Boulding

Feminist sociologist Elise Boulding wonders at the inner peace of mind, the autonomy, the quiet sureness, the serenity of Native American Indian squaws--their freedom from what Betty Friedan calls "the problem that has no name": For Americans, North and South, there is an alternative model for women close at hand, in the native American communities....It doesn't take many encounters with women tribal leaders who have the quiet confidence of centuries of traditional knowledge behind them to realize that here are a set of teachers for European-stock American women right in our midst. Where does their serenity and self-confidence come from?....A combination of humility and good sense should make it possible for non-indigenous American women to learn from Native American women. One supposes that the serenity and self-confidence goes with the lifestyle which causes so many of their babies to be born with fetal alcohol syndrome and makes their infant mortality rate so much higher than that of whites, which makes their men ten times more likely than white men to die before age 45, makes the Amerindian suicide rate triple that of the national average --their lack of self-discipline, their unwillingness to submit to patriarchal law-and-order, their sleazy self-indulgence which keeps them in their squalid poverty. "Another place to look for role models is in black Africa," says Ms. Boulding. "Every part of the world has teachers for women. These women of quiet self-confidence, with knowledge, with strength, are everywhere." In the following passage feminist Marilyn French describes the daily life of two of them from the Subcontinent of India: Two women gather seaweed on the Indian coast near Ahmadabad: they bend and rise, bend and rise, pulling up the greens, adding them to their pile. When they have as much as they can carry, they lug the pile up the beach to a wagon pulled over on the side of the road, dump it in the wagon, and return for more. They continue in this for hours, until the wagon is full. All the while, a man sits in the wagon, head nodding in the sun, holding the reins of his horse. He does nothing....Farm women in Africa (and India) are the most overworked humans in the world, working ten to fifteen hours a day at a host of jobs. A typical Zimbabwean woman's day begins at 3:00 A.M. Every day she goes to the river for water, weeds the fields (breast-feeding her baby as she works), chases animals away from crops, pounds grain into flour, prepares meals, and gathers wood (steadily walking farther with these heavy loads because drought and overcutting have depleted fuel wood). Poor women. Might their being so overworked have something to do with the lack of motivation of their men? These are "the most overworked humans in the world." But they do not suffer from "the problem that has no name," as women do in America, where Ms. Friedan holds the men up as models for women's emulation. Their men doze in the sun, go to pubs, idle their time away and expect to be served by their women. Suppose Freud's question "What does a woman want?" had been put to such a native American, Zimbabwean, Indian woman, what would her answer be? Perhaps: "I want to live in America, that women's paradise, to have a loving father who would care for me, buy me nice things, send me to a posh women's college like Smith where I could get a superior education and meet interesting people. After college I would want to marry a nice husband who would buy a split- level suburban home for me, a car and a station wagon and would protect me with life insurance and health insurance and let me go shopping with his credit cards and allow me to play golf and bridge on the afternoons when I don't shop. In America I would need to spend only 3 percent of my time on my maternal functions. In America I would live such an easy life that I would survive my husband by seven years (unlike here in India, where men outlive women). Or I could divorce him if I felt like it and take my children and his house and compel him to continue supporting me. I could join a feminist group and complain of how oppressed I was." Thus (perhaps) the yearning of the Indian woman, dreaming of the good life as Ms. Boulding dreams of the good life of third world women, and their serenity and quiet sureness. Suppose Freud's question were asked of an American housewife, someone like Betty Friedan. Betty Friedan would reply that she suffered from boredom or acedia ("the problem that has no name")-- but that she did not at all wish to live the life of the squaw or a Zimbabwean peasant woman or the seaweed gatherers of Ahamabad. When Betty Friedan complained that "society asks so little of women" or when Ibsen's Nora complained that her husband's pampering and coddling of her kept her from growing up and being a high achiever on her own, she was thinking of helping to share men's work in corporate offices, university classrooms, medical clinics, research laboratories. This is also what Dr. Gerda Lerner is thinking of when she says "What the cost was to society in general through the loss of talent and intellectual work of half the population cannot be estimated." Dr. Lerner isn't thinking of seaweed