stephanie Coontz is the author of “The Way We Never Were” and the recently published “The Way We Really Are” (Basic Books, 238 pages), two books that explore the myths and realities of American families. Coontz is a sociologist at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. Salon spoke with her recently.
Why do you think the media is suddenly so obsessed with kids and working mothers, with cover stories in two major newsweeklies in the same week?
On the one hand, I think
they are appealing to some legitimate concerns. We have this 24-hour
turbocharged economy, and it is hard to sustain commitments of any kind
in it. And at the same time, our caregiving commitments are growing.
Because government and employers have pushed more of the costs of
raising kids onto families, the number of households which have major time
responsibilities for aging parents has tripled in the last decade, to one
out of every four households. So there is an awful lot of stress
and tension and juggling going on.
But I think that whether intentionally or not, these stories, particularly the U.S. News & World Report one, are aimed right at the hearts of working women
and implicitly endorse a stopgap, short-term solution that is not
family-friendly, one that will not help kids. That is the notion that
women should quit work for a few years after childbirth.
You say in the book that kids who have working moms and kids who
don’t fare pretty much the same. Is that correct?
Yes. The research is overwhelming. A new
national study on child care found that if a woman
starts out insensitive to her child, then if the child
is in child care for more than 10 hours a week or in child care where
there is a big turnover of caregivers, that tends to intensify insecurity and weaken attachment. But you are still talking about two risks interacting there.
In those cases, I think that it would be appropriate to tell the
mother — but why was it only the mother that they asked about? — or rather the parents to spend some more time with their kids. In other cases, though,
when the child care is of high or even medium quality, you are
talking about variations between kids that are minuscule. Only 1 percent of the
difference that they find can be attributed to child care. So this has
been very much blown out of proportion.
How do researchers differentiate between mediocre care and excellent care?
Well, there are some things that almost all researchers agree on.
Excellent care is where there is a lot of talking and interaction
with the children, where they are not just farmed out to watch
TV or to play on their own. And there is high continuity of
caregivers. Children are perfectly capable of attaching to one, two or even three people, but they have to have some continuity, so a high turnover is a problem. But child care is always done as a footnote
in these stories. Since we know that high-quality child care can actually
improve kids’ lives, why are we not spending more time talking about how
to get such high-quality child care, rather than talking about whether
women, and it is always women, are kidding themselves about balancing
work and family?
Have you found any negative effects
on women who do stay home?
There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Sometimes staying home
is obviously the appropriate thing to do. It is not always the best thing
to do right after childbirth; it may be that you find that you need to
stay home when your child is 1 or 2, or you may need to cut back when
your child is a teenager. It is really
more a matter of cutting back than it is quitting work entirely. First of all, new
research shows that while a (male) breadwinner, female-homemaker family was
quite stable during the 1950s and 1960s, in today’s world, where most
women have considerable work experience before they get married and
before they have children, after marriage, the sudden backsliding into
traditional gender roles is extremely disorienting to families. The woman gets quite depressed, she doesn’t feel that she has access to the outside world and status in the
outside world; she doesn’t feel that she has as much leverage in
non-child-rearing decisions. And she is quite right in feeling that,
because studies show that families tend to be more egalitarian when there
is an equal contribution to income. So she gets depressed.
Meanwhile her
husband, who has also changed his expectations and really would like to
be more involved in child care, and has had the experience of having a
co-provider wife, often takes on more hours at work, gets excluded from
the child rearing, and he says, “Well what is she depressed about? I am
the one making the sacrifices, why isn’t she more grateful?” Researchers
are finding that this can sow the seeds of conflict that eventually are
causes of divorce, in some instances.
Did you find any evidence of this in your research?
Yes, I get lots of stories about this backfiring. Women finding
that staying at home caused a lot of conflict in their marriage, women who would say for months or years, “I have to
sacrifice for my kid.” A red flag goes up for me when I hear people talk
about “sacrificing” for their kid in that particular way. Not because I
don’t think you should put your kids first; I really do. But when people
really feel that they are sacrificing by staying home, they are not
necessarily doing their child a favor. The research shows that people
feel better about themselves and have more patience to engage in good
parenting when they’re feeling good about their roles, whatever those
roles might be.
There is a trade-off. If you go back to work, yes, you
are more likely to be harried, you are more likely to have some conflicts
with your husband over housework and child care. But those conflicts can
also pay off, because the best predictor of whether a man does housework
and child care is not his own ideology but the pressure from his wife. Men do more and better
child care when their wives are not there to take over for them. Some women really set
themselves up, when they stay home, as gatekeepers. They treat their
husbands as unskilled assistants. They
don’t give their husbands the right to make the mistakes and learn their
own way.
