Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism [Hardcover]

Christopher Lasch (Author), Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (Author, Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1997

This study looks at the role of women and the family in Western society, examining the impact on them of politics and economics, with special emphasis on the lives of children. Questioning the accepted status quo of patriarchy, this book explores women's experience from ancient Greece to modern America. An introduction by Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, daughter of the author, sets these writings into the context of Lasch's oeuvre.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Christopher Lasch was a cultural critic who sought to redirect America's public philosophy through tough-minded essays of cultural and moral criticism. For several decades, Lasch wrote some of the most compelling and erudite essays in American letters, eschewing the wastrel and faddish trends that afflict much contemporary criticism. The end of his work was nothing less than the reshaping of our own self-understanding. Lasch attempted to make clear to his thinking readers that there is greater purpose in human life than "making it" either in business or the bedroom, combating the powerful drives of greed, lust, and pride in what he saw as our consumerist culture. In Women and the Common Life, Lasch directs his attention toward issues of marriage, feminism, and the men's movement in nine succinct essays that focus on the latent ideals of love and commitment. Too smart to lapse into false nostalgia for set gender roles or "traditional"family structures, Lasch rejects both the Right's unthinking conservatism as well as the Left's loose talk of "oppression" and "liberation." Instead, Lasch challenges gender theorists to consider their complicity in making market success a dominant social and political goal and to reappraise the cultural accomplishment of companionate marriage, which Lasch describes as a "union of desire and esteem." The foreword by Lasch's daughter--the editor of this volume--supplies a moving account of Lasch's last days and his influence on her own work.

From Library Journal

In this collection of essays edited by his daughter, historian and educator Lasch, who died in 1994 and is best known for his best-selling The Culture of Narcissism (LJ 11/15/78), discusses women, feminism, and marriage. The volume contains previously published essays with one exception: "Bourgeois Domesticity, the Revolt Against Patriarchy, and the Attack on Fashion," which analyzes the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, and the domestic ideal of the 18th and 19th centuries. The other pieces here review and sometimes deconstruct the works of others in the field of gender studies, such as Carol Gilligan and Betty Friedan. One recurring theme is the observation that the "traditional" family, which most feminists critique, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Lasch's unique insights into women and their roles in history make this a good purchase for academic libraries.?Janet Clapp, Kingston P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 186 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st edition (January 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393040186
• ISBN-13: 978-0393040180
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #945,132 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Women's Issues" as Crucible for Cultural Critique, December 26, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism (Hardcover)

Lasch chronically falls victim to those who fail to grasp the radical nature of his critique. He approached social issues from a perspective which quickly eludes the typical intellectual constraints of right and left. WOMEN AND THE COMMON LIFE may well become the largest victim to the casual reads to which his work is so often submitted.

Despite all the talk about the dynamic nature of the patriarchy and renaissance drama, the main gripe of WOMEN is that feminism sold its soul for a mess of pottage. Primarily through comparison of Friedan's FEMININE MYSTIQUE and Goodman's GROWING UP ABSURD, Lasch reveals that feminism was uniquely poised to furnish a broad assault on the predatory capitalism, cheap consumerism and therapeutic stupor that has descended over the American scene. Instead, feminists all too frequently seek only to alter the rules so women too can gain entry into the careerist trap.

One senses that Lasch may have invested intellectually in feminism, hoping it would be the crucible for a revivified Jeffersonian agrarianism, but was subsequently let down. Perhaps because of this, feminism suffers the same excoriation as most other stripes of liberalism throughout Lasch's work. In any event, he has feminists dead to rights when he points out that a truly feminist, truly radical critique of American civilization would have sought to undermine, for the good of women, men and children, the gluttonous and heedless consumerism which so characterizes it. Far from missing the critical insights of feminism, Lasch eloquently argues that it is the feminists, particularly Friedan, who have forgotten their own insights, content to sacrifice their integrity on the altar of materialist fixation. In this tome, Lasch's reputation for erudition remains secure, and even tumesces in the ingenuity of its application through critical intelligence, and, notably, in a subtlety of argument not always present in previous work.

This book is crucial reading to those who find themselves inexorably compelled by feminist ideals, but who find it impossible to discover those ideals inhabiting any portion of the contemporary feminist landscape.

12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grand Analysis (but what else would you expect)., December 29, 2005

By 

Bernard Chapin "Ora Et Labora!" (CHICAGO! USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism (Paperback)

Christopher Lasch was a magnificent cultural commentator who I, and many others far brighter than me, refer to as the American Orwell. He had a scholars eye for inconsistency and a serious regard for the truth--so much so that it continually put him at odds with the political left of which he was a part. Frankly, I saw a couple of the reviews below and laughed out loud as this work is not something one would expect your average feminist to have ever heard of let alone view as a threat to their hegemony. It's too sober and erudite for them to even process so I'm surprised that any members of the womyn's studies crowd found their way to this link in the first place. Women and the Common Life is a posthumous collection of essays which were mostly previously published in places like New Republic, Commonweal, and The New York Review of Books. If the reader is even remotely familiar with these publications, he or she will know that they would not be the places in which scathing assaults on feminism can be found. Part history, part philosophy, and part literary review, Women and the Common Life fixes Lasch's high-brow upon marriage, attraction, and the economic relations between the sexes; although, my favorite chapter was the only one in which he came close to giving out a thrashing, and that was in his dissection of professor, and political operator, Carol Gilligan. Her absurd book, In a Different Voice, unwittingly demeaned women under the pretense of saying that they could not think in the same manner as men because they think differently. Lash skillfully, and subtlety refutes the prevailing nonsense of our day, and it is unfortunate that so few will be exposed to this final work.

10 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Feminism: repressive, elitist, historically inaccurate, February 14, 2005

By 

Hulka (Washington DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism (Paperback)

Sorry feminism failed, and Lasch tells some of the reasons why. Feminism, which was supposed to be critical of "patriarchical" values, merely turns out that women want to be men, and when given men's power, just act like men. Carly Fiorina, the CEO of HP is a good example. She fought the male heirs of HP for control over HP, and a proxy fight for a merger with Compaq. And the result? Another pointless corporate merger, massive layoffs in a family oriented company, falling stock prices, and Ms. Fiorina walking out with MILLIONS for basically being a failure. The culture, like HP, would have been way better off to stay with it's "patriarchical" values, then the <snicker> feminism of Carly Fiorina and her ilk. The previous women who posted didn't read the book, nor do they even understand what Lasch was talking about. Mere men-haters, like that don't offer much to other women, or our society.