ON FEMINISM, FAMILY & COMMUNITY

...But Ehrenreich makes a valiant attempt nonetheless...

...Eliding my critique of radical attacks on the family with that "sinister alternative" (my phrase) to family breakdown embodied in the rise of cults, Ehrenreich trivializes both my concern and the horror of Jonestown...

...What about unequal pay...

...She cannot account for disaffection from the welfare state as anything other than meanspiritedness or racism...

...She detaches herself in the opening paragraph by introducing herself awkwardly in the third person as "someone who characterizes her own work as made possible in part by the intellectual ferment feminism has generated...

...and there is a great deal of impressionistic evidence that men of all classes are less disposed than ever to marry a woman who cannot "pull her own weight" financially, or to sustain a marriage after sexual interest has waned...

...Hmmm...

...I think that one reason Elshtain persistently maligns and misrepresents feminism—why she so totally neglects sisterhood and sees only "possessive individualism," why she cannot believe that feminists are "ordinary people" too—is that she is not too sure what we have been fighting for...

...These are not minor mistakes, Elshtain warns: look what happened at Jonestown, where cult members weren't even allowed to go home for Thanksgiving...

...The democratic and antihierarchical commitments of such feminists and radicals as Ehrenreich, who remain captive to an abstract vision of a "collective" order of freely choosing adults, are easily swamped, first, by the internal tensions between democratic imperatives and technocratic politics and, second, by the structural constraints and radicalizing force of that productive machine they must keep intact, but gear only to benign ends...

...This streamlined modern view of things is dramatically at odds with an alternative vision of the family as an intergenerational institution, the primary locus for the nurturance of vulnerable human existence, and an essential, social base for our human self-creation...

...But it is difficult to see why extending the welfare state is a radical move...

...Men are marrying an average of four years later than they did in the '50s...

...My vision holds that if we are to learn to care for others, we must first learn to care for those persons we find ourselves joined to by accident of birth...

...Such commitments are essential to a social order grounded in the image of a social compact or covenant rather than in contract and self-interest...

...If you want you can come along with me and my women's support group...

...She is a Catholic, mother of four and, until recently, a registered Conservative and the wife of a blue-collar worker...

...He or she is instead a business executive, a teamster, a feminist, office worker, farmer, or homosexual whose immediate identity naturally divides him or her from others...

...Are they all benighted dupes in full flight from Ehrenreich's promised feminist freedom...

...Ehrenreich claims that, for some bizarre reason, I publish in journals of the left (and, I might add, in feminist journals, to compound my perversity...

...One agency handles medical assistance, another job training, a third food stamps, and so on ad infinitum...

...This is often done for the most humane reasons and with an eye to promoting social justice —the greater the dislocation and social distress, the louder the calls for rational planning and liberal beneficence...

...I ran into her in June at a school function where, to my amazement, she embraced me like an old friend...

...She cannot explain opposition to her radicalism on the part of the very groups in whose "behalf' her dream is presumably dreamed...

...Taking a leaf from one of the more unedifying episodes in our recent historic past, she engages in a reversal best called "anti-red baiting...

...In the words of Sheldon Wolin: "The individual is not first and foremost a civic creature bound by preexisting ties to those who share the same history...

...Clearly, I should skulk on over to the right-wing where I belong...

...Nor do I think that restoring the family wage to men would necessarily restore the family, even on the capitalist terms sketched above...

...Treating cavalierly the ties that bind generations one to the other, grounding us as historical beings who have a past and look to the possibility of a future, Ehrenreich is blind to the pathos of homelessness, to the alienation of deracination...

...In this unlucky circumstance, ready-to-hand diatribe that shows up one's enemies and confirms simultaneously one's own status as spokeswoman for reason, justice, decency, and social progress won't quite serve...

...For society's cast-offs, the poor, racial minorities, the long-term unemployed, Ehrenreich's radicalism offers more social services...

...At this juncture there seems little left of me: my heritage is impugned, my radical and feminist credentials are in disarray, and my intentions are suspect...

...ethnic communities composed of patriotic, church-going folks who have hitherto been neglected by the left...

...All those who engage in political debate surely will he tempted by and occasionally succumb to the urge to set our opponents up the better to knock them down...

...For me to defend my track record on feminist issues would not suffice to clear me of Ehrenreich's charges for I have never, in her view, acted in good feminist faith...