And of
course, the other side of it is that quitting work reinforces the wife’s pre-existing
social disadvantage in the labor market. That has real long-range
implications. Very few of us can afford to quit work entirely for the
entire time that our kids are being raised. For example, college tuition
costs have tripled. You usually need two incomes when your kid is a
teenager, and you may need more flextime. If you don’t have a
track record at your job, then you don’t have the clout and experience to
get that flexibility, then you have to quit again. Who is going to quit?
It’s the woman because her income is already set in this low pattern. Who
is going to quit when the parents or the in-laws need help? It’s the
woman. The result is that, and this to me is a stunning statistic, only 9 percent of women aged 40 or over can expect retirement benefits from their jobs,
because of this pattern of interrupted work.
Speaking of flextime, in her new book, “The Time Bind,” Arlie Hochschild puts forth the hypothesis
that even people who are lucky enough to have access to flextime, both
men and women, choose not to use it, partly because they feel that their
career won’t advance as quickly if they don’t have
enough “face time” with their bosses. She goes on to say that men and
women increasingly find the workplace to be sort of a respite, in the way the home used
to be. The paradigms have been turned around, because home is such an
unstructured, crazy place to be.
Well, Arlie Hochschild interviewed workers at one firm. I am sure there is a kernel of truth in her findings, but I would have two problems with
the conclusions that other people are drawing from them. I am not sure
she is drawing them herself. One is that family-friendly benefits like
flextime are mostly cosmetic, and most workers know they are. It is not
irrational of them to fear that their supervisors will count them as
being less dedicated. Study after study that shows that both men and
women who even inquire about parental leave begin to be earmarked
as not really committed.
The other part of the argument, that work, not
home, is the haven, seems to me a very exceptional situation. I do not think it is typical that most people are using the job as a place to escape from
home. To the extent that they are, it is not because we have chosen the
job over the home. It is that the job has made the home so hard, that it
has made it a very difficult place to live, even though we would like to
live there. Work demands are so great that they
destabilize family life. Many, many
people have very tense relations at work right now, especially with all
the downsizing that has been going on. Forced
overtime is increasing for unionized employees, and off-the-books
overtime is increasing for non-unionized employees. We have fewer
vacation days now than we did back in 1970, and lower health benefits. These
lead to tremendous resentments at work. And so what people do when they get to work, is to take it out on their employers by using e-mail for personal kinds of correspondence. It is unbelievable how much wasted time goes on because
people are angry at their employers and frustrated at home. So putting the onus on the individual gets it
wrong way around.
What are the effects of all of this overload, this juggling between work and home, on a child?
We’ve gone from a
time when the kid had the mother all over them — in a way that was not
always healthy — to a time when mothers are somewhat distracted, because they have more work going on. But I have
talked to so many kids of 1950s families who said, “I spent very little
time with my mom. She spent a lot of time housecleaning, but she didn’t spend any more time talking to me than I
spend talking to my kids.” And the other trade-off is that
men are spending much more time with their children than they did in the
1950s. So I do not see this as an insurmountable problem, I see it as a
different set of stresses. I certainly am all in favor of turning off
the beepers and the faxes and putting the phone on busy and not looking
at your e-mail, when you get home. I think it is important to carve out,
not quality time, but uninterrupted time. Often the best uninterrupted
time is that which comes about in the course of doing chores together — it
is not sitting down face to face to have these long talks. Washing the
dishes together — I am in favor of that. Taking a
bath — kids are apt to give their best confidences when you are giving
them a bath, or halfway reading the newspaper, and only partly paying
attention to them, or doing a chore together, rather than when you just
get right in their face, and say, “Confide in me!”
Even if mothers and children
weren’t interacting so much during the 1950s and 1960s when women were
at home more, isn’t there a psychological benefit for a child to just
have mom around, whether she is talking to you or not? Is there a way that makes a child feel safer?
I think children need to feel safe. They need to know that there are
adults in their world who care about them and are checking up on them,
but I don’t think that it always has to be the mother, or that it even
has to be a combination of just the father and mother. One of the real losses for kids in some middle-class communities is the loss of neighborhood and community, where you could go out
and you didn’t rely on your own parents to be the only ones around.
Throughout the vast majority of human history, exclusive and full-time
child care by mothers has been totally exceptional. The co-provider
family was the norm in colonial days, and in medieval history — siblings or somebody else had to take care of the
younger children.
