Lillian Rubin, Families on the
Lillian Rubin, Families on theLillian Rubin's book, Families on the Fault Line, goes directly to the experience of everyday people and shows how the connection between economic decline and racial tension is continuously reinvented in America. She interviewed 162 families in all, mostly white, but including a substantial number of blacks, Latinos, and Asians, many from families she had kept in touch with since first interviewing them for her book Worlds of Pain, written about twenty years before. Rubin's compassion for her subjects' situation is clear, and this, added to her training as a psychotherapist, enables her to gain their confidence and draw out the truth about their experiences and their attitudes. She argues that the myth of America as a classless society keeps the problems of working-class families from being acknowledged and dealt with, and that, for these �invisible'' Americans, the shrinking economy has brought fear and anger, hopelessness and helplessness. Rubin sees an shocking rise in white ethnicity as frustrated white working-class families seek to place the blame for their problems on ethnic minorities--an attitude, she claims, that has been fostered by national administrations as a way of deflecting anger about the state of the economy and the declining quality of urban life. Rubin warns that failure to recognize the suffering of the working-class family and to seek solutions for its problems jeopardize ``the very life of the nation itself�. The most striking part of this book is the evidence of the political machine that practically invites racism and other divisive forces into the situation. Families on the Fault Line contributes to a broader understanding of the pressures on the family through the case studies that Rubin demonstrates by using real people to illustrate these many different areas of class, race, and ethnicity in the reading.
There are many current pressures on the family both internal and external.
The make-up of the family is not as "cut and dry" as it once was. The nuclear family is dead and what has replaced it has put all old theories about the family to the test. One major change has been evolving in recent years is the rise of the dual-earner family. Accompanying this dual-earning family change, the women�s position in the family has been changed radically from that of one hundred years ago. There are specifically three important issues have been raised about women�s position in the family. This first issue is that the development of gender inequality within the family is a result of the changing economy. The second issue is that capitalism being the only form of economy we are familiar with pushes for the working of every family member to create a strong economy. Lastly, the evolution of the family dispersed from economic development and instead become a more social issue. Because the position of women in the family has been so altered from past history,...
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