Christopher Lasch was a cultural critic who sought to redirect America's public philosophy through tough-minded essays of cultural and moral criticism. For several decades, Lasch wrote some of the most compelling and erudite essays in American letters, eschewing the wastrel and faddish trends that afflict much contemporary criticism. The end of his work was nothing less than the reshaping of our own self-understanding. Lasch attempted to make clear to his thinking readers that there is greater purpose in human life than "making it" either in business or the bedroom, combating the powerful drives of greed, lust, and pride in what he saw as our consumerist culture. In Women and the Common Life, Lasch directs his attention toward issues of marriage, feminism, and the men's movement in nine succinct essays that focus on the latent ideals of love and commitment. Too smart to lapse into false nostalgia for set gender roles or "traditional"family structures, Lasch rejects both the Right's unthinking conservatism as well as the Left's loose talk of "oppression" and "liberation." Instead, Lasch challenges gender theorists to consider their complicity in making market success a dominant social and political goal and to reappraise the cultural accomplishment of companionate marriage, which Lasch describes as a "union of desire and esteem." The foreword by Lasch's daughter--the editor of this volume--supplies a moving account of Lasch's last days and his influence on her own work.


From Library Journal
In this collection of essays edited by his daughter, historian and educator Lasch, who died in 1994 and is best known for his best-selling The Culture of Narcissism (LJ 11/15/78), discusses women, feminism, and marriage. The volume contains previously published essays with one exception: "Bourgeois Domesticity, the Revolt Against Patriarchy, and the Attack on Fashion," which analyzes the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, and the domestic ideal of the 18th and 19th centuries. The other pieces here review and sometimes deconstruct the works of others in the field of gender studies, such as Carol Gilligan and Betty Friedan. One recurring theme is the observation that the "traditional" family, which most feminists critique, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Lasch's unique insights into women and their roles in history make this a good purchase for academic libraries.?Janet Clapp, Kingston P.L., Mass.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Andrew Delbanco
When Christopher Lasch died three years ago at the age of 61, he left behind a body of work as likely to endure as that of any postwar American intellectual.... Women and the Common Life is vintage Lasch. It continues his assaults on the culture of consumption, and extends it to feminist and academic critics who claim to stand outside and above it.


From Kirkus Reviews
That this collection of nine essays (all but one previously published) was assembled as Lasch faced death is a tribute to his fortitude and his enduring commitment to intellectual dialogue. His daughter, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, has scrupulously edited the volume and introduced it. The pieces are concerned with issues and aspects of women's gender identity as revealed in a variety of social and literary artifacts. From his interpretation of the conventions of French comic and courtly love (the querelle des femmes, the Roman de la Rose), through his reading of The Feminine Mystique as a response ``not to the age-old oppression of women, but to the suburbanization of the American soul,'' the scope of Lasch's critical apparatus is stunning--the fluency and generosity of his scholarship and the muscularity, plasticity, and originality of his thinking; his passionate belief in purposeful, ego-suspending activity as the vocation of every responsible citizen of the collective. A review of Carol Gilligan's research among boarding- school girls gives Lasch a platform for indicting the curricular ``dogma of immediacy'' that effectively alienates today's adolescents from wider, more demanding beliefs, exposing them only to visions deriving from their own subjective reality (e.g., Catcher in the Rye). Lasch is perhaps most troubled about the ``rationalization of everyday life'' by the institutionalized social disciplines (psychology, pedagogy, home economics) that began to replace familial and communal authority around the turn of the century. The new controls, by creating new forms of dependence, served to isolate individuals, discouraging political participation and a sense of community and shrinking ``our imaginative and emotional horizons'' while draining ``the joy out of work and play, wrapping everything in a smothering self-consciousness.'' Yet another wide-ranging, erudite challenge (after The Revolt of the Elites, 1995, etc.) to conventional academic wisdom by a masterly cultural historian. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Kirkus Reviews
Lasch's critical apparatus is stunning--the fluency and generosity of his scholarship and the muscularity, plasticity, and originality of his thinking; his passionate belief in purposeful, ego-suspending activity as the vocation of every responsible citizen of the collective. . . . Another wide-ranging, erudite challenge to conventional academic wisdom by a masterly cultural historian.


