Arlie Russell Hochschild
Arlie Russell Hochschild
Arlie Russell Hochschildis a professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her newest book is Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Based on intensive interviews with Tea Party enthusiasts in Louisiana, conducted over the last five years, she tries to scale an “empathy wall” to learn how to see, think and feel “red.” She traces the views and desires of those she comes to know to what she calls their “deep...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth15 January 1940
CountryUnited States of America
Formerly, many men dominated women within marriage. Now, despite a much wider acceptance of women as workers, men dominate women anonymously outside the marriage. Patriarchy has not disappeared; it has changed form. In the old form, women were forced to obey an overbearing husband in the privacy of an unjust marriage. In the new form, the working single mother is economically abandoned by her former husband and ignored by a patriarchal society at large.
Children born of married parents in America face a higher risk of seeing them break up than children born of unmarried parents in Sweden.
Many of the young aspire to happy marriages and dot-com fortunes but end up in guarded love and okay-for-now jobs.
Each marriage bears the footprints of economic and cultural trends which originate far outside marriage.
To televisionize any serious problem, the program directors face the task of making the message 'go down smooth' until the audience is delivered to the commercial.
The "female culture" has shifted more rapidly than the "male culture"; the image of the go-get 'em woman has yet to be fully matched by the image of the let's take-care-of-the-kids- together man. More important, over the last thirty years, men's underlying feelings about taking responsibility at home have changed much less than women's feelings have changed about forging some kind of identity at work.
The influx of women into paid work and her increased power raise a woman's aspirations and hopes for equal treatment at home. Her lower wage and status at work and the threat of divorce reduce what she presses for and actually expects.
Just as the archetype of the supermom--the woman who can do it all--minimizes the real needs of women, so too the archetype of the"superkid" minimizes the real needs of children. It makes it all right to treat a young child as if he or she were older.
Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?
Compared with the employed, the jobless are less likely to vote, volunteer, see friends and talk to family. Even on weekends, the jobless spend more time alone than those with jobs.
The more we rely on the market, the more hooked we become on its promises: Do you need a tidier closet? A nicer family picture album? Elderly parents who are truly well cared for? Children who have an edge in school, on tests, in college and beyond? If we can afford the services involved, many if not most of us are prone to say, 'Sure, why not?
And the Republican Party especially associates the market with the idea of progress, goodness, family, and points us toward the mall as an answer to all our personal dreams.
Paradoxically, those who call for family values also tout the wonders of an unregulated market without observing the subtle cultural links between the family they seek to regulate and the market they hold free.