...What about rape...

...Internally, this kind of family is likely to be permeated by the values of the marketplace: men, for example, come to feel they are "trapped," that their wives are "parasites" (and this tradition of male contempt and resentment predates the feminist revival by many decades...

...What she was decrying, in this phrase, was the futility of the housewife's daily routine, and the dreadful isolation in which it is performed...

...Again, Wolin: They are "targeted" by specialized programs that, in effect, fragment their lives...

...But she is wrong...

...My critique of this standard liberal agenda as radical politics is used by Ehrenreich to "prove" that I have gone over to hard-hearted Reaganomics...

...My grandmother will never read my essay...

...I too think it would be nice if every man earned enough to support a family...

...To be sure, publicists of liberal capitalism acquiesce in family breakdown even as they, unlike Ehrenreich, extol a sentimental version of domesticity...

...and (2) as late19th-century conservative feminism, which upheld "home values" and believed that homebound women could change the world by the sheer force of their feminine moral superiority...

...Ehrenreich's suggestion that single mothers living with their children may well be disqualified from my definition of "family" is ludicrous...

...If a person's life is first flensed by bureaucrats whose questionnaires probe every detail of it, and that life is reorganized into categories corresponding to public programs that are the means of one's existence, the person becomes totally disabled as a political being...

...Widely circulated" it may have been, but was it ever published...

...The language "socially irresponsible corporate etc...

...Brenda and I are both single mothers (which may disqualify us from Elshtain's definition of "family...

...wrote in 1971, that "there is no monolithic approach to the family among women in the movement...

...There were Marxist feminists—best represented by the Wages for Housework group—who strove to vindicate women's role in the family with the clumsy argument that housework "produces surplus value...

...She could no more think of herself outside the tissue of "unsere Leute" than she could fly...

...Before proceeding to the right-wing denouement of her argument, though, I have my own axe to grind about two of Elshtain's centerpiece concerns —feminism and the family...

...She would do better to think about the manipulative implications of social engineering and "rational" planning...

...Memory, it seems, becomes politically suspect if memories do not confirm a particular view of the past, and the people who gave it texture and meaning, as so much detritus to be swept into the dustbin of history...

...It is the children of single mothers who are most at risk from poverty, inadequate child care and, in the wake of Reagan's cutbacks, malnutrition...

...Ehrenreich is unmoved...

...For my grandmother," she tells us...

...Why would radicals do such a silly thing...

...This is an unobjectionable sentiment, and one shared by many feminists...

...For she, "someone" with no reference point "other than family and nation," is (or could be) party to "a cult . . . vastly more evil and destructive than anything Jim Jones managed to organize...

...Supposing we accomplished the massive downward redistribution of income necessary just to give the men a family wage, would the pristine "feminine" values be restored to our families and to society...

...Ehrenreich, "with all due respect," will not have my grandmother as a "role model...

...Then, to my greater amazement, she asked somewhat sternly whether I would be going to an upcoming antinuclear demonstration...

...She had little formal education, for she labored in the sugar-beet fields of Northern Colorado and cleaned other people's houses when she was a little girl and a young woman...

...Let's not forget the context: Friedan had nothing against marriage and children...

...With all due respect to Elshtain's grandmother, this image evokes for me a cult that was vastly more evil and destructive than anything Jim Jones managed to organize...

...This is because he or she has been deprived of the most elemental totality of all, the self...

...This is familiar enough, and pretty tame stuff, but Elshtain goes further...

...The unborn and newborn are similarly invisible as the "chosen" comings-together of age, class, and sexspecific persons are set up, not as one social form, but as the preferred alternative to "traditional" familiar and kin ties...

...By accepting the state and the culture of productivity as givens, by downgrading human ties that do not conform to "sovereign choice," Ehrenreich lends tacit support to a new world that will be very much like the one that preceded it, only more so...

...Well, I dug out one of my now-yellowed copies of this publication and, sure enough, as I recalled, it was an organ, not of a feminist group, but of that half-crazed Trotskyite sect, the Spartacist League...

...Once we are back at home with the children, we can try, somehow, to rebuild "organic communities" to infuse "female-created and sustained values" into the public domain...

...Why are women doing this...

