Every few years, I find myself picking up a book that's been on my shelf that I have never quite finished. Stephanie Coontz's The Way We Never Were is one of those worthy social histories that, if you're the sort of person who reads popular history at all, you might fear would have a political slant on it -- liberal or conservative -- that'd make you too angry to finish it.
I mentioned I've never finished it. But it's not because the lady is conservative or liberal or wrong or flawed or dismissable or makes me angry. It's because I've always hit a certain wall of personal grief. I get about half way through and I realize -- here is a person who is capable of framing rational discussions about the real problems of the American family -- poverty, medicine, time -- and the costs of the things people require. Discussions based on facts and science, not illusions of what we remember badly from our own childhoods as recipes for the future are possible. And this person has no political face. She changes nothing. How many people read social histories, after all? Who will hear the wise man speak? If no one hears him, then who is he?
This time, I found something new. In Chapter 1, through a relatively unquotable string of statistics and historical figures she establishes that the women's movement of the 1960s; Feminism if you will, merely attempts to codify through law and gain protections for what had already been the reality of the common woman's position. Women were already in the workforce in very large numbers earning their own money, supporting their own families. No matter what rhetoric was in the public eye, the economics of the period demanded they come into the workforce and stay there.
It was the reality of the life situations that forced the law to take what was actually happening into account and to attempt to produce pay and property equity. Sure, the Feminist movement was an attempt to right injustices, but the mass movement, the mass injustice if you like, had to come before the law.
And somehow, that settled something in my head. It's one of those stupid things you learn, relearn and then wonder why you forgot. Oh. Right. Life comes first. THEN the law. The act of living uniquely and balancedly IS revolutionary. Every employer you negotiate with to come up with a balance between work and family, every person who sees what you did with your life and sees what's possible is changed. Likewise, every injustice an individual puts up with is one more example of ways in which law needs to change. Law can't change without any precedent to base itself on. Law is not really supposed to be social engineering. Of course sometimes it is -- especially when we don't know exactly what the outcomes of social programs will be. But that's not the law's first purpose.
Anyhow, I'm reading on and I think I'll finish it this time. And for the record, any economist, any historian who talks about social or economic trends without close and careful reference to the demographics of the period they're talking about is probably selling you something.
Posted by karen at December 14, 2004 09:37 PM