add to Gilligan?
Christopher Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World
(1977)
[170] The therapeutic conception of insanity, disease, and crime repudiated theological assumptions of their inevitability and relieved the patient of responsibility for his actions, insisting that he was neither possessed nor willfully sinning, but sick. The new conception of the family as an asylum similarly repudiated fatalism and the assumption of original sin, insisting on the child's innocence and plasticity. ... Whereas the church, in attempting to stamp out sex, had merely made it an obsession, these theorists maintained, marriage put sex at the service of procreation and encouraged a healthy acceptance of the body. This...had demonstrably better effects on the health of the individual and the community, according to bourgeois moralists, than the church's denial of the body.
From the beginning, a medical view of reality thus underlay attempts to remodel private life. The struggle between the new remissions and the old proscriptions, between personal fulfillment and
[171]
self-sacrifice, between the ideology of work and the ideology of creative leisure, began in the nineteenth century. Liberal clergymen themselves participated in the campaign to transform religion into moral and mental hygiene. They allied themselves with a nascent feminism and with the campaign to feminize society by extending the domesticating influence of women to institutions beyond the home. The religion of health had a special appeal to women because of its concern with personal relations, its attempt to substitute domestic enjoyments for the rough and brutal camaraderie of males, and its glorification of the child and of maternal influence on the child's development. The conflict between the work ethic and the therapeutic point of view, which became sharper as the century wore on, also presented itself as a conflict between masculine and feminine "spheres"—the split between business and "culture," the practical and the aesthetic,
This is weird! Suddenly "culture" is feminine. Perhaps the older nature-culture dichotomy makes a bit less sense under postindustrialism than under early industrialism; "culture" being ultimately a social product, there surely must be a version of it based on the "feminine" version of sociality (e.g. "personal relations" and "domestic enjoyments" above, which certainly can form the basis of some "culture," just not the of the "masculine" "culture" of industrialism's heyday.)
so characteristic of bourgeois society and of American society in particular.