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The High Cost of Marriage
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20472 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
3,241 Words |
| Author
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Richard Quebedeaux
Richard Quebedeaux is a senior consultant for the
International Religious Foundation in New York. He is the
author of The New Charismatics II (1983), By What Authority:
The Rise of Personality Cults in American Christianity (1982),
I Found It! The Story of Bill Bright and Campus Crusade
(1979), and The Worldly Evangelicals (1978). |
WARM HEARTS AND COLD CASH
The Intimate Dynamics of Families and Money
Marcia Millman
New York: The Free Press, 1991
240 pp., $19.95
Money doesn't just talk, it screams, to quote Bob Dylan. In Warm Hears and Cold Cash, Marcia Millman gives us a largely economic interpretation of the contemporary American family. She is a professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, a campus not particularly known for its conservatism; and her new book sets forth marriage and family life in terms of an essentially Marxian and Freudian analysis. It underscores the role and power of money in the competitive nature of family dynamics and intimate relationships, while it also insists that childhood experiences with parents shape domestic conflict among adults.
Millman's book can hardly be called a happy assessment, and it may well shock the average lay reader by exposing in broad daylight what so many of us would prefer to keep hidden. Her research was based on interviews with many Americans about the roles money played in their relationships, on countless conversations with her friends about the topic, and on several months in courthouses observing cases in which relatives were suing one another over contested wills and divorces. Millman presents a forceful and controversial argument.
Haven in a heartless world?
Popular culture and the world of scholarship in general share a tendency to take family love as a given, as non-problematic. But in real life, people in families are far less certain about love, which is, in fact, ambiguous, unequal, unsteady, and uncertain. Scholars often totally ignore the competitive aspects of family life and the rivalry with which it is infused. We may be bound to our families with love, but also through dependence and guilt. In this context of rivalry and uncertainty in intimate relationships, money takes on a special significance. Because love is ambiguous and unmeasurable, people look for something clear and quantifiable to gauge and judge feelings and relations with others. Money fills the need for such an entity, becomes an equivalent for love, and often serves as a payment or substitute for attention and affection.
Millman argues that any close relationship, whether between parents and children,
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