The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment

The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment

Barbara Ehrenreich

Language: English

Pages: 206

ISBN: 0385176155

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


finding joy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

earning something near the minimum wage. So what was at stake for women in the battle of the sexes was, crudely put, a claim on some man’s wage. Both sexes, of course, were under intense social pressure to enter the fray and resolve it by “settling down,” but the penalities for failure were very different. The man who failed to marry or stay married might be judged a little “odd”; the woman might well be poor. In the eyes of the middle-class, mid-century world, he had dodged a responsibility,

us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your life and get back to your Ladies’ Home Companion. When a Memphis woman wrote in to the second issue protesting the “Miss Gold-Digger” article, she was quickly put in her place. The article, she wrote, was “the most biased piece of tripe I’ve ever read,” and she went on to deliver the classic anti-male rejoinder: Most men are out for just one thing. If they can’t get it any other way, sometimes they consent to marry the girl. Then they

Marriage. 1. Title. HQ1090.E36 1983 305.3’1 82–45104 eISBN: 978-0-307-77904-5 www.anchorbooks.com v3.1 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book was made possible by a Ford Foundation Award for Humanistic Perspectives on Contemporary Society and by a fellowship from the New York Institute for the Humanities. I thank the latter institution not only for financial support, but for the collegial environment it has provided me for the past two years. At the beginning of this project I often feared that I was

after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding …6 Others in the fifties were discovering the subversive masculinity of the blue-collar, or lumpen, male. White-collar men had all but admitted their own

more out there besides playing cool, macho and getting laid. You could even go to college, get a degree.” Traditional masculinity is constrictive and dead-ended; feminization (in the film’s terms) offers upward mobility. In the end, it’s not so much the attractions of the middle-class career option that tips the balance for Stony, but the horrors of blue-collar family life. His father’s “traditional” masculinity, which seemed functional enough in the barroom or on the construction site, turns

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