The Commercial Spirit of Intimate Life and the Abduction of Feminism: Signs from Women's Advice Books

Abstract

Bestselling advice books for women published in the United States over the last two decades may offer a glimpse into an important wider trend in popular culture. This trend is a curious, latter-day parallel to the very different cultural shift Max Weber describes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 2 (1958). The current cultural shift differs in the object of its ideas (love and not work), in the social sphere it most affects (the family and not the economy) and in the population most immediately influenced (women, not men). The cultural shift reflected in advice books concerns a more marginal ideology, feminism, and the commercial transmutation of it is a shift that is smaller, I hope, in scale. Like the earlier trend, this one represents the outcome of an ongoing cultural struggle, gives rise to countertrends, and is uneven in its effect. But the parallel is there. Just as Protestantism, according to Max Weber, “escaped from the cage” of the Church to be transposed into an inspirational “spirit of capitalism” that drove men to make money and build capitalism, so feminism may be “escaping from the cage” of a social movement to buttress a commercial spirit of intimate life that was originally separate from and indeed alien to it. 3 Just as market conditions ripened the soil for capitalism, so a weakened family prepares the soil for a commercialized spirit of domestic life. 4 Magnified moments in advice books tell this story. In exploring evidence of this shift, this parallel, I'm assuming that bestselling advice books for women published between 1970 and 1990 are a likely bell-wether of trends in the popular ideas governing women's approach to intimate life. I also assume that advice books, like other commercial and professional conveyors of guidance, are becoming more important while traditional spheres of authority, families and to a degree churches, are becoming less so. 5 Thus, while