| our social order can hardly be described as either just or humane. The family, Howard insisted, plays a pivotal role in perpetuating inequalities of class, race, and gender. In short, Howard argued that the family is both psychologically and socially repressive. So fundamental a disagreement is not the most promising basis for collaborative writing. Collaboration is hard enough to sustain, even when authors are in complete agreement about what they are writing. We decided to defy the odds because each of us found ourselves increasingly dissatisfied with the flood of writing on the family and, though it was hard to acknowledge at first, increasingly unhappy with our own stances. |
| The writing, as might be imagined, did not proceed smoothly. We each drafted sections that neither of us found satisfactory. We fought, and more than once accused the other of long lists of unpardonable ideological rigidities and only somewhat shorter lists of more personal failings. Had ours been a marriage, it certainly would not have survived. Luckily, we were "only" friends. We persisted, as it were, for better or worse. And as we alternately argued and fell silent, we gradually began to glimpse the possibility of a resolution. |
| We had been laboring with conceptions of how private and public life were related that no longer made sense. Our mutual distrust of the state, combined with our critique of commodity capitalism, had kept us tied to the alternatives of fanciful celebration of familism and equally fanciful hope for a proliferation of defamilized free spirits. What we had been overlooking was the elemental fact that the people whose lives we were trying to describe were by no means passive. If the family was eroding, it was because it no longer met people's needs, not merely because the economy required people to become more grasping or preoccupied with themselves. By the same token, we could not deny that family decline had failed to create the dynamic, emancipated personalities that the death of the family might have led one to expect. In their attempts to fashion better livesor at least adequate livesfor themselves, ordinary people were changing the meaning of "family," and they were also implicitly changing the relationship between private life and public life. |
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