The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency - Hardcover

Fineman, Martha Albertson

3.81

26 ratings by Goodreads

9781565847606: The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565847601 ISBN 13: 9781565847606

Publisher: New Press, The, 2004

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A brilliant expose of the contradiction between the American myth of self-reliance and the reality of an interdependent society. In a truly paradigm-shifting book, Martha Albertson Fineman, the influential and always-provocative legal theorist, makes the fascinating case that the sexually affiliated couple is not the appropriate building block for contemporary families. Rather, society should be organized around "caretaking relationships," particularly those involving children or elderly dependents. Having previously argued in her widely acclaimed The Neutered Mother for the end of marriage, Fineman here tries to extrapolate out beyond changes in the family itself to other adjacent social institutions, considering what types of adjustments are necessary to achieve a more just and realistic allocation of responsibility for dependency. Sure to cause an uproar in fields ranging from law to economics and social welfare, The Autonomy Myth offers an important new way to think about society and its institutions.

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About the Author:

Martha Albertson Fineman is a professor at Cornell Law School, where she directs the Feminism and Legal Theory Project. She is the author of The Neutered Mother and Law at the Boundaries, among other books.

From Publishers Weekly:

The director of Cornell University's Feminism and Legal Theory Project, Fineman here imagines legal structures that put caregivers-parents, children of the elderly, spouses, partners or others-at the center of a web of recognitions and subsidies, a framework that works to "reconceptualize and transform our notions about the family and its relationship to the state and other social institutions." Fineman (The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies) seeks to change how society defines and supports families, traditional or otherwise. Fineman finds that in the U.S., "collective responsibility...is privatized through the institution of the family," and that U.S. domestic policy is oriented toward "the delivery of social goods only in the case of family default." This set-up has allowed, on the one hand, a kind of deregulation of social goods as delivered by corporations and other sources, and on the other, a relative lack of support for many kinds of caregiving relationships, including same-sex households and partnerships. Fineman argues that the U.S. must extend the shield of privacy, in its legal sense, around such caregiving relationships, and support all of them with a guaranteed set of rights and subsidies. Putting caregiving, rather than sexual affiliation, at the center of policy, would reflect a recognition that "merely being financially generous with our own mothers or... wives will not suffice to satisfy the share of societal debt we generally owe all caretakers." While non-scholars should be able to follow Fineman's use of jargon and legal precedents, her book is largely theoretical, and lacks the case studies, anecdotes and reportage that would make her ideas more immediate to lay readers. Anyone who calls for "the abolition of marriage as a legal category," as Fineman has done previously and does again here, is bound to raise hackles, but Fineman makes an interesting case.
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