It is a great pleasure to address you
young conservatives of Texas. Being young is wonderful, but to be
conservative can be difficult. In the present culture, you are often
outsiders, distrusted, even shunned by the politically correct mainstream. I
admire you and thank you for your willingness to defend conservative
principles.
My topic is the question, "Can the Traditional Family Survive
Feminism?" My
answer is, "Perhaps, but with great difficulty." In the movie Saving Private
Ryan, there is a very moving scene in which the dying leader of a group of
men that had rescued Private Ryan from behind enemy lines tells the grateful
private to "earn it." Many died in World War II so that we could live in a
better world. I doubt that we have earned it. The immediate post-war period
did witness our mid-century's golden age of the family, with high marriage
and birth rates, low illegitimacy, divorce, and crime rates, and the growth
of a broad and stable middle class. But then our marriage and birth rates
plummeted, while the rates of crime, unmarried cohabitation, divorce,
illegitimacy, and abortion skyrocketed. We now have the highest divorce and
abortion rates in the western world, and one out of three children born
today in this country is illegitimate.
How did such a massive change in social values occur in just two decades? No
foreign enemy, no force of nature, no economic catastrophe caused our social
and moral decline. We did this to ourselves. We trashed our own society. The
force that I indict as critically, but of course not solely, responsible for
our plight is the contemporary
feminist movement which was revived in the
1960s. As my book, Domestic Tranquility, documents, the homemaker and her
family were the primary target of a vicious and successful war waged by this
movement. Proof of that success is all around us. Two years ago, the front
page of The New York Times quoted then President Clinton's statement
praising the efforts to put welfare mothers into the work force and their
children into day care. He said: "Work is more than just a weekly paycheck";
"It is, at heart, our way of life. Work lends purpose and dignity to our
lives." In the 1950s, a president would have been far more likely to say
that the home and the family and the rearing of children--not market
work--was, at heart, our way of life, and that no other way of life could
have a higher purpose and a greater dignity than rearing one's own children
at home. Who dares make such a statement today? The latest New York Times
Style Manual tells the writer not to use the term "housewife" and to resist
using the term "homemaker" because it is "belittling." As one
psychotherapist has noted, although "1950s' culture accorded its full-time
mothers unconditional positive regard," today's "stay-at-home mothers I know
dread the question 'And what do you do?'"
In 1998, Time magazine had a cover story asking "Is
Feminism Dead?" and
voicing regret that perhaps it was. Noting that only 28 percent of women
said that feminism is relevant to them, Time deplored the fact that Ally McBeal was the most popular female character on television. Ally was an
unmarried lawyer with an excellent job in a law firm, leading the life of a
young sexual revolutionary. Living precisely as feminists encouraged women
to live, she was doing exactly what her society had socialized her to do.
However she identified herself, Ally, like many women today, played the role
feminism scripted for her.
To the annoyance of Time and Feminists, Ally was discontented with her
unmarried state and was more concerned with her "mangled love life" than her
career. Surprise! Although Ally was smart enough to graduate from law
school, she had apparently not yet been able to discern the connection
between her pursuit of casual sex and her unmarried state. As Robert Wright
bluntly puts it in his book The Moral Animal, "if it is harder to drag men
to the altar today than it used to be, one reason is that they don't have to
stop there on the way to the bedroom."
Far from dead,
feminist ideology is now incorporated within the fabric of
our society. The crucial question today is whether real manliness is dead.
For if feminism's domination of our culture is ever to be significantly
weakened, manliness must be resurrected. If it is not, women have little
choice but to live by the feminist script. Men should understand that this
script is extremely demanding of a woman and can leave very little of her
left over for her husband or their children. But is it fair to wish
feminism
dead? Doesn't feminism only want women to lead whatever life they choose?
Feminists claim that they simply want women to have the opportunity to fulfill their potential without having the barriers of society strung so
tightly around their goals that women have little chance of success. These
goals, feminists will say, can include being a homemaker--solely that. But
feminists speak with a forked tongue, for the actions of their movement
belie their words.
Within the memory of no one living today have the barriers of society been
strung so tightly that women could not pursue careers if they chose to. From
the time in middle school when I decided to become a lawyer (that was in
1941) until I left my law firm to raise a family, I encountered no barriers,
but only support and encouragement. Living on the edge of poverty in the
working class with my divorced mother, I could not have succeeded otherwise.
When I entered college in 1947, I knew that women were in all the
professions. The doctor who performed my pre-college physical was a woman.
