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

Abstract

In The Hearts of Men, Barbara Ehrenreich examines men's relationship to family as shaped by and reflected through popular and elite cultural ideas and images from 1950s through 1970s, relationship of those to economic realities of family wage system, and consequences of both ideological and economic realities for future of marriage and family life. For those who have lived through these decades, reading her analysis is like seeing an old melodrama through camera angles of an exceptionally gifted director. The materials, sequencing, naming (e.g., Reisman's other-directed man as Parsonian woman or Charles Reich as the voyeur in supermarket) are sharp, often ironic, and reverberate with one's memory of those times. I did not just read this book; I viscerated it. Among images and ideas that have shaped men's hearts for past two decades are: 1950s requirement that adult male have a career, marry, and support a wife and children; resentment of gray-flannel-suited man towards conformity and his work; escape from marriage by Playboy; rejection of both work and marriage by Beat; discovery that success could be a health hazard, medical advice to men to slow down and relax; humanistic psychology and Fritz Perls (Do your own thing); hippies, androgyny and counter culture; and ethnicization of gay man, and growth of macho gaymale culture. From a moral climate in 1950s that honored men who were responsible, self-disciplined, and committed to protecting women and children, Ehrenreich argues, we have moved into one that lauds as healthy, in men, irresponsibility, selfindulgence, and an isolationist detachment from claims of others (p. 169). It was men, not women, who rebelled first from their sex-role, and that revolt has profoundly undermined breadwinner ethic and altered relationship between sexes.