From a book written in 1953 by Elton and Pauline Trueblood, which my friend (the Friend) had borrowed from her meeting house; she was reading parts of it aloud to us yesterday as we sat on the grass under a blue, blue sky while, let’s see, eleven children played around us.
The title, I believe, was The Recovery of Family Life; it seems to be out of print but is in many libraries and can be found used. What made this slim little volume so interesting was that the authors wrote about changes in the American family that we often think of as happening, on the whole, much later. They could see things beginning to change and they were pointing them out. In particular, writing for a mid-fifties audience, they tried to draw a comparison between the de facto, spontaneous changes in the American family (more women working, more small children placed in day care) and the ideological, planned changes called for by Marxist philosophy.
I hope I get a chance to read the book in full — it’s a very little book and in the short passages that my friend was reading to us there were many little gems that sparked our conversation for a long time that lovely afternoon.
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