I don’t espouse the “it takes a village” approach because I think that it’s
as romanticized as the 1950s (nuclear family). We do not live in villages anymore. The real issue is that we have to make a village or make a community. We have to think in terms of the way we design our cities, the
way we design our houses, the kind of social space that we reserve,
whether we allow affluent people to withdraw into their private
schools and gated communities. We have to rethink our work and school
schedules to make them less conflictual with family life. People thought
the world would end when the union movement demanded the 40-hour week.
With our technology, there is no reason that we couldn’t have a 30- or 35-hour week. Everybody says that that is an unreasonable
demand. To my mind it is an unreasonable demand to ask that individual
women shoulder all the burdens of caregiving in today’s modern world. I
think it is more reasonable to say that we have to adjust our housing and
our work expectations and our child-care opportunities.
A lot of media attention seems to be focused on the “plague” of
absent dads. Are kids without fathers, whose parents are divorced
or who are raised by single moms, that much worse off?
No. This has been HUGELY exaggerated. Do not misunderstand me: I
think that there are obvious stresses involved with raising a child
alone. But a lot of women raise children alone, even when they have a
father in the home. The key is: Do you have two cooperating parents,
who are both involved with the children and respectful of each other?
That is the ideal situation. And there are
plenty of times when, in the absence of that ideal situation, a kid will
be better off after a divorce.
Let me give you a couple of examples. When
there is high conflict in a home, we know for sure that the kids are
better off if their parents do not stay together. Some of the other
instances are very close calls. For example, even when there is low
conflict, but you have a disengaged father, we find that teens in
two-parent families with disengaged fathers have lower self-esteem than
either teens in two-parent families where the father is engaged or teens
in one-parent families. Because the divorce gives the kid the excuse to
say, “Well, Dad’s not involved with me because he can’t get along with
Mom.” Whereas the one who has the disengaged Dad who is still in the home
doesn’t have that excuse. Similarly, we find that the men who are unhappy
with their wives have a tremendous spill-over with the way they treat
their daughters. So although divorce may be traumatic for such young
women, they may end up better in the long run, in terms of their
self-confidence and achievement, than having a father around who is
belittling them. I am not trying to say that people should run out and
get divorced, but I am saying we know that it is far too complex a
situation for anyone to have the arrogance to play God about telling
people what they should do.
Are there any government policies that you see as truly family-friendly, that
aren’t just rhetoric?
There are some being talked about, but they are
being talked about too timidly. What we need is a major new
campaign, much along the lines of the Progressive movement’s campaign at
the turn of the century, to make family issues a health and safety issue,
in terms of national regulations, guidelines and investment. It
is a health and safety issue to make sure that parents can take time off
without having to give up their jobs entirely. We should have laws that
prohibit forced overtime, where you can sue an employer who prevents you
from taking time off. We should have laws such as Sweden’s that allow any
caregiver (not just parents but caretakers of people with Alzheimer’s)
to drop down to three-quarters time — with a cut in pay, of course, but
not to lose health benefits and not to lose seniority. We
have to do something about our ludicrous family leave policy — it covers
less than 50 percent of the workers, and it is unpaid. It is for wealthy people
only, and for those who work for big corporations only. The maximum of
leave that you are allowed under the act is smaller than the minimum
amount of leave in all of our European counterparts. And we have to invest in
quality child care. Child care is not good. We must make it
better. That should be a major campaign, unless you think that kids are
less important than inspecting meat and regulating airline safety.
The failure
of liberals to confront these issues head-on has left the right wing in
charge of not just the dialogue, but the very language, so that it does
get posed in terms of “family values.” I was on tour in East Texas a few months ago, I was on a panel, and the first 10 minutes of questions were all about
family values. Instead of just saying, “You are wrong,” I said, “Tell me
more, what does it mean in your life?” and after 10 minutes, we were all
agreeing. So, it’s a sentiment that is a mile wide but
only an inch deep. Our politicians don’t have the courage to dig below
that inch — in fact, they prefer to keep it at that shallow level.
The U.S. News article cited a 1997 poll in which 75 percent of 950 adults
said moms with kids under 3 who work outside
the home are threatening family values.
You know these polls change from day to day depending on how they’re phrased. If you phrase the question, “Are women who work
neglecting their kids?” the overwhelming majority will say no.
In many cases, because it is the only vocabulary people have to express
their concern, they’ll use the conservative term “family values,” but when you press
people on what they mean by that, they’ll define it in a totally different way
than the right wing does. The public defines it in terms of teaching your kids to look beyond the family. They define it in terms of reaching out to
get involved in community activities. Whereas the right-wing definition of
family values is extraordinarily narrow — even in terms of the
history of Christianity. Christ was quite anti-family. He said that
family bonds can interfere with your commitment to the larger Christian
community. And the early evangelicals took pains to always talk about the
Christian household, to indicate that you had to reach beyond the narrow,
selfish ties of sexual attraction and the narcissistic ties of blood in
order to look out for the larger community.
arlie Hochschild is a sociologist at the University of California’s Berkeley campus and the author of “The Time Bind.” Salon spoke with her recently.
