Going Towards a Postpatriarchal Family :: Philosophy Hochschild Women Papers

Going Towards a Postpatriarchal FamilyOurs is a succession of hammy and confusing transformations in everyday life, many of them originating in the social credentials of women that has occurred everywhere the past twenty-five years. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild demonstrates a widespread phenomenon of work-family imbalance in our society, experienced by people in terms of a time bind, and a devaluation of familial relationships. As large numbers of women go through go into the workplace, familial relations of all sorts have been colonized by what Virginia Held critically lifts to as the contractual paradigm. Even the mother/child relationship, representing for Held an alternative womens rightist paradigm of selfhood and agency, has been in large part outsourced. I believe that an Arendtian invention of speech and action might enable us to assert afresh the grounds for familial relations. If we require a new site upon which to hook our human plurality and natality, the postp atriarchal family may provide that new site upon which individuals house freely act to recreate the fabric of human relationships. It would seem to be our moral and political responsibility as social philosophers today to speculatively contribute to the difficult yet imperative task of reconfiguring the family. In this paper, I attempt to articulate the basic assumptions from which such a reconfiguration must begin. I. nigh Ironies of Our Current MomentWhile motherhood represented womens primary luck for achievement and respect within previous societies, second-wave feminism critically explored the lived existence of women as mothers within our middle-class American society. Betty Friedans influential The Feminine Mystique, make in 1965, indicted the deadly boredom of the suburban home, while later kit and boodle such as Adrienne Richs Of Woman Born, articulated with devastating incisiveness the tyrannous qualities of the contemporary institution of motherhood. According to Ri ch, the intense joys of mothering children were embedded in a patriarchal structure that created agonizing conflicts for any woman 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 wobble quite radically as women entered the workplace.And they have. Our lives have been dramatically transformed over the last twenty-five years, through a process I refer to as the social enfranchisement of women. (1) As large numbers of women have entered the public workforce and contraception has be follow widely available, women have come to be seen as possessing the same economic and political rights and responsibilities as men.