Word: hackers
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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WOMEN'S CHANGING ROLE. "Put very simply," says Cornell Political Sociologist Andrew Hacker, "the major change in the family in recent years, and the problems of the future, are both summed up in one word: women. In the past and until very recently, wives were simply supplementary to their husbands, and not expected to be full human beings. Today, women are involved in much greater expectations and frustrations. For one thing, 40% of U.S. women are now employed. When a woman is working, she tends to have a new perception of herself. I see this most egregiously in those women...
...only woman's aspirations that have changed, Hacker adds, but society's support of her as a wife. "In the past, the role of wife and mother was reinforced by the church and the community. The whole complex descended on women and said, This is what you are; this is what you will be.' Now marriage has to be on its own, because the reinforcements are no longer there. So women are listening to all the subversive messages...
...does not simply sermonize about the quality of American life. (This is Slater's particular flaw.) In his chapter on "Corporate America," for example, Hacker depicts, more like a novelist than a political scientist, exactly how the machinery of technology dictates the shape of bureaucratic government, and how that machinery, in turn, frustrates the men of good intent, who only imagine they are at the controls. Then, in a biting but witty chapter called "Domestic Dissonance," he dramatizes how the character of public experience carries over into the home. The laissez-faire economy of the past he relates easily...
Premature Hysteria. By seeing American history in a special perspective, Hacker perceives the tragedy of a nation divided between its transcendent dream of itself and its present quality and affluence. If America's rewards are turning into a kind of curse, Hacker understands that it is because the country committed itself with a large measure of idealism to salvation by good works−a not unreasonable goal until the machine came along to make a parody...
...question remains, is it time for Hacker−or anyone−to write the country off? It may be too late to trot out again the "We are a young country" routine. But there is also a premature hysteria to the new-style despair, as if American opinion were going from polarized optimism to polarized pessimism−from the foolish complacence of thinking we were the best to the equally foolish self-contempt of accepting that we are the worst...