The New York Times review of “The Time Bind” observed that your “calm, understanding tone” tended to disguise your book’s
alarming message. Were you alarmed by your findings about work and home?
Let me put it this way. I felt that there was something going on that
we haven’t clearly understood. I think the book itself is a story book.
There are a lot of different personal stories, and all of these are about
parents really trying to strike a balance. These are involved
parents. One single father described himself going to work and said it’s
just like a caffeine high, going from one meeting to the next until it got to be 5 o’clock, and finally he could sit down to his
real work. But it meant he couldn’t pick up his child until 6 or 6:30.
He said he felt like he wasn’t living his values. He moved me
tremendously; here was a good man and a good father, but he was caught in an imbalanced
life.
I guess I am a little bit worried, but not in the way the media has framed it. There was a horrible article on the cover of
U.S. News & World Report. That really threw
me back. I wrote a letter of protest to the editor. It introduced a very
accusatory tone. I felt it was a women-bashing tone.
Are you concerned that
your book is being interpreted as part of the backlash against feminism? Is there an implicit message that women should go home?
Am I concerned that it could be used that way? Yes. Is that what it
is? No, absolutely not. I see it as a call for an open, gentle, respectful, public conversation about what
steps we need to take to get a family-friendly workplace, more like they have in Sweden or
Norway — a 35-hour work week, work-sharing and so on. Motorola has done that in Arizona. In a way, this is crashingly
moderate. I am simply saying, look, knock two hours off on a Wednesday.
It would make it so much better for family life. That would be huge. Why not? Why can’t
we have that?
The “news” in “Time Bind,” as the New York Times put it, “is that growing numbers of
working women are leery of spending time at home.” Does this message, that more women are abandoning the home for work, let men off the hook?
Should we be more pointed in saying that men need to be more
responsible for the domestic maintenance of a family?
Yes, we do need to be more pointed about that. I think that is
exactly the direction that the conversation needs to take and actually
surveys show that children report that they want more time with their
fathers a lot more than they report that they want more time with their
mothers. Something like two-thirds
of kids say that they’d like more time with their fathers, and half of
them say they want more time with their mothers.
Let’s shape this article that way. Write about men. It really is true.
Do you think your book could have been more direct in pointing out men’s domestic responsibilities?
Yes, I think I could have.
Why didn’t you?
I wanted to end up with a non-gendered book. In a way this whole
family-friendly project is informally coded as a women’s project.
I wanted to de-gender it. Why I didn’t single out men is because I did
that in volume one of this study. “The Second Shift” is really all
pointed at men. Maybe I should have pointed at men twice, but in this
one … I could have probably made more of the men thing.
The time bind is in fact more a
man’s issue than a woman’s, because men have subtracted more time from
the home than women have but women are the ones who feel it.
They are expected to protect the home more. But all of us, men and women, have
to get ourselves out of what I call a “talk bind.” We can’t talk about
this without being guilt-tripped.
I think we really have to establish a safe, public place to
talk about this honestly. I would ask right-wing guilt-trippers to lay
off and detoxify this conversation, because it is an important one to
have in a safe, exploratory, non-guilt-trippy way. We are not alone in this.
It is a cultural issue.
“isn’t it odd,” sociologist Stephanie Coontz observes sarcastically in her new book, “The Way We Really Are,” “how quickly a discussion of working parents becomes an indictment of Mommy?” That indictment seemed apparent in U.S. News and World Report’s May 12 cover story, which blared, “Lies Parents Tell Themselves About Why They Work” accusingly from the newsstand. “When men (especially male politicians) talk about ‘working parents’ they really mean ‘working women,’” the newsweekly averred — and then proceeded to do exactly what it accused the politicians of doing.
Opening with a hapless 29-year-old professional woman’s feeble defense of why she left her 10-week-old baby in day care while she worked — “It’s not the amount of time I spend with my daughter, but the quality of time … Or maybe that’s just me rationalizing” — the article went on to enumerate five “lies” that parents tell themselves about why they’re working. Of these, the first and most important “lie” — “we both work because we need the money” — was clearly aimed at yuppie moms. Pointing out that wealthier families are as likely to have both parents working as poorer ones, the article argued that such families don’t really need the money. The real villain of the piece, lurking backstage, was the upper-middle-class mother who dumps her young kids in child care so she can buy a swimming pool.