gathering. Would some Indian philosopher-playwright like Ibsen sympathize not (as Ms. French does) with the female seaweed gatherer but with her husband sitting idly on the wagon all day holding the reins of his horse--and allow him to complain (as Ibsen's Nora does) that he was suffering a "great evil" by being deprived of meaningful labor, perhaps driven, like the husband of of the squaw described by Ms. Boulding, to alcoholism or suicide? Here is another feminist complaint. Readers of Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas will remember her indignation over the money expended by educated parents on the education of their sons, not of their daughters. Thackeray calls this "A.E.F.," Arthur's Education Fund. "You who have read Pendennis," she explains: will remember how the mysterious letters A.E.F. figured in the household ledgers. Ever since the thirteenth century English families have been paying money into that account....It is a voracious receptacle. Where there were many sons to educate it required a great effort on the part of the family to keep it full. Virginia Woolf's complaint is that families will not make such sacrifices to educate their daughters. The reason, clearly, that these families understand the male role to be what Margaret Mead calls, "a social creation." Putting money into Arthur's education fund is the way to make Arthur a high achiever capable of supporting a family. The role of Arthur's sister is like the role of the Indian squaw, what Mead calls "a biological fact"--it doesn't need to be created. The non-creation of a comparable role for Arthur's sister might have enabled her to be a contented squaw of the sort envied by Ms. Boulding. But this merely "biological fact" won't suffice for Ibsen's Nora, or Virginia Woolf or Betty Friedan, who dazzled by male achievements in the real world, aim to found empires, build pyramids and sway multitudes, just like us peacocky males. "In the primitive civilizations of the South Sea islands," says Ms. Friedan, anatomy was still destiny when Margaret Mead first visited them. Freud's theory that the primmitive instincts of the body determined adult personality could find convincing demonstration. The complex goals of more advanced civilizations, in which instinct and environment are increasingly controlled and informed by the human mind, did not then form the irreversible matrix of every human life....Because the human body is the same in primitive South Sea tribes and modern cities, an anthropoligist, who starts with a psychological theory that reduces human personality and civilization to bodily analogies, can end up advising modern women to live through their bodies in the same way as the women of the South Seas. The trouble is that Margaret Mead could not recreate a South Sea world for us to live in But the price of leaving her in that role and not creating a role for her husband--or rather, her boyfriend, for the male in her life hardly functions as a husband or father--is that the squaw is pretty much the master of her own destiny: she functions without a male provider. The man is getting drunk or idling away his time while the woman does the work. What Virginia Woolf hates is that Arthur's sister can't escape from her biological role and get into Arthur's "invented" role where she will not be required to bear some man's offspring, change its diapers, get up with it when it cries during the night and so forth. A fair distribution of the money going into Arthur's Education Fund would enable her to escape these chores, get an education like Arthur--maybe remain childless, like Virginia Woolf herself and the heroines mentioned on page 14: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot. The idea suggests itself that Arthur's father and Arthur himself are more concerned about having families and bringing up children properly than is Virginia Woolf and her feminist sisters, few of whom, not incidentally, have families. This non-desire for having families is the key idea. This is why feminists want to have careers "so I don't have to depend on a man...so I don't have to live the kind of life my mother lived, so I can control my own reproduction, my own body, my own sexuality." Female autonomy is the goal: they want to live like my neighbor's cat, who, being female, runs her own reproductive enterprise once she gets herself impregnated by some otherwise useless male. Only the human female doesn't want kids, or not very many: it is the human male, like Arthur, who wants kids and is willing to work and create the wealth to pay for them and for the wife who bears them. Today the woman's way of handling this situation where Arthur wants a family and she is much less desirous of having one is to not have kids (like Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot) or to have them and then kick the old boy out and let him pay for them in absentia via alimony and child support. English sociologist Patricia Morgan informs us that there are five main ways by which wealth moves from one group to another. These five ways are thus summarized by Tom Utley in the London Sunday Express, 12 Feb, 1995: *From families with children to individuals without