Lillian Rubin, Families on the Fault Line

A detailed Summary of Lillian Rubin, Families on the Fault Line

Lillian 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 econom

According to what has been discussed so far the definition of a family

y 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.

The Modern family depends heavily on the all the institutions of society for

would be a non-capitalist unit in which the maintenance and reproduction of labor power takes place. The Webster's Dictionary describes a family as "a group of related things or people". Because the governments definition of family lets several groups that may still be considered families "slip through the cracks", this gives bargaining power to the family unit yet again to change government regulation. One aspect of the political sphere that the family continually challenges is gender equality. Starting with the latter part of the nineteenth century where waves of feminist protest began throughout the western world. Women organized in groups starting at the family level and gaining support from other women's groups. One of the first cases early feminists argued before the government was their collective right to vote. The women's movement appeared to lose its momentum after women gained the right to vote. But although women's groups were no longer held together by a single goal. They continued to fight for women's rights on several fronts. However, it wasn't until the 1960's that the movement regained its previous strength. Women in families are not the only ones who have argued with the political sphere and won some political rights. Some Gay families or same-sex couples have won the right to adopt children and in some states to get married.

economic family unit is reproduction. The goal of the family unit is

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Approximate Word count = 1488
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English