Both the U.S. News article and Newsweek’s simultaneous cover story, “The Myth of Quality Time,” drew heavily on Arlie Russell Hochschild’s much-talked-about new book, “The Time Bind.” Hochschild’s book presents a simple, startling thesis: For many Americans, including women, home is becoming work, a place to escape from, and work is becoming home, a seductive and stimulating environment. At the pseudonymous “Amerco,” a Midwestern Fortune-500 company profiled by Hochschild, an entire program of “family-friendly” policies had been instituted to encourage their employees to carve out more family time, and yet the program attracted shockingly few takers. Only 53 of 21,070 employees opted for part-time work; a total of two men took paternity leave. Even the most popular program, flextime, attracted only a third of working parents.
The reasons why were various and mostly predictable: peer pressure, bottlenecking supervisors, financial need, fear of being labeled “uncommitted to the company.” The surprise, though, was that women were just as likely as men to pass up “family-friendly” policies in order to keep working Amerco’s long (an average of 47 hours per week) hours.
Stephanie Coontz doesn’t see anything wrong with this. In “The Way We Really Are,” a statistics-drenched analysis that defends American families against the doomsaying of “family values” propagandists, she argues that women who work do better than those who don’t — and that their children, by and large, don’t suffer, either. She cites studies showing that women who work are “consistently healthier, less depressed, and less frustrated than women who do not,” and says that a woman’s satisfaction with her role, whether as worker, homemaker or spouse, “is one of the best predictors both of a good relationship with her child and of the child’s own well-being.”
Not surprisingly, Coontz takes exception to the way the media is spinning the time-crunch issue. “These cover stories, particularly the U.S. News & World Report one,” she says, “are aimed right at the hearts of working women and implicitly endorse a stop-gap, short-term solution that is not family-friendly, one that will not help kids. That is the notion that women should quit work for a few years after childbirth.” Although sales of her book are undoubtedly profiting by the hoopla, Hochschild also decries the newsweeklies’ alarmist tone: “I guess I am a little bit worried … That (article) really threw me back. I wrote a letter of protest to the editor. It introduced a very accusatory tone. I felt it was a woman-bashing tone.”
In separate interviews, both Hochschild and Coontz point the finger of blame not at mommies, but at daddies. They argue that American men have made a career out of escaping from home for decades, and nobody has raised an eyebrow. Male flight not only allows men to indulge their morbid fear of housework, it places them in an environment where they are paid for their time, respected and recognized. Child-rearing and housework, on the other hand, are supposed to be their own rewards. For many women they are, but it shouldn’t be surprising that women find the workplace as attractive as men do — particularly when men aren’t carrying their weight at home. In Hochschild’s earlier book, “The Second Shift,” which studied two-job families, she found that regardless of how many hours they work outside the home, women are forced to do most of the housework and child rearing; men simply don’t do their share. According to a new book, “Time for Life,” cited by Newsweek, men spend only 17.4 hours per week on housework, while women spend 35.1. (And men only put in seven more hours per week on the job — no help, there, guys.) Granted, many men are far more involved in their children’s lives than were, for example, their own fathers, but that doesn’t excuse them from doing the laundry every other week.
Neither does touting “family-friendly” policies excuse employers from implementing them in a practical way. Amerco was ultimately unsuccessful in attaining more flexibility for its workers because it failed to clear the roadblocks — uncooperative middle managers, corporate “evil eyes,” sexist “mommy track” assumptions — that prevented employees at every level from utilizing the programs the company had gone to great expense to develop. Both Coontz and Hochschild point out that women have entered a work culture that was created by men without regard to family needs. “Family-friendly benefits like flextime are mostly cosmetic,” Coontz says, “and most workers know they are.”
Both Hochschild and Coontz have concrete suggestions to improve the lot of working families. These include creating alternative work and school schedules, giving tax incentives for businesses and implementing federally regulated and mandated family benefits, the most important of which is high quality, affordable child care. Hochschild calls for a national dialogue about work and family, but clearly what she is really asking for is that men acknowledge their unequal share of power and relinquish it — something less likely to happen in an overt way.