Women, in fact, were in the first medical class at Johns Hopkins University
in 1890. They now are the majority of entering students at the most
prestigious medical schools. My mother's divorce lawyer in 1936 was a woman
and a mother. And the president of the bank where I opened my first account
in 1942 was a woman and a mother, Mary G. Roebling, who said American women
have "almost unbelievable economic power" but "do not use the influence [it]
gives them." Women's failure to pursue opportunities in the workplace has
always been much more of a choice than feminists admit. The most significant
barrier to a woman's market success is her own unwillingness to constrict
her maternal, marital, and domestic roles.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman--the feminist whose writings were the foundation
for the work of Simone de Beauvoir and
Betty Friedan--wrote in 1898 that the
mistreatment of professional women "is largely past." "The gates are nearly
all open," said Gilman, and the "main struggle now is with the distorted
nature of the creature herself." Remember that she said this in 1898!
Contemporary feminism is grounded on Gilman's belief that a distorted nature
characterizes those women who prefer homemaking and child-rearing to
marching through those open gates into the workplace.
It was this struggle to convince the homemaking creature like me of her
distorted nature that Betty Friedan took up in 1963 in The Feminine
Mystique. Friedan berated women with the fact that "despite the
opportunities open to all women now," even the most able "showed no signs of
wanting to be anything more than . . . housewives and mothers." Echoing
Gilman, she complained that so few women were pursuing careers even though
all professions are open to women, since the "removal of all the legal,
political, economic, and educational barriers." Remember that Friedan said
this in 1963 before the concept of affirmative action was developed.
Far from claiming that discrimination kept women from the workplace, Friedan
blamed the housewife's belief that "she is indispensable and that no one
else can take over her job." She was right; that is precisely how many of us
did feel. Friedan sought, therefore, to destroy the housewife's confidence
that she was engaged in an important activity for which she was uniquely
qualified. Feminism's effort to re-educate housewives as to their distorted
nature and degraded status pitted the most educated, sophisticated, wealthy,
aggressive, and masculine portion of the female population against women who
generally possessed less education, wealth, and worldly experience, who were
more likely to be docile than aggressive, feminine than masculine.
Thus began the contemporary feminist movement. Its founding principle was
that the traditional male role as a producer in the workplace is superior to
the female domestic role. Feminists urged women to abandon homemaking and
child-rearing as inferior activities and to enter the workplace so that
women would become independent from men and gain equal political and
economic power with them. In the words of economist Jennifer Roback Morse, a
feminist who had second thoughts, the movement chose "'Having it All' as our
slogan and equality of income as our goal," and so she says, "we embraced a
shallow materialism and a mindless egalitarianism." Morse wisely asks: "When
we harden our hearts to place a six week old baby into the care of
strangers, who will moderate us?" The feminist egalitarianism that Morse
speaks of is, it should be clear, only vis-à-vis men, not vis-à-vis other
women. The movement has largely been concerned with professional women, and
it is the most elitist of ideologies. Feminists denounce the worthlessness
of homemaking and of child-rearing, yet the movement's goals require the
existence of a servant class, a lower-class infrastructure of other women
who will perform those domestic and child-rearing activities which feminists
scorn.
In pursuit of their goal to drive all women into the work force, feminists
waged war on what had been the two underpinnings of our civil society, the
traditional family with a breadwinner husband and homemaker wife and
traditional sexual morality. The tangle of pathology that so many of our
families have become is proof of this war's success. One of feminism's
primary tools in their war was promotion of the sexual revolution. Because
feminists correctly perceived that a woman's child-rearing role is the
greatest impediment to her career success, they encouraged women to
postpone, or even forgo, marriage and, if they did bear children, to leave
the bulk of child-rearing to paid employees. In sum, women were told to
abandon what had been, for many, the very successful "matrimonial strategy,"
which was to marry young, bear three or four children, and work outside the
home only until a child was born and, perhaps, return to work once the
children were grown.
The sexual revolution undermined the matrimonial strategy by encouraging
women to engage in promiscuous sex on the same terms as men. As Richard
Posner correctly notes in his book Sex and Reason, the "freer women are
sexually, the less interest men have in marriage." Since their own interest
in marriage was minimal or non-existent, feminist sexual revolutionaries
urged women to abandon the ideals of premarital virginity and marital
fidelity as vestiges of discredited Victorian morality. Premarital sex, they
said, should be seen as a morally indifferent and harmless source of
pleasure.
How harmless this source of pleasure was is indicated by the fact that the
United States now has the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases and
of abortion in the Western World. 24 million Americans, for example, are
infected with the Human Papilloma Virus, an incurable sexually transmitted
disease linked to over 90 percent of all invasive cervical cancers, which
are the number two cause of women's cancer deaths. Sexually transmitted
diseases cause twenty percent of our cases of infertility--an increasing and
heartbreaking problem in our society that is now so familiar to those who
know women in their late 30s and early 40s desperately trying to conceive.
