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

From the bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed, an explanation of recent sexual culture and the loosening of marriage bonds in recent history.'Finally someone is offering a new, utterly plausible explanation...of loosening marriage bonds. According to Barbara Ehrenreich...it is men who started walking off, in search of freedom from their stifling role of breadwinner/success-machine. The shock—and exhilaration—of this book comes from the recognition that here is a woman who has dared to look beyond the everyday assumptions about love and commitment to examine which bonds between men and women can endure and which may last forever.”--Vogue "These men crafted and popularized the ideology that had supported the breadwinner ethic, and when the ideology changed, it was because they changed it. For this reason I feel justified in using a more active construction than the 'collapse of the breadwinner ethic' and talking about a male revolt--though hardly organized and seldom conscious of its goals--against the breadwinner ethic. As a feminist, I have been busy with another revolt for the past twelve years, and I approached this one with initial antagonisim, a gradual increase in understanding and, finally, a certain impatience. The great irony, as I will argue later, is that the right-wing, antifeminist backlash that emerged in the 1970s is a backlash not so much against feminism as against the male revolt. We live in a time that is dangerous to dissidents of all persuasions, and not least to those too helpless and impoverished to dissent. The question is whether we rebels of both sexes have enough in common to work together toward a more generous, dignified and caring society."--Introduction (page 13) From the bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed, an explanation of recent sexual culture and the loosening of marriage bonds in recent history. "Finally someone is offering a new, utterly plausible explanation...of loosening marriage bonds. According to Barbara Ehrenreich...it is men who started walking off, in search of freedom from their stifling role of breadwinner/success-machine. The shockand exhilarationof this book comes from the recognition that here is a woman who has dared to look beyond the everyday assumptions about love and commitment to examine which bonds between men and women can endure and which may last forever.- -Vogue The fact that men marry in precisely the same numbers as women do conceals a basic inequality of motivation: namely, that in the sort of marriage we have rather suddenly come to see as "traditional," women need men much more than men need women. An analysis of recent cultural evolution argues that the abandonment by men of the traditional male commitment to the "breadwinner ethic" has had the greatest impact on changing sex roles