...But since she presents herself as a feminist and publishes in a journal of the left, she has a claim on my—and other feminists'—attention, and I'm not so sure that this isn't what she's looking for...

...For the "citizen, unlike the groupie, has to acquire a perspective of commonality...

...q Jean Bethke Elshtain Replies I trust that Barbara Ehrenreich has recovered from the onerous task of responding to me...

...She disallows my right in good faith to engage feminism and the left as someone within that community...

...She ignores the family as the locus of deep emotional bonds and ethical imperatives, as the source of what Jane Addams called "the family claim...

...Thus we are enjoined to go out and demand that men be paid a family wage, so that their wives can stay home, their children will not be sent out to day care, and the family will not fall apart...

...Reflect for a moment on what Ehrenreich's argument fails to account for...

...My response is written with regret that Ehrenreich never seriously joins the issues I pose...

...The husband, in turn, is dependent on his employer, so that the family as a whole might as well be married 104 to capital...

...What about sexism...

...The point is that Ehrenreich, with apologists for corporate capitalism, views the family primarily in economic terms, as if this were its first and foremost "function...

...an astonishing number are choosing to remain single and live alone...

...If bourgeois individualism has not produced a just and stable social order, the alternative is not to submerge ourselves in the mystic body of the Volk...

...But Ehrenreich has no doubt whatever about my true motivation: I "present" myself as a feminist in order to get the attention of real feminists like herself, thereby deflecting such real feminists from important matters by forcing them to respond to odious arguments...

...Fascism ran roughshod over family, community, and religious ties in the name of an overarching nationalistic loyalty...

...Being a feminist, I think it would be even nicer if every woman also earned enough to support a family—but let's leave that aside for a moment...

...Now Ehrenreich's suspicions about my doctrinal purity are confirmed when she arrives at the "rightwing denouement" of my argument...

...That is blatantly false...

...That is, Ehrenreich's determination to limit the range of debate within feminism and the left requires that her response to me be a strategic, not a substantive one...

...I have tried to understand this disaffection from liberalism and its radical alternative (of Ehrenreich's sort) and have argued that the animating ethos of women's familial and communal identities may serve as the nucleus of an alternative to atomistic and technocratic politics...

...The two levels of Ehrenreich's argument—personal slander and political excommunication fused with self-serving personal and political celebration —operate to a single end, to quash debate among feminists and radicals on contested and vital matters...

...The thinness and fragility of this scheme of things is glossed over as its enlightened modernity is celebrated...

...Whether because of divorce, desertion, or the failure to marry at all, increasing numbers of women are both raising and supporting children on their own...

...In the most fundamental sense, no, simply because the family that is based on the family wage has always been very much a capitalist, market-bound institution itself...

...Out in the smaller cities and in the suburbs, the women who were drawn to feminism in the early '70s were, for the most part, already wives and mothers, and eager to get past the theory and on with the movement...

...To summarize her argument as best I can: Capitalism has been undermining the family, and radicals (leftists and feminists) have been mindlessly cheering it along, thus losing the allegiance of "ordinary people," sometimes introduced as "ordinary decent people...

...Elshtain would like a kind of feminism that honors the values associated with women's traditional domestic role— nurturance, caring, and so on—above the values of the marketplace...

...Many will recognize Elshtain's argument as (1) the kind of "backyard" populism popularized by Harry Boyte and others, in which social change is supposed to come from (white...

...That may help to account for the animus of her piece, a diatribe that alternates between flip sarcasm and crisp matter-of-factness, as if any fair-minded and genuinely radical person will see things her way...

...Unlike Ehrenreich, I cannot claim to speak in the name of the future...

...For example, she cites a 103 "widely circulated" essay by Laurel Limpus that described the family as "the central agent of oppression...

...We already knew that Elshtain was a conservative on social issues, but with this statement she joins the right on economic issues...

...If corporate capital has defaulted on the pact represented by the family wage system, so too have men, and—short of some plan to conscript them into marriage and compel them to hand over their earnings to their dependents—I do not see what feminists, "social feminists," or antifeminists, for that matter, can do about it...

...First, because they see the family as a part of an "enemy system" and, second, because they see that family ties detract from devotion to "the Cause...

...She claims that I accuse radicals and feminists of doing a "silly thing" by "mindlessly cheering" from the sidelines as capitalism undermines the family, for in so doing these groups lost the allegiance of "ordinary people...

