>On the connection between issues like unemployment and relationship
>problems:
just a point of order: I'm not sure how unemployment got into this. the specific case i was talking about was about someone who refuses work in order to watch the soaps, but also because he's angry about a lay off and angry that he probably won't ever "make it." he'd gotten a new, comparable job after the lay off, he just didn't like it, so he quit. she works for the same company that he quit. he feels that the work is "beneath" him, even though it paid the same. their main problems are about each person's gendered expectations of how the other ought to behave, what kind of job and job opportunities and expectations one should have, what their duties are around the home, etc.
similar things happen in Arlie Hochschild's _Second Shift_. The women who had jobs that were more important and more highly paid than their husbands often ended up doing more work than women who had lesser jobs than their husbands. The wives who made more money had to compensate by doing more housework so their husbands wouldn't feel even more threatened.
As an aside, Kathleen Gerson studies men who did close to half of their share of the housework. Those men were mostly men who had hit a wall in their careers, realized that they'd never go further and decided to renegotiate their relationship to wife, children, home, and housework. That is, they renegotiated their identities, finding satisfaction in family/home where they would otherwise have found it at work had their careers been successful.
In my own research on downsized professionals, men did the same. I described this as renegotiating their identities by redefining what success meant to them. I should note that it was the younger men who tried to readjust by finding meaning in family/ friends/home. The older men, 50 and up, didn't because they didn't reject or resist their downsizing. Indeed, they actively embraced the "new economy" arguing that this is the way is _should be_. Younger men, however, were far more jaded and often had been laid off before.
At any rate, women, OTOH, hated the "new economy" pretty uniformly, openly criticizing it. (Mind you, they were as high up on the corporate ladder as the older men, so...) Women renegotiated their identification with work and success. They chose to drop out of the corporate world altogether and look for "meaningful" work: their own business or work for a non-profit or political/social organization they felt gave their lives some meaning.
when I have time, I'll be happy to tell you more about the Centertown Project, which was an attempt to reinvigorate civil society in a small community in the rustbelt. We ran out of funding and the man who'd initiated the whole thing became ill with Parkinson's, but I think that the thrust of our work would be something the left could draw on.
I have one question, though. How do rent parties address the structural issues of unemployment? I assume I know what rent parties are, but perhaps there is a social history there that I'm unaware of.
Carol Stack talks about how the habit of sharing--the normative ethos, in fact, that one must share one's abundance when one obtains any at all--can be a problem. That is, when one couple in her research saves up enough money to "move out" they never do because they are expected to share their abundance with down and out relatives and friends. While having a more communal sense of property certainly helps the community survive, I'm not sure how the practice gets at the bigger issue: how fucked that people don't have enough to live on in the first place, white flight, deindustrialization, racism, etc.
are we just talking at cross purposes here?
kelley
kelley