dependents. *From families with one main earner to couples with two full earners. *From two-parent families to lone parents. *From the child-rearing to the elderly. *From child-rearing at home to child-rearing outside the home. Utley complains against the British Tory party, which engineers such transfers, but the same complaint can be made against U.S. policy-makers: "The party," says Utley, "is against two-parent families, but in favor of single parents. It is against mothers who look after their children, and in favor of mothers who go out to work. It is against marriage; and it is against the family." Last week [says Utley] I rang the French Embassy and asked how much income tax a married man earning 50,000 pounds a year, with four children and a wife who stays at home, would have to pay in France. The answer was 2,400 pounds. The same man living in Britain has to pay 14,239 pounds. Patricia Morgan's five "movements of wealth" are ways of financing the War Against Patriarchy and the father-headed family. (She omits to list payments of support money to ex-wives and ex- girlfriends--surely anti-family also.) The feminist reply will reply that feminism is not anti- family; it is pro-family. It's just not in favor of the Ozzie-and- Harriet family, what Betty Friedan calls the "family of Western nostalgia," "that obsolete traditional family in which mothers, by necessity or choice, stayed home and were supported as housewives by breadwinning fathers." This family is now obsolete and must be changed, developed, modified, modernized--otherwise, like the dinosaur, it will become extinct. The "modernization," however, is a reversion to the pattern of my neighbor's cat, where Mom is everything and Dad nothing except a sperm-provider--and a provider of support money for Mom, since Mom's role in reproduction is obviously central and it would be a crime against biology to not subsidize her. The Ozzie-and-Harriet family, the family of Western nostalgia, however, was not only characterized by the feminine mystique and the "problem that has no name," it was characterized by the creation of the wealth feminists want to get their hands on. The family of Ozzie-and-Harriet's day created the most prosperous era in the history of the world: "Never, have so many people been so well off," said Joseph Satin back then. "The future can be left to care for itself," said William Baumol back then. This wealth was created by men during the era of the feminine mystique. Women were not grateful. Betty Friedan complained that "Society asks so little of women"--much less than it asked of the Indian seaweed gatherers or the Zimbabwean women described by Ms. French. Arthur's education enabled Arthur to work and support his wife and children. But he is resented by women who want to work too, so they won't have to depend on a man, so that they won't have to live the kind of life their mothers lived, even though these mothers wouldn't exchange places with the seaweed gatherers. "If you enter a Dublin pub during working hours," says Ms. French, it is filled with men....In Moscow even in the days of full employment , men loitered outside hotels, in airports and railroad stations, waiting to sell rubles to a foreigner on the black market, waiting for something, a deal. There are more of them now. You don't see women except on the block- long food queues; the only queues men stand on are for vodka. You don't see women on the streets of Athens either, except in the evening shopping hours. You don't see women because they are all working--at home, in offices, in factories. But you know that the men, whatever they do, however little work they do, earn more than the women. And you know that the women spend the evenings working just as hard at home, while the men sit back expecting to be waited on. Unlike Arthur or Ibsen's Torvald (Nora's husband in A Doll's House) or the competent husbands held up as exemplars for wives by Ms. Friedan, who, confronted with housework which would take their wives all day to do, polished it off in a hurry--these males in Dublin, in Moscow, in Athens, lack motivation. Men's lack of motivation is why "you don't see women because they are all working." On the contrary men's high degree of motivation is why Ibsen's Nora complained of being consigned to being a sex-toy doll- wife and why Ms. Friedan complained that "society asks so little of women," and told them that "housewifery expands to fill the time available." Ms. Friedan would like to tell these women--Nora and American housewives of the era of the feminine mystique--they can find fulfillment by getting elitist jobs. But she cannot tell this to most women, who are not women "of ability and education" and who will find that the jobs they qualify for are mostly less interesting than housework and don't offer the kind of fulfillment she is promising women. She might warn them that achieving economic independence may be hazardous to their marriages and their sex-lives--that the Kinsey statistics on the high orgasm rate for educated married women during the era of the feminine mystique fail to indicate that once these educated women are also economically independent their marriages are at enormously