In analyzing who’s to blame for the time-crunch predicament, no doubt Coontz and Hochschild are right to shift the emphasis from the evil yuppie mom — that venerable figure of cultural abuse — to the housework-avoiding dad. But in the end, the blame may rest less with either dads or moms than with the inexorable, seductive logic of America’s late-capitalist commodity culture, which is increasingly making family life into an image of itself: high-speed, compartmentalized and rational. And the real issue is how this squeezed family life (Hochschild calls kids “time squatters”) is going to affect children in the future. Despite the studies that Coontz cites in her book, which show that the children of mothers who work outside the home and the children of mothers who don’t fare pretty much the same, it’s hard not to believe that a childhood’s worth of nine-hour days at preschool, or having an hour or two of earnestly believed-in “quality time” with one’s parents before everyone collapses into bed, or shuttling between four different baby-sitters while the parents work back-to-back shifts, or coming home to the glow of TV and an eerily shadowed house every day after junior high, is going to affect a child’s life. As comforting as it is to know that your kid isn’t going to be any worse off than the kid of the housewife down the street, is that really all our children should be permitted to expect?
i’m not sure if “The Daytrippers” is the first movie to take place primarily inside a station wagon. But it certainly does go a long way toward explaining why the family car is one of the most intimate spaces we know. (And why the station wagon will keep evolving into spin-offs like the minivan and not into those rocket-driven individual transportation devices they use on “The Jetsons.”) Inside one such group-toting vehicle, writer-director Greg Mottola’s entertaining debut captures the experience of an American family caught up in a crisis affecting one member. It’s the adult equivalent of a family trip to the Dairy Queen to soften the blow of one kid’s getting beaten up at school.
The story begins when Eliza (Hope Davis) finds a letter — a love poem, actually — to her husband from someone named Sandy. Unable to digest its implications alone, she drives out to Long Island to discuss it with her family. There, her overbearing mom, Rita (Anne Meara), her laconic father, Jim (Pat McNamara), her sister, Jo (Parker Posey), and sister’s Kafka-reading boyfriend, Carl (Liev Schreiber), pile into the wagon and drive to Manhattan, the better to confront the possibly philandering Louis (Stanley Tucci). The result is a sweetly comic, small-scale essay on family interactions, a road movie that never seems to have left the dinner table.
Mottola finds his gods among the details, and his actors. As the trip unfolds, Jo’s boyfriend spews out installments of a mind-bogglingly awful novel he’s writing. (Its human protagonist has the head of a pointer dog, the better, the author explains, “to point out” things other characters need to know.) The father barely says anything — he can’t get a word in while his wife churns up a large outboard motor. (One of the film’s few missteps is that Meara’s blackboard-scraping portrayal quickly becomes shtick.) Meanwhile, Jo makes it clear that she’s not on the same page with her would-be intellectual boyfriend. In fact, she’s not even on the same planet.
In the midst of all this family bathos, Eliza’s suffering almost comes off like one more minor car-trip problem — akin to not having enough fast-food ketchup packets to go around. The beauty of “Daytrippers,” though, is that it shows how being a member of a family like this means that while no one outwardly gives you a lot of credit for being in pain, you still get the security of knowing the whole clan has mobilized for you. Eliza understands this, and Davis’ performance deftly revolves around this psychological axis.
Despite the literal mileage it racks up — and despite one hilarious side trip into the apartment of a complete stranger — the film doesn’t really wander much beyond this emotional area. Things don’t so much develop as spill out. A fight brewing between Jo and Carl lets the family explode at each other, but it’s not nearly as fulfilling as the film’s quieter moments, like when the two sisters ask about each other’s method of birth control with a delicate mix of intimacy and guardedness. Or when the father finally opens his mouth — and shows that he’s nothing like the browbeaten silent sufferer he looks to be.
“Daytrippers” is so well-crafted that you may make it more than halfway through before wondering whether the story will sustain any lasting emotional power. It does — but not in the way you think it’s going to. The film’s final confrontation in Manhattan between Eliza and Louis gives you something to think about, but it’s the mental snapshots of the road trip that will keep you savoring its memory.
Despite the bite independent films took of last year’s Oscar field, our movie industry — and our movie-going habits — aren’t really supportive of writer-directors whose scope is that of a short-story teller rather than an epic mythmaker. That’s unfortunate, because there’s no reason why Mottola should go on to make big-budget studio projects if his talent really lies in making jewel-box works like this. Where would Eudora Welty’s fans be if the world only nurtured “Gone with the Wind”?
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way.” Think about Tolstoy’s celebrated opening line for “Anna Karenina” and you can’t help sensing its subtle pessimism. How could any real families — these unfathomably complex aggregations of human life and experience — be alike? We know our families are all unique; therefore they must all be unhappy.
Now think about what might happen to Tolstoy’s formula if you flung it into the melee of today’s political debates. Conservatives would denounce it as a slur on the traditional family. Liberals would protest that it denies happy families their unique cultural differences. And everyone would want to know exactly what Tolstoy meant by “family,” anyway.
