Mothers, whose need for connection is an especially high-stakes matter, are among the hardest hit by these shifts. Adrienne Rich notes that during the relative affluence of the mid-twentieth century, “the move to the suburbs, to the smaller, then the larger, private house, the isolation of ‘the home’ from other homes . . . The working-class mothers in their new flats and the academic wives in their new affluence all lost something: they became, to a more extreme degree, house-bound, isolated women.”[27] Such tendencies are exerting themselves internationally and with growing force under the
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