greater risk. She might issue the same warning to men contemplating marriage with such liberated women, who need to know that their chances of being dragged through the divorce courts and losing their children are far greater than if they married less-educated, less economically independent women. In other words, the kind of fulfillment Ms. Friedan is talking about is statistically not likely to be accompanied by a stable, happy marriage, whatever satisfactions the women (not the husband or the children) may obtain by women's liberation. Ms. Friedan may tease the boys by asking, How will men know if their wives really love them as long as they are economically dependent on them? How will they know if their ex-wives love them? What they do know is that ex-wives, including elitist career- women, are very much interested in what they affect to call the "assets of the marriage"--aka the man's money. Wives and ex-wives retain an abiding interest in their paychecks and this interest provides a far more stable basis for ensuring their role within their families than the agreeable but fluctuating set of feelings called "being in love." Ms. Friedan is saying that it is capable, educated, economically independent women who suffer from acedia, "the problem that has no name." From which it follows that education (1) is wasted on women or (2) disqualifies them for marriage. Unless, of course, their husbands are guaranteed custody of the children. Ms. Friedan holds up Margaret Mead as an exemplar of "the woman thinker in America" who should be regarded as giving her sisters a vision of the infinite variety of sexual patterns and the enormous plasticity of human nature, a vision based on the differences of sex and temperament she found in three primitive societies: the Arapesh, where both men and women were "feminine" and "maternal" in personality and passively sexual, because both were trained to be cooperative, unaggressive, responsive to the needs and demands of others; the Mundugumor, where both husband and wife were violent, aggressive, positively sexed, "masculine"; and the Tchambuli, where the woman was the dominant, impersonal managing partner, and the man the less responsible and emotionally dependent person. The "infinite variety" and "enormous plasticity" referred to need to be not merely acknowledged but emphasized. This variety and plasticity have created (1) the Arapesh; (2) the Mugundumor; (3) the Tchambuli; and (4) American patriarchal civilization. What conclusion deserves to be derived from a comparison of these four systems of sexual arrangement? That there can be many different sexual arrangements. That the Arapesh, the Mugundumor and the Tchambuli are miserable failures, incapable of raising their societies out of Stone Age savagery. That the American patriarchal system is a success. It might be added that the American patriarchal system was considerably more successful a third of a century ago, prior to feminism and its weakening of families--and the accompanying mass illegitimacy, drugs, demoralization and the rest, which have worked to restore the matriarchal family. Washington, D.C., for example, Which women are truly oppressed? Arthur wants an education so he can have a family; Virginia Woolf wants one so she need not have a family, or can have a smaller one, or, perhaps like Betty Friedan, can afford to divorce her husband. There is a jingle which incorporates what is supposed to be the wisdom of the folk: "Higamous-hogamous, woman's monogamous; Hogamous-higamous, man is polygamous." Is it so? Not at all; it is men who want families, women who say "Get rid of HIM!" who say "'Marriage as an institution is doomed' is the feeling of many women in the movement for whom the essence of women's liberation sometimes seems to be liberation from marriage." Nancy Yos, reviewing volume V of A History of Women in Commentary, Jan 95 has this: "Nevertheless, in spite of the opaque writing the tome's central theme emerges with crystal consistency: 20th-century women have strained to escape patriarchy and 'phallocentrism' and its horrible servant--motherhood--but are nowhere fully free...to achieve autonomous creativity outside the domestic setting....Women's liberation is completely bound up in the thinking of those scholars with the desire and right to work outside the home. Whatever is in aid of this end (day care, unfettered access to abortion) is objectively good, whatever hinders it is bad....And children themselves are the worst of all, being physical danger, poverty, and frustration to the progressive female class. The more children women have the less they work outside the home." President Clinton, on the other hand, is concerned about yuppies not having enough children. The Los Angeles Times of 20 July, 1995, quotes him as follows: "We have more and more young couples where both of them are working and having careers and deferring child-bearing, and in many cases not having children at all....That is a very troubling thing for our country: The People in the best position to build strong kids, and bring up kids in a good way are deciding not to do so." Clinton, says the Times, apparently learned about the declining birthrate in