We don’t accomplish anything in this world alone… and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads form one to another that creates something. — Sandra Day O’Connor
This quotation from Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to sit on the US Supreme Court, speaks to the Worth found in human interdependence. Each of us is a thread in the fabric of the community. We can never complete a portrait of Worth without considering both personal Worth and Worth embedded in a community.
With this shift to a community-based perspective, we gain a better understanding of the life and labor of both the Mill Girls and Harvey Girls—two populations I have studies in collaboration with Dr. Rosalind Sun (Sun and Bergquist, 2021). More broadly, we gain an appreciation for the Worth inherent in the life led by each of us inside and beyond the workplace. We also gain appreciation for the settings and culture to be found in community. While a portrait can be rendered concerning the way Worth is found in an individual, the Worth found in community requires a landscape rendering.
In seeking to provide this broader portrayal of community-based Worth, I turn to wisdom provided by several historians (expanding the temporal horizon) and then to wisdom provided by several sociologists (expanding the spatial horizon). A common theme runs throughout this historical and sociological portrayal. This theme concerns something called “habits of the heart.” It is in these habits that a bridge is built between Personal and Collective Worth.
These habits are found specifically in communities of the United States. We Americans have often strayed far away from these habits and may be straying away from them right now in the mid-21st Century. However, there has always been a return of American communities to this concern for the welfare and Worth of its residents. American pioneers of justice, such as Sandra Day O’Connor, have repeatedly helped forge judicial decisions that lead American communities back to inclusion, support, and equity. These are the tapestry-based habits of the heart that produce collective and community-based Worth.
I now offer a more detailed consideration of those habits that are deeply embedded in American culture and community.
The American Community: Habits of the Heart
There is a historian and social observer from the 19th century to whom we direct our attention in seeking to understand something about the nature of Worth as it shifts from a personal focus to one of collective Worth, especially as this shift takes place (or is resisted) in American culture. I will introduce Alexis de Tocqueville (1835/2000). During the formative years of American democracy (1830s), Tocqueville journeyed to America from France—hopefully under better sailing conditions than our Colonists and Emigrants. He wrote about the “Habits of the Heart” that exemplified the best of American communities.