The latest wave of left-oriented intellectuals writing about the family offers a new twist on Tolstoy’s line. They’re arguing that it’s the unhappy American families these days that look alike: stressed by working too long hours, isolated from their relatives, strained by the disappearance of communal institutions and bombarded by bad media. In books like Michael Lerner’s “The Politics of Meaning” and Mary Pipher’s “The Shelter of Each Other,” these writers are trying to reclaim the rhetoric of family values from Republicans and the religious right. They hold that to fix families today, we must fix the wider culture that assails them — or at least help them resist the assault of drugs, delinquency, divorce and (most implacable of all) Disney.
They’re not just opportunists applying an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” strategy in the era of the Gingrichian Contract with America; they offer a useful and sometimes powerful critique of the hypocrisy of conservatives who denounce “selfishness and materialism” in private life while promoting it with their public policies. But when it comes to offering a specific idea for change, these thinkers lose their fire. You could call their program Tofu Family Values — not simply to make fun of it, but to recognize that it is both undeniably healthy and undisguisably bland.
Lerner is a therapist and student of theology who edits Tikkun magazine and who emerged, blinking, into a media spotlight when the Clintons briefly embraced his “politics of meaning” rhetoric in 1993. After Hillary Clinton kicked off her health-care reform plan with a speech identifying a “crisis of meaning,” she got blasted by the press, and that was pretty much the end of the White House’s flirtation with Lerner’s ideas.
Lerner evidently feels betrayed by his erstwhile patrons, and in a lengthy epilogue to “The Politics of Meaning” he details how Bill Clinton blew one opportunity after another in his first term by caving in to the Washington establishment and the media instead of articulating a clear, progressive vision of community that might mobilize everyday Americans. It’s the only part of “The Politics of Meaning” in which passion seeps into Lerner’s prose.
Lerner’s central idea is that “the deprivation of meaning in daily life is at the root of many of our individual and social problems.” While traditional liberals cling to a legalistic framework of individual rights, the right keeps winning votes by “addressing our meaning-needs.” Conservatives have learned how to stroke people’s “meaning-related” anxieties — yet their get-government-off-our-backs program simply abandons the family to the vagaries of the free market, where it becomes raw meat in a competitive grinder.
“The Politics of Meaning” calls on us to abandon cynicism and hopelessness, to “transgress the reality police” who tell us things can never change, and to try to imagine a different “bottom line” in our society “that values ethical, spiritual and ecological sensitivity and the ability of people to be loving and caring” over profits. Proposing “a movement whose goal is to nurture our souls, not to grab power,” Lerner declares, “I insist on the possibility of possibility.” It’s a shock when you finish the book and realize he hasn’t once quoted John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
Lerner is a smart debater, and he’s very good at protecting his left flank from the typical objections progressives have raised to the traditional family. His family values are neither patriarchal nor intolerant. But the deeper you read in “The Politics of Meaning,” the clearer it becomes that, to Lerner, “meaning” is never going to progress beyond the boilerplate phrases he pastes throughout the book, like “ethical, spiritual and ecological sensitivity and the ability of people to be loving and caring.” “Meaning” here is an abstraction into which readers may project their own “hunger” and “pain.”
Like many other critics, Lerner complains about liberalism’s moral vacuity: “A just society, according to liberalism, does not seek to promote any substantive aims of its own, but rather enables its citizens to pursue their own ends,” and that’s not terribly inspiring for people who feel “meaning-needs.” Yet Lerner is too steeped in liberalism himself, and too unwilling to appear authoritarian, to fill his word “meaning” with any content. Instead, he writes, “A politics of meaning does not seek to create a particular meaning system, but it does seek to create social and economic arrangements that will be friendly to meaning-oriented communities rather than harmful to their central concerns.”
That sounds awfully like a marketplace all over again, with the abstraction of “meaning” substituted for the abstraction of money. And the more detail Lerner adds, the greater the resemblance grows. He tries to sketch a society that offers “spiritual and material incentives for individuals who acted cooperatively and for corporations who were environmentally sensitive.” Schools would teach empathy and “moral achievement,” and college entrance exams would test for it. Business and government projects would be evaluated by a “social audit.” High-school students would compete for places in a high-prestige national service program. Is this a “meaning-oriented society” — or government by brownie points?
Lerner is too intelligent not to know that morality is something people fight over a lot more readily than they agree about — but that awareness is just too inconvenient for his ideas, so he ignores it. As a Jewish thinker, he writes of the Bible as a sort of moral bedrock — one taproot of the “God-energy” present in all the great religions of the world. But how do you sort out the Bible of “love thy neighbor” from the Bible that requires adulterers to be stoned to death? Does the umbrella of “loving and caring” begin at conception, or is that a matter individual women should be allowed to work out themselves? These are the kinds of issues wars get started over, yet in Lerner’s framework they are simply different “meaning systems,” and government’s role is to step aside and let “meaning-oriented communities” work things out.