his voracious reading. The President suggests better child care might help encourage two-career couples to have more children." The President's voracious reading evidently didn't include Nickles and Ashcraft's The Coming Matriarchy, where he could have read that women who work "prefer smaller families....In fact fewer have children." This is why they want to work. Work offers them the lure of economic independence, sexual independence, meeting males and having innocent flirtations and adulteries on the job. Dad's paycheck becomes relatively less attractive, especially when they know they are assured custody of the kids in the event of divorce, as well as support money, maybe welfare money to help them stand on their own feet "without sexual favor or excuse." Then they can talk about giving their love "freely and joyously" rather than as "joyless dues for economic support," --paid for, required of them, by their patriarchal marriage vows, which everyone now agrees are obsolete, designed to enslave them, keep them barefoot and pregnant, breeders in an overpopulated world. There's a new order of things now, thanks to feminism. Mom can now be true to herself as Fergie the Duchess of York says, rather than to her marriage vows. Here's how Andrew Morton describes her declaration of independence: A few days before the Queen celebrated the 40th anniversary of her accession, the Duke and Duchess of York [Prince Andrew and Fergie] drove from Buckingham Palace to Sandringham to see the Sovereign. On that bleak Wednesday in late January the royal couple formally discussed an issue which had troubled them for many months: their marriage. They had agreed that, after five years of married life, it would be sensible if they separated. The Duchess...had become increasingly disillusioned with her life within the royal family and depressed by continual and hurtful criticism....The final straw was the raucous discussion in the media about her relationship with Steve Wyatt, headlines provoked by the theft of photographs taken when the Duchess, Wyatt and others were on holiday in Morocco.... One of the first to be given of the news was the Prince of Wales who was then staying on the Norfolk estate. He spoke to her about his own marriage difficulties, emphasizing that his constitutional position as direct heir to the throne made any thought of separation from Diana almost unthinkable. In a ringing rebuke the Duchess replied: "At least I've been true to myself." It is a sentiment which lies at the heart of the dilemma facing the Princess of Wales and strikes at the foundations of the modern monarchy. It is a sentiment which strikes at the foundations of the patriarchal system, the male kinship system, the family and the civilization based on these. And nobody sees this. Being true to herself was not the requirement of her marriage vow. If it had been, it would have justified the return to the matriarchal system, which is what Fergie and the feminists want. If the Archbishop had said "Will you, Fergie, be true to yourself?" he would have been saying what feminists want, which is: "Will you, Fergie, regard your (other) marriage vows as non-binding?" Then her "Yes, I will" becomes a statement of the Promiscuity Principle, her right to control her own body/sexuality/reproduction. That is matriarchy, the female kinship system, where the woman refuses to share her reproductive life with one man, the system of my neighbor's cat, who doesn't want a male around except when she feels like giving her love "freely and joyously," being "true to herself," being in heat. This is the "greater morality" of Dalma Heyn's adulteresses: All those words I'd scoffed at, words like "growth" and "experience" came to me in a rush: I suddenly felt my own life was a human-potential movement and this was the only way to develop my human potential and I'd be throwing away what I knew was right for me if I didn't pursue it. I'd be a woman with no life in her, a silly, scared wimp. All my "Grab the Moment" impulses; all my "Don't Let Opportunity Pass You By" feelings came up and squashed my puny little "Don't Because You're a Married Woman" prohibitions, which suddenly felt about as compelling as my "Don't Eat Sugar" vows. I was surprised by my own vehemence, and about the stupidity I was able to ascribe to my own prohibitions. It wasn't as if morality didn't exist; it was as if a greater morality, one I hadn't yet been aware of, and finally made itself visible to me. This must be how people rationalize murder, I thought. They tell themselves: It Is Good. God wants it that way. Do it. And so I decided, since I wasn't even on the fence about this, that I wouldn't dredge up some fatuous rationale to try to justify it or dissuade myself. I'd go with it, and deal with the rest later." A greater morality. Growth. A mission. This is the way feminists see their right to control their sexuality, their commitments, their marriage vows--and it is the way the law sees them, which is why society is reverting to matriarchy. The law doesn't have the foggiest notion what it is doing. Which is why we have all the crime, delinquency, drugs, teenage suicide. Women yearn for the life of the squaw on the Indian