But this was inconsequential to the women who spearheaded the feminist
movement, only one of whom married and bore children and all of whom
rejected child-rearing as inconsistent with career achievement.
Thus, in 1965, feminist Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan
magazine, applauded the single sexual revolutionary because, unlike the
housewife, she was "not a parasite, a dependent, a scrounger, a sponger, or
a bum." In 1993, her revolutionary ardor still afire, Brown advised women to
look at their friends' husbands as potential lovers; she never felt guilt,
Brown said, about the wives who can't keep their husbands at home. Nothing
better illustrates how feminists molded our society than a comparison of
Cosmopolitan under Brown's editorship with the women's magazines of my
youth, which affirmed the homemaker's worth and the societal importance of
traditional virtues.
Our no-fault divorce regime that enables men to abandon and impoverish
families was crucial to the feminist goal. By subverting housewives' social
and economic security, no-fault enforces feminism's diktat that women must
abandon homemaking for market production. Betty Friedan explained that
feminist divorce policy purposely deprived women of alimony to force them
into the workplace. No-fault tells mothers it is unsafe to devote oneself to
raising children, warning them "that instead of expecting to be supported, a
woman is now expected to become self-sufficient."
No-fault's declaration of war against homemakers had exactly the result
feminists sought: to make women distrust their husbands and fear leaving the
work force; many women say they work only for divorce insurance. All fifty
states have no-fault divorce; only Louisiana, Arizona, and Oklahoma have now
slightly modified it. I have testified before two committees of the Texas
legislature in favor of bills reforming no-fault. Both times, the only
opponents of the bills were feminist lawyers.
Professor Herma Hill Kay of the University of California Law School at
Berkeley, who was one of the proponents of the ground-breaking California
no-fault divorce law, warns that reforming no-fault in order to protect
women who have already chosen traditional roles will only "encourage future
women to continue to select traditional roles." Kay concedes that "many
couples still choose to follow the traditional allocation of family
functions by sex," thus creating a family in which the wife and children
depend on the husband "for support." But, says Kay, women must learn that
"their unique role in reproduction ends with childbirth" and that "like
men," they should "lead productive, independent lives outside the family."
In order to teach this lesson to women, Kay argues, society must "withdraw
existing legal supports" for traditional marriage, a goal, she says, that
no-fault divorce laws now accomplish.
Anyone who wonders why our society so readily embraced divorce laws that are
patently hostile to the traditional family should know that the woman
expressing these views does not simply belong to a fringe group of so-called
radical feminists, but is a leading policymaker in our society. Not only was
Kay Dean and professor at Berkeley, but she was a member of the California
Governor’s Commission on the Family, A Co-Investigator on the California
Divorce Law Research Project, and the Co-Reporter of the Uniform Marriage
and Divorce Act, which means that she drafted the model divorce law that the
prestigious American Law Institute recommends for adoption throughout the
United States. The barbarians are not at the gates; they help run our
society.
Thus, at the urging of feminists, we have made marriages unilaterally
revocable at will, thereby rejecting traditional marriage and discrediting
it as a woman's career. And this is why feminists speak with a forked tongue
when saying that a woman's goals "can include being a homemaker--solely
that." If marriage cannot be a woman's career--and no-fault divorce tells
her it cannot--homemaking cannot be a woman's goal, and child-rearing by
surrogates must be her children's destiny. It is because feminists do in
fact reject homemaking as a legitimate goal that they never treat women's
underrepresentation in workplaces as legitimate. Rather, they see it as
something to be deplored and corrected on the theory that if they were not
discriminated against, women would be represented equally with men at all
levels within every workplace. The assumption underlying all affirmative
action for women is that no woman willingly chooses the domestic role.
Another weapon against housewives was to marginalize them by degrading their
role. Child care, in the words of one feminist, is "boring, tedious, and
lonely," and being financially dependent on a husband is "irksome and
humiliating." Friedan's Feminine Mystique described the housewife as a
"parasite" who lives without using adult capabilities or intelligence and
lacks a real function. "Parasite" became the feminist word of choice to
describe the housewife. In her famous essay setting forth feminist goals,
Gloria Steinem, the media darling, called homemakers "parasites,"
"inferiors" and "dependent creatures who are still children."
