Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism Book

Of posthumous publication, this was a book that historian Christopher Lasch worked on for over two decades and the last to be published before his death in the 90's. Rather than one continuous narrative, this book is a set of related essays on the different theories of the femenine throughout various historical periods and the effects of those theories on families and country. These essays vary in quality and scope as they try to trace the changing views of womens' roles from the middle ages to present. The least interesting essay to my mind is Misreading the facts about Families as it focuses too narrowly on one silly book. The most interesting essay to me is The Mismeasure of Man, an essay in which he argues that the demise of unstructured environments (loose family education, debating clubs, fraternal organizations) has undermined the ability of men to develop initiative and self organization, thus killing the 'masculine' in our young men. Mismeasure dovetails with what is to me the strongest essay (if not the most original), The Sexual Division of Labor, an essay about the decline of civic involvement of women after the first wave of feminism and of the increasing institutionalization of organizations of charity and of the care of children. Women increasingly giving up their soft authority over family and society to experts and the erosion of community and child-care ties as families fled into the suburbs. A good solid book that smashes a lot of myths about what we think caused the change in family structures, though a tad hard to read. I was impressed by Lash's ability to give credit where credit was due to feminist writers and their ideas. The strength of this book lies in Lash identifying the thought process of women of those times and showing how they viewed their roles as opposed to how we moderns think they did. Overall trustworthy as a historical record, as I have seen the same ideas in various other unrelated treatises namely A History of Christian Marriage by Glen Olsen. A few caveats here and there, mostly about the first part of the book where the author misses the theological underpinnings of marriage by crediting Lombardo and Luther with starting ideas about personal will as the basis of marriage in canon law. Overall a solid book, if somewhat difficult to read.