reservation, so admired by Ms. Boulding, the life of the ghetto matriarch, so admired by Debold, Wilson and Malave, and Richmond-Abbott and most feminists. They hate patriarchy and want to get back to matriarchy. This is what the sexual revolution is all about. Dalma Heyn does a service to patriarchy (and a disservice to feminism) by revealing that this sort of shallow emotionalism is what motivates her adulteresses and drives them to undermine their families and the patriarchal system based on the family. These women, all of them--and there is no reason for supposing them atypical except in being better educated and more intelligent--are moral minors who have no intention of keeping their marriage contracts. They have the judges on their side, and the judges don't understand how patriarchy works, that its object is to create a two-parent family headed by the father. "The courts have abandoned the concept of breach of matrimonial obligations," says former Law Commissioner Brenda Hoggett. "We should be considering whether the legal institution of marriage continues to serve any useful purpose." "The law," says former Lord Chief Justice Lord Lane, does not seem to be about justice. It seems that the needs of children have to come first." That means, if the children are removed from a father headed family and placed in Mom's custody, the needs of Mom have to come first, and Dad has no right to spend his own paycheck--he must share it with Mom. The Church of England, according to Paul Johnson, thinks "living in sin" is so common that it is scarcely sinful. And Abigail van Buren tells us (about once a month) that there is no such thing as an "illegitimate" child. A correspondent writes her: Our son and his girlfriend (both in their 20s) aren't married. And when they first announced she was pregnant we weren't elated, but we accepted the situation. Your answer was terrific: "There are no illegitimate children--all children are 'legitimate' in God's eyes." I could never say the word illegitimate or even consider it. I see only a beautiful, healthy, bright child who, with his parents' and God's help, will be an asset to this world....Keep up the good work. We're not here to judge; God handles that! To which Abby replies: Your letter was an upper. The world would be far less complicated if more people thought as you do. I admire your attitude and agree with your philosophy. (LAT 14 April, 1995) The world would be less complicated but more matriarchal, more like the ghetto and the Indian reservation. If there are no illegitimate children then there are no legitimate children, no unchaste women (since all women are unchaste and there is no basis for comparing them), no fatherhood (since all fathers are mere boyfriends and most boyfriends are merely biological--not sociological--fathers)--the ghetto pattern. Abby and her correspondent are proposing to solve our most pressing problem by applying the Mutilated Beggar Principle, by saying we must reject patriarchy and embrace matriarchy because patriarchy stigmatizes and humiliates illegitimate children for the purpose of enforcing female chastity and normalizing the patriarchal family. By getting rid of the stigma--refusing to use shame to regulate sexual behavior--society can reduce human suffering. Is it so? There is no stigma for ghetto mothers or the children who bear their mothers' surnames and who may not even know their fathers' surnames. But who would want to live in a matriarchal ghetto like Watts if he could choose to live in a patriarchal community like Bel Air? Are the children of the ghetto happier than the children of patrician families who trace their ancestry--through male kinship--back to ancient roots? Robert Scheer, illegitimate and angry at the society which stigmatized him for being so, rejoices that "Born-free" children, as I prefer to call them, are now far more common because parents are freer. Also commoner are crime, drug addiction, educational failure, gangs, second generation illegitimacy, drive-by shootings, teenage suicide, and other accompaniments of father absence. Scheer continues: Movie stars have made out-of-wedlock kids more acceptable, and single parents can get jobs to support their children. The "promiscuity chic" actresses have helped to de-regulate the sexuality of the women and girls of the lower orders. Anti- patriarchal social policies such as Affirmative Action, quotas and comparable worth have made it easier for single mothers to support fatherless households and therefore to create them. And there are other anti-patriarchal social policies such as the welfare program paid for by taxpayers who must also pay the costs of the crime and delinquency generated by the female-headed households they subsidize. These programs also help to remove the stigma Scheer and Abby want to get rid of. The main de-regulator of female sexuality, and hence the main reason for the lessening stigma of illegitimacy, is the divorce court's preference for mother custody in divorce, its policy requiring ex-husbands to subsidize the ex-wives who throw them out and place their children in the fatherless family headed by Mom. What purports to be defense of children and removal