This essay discusses Anthony Giddens book with regard to women in Modern society.
IIntroduction
Anthony Giddens’ book tackles a vast and complex subject: the way in which institutions have influenced day-to-day social life in what he calls the “High Modern” era. “High modernity” is the society in which we live today: fast-paced, highly industrialized, and sometimes dangerous.
This paper will explain his theory and how it applies in everyday life, particularly to women.
IIDiscussion
Giddens’ provides a very succinct description of his theory for us:
“… modern social life is characterized by profound processes of the reorganization of time and space, coupled to the expansion of disembedding mechanisms—mechanisms which prise social relations free from the hold of specific locales, recombining them across wide time-space distances. The reorganization of time and space, plus the disembedding mechanisms … act to transform the content and nature of day-to-day social life.”
Basically what he’s saying is that society is now so fluid, with people moving easily around the globe, working and living in other countries, and raising children in new cultures, that the old paradigms of social life have broken down. We are no longer confined to one time and place, but can go where we wish, whenever we wish to do so. This fluidity has led to some significant problems, as well as great benefits.
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It’s easy to understand the significance of the new age for women, particularly women with children. Giddens discusses the formation of the child’s identity, and the concept of trust that accompanies it.
First, he defines humanity when he says that to be human is to know what one is doing all the time, and why. He also says that self-identity is “… the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her or his biography.” Thus in order to form an identity in which self-esteem is healthy, a child has to know what it is to be able to trust someone. (Trust is a very important concept in Giddens’ book, perhaps the most important.)
Giddens explains that life – the simple act of living – in inherently risky. In order to be able to function, we all have a sort of personal sense of invulnerability that allows us to accept the risks and keep going. Without it, we’d be paralyzed. This way of living, which he describes as “a generalized attitude of hope” is inculcated in us as infants. This is where we learn to trust the world, despite the fact that it can be a dangerous place.
In addition, creativity is tied to this basic trust. To develop creatively, an infant must acquire those routines that open up the space between the developing child and its caregivers. Since women are still the primary caregivers in our society, they will be the ones responsible for creating the trust that allows creativity, and the formation of self-identity, to take place.
Giddens makes many points about trust, but one that particularly struck me was that we all also learn “bodily discipline.” He doesn’t precisely define it, but we understand intuitively that he means we keep ourselves healthy, clean, fed, dressed, groomed; that we handle sex in a responsible manner; that we understand and care for our bodies. It’s necessary that we do this, because “routine control of the body is integral to the very nature both of agency and of being accepted (trusted) by others as competent.” Again I would point out that women are the ones who teach infants and children about their bodies, how they work and what they need; they also teach them about appropriate behavior.
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IIIConclusion
Women, it seems to me, are responsible for molding the children that will live in the High Modern era. As the primary caregivers in society, it’s up to the women to engender the trust, self-esteem, self-respect and bodily discipline that children need to become healthy, functioning adults in a society that is increasingly frantic, puzzling and difficult.
Bibliography
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford U. Press, 1991.