To be sure, much of what Lerner is talking about makes gut-level sense; who’s against “caring and loving” in general? It’s when you get into specific programs to “promote caring and loving” that you risk sounding ridiculous. Anticipating readers’ disbelief, Lerner repeatedly admits that his ideas are going to appear ludicrous and unworkable to people raised in our materialistic society. Yet he never finds the kind of images and stories to make his “meaning-oriented society” vivid. Just as, in his view, liberal churches’ “boring and lifeless energy” drives worshipers into the arms of more stirring conservative preachers, so his own flabby rhetoric may drive even a sympathetic reader to long for some spry right-wing wit — smugness, arrogance and all.
“The Politics of Meaning” is astonishingly devoid of color and life, and when it does grab at a picture meant to inspire, it winds up with a banality — like the following description of the “meaning-based society”: “Picture it as one on which people will be so excited to be meeting one another and having the opportunity to spend time together, that we will resemble playful puppies, joyfully exploring and celebrating one another’s existence.”
What’s depressing about “The Politics of Meaning” is how little its language connects with the great tradition of visionary writing on the left. Lerner writes as if he were the first thinker to urge us to imagine a society based on some other value than money. If he is aware of previous exercises in this direction — from classics like William Morris’ “News from Nowhere” to contemporary works like Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift” — he makes no use of them. “The Politics of Meaning” is full of the language of political debate but devoid of the faces and words of actual people. Lerner talks of “the prophetic voice of the politics of meaning,” but he never finds such a voice in himself.
The people who ought to be filling Lerner’s pages are all huddled together in “The Shelter of Each Other,” psychologist Mary Pipher’s prescription for “Rebuilding Our Families.” Pipher, whose “Reviving Ophelia” was a popular study of the plight of adolescent girls in our culture, chronicles the precarious state of family relationships among her clients. But instead of following their troubles back to sources in childhood trauma or inner conflict, she blames our social institutions for most of their problems. Long hours at the workplace keep parents away from each other and their children, while the kids absorb unhealthy messages from their movies, their TV commercials and even their classmates. The pervasiveness of our media have turned the American home into a “house without walls,” unprotected from the gales of popular culture.
To readers who might have grown up amid suburban conformity, finding salvation by claiming nooks and crannies of pop culture for their own, Pipher’s perspective is a little alien. If one experienced family as a stifling prison, a “house without walls” might sound like a fine thing. But Pipher argues persuasively that knocking down those walls winds up benefiting corporate profits far more than it frees captive spirits. Though she doesn’t ever label herself a liberal, she’s plainly not signing on the Contract with America’s bottom line.
Pipher’s is a skeptical, no-nonsense voice as solid as the Nebraska plains that surround her community. There’s nothing terribly new in her case-studies. But there’s a consoling practicality in the way she breaks ranks with the therapeutic norm and looks beyond the individual psyche to explain family problems. She understands that the flipside of every New Age-style exhortation to “do your own work” is the suggestion that your problems are all your own fault, and she sensibly points out that many of the worst problems families face today are inherited from their cities, their schools and their television sets.
But though she declares that “The cure for cynicism, depression and narcissism is social action,” her advice to the families she counsels tend to lead away from public engagement. Families today, she insists, need to get together more often to eat meals, tell stories and play games; her most frequent Rx is for more time outdoors. Good recommendations, no doubt — but they seem to encourage families to flee uncaring institutions rather than try to change them.
Pipher offers folksy wisdom for protecting families from society, but she never looks beyond to imagine a society that we might not need protecting from. “The Shelter of Each Other” may prove a helpful handbook for family self-defense, but as a vision of a better world it’s disappointingly thin.
Sure, imagining different ways of organizing society is hard work, with little immediate payoff and a pretty lousy historical track record. But if you’re standing up as a liberal or a progressive, that’s the job description.
Lerner complains that the “savvy”-worshipping media are too eager to jump on any public figure who dares express an idealistic thought. Yet one can share his distaste for cynicism without embracing his explanation for it: “The cynical journalists and intellectuals who belittle the meaning-needs, and who ridicule contemporary movements seeking spiritual renewal, may themselves be the most oppressed, because so many of them are victims of internal voices that require the denial of their own need for love, caring and recognition.”
Maybe in critiquing Lerner’s work I’m just revealing my own oppression and need for “love, caring and recognition.” On the other hand, maybe it’s possible to hold books like “The Politics of Meaning” to the same idealistic standards they propose to apply to our public life. What’s cynical about that?
Happy political movements are all alike; every unhappy movement is unhappy in its own way. The latter can always benefit from a little skepticism. And the former almost certainly don’t exist.