of humiliating stigma should be seen as a battle in the War Against Patriarchy, as the promotion of matriarchy, the great breeder of the pathology of society. Scheer rejoices that he is now a role model, like the glamorous movie actresses, like Murphy Brown. But such admired role models are increasing the number of imitators who are increasing the number of fatherless children who will be overrepresented in socially pathologically groups. These children will suffer less stigma but they will suffer more of other disadvantages. And there will be more sufferers. Welfare reformers talk about stopping teenagers from getting pregnant. "Eight out of ten teen-agers who have kids," says Kathy Kristof, "end up poor for the rest of their lives." According to William P. O'Hare, coordinator of Kids Count at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, "the negative consequences of having a child when you are 15 or 16 years old seem so clear that it is hard to imagine why anyone would do it....But the homes that many of these girls live in are so crummy that having a child and getting [welfare] is a way of getting out--an escape." The politically correct solution today is to make the fathers of the illegitimate children pay for them. But if there are no illegitimate children there can be nothing wrong with procreating them--no such thing as irresponsible fatherhood. Abby and Scheer want to remove stigma from the child, the corollary of which is removing it from the mother also. But then the other corollary won't go away--there is no stigma for the father either. This pattern of joyous and guiltless breeding is called matriarchy. It is an attractive idea--the sort of thing that made Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa popular in the 1920s, the idea that what was needed to achieve sexual sanity was to get rid of Victorian puritanism and patriarchal sexual regulation. Let's consider an example of how it works. Lydia Nayo was an unwed mother and a welfare mother at age 16. Also a good example of a type much praised in feminist literature, the black matriarch, but one who rises above welfare dependency and becomes, no less, an associate professor of law at Loyola Law School, and in consequence a role model who gets invitations to speak at ghetto schools where the girls are considering the plunge into unwed motherhood and the matriarchal lifestyle. She tells the girls about how her unwed motherhood didn't stop her. She got herself pregnant at age 15 and bore a daughter. Her talks to the girls are, she says, "a grounding exercise": I once was, in the language of social science, an economically disadvantaged, single teen mother. Statistically, I should not be a law-school professor, nor should my daughter be an only child or a college graduate. These facts are vital elements of my discussion, because the risk exists that some members of the audience are or will become single teen parents. She can help the girls by showing that the matriarchal lifestyle need not prevent "success"--if you don't go "all the way" by continuing to breed illegitimate kids and increasing your welfare dependency by using them as Mutilated Beggars. This is to say, the War Against Patriarchy can be a success if you accept patriarchy and its values, as Nayo finally does. I tell them about my origins and my early parenthood, not merely as cautionary tale, but also as an offering of hope. It is as important to me to include unplanned parenthood in my presentation as it is to point out how I got into college, what my grades were like or the route I took from law student to law professor. It is part of my objective of presenting possibility to these students: You can have a life after early, unexpected parenthood....[W]hat seems like a mistake can become an opportunity. The guidance counselor suggested that she withdraw from her college-preparatory course, enroll in a vocational school, learn a trade and maybe find a husband for herself and a father for her child: "I ignored her and graduated with my class; my mother brought my daughter to the ceremony." To find a husband/father would have been the path of failure--accepting the patriarchal lifestyle. She rejects marriage for herself because it would make her dependent on a man. (Perhaps her feminist teachers had told her "You want to have a career so that you don't have to depend on a man"?) She rejoices also in her daughter's independence--she won't need a husband either, though Nayo's account ends happily with a reference to the daughter's coming wedding, which has traditionally signaled success in the patriarchal script. The daughter and her husband will have a marriage based on the "equality" feminists talk about. It will be a marriage which ignores hypergamy. It will really mean that the husband, however nice, will be dispensable, since the daughter may toss him out if she tires of him, while he will not be able to toss her out without giving up his children and his home and part of his paycheck. This view of proper reproductive arrangements is one that ignores male motivation and the male's biological marginality. It tells females they can earn for themselves the benefits that patriarchal males once