Today Americans Are Overcome Not

A Society That Has Made 'nostalgia' A Marketable Commodity On The Cultural Exchange Quickly Repudiates The Suggestion That Life In The Past Was In Any Important Way Better Than Life Today.

Once Women Begin To Question The Inevitability Of Their Subordination And To Reject The Conventions Formerly Associated With It, They Can No Longer Retreat To The Safety Of Those Conventions. The Woman Who Rejects The Stereotype Of Feminine Weakness And Dependence Can No Longer Find Much Comfort In The Clich? That All Men Are Beasts. She Has No Choice Except To Believe, On The Contrary, That Men Are Human Beings, And She Finds It Hard To Forgive Them When They Act Like Animals.

Ideologies, However Appealing, Cannot Shape The Whole Structure Of Perceptions And Conduct Unless They Are Embedded In Daily Experiences That Confirm Them.

We Do Not Need To Minimize The Poverty Of The Ghetto Or The Suffering Inflicted By Whites On Blacks In Order To See That The Increasingly Dangerous And Unpredictable Conditions Of Middle-class Life Have Given Rise To Similar Strategies For Survival. Indeed The Attraction Of Black Culture For Disaffected Whites Suggests That Black Culture Now Speaks To A General Condition.

It Is No Longer An Unwritten Law Of American Capitalism That Industry Will Attempt To Maintain Wages At A Level That Allows A Single Wage To Support A Family.