Persuade a Family Member That the World Today Is Better Than It Was 50 Years Ago

In this study, I am persuading my father that the world today is better than it was 50 years ago. I know it is not so easy to convince my father but I have few important points that can help me to motivate my father and to realize him that today we are in a much better situation. First of all I would like to say that in the beginning of 1950s all Europeans societies were clearly patriarchal. The world was not equally patriarchal, though. The powers of fathers, brothers, husbands, and of adult sons, although virtually everywhere overwhelming, did differ across classes and cultures. Furthermore, our story does not begin 'Once upon a time there was traditional patriarchy'. Such a notion is generally vacuous, ignoring the great variety of 'traditions' and their historical mutations, and it is particularly inadequate to capture the situation in 1960, when a worldwide wave of recent family change had just rolled onto the stone tablets of historical archives. Indeed, the era of 1970s was also a landmark for the rights of women.

By 1950, the European family had been subjected to at least three tremendous social and economic changes, the onslaught of which went roughly from the northwest to the southeast. The first one was proletarianization, the growth of non-propertied classes, dependent on the sale of their labor. Proletarianization is pertinent to patriarchy because the proletarian father has no property to transmit to his children, and because his fatherly power is subject to the superior powers of owners of land or capital.

Industrialization, finally, challenges patriarchy, and any family arrangements in existence, primarily by its large-scale severing of work-place from residence, thereby undercutting paternal control. While general employment statistics have generally been unable to distinguish domestic, proto-industrial manufacturing from factory production, there is no doubt that Europe saw an epochal industrial revolution in the course of the nineteenth century. Throughout 1960s there has been an optimism associated with the rise of science and its capacity to ameliorate the human condition. This feeling reached a high point following the Second World War with the rise of the consumer society and the creation of material wealth and prosperity on a scale seldom anticipated in earlier history. The consumer society also brought with it a host of social programs financed by taxes on the new wealth, waves of immigration and urban growth, as well as greater political emancipation for minority groups and women. It was in this context of unrestrained growth and prosperity that the first warnings about the unintended consequences of the technological society emerged.

Advocates of the information society have noted that the capital goods industries for data processing and telecommunications have rekindled competitive markets in the world capitalist economy. Technological innovations were initially promoted by the major industrial states as part of their military and strategic policies following the Second World War. In data processing, large U.S.-based multinational corporations have established ...