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
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?
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.
People who volunteer at the recycling center or soup kitchen through a church or neighborhood group can come to feel part of something 'larger.' Such a sense of belonging calls on a different part of a self than the market calls on. The market calls on our sense of self-interest. It focuses us on what we 'get.
The surface of American life looks smooth, prosperous, peaceful. But underneath, fault-line shifts in family and work life have led us into what some have called 'advanced insecurity.
Many working families are both prisoners and architects of the time bind in which they find themselves.
Most women work one shift at the office or factory and a 'second shift' at home.
For many of us, work is the one place where we feel appreciated. The things that we long to experience at home - pride in our accomplishments, laughter and fun, relationships that aren't complex - we sometimes experience most often in the office. Bosses applaud us when we do a good job. Co-workers become a kind of family we feel we fit into.
Most women without children spend much more time than men on housework; with children, they devote more time to both housework andchild care. Just as there is a wage gap between men and women in the workplace, there is a "leisure gap" between them at home. Most women work one shift at the office or factory and a "second shift" at home.
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.
If in previous decades large historic events drew people together and oriented them toward collective action, the recent double trend toward greater choice but less security leads the young to see their lives in more individual terms. Big events collectivize. Little events atomize.
Here is a new car, a new iPhone. We buy. We discard. We buy again. In recent years, we've been doing it faster.
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.
And were in the middle of a perfect storm. These days, government social services are being bad-mouthed and defunded. The non-profit world is looking more and more like the for-profit world. The growing gap between rich and poor makes most of us very anxious about where we stand.