Family: Washington DC
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 1999
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Professor Giddens was director of the London School of Economics and he has been described as 'Britain's best-known social scientist since Keynes'.
The lectures are delivered from five major cities around the world, locating the lectures themselves within the cultural variety of the world across which they were broadcast.
In his fourth lecture, delivered from Washington DC, Professor Giddens examines the roles within the family and argues that the persistence of aspects of the traditional family, in many parts of the world is more worrisome than its decline. Professor Giddens believes that the most important forces promoting democracy and economic development in poorer countries are the equality and education of women and it is the traditional family that must be changed to make these possible. Sexual equality is not just a core principle of democracy, he argues, it is also relevant to happiness and fulfilment.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures. |
| 0:04.3 | This lecture in the series Runaway World, given by Anthony Giddens, was originally broadcast in 1999. |
| 0:14.4 | Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the National Press Club in Washington for the fourth in this |
| 0:22.1 | year's BBC Reef Lectures on Globalisation. Appropriately for a lecture series entitled |
| 0:29.0 | Runaway World, our distinguished speaker, Anthony Giddens, eminent sociologist and director of the |
| 0:35.6 | London School of Economics, is already well on the way |
| 0:38.6 | to traversing the globe. After an opening lecture in London, he's addressed audiences in Hong Kong |
| 0:45.1 | on the impact of risk in our lives and in India on the influence of tradition. So what better |
| 0:52.5 | place to come than to the United States for his next subject, |
| 0:56.6 | the changing role of the family? Perhaps nowhere else in the world has the debate over family |
| 1:03.4 | values been conducted with such impassioned vigour as in America. This, for many feminists, |
| 1:10.5 | is the place where the political fight for equality |
| 1:12.5 | has been waged longest and got furthest. This is the country where homosexual rights and |
| 1:18.8 | children's rights have been championed most energetically. And yet, there's also an opposite |
| 1:24.7 | trend here, a desire to preserve traditional family values in order to |
| 1:29.7 | stem what some see as a dangerous moral decline. American women have clung on to their legal right |
| 1:35.7 | to abortion, but the powerful anti-abortion movement has made it almost a taboo subject. In many places, |
| 1:43.0 | American homosexual couples can legally adopt, but at the same |
| 1:47.3 | time, a backlash against gay families means that over half America's states recently rushed |
| 1:53.1 | to ban same-sex marriages. And don't let us forget that this is the country where the arrival |
| 1:59.7 | of the telitub is, a British import, |
| 2:02.9 | prompted the suspicion in some quarters that the fact Tinky Winky had a red handbag |
... |
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