...Someone who has no reference point other than family and nation, and who cannot sort out a historically responsible "I" from either, is not my idea of a role model...

...Should any doubt linger as to the true nature of my essay and its intent, Ehrenreich, not content to anti-red bait me, throws out the tantalizing suggestion that my grandmother, whose presence haunts my essay and whose life inspired my reflections, is a protofascist, or the prototype for one...

...It turns out that to restore a happy, preEnlightenment state of Gemeinschaft, we are going to have to roll back most of liberalism...

...The number of single mothers who are in poverty, as defined by the federal government, almost doubled in the decade of the 1970s...

...No decent person can support Reaganomics as an alternative to such social welfare...

...The children who are going without school lunches, the young women who cannot afford prenatal care, the people lining up at soup kitchens and churches for a handout will, I suppose be expected to join in Elshtain's great refusal...

...The most astonishing piece of evidence Elshtain adduces is from her "now-yellowed copy of Women and Revolution," in which the family is denounced as a distraction to "the class consciousness of the workers...

...Ehrenreich's queasiness is misplaced...

...Along the way she recasts the political history of contemporary feminism in a manner most favorable to her case and most damaging to mine...

...and I think we are on our way to being, in a very concrete sense, "community...

...This family serves as a barrier to the total intrusion of market imperatives and forestalls premature leaps into an abstract universalism that invites an arrogant pact with the Weltgeist...

...Who gets left out of this voluntarist order...

...It must be annoying to face a challenge to one's unreflectively held dogma, particularly when the source of that challenge is a thinker who positions herself on the left and identifies herself as a feminist...

...Jean Elshtain, Christopher Lasch, and others who romanticize the traditional family as a haven for nonmarket values consistently overlook the economics of the situation...

...Yet at the mention of social services, Elshtain suddenly drops her role as the representative of maternal virtue against hard-hearted feminism and announces her ". . refusal to embrace the standard liberal agenda of more provision of social services to ameliorate the destructive effects of a socially irresponsible corporate structure...

...But even if one allows a wide berth for polemical enthusiasm, Ehrenreich's recasting of my argument is stunning in its selective vapidity...

...And, alas, since she has, so must I. If only she had published her rambling, pretentious essay somewhere else, like Commentary or, perhaps, The Pro-Family Reporter, I would have been spared this unpleasant task and could be spending the day doing something Elshtain and I are probably in substantial agreement about, like the laundry...

...There is a great deal more I would like to say about feminism—what it means in the lives of those of us who proudly count ourselves as feminists, what it means as a political force in the United States today (note, for example, the growing "gender gap" in voting patterns)—but, for brevity, let me end with my own paradigmatic image of a "strong woman...

...I have suggested that the most radicalizing force at work in our time is capitalism...

...the "I" of the self was always a "we" located within a dense web of human ties...

...Look what happened at Jonestown," she cracks, "where cult members weren't even allowed to go home for Thanksgiving...

...Ehrenreich is made "queasy" by the image of a woman whose identity is bounded by family and her sense of "peoplehood" (not nationalism...

...She seems willing to give over to the right all serious discussion of family, community, and traditional values...

...Why these journals, including Dissent, should misguidedly print essays that really belong in neoconservative or right-wing publications only deepens the mystery...

...Feminism did not singlehandedly "destroy the family" in the 1970s...

...I hope to clarify certain matters for myself and for others who no longer find delusory comfort in the assurance that the crisis on the left is attributable solely to our nefarious foes and the "false consciousness" of those who enthusiastically or half-heartedly endorse them...

...Since this is not true, she is forced to rely on some pretty specious bits of evidence...

...I argue that the popular understanding of family locates its origin in ties of kinship and marriage—certainly true with mothers and children...

...A "feminist" who devotes much of her considerable journalistic energy to attacking feminism is bound to be an attention-getter, and while I appreciate the novelty of her stance, I am not so sure about the ethics of it...

...3) restore and expand the publicly sponsored social services—Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, Food Stamps—that poor families depend upon for subsistence...

...For the poles that frame her vision are those of the state, on the one hand, and a wholly voluntarist "community" of like-minded persons, on the other...

...These strategic ploys play off against one another as Ehrenreich interweaves innuendo, sarcastic put-down, and sinister suggestion with her presentation of an "authentic" left-wing 106 and feminist alternative...