Decrying the lives of housewives as a "waste of a human self," Friedan
likened them to people "with portions of their brain shot away and
schizophrenics." Housewives are "less than fully human," she wrote, for they
"have never known a commitment to an idea," "risked an exploration of the
unknown," or "attempted . . . creativity." For me, those euphoric years when
I conceived, bore, and raised my children provided far greater opportunities
to explore the unknown and exercise creativity than did my years in the
workplace writing legal briefs.
A survey of women who have left the workplace to raise their children at
home shows the success of feminism's effort to degrade the housewife. The
most frequently mentioned disadvantage of not being in the work force was
not the loss of income but the lack of respect from society. Women at home
complain that the message they are bombarded with from the media, from
friends, and most hurtful of all, from family members--even their own
husbands--is one of reproach because they are wasting their education.
Commenting on my book, a friend who is a law professor, and much younger
than I, said that she and many of the women in her generation who gave up
child-rearing for careers were sold a defective bill of goods by feminists.
Many of her women friends who are lawyers, she writes, are "simply miserable
in the practice of law and in the 'escape' jobs on the periphery." "We all
engage in deception," she says, and "that deception is the modern Big Lie
that women find fulfillment in their careers," but "we have allowed the
media to so flavor our goals and views that we continue down a path we
despise."
My message is that the domestic life is not a sacrificial life and that
one's education is never wasted--you can use it every day. My education
enabled me to be a better mother, a more interesting wife, and to create a
many-faceted life out of my domestic role. My education showed me how to
find the greatest delight in the simplest activities of daily life. These
are rewards that can make an education worthwhile. A paycheck is not the
only source of value.
It should be clear that the feminist movement could have been orchestrated
by Playboy magazine: readily available sex for men without marriage; readily
available abortion to eliminate inconvenient children; and devaluation of
maternal commitment to child-rearing so that mothers would always work and
never become dependent upon their husbands. Did this movement really advance
the position of women in our society when it supported no-fault divorce, the
sexual revolution, and the glamorizing of careers at the expense of
motherhood, leaving behind broken families, mothers who are devalued and
abandoned, and young women who become the trophies--of either the bimbo or
brainy variety--that advertise men's success?
Many men have enjoyed the fact of women's increased sexual availability,
they have sloughed off old wives and acquired young "trophies" under the
sanction of no-fault divorce, they have encouraged abortions--thus avoiding
responsibility for children they have bred--and they will willingly see
women sent into combat to face the inevitable rape, injury, and death. In
the eyes of such men, women are not uniquely precious individuals but only
easily disposable sex objects. Contemporary feminism taught that lesson to
men.
A sea change has occurred in men who only several decades ago took pride in
their ability to provide for wife and children. With scarcely a whimper,
many men accepted the feminization of our society and capitulated to
feminist demands that impaired men's own earning abilities. Then, they too
encouraged their wives to leave children hostage to the vagaries of
surrogate care and pursue the economic opportunities, which would spare
husbands from assuming the role of breadwinner.
Feminism will not die and the traditional family will remain in peril until
we derail the feminist engine of reform by killing the sexual revolution, by
replacing no-fault divorce laws with laws that protect homemakers and
families, by ending preferential treatment of women in education and
workplace, and by reforming all laws that discriminate against one-income
families through requiring them to subsidize child care for two-income
families. All government initiatives designed to help families with children
must be directed to all families--not just to families that use child
care--for example, by increasing the federal income tax dependent exemption
and providing larger child credits.
But these things will not happen until a change occurs in those men who have
rejected the value of a woman's traditional role and of a man's
contributions that make this role viable. Without those contributions, what
do men think will define their manhood? If women's traditional role is
expendable, then, as increases in the number of well-educated, never-married
mothers indicate, so also are men expendable for all purposes other than
sperm donor. When men who no longer value the traditional role of either sex
abandon women to fend for themselves in the workplace, they teach women to
cease valuing men. The result is a society increasingly like Sweden's, which
has the lowest marriage rate and one of the highest illegitimacy rates and
employment rates of working-age women in the western world.
Not all women seek the passive, feminized male of feminist ideology. Some of
us consider child-rearing the most rewarding activity of our lives, and we
are happy to be dependent on a husband who enables us to stay home and enjoy
all the delights of a domestic life. We seek a man who believes that there
are real differences between men and women. We seek a man who does not
expect his wife to be a clone of himself. We seek a man who does not think
that the best he can do for a woman is to guarantee her unlimited access to
abortion, to assure her the right to fight and die in combat, and to create
for her a society that expects its children to be raised by someone other
than their mother. When a critical mass of the kind of man we seek appears,
feminism will begin to die, and the traditional family will cease to be in
peril.
Carolyn Graglia is the author of Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against
Feminism. |