian conception of speech and action might enable us to assert a recent the grounds for familial relations. If we require a modernistic site upon which to address our gentle plurality and natality, the postp atriarchal family may provide that new site upon which individuals can freely act to recreate the fabric of human relationships. It would seem to be our moral and policy-making responsibility as social philosophers today to speculatively contribute to the difficult yet imperative undertaking of reconfiguring the family. In this paper, I attempt to articulate the basic assumptions from which such a reconfiguration must begin. I. Some Ironies of Our Current MomentWhile motherhood delineated womens primary opportunity for achievement and respect within previous societies, second-wave womens lib critically explored the lived reality of women as mothers within our middle-class American society. Betty Friedans potent The Feminine Mystique, published in 1965, indicted the deadly boredom of the suburban home, plot of land later works such as Adrienne Richs Of Woman Born, articulated with ruin incisiveness the oppressive qualities of the contemporary institution of motherhood. Accordi ng to Rich, the intense joys of mothering children were embed in a patriarchal structure that created agonizing conflicts for any womanhood who saw herself as more than merely a nurturer of her spouse and children. As feminists, we believed that the institutions of family and motherhood would change quite radically as women entered the workplace.And they have. Our lives have been dramatically transformed over the last twenty-five years, through a surgery I refer to as the social enfranchisement of women. (1) As large numbers of women have entered the public workforce and contraception has become wide available, women have come to be seen as possessing the same economic and political rights and responsibilities as men.