...She remains most at home in the language of her German Bible and her books of prayer and devotion...

...Ehrenreich's second strategic move is to caricature my argument, to set it up as an easy target for her polemical riposte...

...Is there no room in her scheme of things for a few tears to be shed for these victims, 276 of whom were minor children, many of them poor, black wards of that welfare state in which Ehrenreich ultimately places such confidence...

...All the internal dependencies that hold it together depend on that link to capital, the male wage...

...Elshtain insists that feminism, or at least late'60s to early '70s feminism, was relentlessly and almost monolithically "antifamily...

...There were feminists fresh from the counterculture who were indeed antifamily and disposed to a utopian communalism...

...I say this only to recall the dangers of sacking the Enlightenment values of rationalism, liberalism, and democracy...

...She dusts off her full panoply of anticonservative rhetoric and finds that it will pretty much do the job—if she can convincingly portray me as a Moral Majoritarian in left-wing, feminist drag...

...If it does not, if there are too many hassles, one opts out and seeks something more fulfilling...

...My stance is radical in relation to the ethos of modern liberalism and to that mode of left-wing feminist protest Ehrenreich represents...

...I call for a selfdefinition that is solicitous of place and concerned with popular understandings of family and community...

...The reason I recalled this, incidentally, is that Women and Revolution devoted most of its space to attacking feminists (me among them) for our petty-bourgeois deviationism...

...is leftist, but the intent is as bad as anything to come out of the New Right...

...For this reason I shall recast my argument as I respond, for I do not want the substance of my case to be lost as I defend myself against Ehrenreich's attempt to write me out of the universe of left-wing and feminist debate...

...There were equally radical feminists—some of the members of New York's Redstockings group— who upheld marriage and monogamy...

...Elshtain is a little coy about exactly how much will have to go, but I don't see much future for divorce, day care, or publicly sponsored social services of any kind if her brand of "social feminism" gets its way...

...A neighbor, I will call her Brenda, is without a doubt one of those "ordinary people" Jean Bethke Elshtain claims to speak for...

...The same holds for state-socialist systems and is increasingly true of our liberaltechnocratic order, its statism curbed by lingering democratic imperatives and by the "refusals" of people protective of place, committed to community, family, friends, and a future for their children...

...2) provide high-quality day care for the children of all working mothers...

...The new model family, besides being the locus for consumption, may also serve as an interpersonal association to "fulfill" the "self...

...She boldly tells it like it is: "Elshtain, never 'correct' ["always a conservative"] on the social issues has now gone over to Reaganomics," and has been unmasked at last as one of "them...

...And who is Ms...

...When I got to this point in Elshtain's reflections, I began to have a queasy feeling about the "image of a strong woman" held out to us at the beginning of the article, Elshtain's grandmother, a farm woman of German descent...

...EDS...

...The answer, apparently, is "no," for Ehrenreich's radical-feminist agenda is in fact a souped-up version of the liberal welfare state...

...Where Elshtain parts company with feminism and, I believe, with reality is that she imagines that the "feminine values" are uniquely engendered by the traditional family, in which a male breadwinner supports his full-time homemaker wife and their children...

...But it is not too late for feminists to shape up and become "social feminists," who are to occupy themselves by indicting "an economic system that denies families a living, family wage and that forces both parents into the labor force, often against the will of the woman...

...Ehrenreich also finds my ethics suspect, arguing that I long ago mislabeled myself with malice aforethought to get all that attention and just maybe, she hints, to ensure a cushy "senior academic position...

...Statist politics, whether it calls itself liberal, radical, or feminist, is interest-group politics...

...But most of these debates about "the family" went on in the urban and campus enclaves of intellectual feminism...

...q • Another comment on Jean Bethke Elshtain's article, by Marshall Berman, with her reply will appear in our Spring issue...

...105 . . . Then Brenda's husband split (a not uncommon occurrence in this outwardly peaceful suburban neighborhood), and I heard through the girls that she had, with great difficulty, pulled herself together and gotten a clerical job...

...Instead, I hope to serve certain human values and to keep alive, through political discourse, the texture of lived experience and personal memory...

...This image, not my argument, parts company with reality and it does so calculatingly, from strategic aims...

...In a self-interested group order, politics is a struggle for advantage and citizenship dissolves...

