The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz

Author:Stephanie Coontz [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2008-08-08T07:24:00+00:00

Consumerism, the Work Ethic, and the Family

The problem of consumerism is sometimes posed as a collapse of the work ethic, often by the same people who blame women's adoption of the work ethic for ruining family life. However, a work ethic does not necessarily provide an alternative to the consumer ethic; frequently both stem from the same sources and have the same effects. Almost everyone knows the workaholic father who is as totally unavailable to his children as any man who abandoned his family to pursue a hedonistic life.

Sociologist Robert Bellah and associates point out that "an emphasis on hard work and self-support can go hand in hand with an isolating preoccupation with the self.... The problem is not so much the presence or absence of a `work ethic' as the meaning of work and the ways it links, or fails to link, individuals to one another." The private family values generally thought of as traditional have a built-in tendency to degenerate into me-first individualism because they ignore the fact that "work is a moral relationship between people," a relationship that can support family life only if it extends beyond any particular family and forges bonds throughout the community as a whole.75

The way work is organized and rewarded in America today exacerbates consumerism and individual alienation by eating away at family time, neighborhood cohesion, and public solidarities. Most individuals still attempt to carve out space for personal commitments, family ties, and even social obligations, but they must do so in opposition to both job culture and consumer culture. To blame their frequent setbacks or defeats on "abandonment of traditional family roles" is ahistorical and unfair. Nowhere is this more evident than in the tremendous changes that have occurred in sex, reproduction, aging, and the life course-the subjects of the following chapter.

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