Book Description
The best-selling author of The Culture of Narcissism and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy looks at the role of women and the family and how it changed in Western society.


About the Author
Christopher Lasch was professor of history at the University of Rochester. He died in 1994. He was one of our great contemporary social thinkers. Norton publishes his works The Culture of Narcissism, The Minimal Self, Haven in a Heartless World, The True and Only Heaven, and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Christopher Lasch's daughter and professor of history at Syracuse University, has edited this work and offers an original interpretation of the interconnections between Lasch's provocative writings in her introduction.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Christopher Lasch has examined the role of women and the family in Western society throughout his career as a writer, thinker, and historian. In this latest work, Lasch suggests controversial linkages between the history of women and the course of European and American history more generally. He sees fundamental changes in intimacy, domestic ideals, and sexual politics taking place as a result of industrialization and the triumph of the market. Alongside these developments, he explores the concomitant rise of social services, privatization of the family, encroachments of the liberal state, and the decline of community. Questioning a static image of patriarchy, Women and the Common Life insists on a feminist vision rooted in the best possibilities of a democratic common life. Analyzing Lasch's perspective on love, marriage, and feminism, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn offers an original interpretation of the interconnections between these provocative writings in the introduction.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

In this collection of essays edited by his daughter, historian and educator Lasch, who died in 1994 and is best known for his best-selling The Culture of Narcissism (LJ 11/15/78), discusses women, feminism, and marriage. The volume contains previously published essays with one exception: "Bourgeois Domesticity, the Revolt Against Patriarchy, and the Attack on Fashion," which analyzes the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, and the domestic ideal of the 18th and 19th centuries. The other pieces here review and sometimes deconstruct the works of others in the field of gender studies, such as Carol Gilligan and Betty Friedan. One recurring theme is the observation that the "traditional" family, which most feminists critique, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Lasch's unique insights into women and their roles in history make this a good purchase for academic libraries.-Janet Clapp, Kingston P.L., Mass.

Kirkus Reviews

That this collection of nine essays (all but one previously published) was assembled as Lasch faced death is a tribute to his fortitude and his enduring commitment to intellectual dialogue. His daughter, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, has scrupulously edited the volume and introduced it.

The pieces are concerned with issues and aspects of women's gender identity as revealed in a variety of social and literary artifacts. From his interpretation of the conventions of French comic and courtly love (the querelle des femmes, the Roman de la Rose), through his reading of The Feminine Mystique as a response "not to the age-old oppression of women, but to the suburbanization of the American soul," the scope of Lasch's critical apparatus is stunning—the fluency and generosity of his scholarship and the muscularity, plasticity, and originality of his thinking; his passionate belief in purposeful, ego-suspending activity as the vocation of every responsible citizen of the collective. A review of Carol Gilligan's research among boarding- school girls gives Lasch a platform for indicting the curricular "dogma of immediacy" that effectively alienates today's adolescents from wider, more demanding beliefs, exposing them only to visions deriving from their own subjective reality (e.g., Catcher in the Rye). Lasch is perhaps most troubled about the "rationalization of everyday life" by the institutionalized social disciplines (psychology, pedagogy, home economics) that began to replace familial and communal authority around the turn of the century. The new controls, by creating new forms of dependence, served to isolate individuals, discouraging political participation and a sense of community and shrinking "our imaginative and emotional horizons" while draining "the joy out of work and play, wrapping everything in a smothering self-consciousness."

Yet another wide-ranging, erudite challenge (after The Revolt of the Elites, 1995, etc.) to conventional academic wisdom by a masterly cultural historian.