...The wife's dependence on her husband—whatever feelings may or may not be involved—is also a financial dependence...

...This does not preclude by fiat other intimate arrangements, but it insists that in a democracy popular understanding should carry some force...

...My argument holds that when the family as a mediating institution is either nonexistent or has been purposefully destroyed, individuals become more vulnerable, whether they face a megalomaniac aiming to create one large "family" under his absolute command or a large-scale bureaucracy which sees them as "clients...

...But at least I will not, through my silence, have permitted her to pass away as in a dream...

...But one wonders: if Jonestown is funny what sort of human tragedy would Ehrenreich find truly hilarious...

...She sees in such ties the origins of fascism...

...WHAT WE CAN HOPE to do something about without abrogating anyone's civil rights (I know, another liberal post-Enlightenment concept, but I'm fond of it) is the increase in female poverty that has resulted, in part, from the collapse of the family wage system...

...Given her version of things, I become an obsessive crank, yearning for Gemeinschaft and generally twisting the truth of the matter...

...I would hate to think that Elshtain was running out of legitimate quotes to prove her point...

...Or does their disaffection have deeper roots...

...must write a piece on feminism, family and community," Jean Bethke Elshtain declaims in her opening sentence...

...For the ultraliberal, all the old constraints are intolerable, so one is free to redefine "the family" any old way...

...When I admitted I would be, she said, "That's wonderful...

...To read Ehrenreich one would never know, for example, that the ERA fight was not a clear-cut battle between men and women but one between organized groups of women who dominated both sides of the struggle...

...We did not, on the face of it, have much in common except for the fact that our little girls were friends...

...But with the liberal technocrat, Ehrenreich can think of no better response to the radicalizing force of capitalism than to redefine the family in line with the market imperatives and 107 consumerist ethos it trails in its wake...

...So far so good or, at least, not so terrible...

...Ehrenreich offers a tidied-up picture of the contemporary American political world in which capitalists, Reaganites, male oppressors in traditional families, racists, "romantics" who find some good in the past, and radicals of dubious pedigree, the unwitting allies of reaction—on the one hand—and enlightened reformers and revolutionaries, fighting the good fight against sexism, racism, rape, unequal pay, oppression of every kind, and right-wing reaction, promising sisterhood, liberalism, democracy, and more and better social services—on the other— square off...

...Ehrenreich's other pole—voluntarist "community" —acquiesces in the dissolution of particular and generational ties...

...It seems to me that if we are to let ourselves be guided by the "female-sustained," non-market values of nurturance and compassion, we should be struggling mightily to (1) increase women's earning power so that single mothers can hope to become effective breadwinners...

...we are both feminists...

...109...

...The generous interpretation would be that she recognizes that there would not be so many women, like herself, in senior academic positions if it were not for that feminist "ferment," though one could also conclude that she is merely thankful to feminism for having given her a polemical bone to chew...

...Could there have been another publication called "Women and Revolution"—a feminist one (though, wherever it came from, the quote Elshtain uses sounds far more "left" than feminist...

...More important, "Feminism, Family, and Community" was an act of hommage to a remarkable 108 woman, my grandmother, she is still among the living—caring, chastising, instructing, calling upon us to act from "the better angels of our nature...

...At stake in our debate is nothing less than the way in which radicalism and feminism define themselves in relation to past and present...

...For just because a man earns a family wage does not mean that he has to share it...

...She calls for increased female earning power, more day care, more social services...

...Limpus...

...Or she quotes Betty Friedan's description, in The Feminine Mystique, of the home as a "comfortable concentration camp...

...Capitalism is a machine in incessant motion that constitutes the human subject as a sovereign consumer and forges an order in which market imperatives and a technocratic ethos fill up more and more of the available social space...

...The dislocations thrown up by this force are papered over, from time to time, by providing social services to its temporary or "permanent" victims...

...If one didn't know that Jonestown is a place where 900 human beings perished in a mass suicide-murder, this remark might be mildly amusing after a cynical, sophomoric fashion...

...The truth is, as the editors of the feminist anthology Liberation Now...

...One rarely encounters old or sick people...

...Later, when she gets around to explaining why something like feminism could have happened at all, she suffers another syntactical breakdown: "Feminist protest" becomes "a response by women to conditions of their identities that had grown problematic under the pressures of modernization and capitalism...