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Lasch, in fact, had begun to
write on women’s history in the early 1970s.. He is one of
the very few historians who examined the roles women,
feminism, love and marriage, and the family play in the
history of the West. The reason for this passionate pursuit
was his conviction that it is impossible to study cultural
history without a sympathetic understanding of these subjects.
The value of women could never be underestimated or
marginalised as it was inseparable from cultural history as a
whole. In a fascinating essay, "The Mismeasure of
Man", Lasch writes: "The history of women could not
be detached from the history of the human race in general,
without reducing it to something slight, and superficial and
second-hand."
To chart the
history of women would amount to recreating "a history of
mankind in a more intimate sense than anything yet
attempted". The coherence and lucidity of these essays
emerges owing to the parallels between the history of women
and the history of the West.
Through
nausea and pain, battling continuously against cancer,
Christopher Lasch persistently worked on these essays. The
essays complement one another brilliantly in spite of their
broad assortment of subjects over an extensive time span. The
essays, though themselves full of elaborate interpretations,
can be supplemented by a full length study of the family in
his book, "Haven in a Heartless World: The Family
Besieged" which he wrote in 1977. While there are many
contradictions in the essays owing to unresolved questions and
development of his thinking, several themes are very
prominent: shifting marital ideas and practices, feminism’s
linkage to the history of the middle-class and the family, an
oppositional tradition of love, the history of self-respect
and the rationalisation of everyday life.
In many ways,
it is this rationalisation of life that indicates the
explanation for the alterations in conceptions of love,
marriage and feminism. It is with passionate scrutiny that he
observes the human experience and carries out an enquiry into
the daily existence of women.
These
challenging essays are primarily appraisals of present society
and an answer to a vigorous alternative to it. Lasch’s views
here emerge out of an intense and developed moral code, an
obsession with a vision of what bestowed value to life. Never
for worldly comfort or success, he endeavoured throughout to
engage in productive occupation and to do his bit for the
shared life, that is, the life of the family, the community,
the nation or the world. The yearning to be always entrenched
in the social framework to which one gives earnestly was his
lifetime’s project. But he is of the view that such a vision
opposes contemporary life where material benchmarks are
employed to assess achievements. Personal accomplishment comes
before the good of the commune. The self, thus, is false and
fragile.
The opinions
of the modern-day specialist infiltrate into the arena of
family and the community thus injuring both. Scientific
rationalism, in turn, becomes a negative development of the
industrial age.
Feminism, in
Lasch’s view, is neither adverse to patriarchy nor is it a
rejection of gender roles that industrial revolution ushered
in. It is, on the other hand, an answer to the segregation of
women from the mainstream in which she had always had
opportunities of relatively valuable work that had given worth
to their lives. This had come about in the middle of the 20th
century through "suburbanization". Current feminism,
according to Lasch, has compounded the damage by inspiring
women to embrace the same sterile desires to self-fulfilment
in the consumer culture that men held on to for quite a few
generations previously.
Lasch
examines the relationship between men and women in medieval
and early modern texts where they acted with mutual respect
and possessed egalitarian roles, though it is to a great
extent quite inadequate and lacks the depth so characteristic
of his other works. In the pre-industrial era, women had more
power and more competence for achievement but with the 19th
century trend of romantic love being swapped by the cult of
marriage and domesticity, women’s hold on power began to
diminish. And as the number of the skilled enlarged, women
gradually retracted into empty, unsatisfactory suburban
existence so characteristic of the 20th century. Where, in the
pre-industrial age, women were gainfully occupied in
fashioning life of the family and community, contemporary
culture, on the other hand, does not show any such rewards
going to them. They appear now to be obsessed only with the
idea of gender difference as a source of empowerment.
Competing and achieving material comfort is what they seem to
be pursuing, thereby replacing caring and nurturing with these
materialist engagements.
Such an
attitude that prefers the material, so dependent on the
nondescript qualities of equal rights and freedom, pays little
heed to the notion of "conduct of life" and what is
"good". Lasch pursues the idea that the essence of
strength, equality, and self-respect derives from taking
charge of our own lives, managing to maintain long-term
commitments, and facing challenges head on.
Undoubtedly
the rise of the liberal order brings these fundamental rights
to them, but an inordinate emphasis on them ignores the basis
values of life.
True to his
argument, Lasch, in a critical essay, demolishes Carol
Gilligan who is one of the supporters of the idea of gender
difference. He claims that the effect of her analysis "is
to assert double standards of competence, performance and
moral development while demanding respect for women’s
rights." For Lasch, the only way of reaching fulfilment
is through "the selflessness experienced by those who
lose themselves in their work, in the effort to master a craft
or a body of knowledge, or in the acceptance of a formidable
challenge that calls on all their resources. It is only in
purposeful activity that we find a suspension of egoism that
goes beyond conventional self-sacrifice."
Though such views are
thought-provoking and provocative, Lasch’s treatment of the
feminist movement which is so varied in its concerns, is
rather mechanical, often sketchy and quite polemical. Yet the
engagingly written book wills to be read, if only for a
different opinion since its writer, a masterly cultural
historian, cherishes the details of everyday lives of women
and listens to their voices past and present. And somewhere
these essays put across some hope for a brighter and different
future. Experience, common sense and analytical brilliance are
behind Lasch’s wide-ranging treatment of women whom he loved
and cared for
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