conferred on their wives and children. Since "you can have a life after early, unexpected parenthood," you not only don't need a man, you don't need the bargaining power in the patriarchal sexual arena which chastity formerly gave women by allowing them to offer a male a stable family based on a stable marriage. Men, she is indicating, will have to content themselves with what feminism is willing to allow them, a marginal role perhaps as stud, perhaps as stepfather, perhaps even as traditional father--though with tenure at Mom's pleasure. She speaks of "unexpected parenthood." The wisdom of patriarchy speaks of something different. It says that parenthood ought to be the most deliberate and responsible choice of your life. The wisdom of feminism says, Don't worry about it. In a later piece written for the Times, Nayo tells of being a poor pregnant 15-year-old: I was a book-smart ugly duckling. When an older guy with a glamorous-sounding job expressed an interest in me, I was grateful. From my current vantage point of maturity and higher self-esteem this seems so little to commend a suitor. While I never collected a cash grant, I could not have gotten from his abandonment and disavowal of his child to my current life without food stamps and Medicaid, without reduced-cost school lunches for my daughter. She complains of his "abandoning" his child and "disavowing" it. His problem is that he has no real claim to the child, no way of making a meaningful commitment to it, or to her. He gives her a little flattery and "I was grateful." He didn't offer her much. But she didn't offer him much--a one-night stand, evidently. If she had had "higher self-esteem"--meaning if she had been chaste when she was 15--she would have had no reason to complain of abandonment. What could he have offered her besides flattery? His chance of having a stable family with a female he knew to be unchaste was insufficient to motivate a reasonable male to make a lifetime commitment justifying bringing new life into the world. She wouldn't offer him this and society couldn't expect it of him because it wouldn't offer him a meaningful role as a father. Her piece is written to show that the welfare system ought not to be reformed by denying money to "penniless teen mothers": The minds that conceived a provision denying AFDC to teen mothers have forgotten exactly how young 16 is. Sixteen is young enough to have a limited idea about how pregnancy occurs. That is why she should have been taught chastity. The flattery she got from her boyfriend "seems so little to commend a suitor." It was, but he was not even a suitor: her unchastity kept him from being one and he knew it. "Sixteen," she says, "is possibly insecure enough to believe a boy or man who professes to have the thorny area of contraceptives under control or who says that he will stand by you if anything happens." A girl of sixteen should instead believe her patriarchal father who will be asked on her wedding day, "Who gives this woman?" and who will reply, "I do," signifying "I brought her up to believe in patriarchal values, including premarital chastity, and I am now turning her over to a husband who will love, honor and protect her within the same patriarchal system, which will maximize her chances for happiness and a stable family--and will maximize the chances for happiness of her husband, her children and her grandchildren and will help stabilize society by reinforcing patriarchy, the best friend women ever had." Elise Boulding, The Underside of History, p. 790. Ibid. Marilyn French, The War Against Women, pp. 29, 34. Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper and Row,, 1976), p.25: Another generous average estimate is that each birth might remove a woman from her normal sphere of activity for at most six months. This assumes, of course, that except for lactation--which is also optional--the responsibility for child care is shared equally by men, and that working hours are short and flexible enough to make this possible. Both of these conditions are so well within our technical means that the problem is to explain why they do not now exist (that is, to understand the societal and psychological patterns that block their overdue development). Six months times three is a year and half. Thus to be physically a mother should in principle, for a woman who chooses this option, require at most about 3 percent of the fifty-year period of adult vigor between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, p. 338. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 30. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, p, 4. Sheila Rowbotham, A New World for Women: Stella Browne: Socialist Feminist (London: Plato Press, 1977), p. 32: When the issue was raised at the Labour Women's Conference in 1924 people were astonished by, the intense hostility shown by women to bearing children. It was regarded as the great joy of every mother and the noble work of womanhood and there they were, all getting up and saying they couldn't stand it, they weren't going to have it and they must have it limited. The actual circumstances of working-class women's sexual and maternal lives belied the myth of motherhood. