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Introduction: Women in a Changing World
| Article
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18564 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
1,901 Words |
| Author
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Brigitte Berger
Brigitte Berger is a professor of sociology at Boston
University. Among the books she has authored or coauthored,
the following relate to issues of the family: Societies in
Change, The Homeless Mind: Modernization Consciousness, Child
Care and Mediating Structures, and The War over the Family:
Capturing the Middle Ground. Her most recent book, The Culture
of Entrepeneurship (a book in which the family figures
prominently), will be published in October 1991 by ICS Press
(Institute of Contemporary Studies), San Francisco. |
The broad forces of modernization that have transformed the world with cataclysmic speed have not come without cost. As the twentieth century comes to a close, apprehension grows about the future of the world cast in the modern mold. All too often the consequences of this relentless process are ambiguous, if not outright contradictory; they frequently cause consternation and confusion. On the one hand, the modernization of the economy under a market system has produced a world of affluence and comfort unparalleled in human history; yet the very material abundance mankind has struggled for since the beginning of history seems to create ever-new problems.
Modernization has provided enormous power, both in the control of nature and in the engineering of human biology; yet this power has also conjured up visions of a "brave new world" in which the extension of these engineering potentials produces horror and fear. The process has liberated human beings from the narrow confines of their lives and has opened up a hitherto unimagined range of options but the very number of possibilities seems to have resulted in more confusion than in happiness to many. Whether we like it or not, many of these contradictions are inherent in the modernization process itself. Yet in reading the essays that follow, a more nuanced view begins to present itself. It may well be that modernization only in its hyperrationalized and hyperindividuated forms--that is to say, when individual experiences, and particularly those of women, can no longer be related to concrete realities in family, community and voluntaristic groupings--takes on these oppressive and devastating dimensions. (The essays of Horst Helle and Shelley Greene speak to this possibility.)
With the collapse of world communism and the failure of four decades of massive effort on the part of the industrialized democratic countries of the West to bring prosperity, equality, and justice to all, utopianism is decidedly on the wane. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe has brought to the fore a fact long denied by the Western intelligentsia: that the socialist agenda in reality was mainly rhetoric and failed to deliver to women the freedom and equality prized so highly by all. Sharon Wolchik's sidebar on Czechoslovakia makes abundantly clear what more skeptical minds in the West had known for long; namely, that socialist legislation on behalf of women means little without an economy that provides opportunities for women to realize whatever choices they may favor.
On the decline today as well are some of the more extreme agendas of those who for the past three decades have defined the public
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