Word: socializes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...getting 23 miles to the gallon. The kitchen was streamlined with so much labor-saving gadgetry that meals could be prepared, served and cleaned up in less time than it took to boil an egg. Thus freed from household chores, Mom could head off to a committee meeting on social justice, while Dad chaired the men's-club clothing drive, and the kids went to bed at 10:30 after watching a PBS special on nuclear physics...
Sure enough, the computers are byting, the satellites spinning, the Cuisinarts whizzing, just as planned. Yet we are ever out of breath. "It is ironic," writes social theorist Jeremy Rifkin in Time Wars, "that in a culture so committed to saving time we feel increasingly deprived of the very thing we value." Since leisure is notoriously hard to define and harder to measure, sociologists disagree about just how much of it has disappeared. But they do agree that people feel more harried by their life-styles. "People's schedules are more ambitious," says John Robinson, who heads up the Americans...
...additional irony: all the time-saving devices may actually make people work harder. Sometime in the early '80s, suggests futurist Selwyn Enzer, Americans came to worship career status as a measure of individual worth, and many were willing to sacrifice any amount of leisure time to get ahead. "Social scientists underestimated the sense of self-esteem that came with having a career," he observes. These days, if an entrepreneur has not made his first million by the time he is 30, his commitment to capital accumulation is suspect. And in the transition from an industrial to a global service economy...
Children are scuttling from karate classes to play dates scheduled by Mommy's secretary. Their social lives out of nursery school may rival those of their parents in complexity. Meanwhile, the parents must work even harder to pay for it all. When Arlie Hochschild studied working couples in the San Francisco area for a forthcoming book, Second Shift, she found that "a lot of people talked about sleep. They talked about sleep the way a hungry person talks about food...
CITIZENS, A CHRONICLE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION by Simon Schama (Knopf; $29.95). Exactly 200 years after the bloody facts, a Harvard historian offers a fascinating, often surprising account of what went right -- and wrong -- during one of the world's most celebrated social convulsions...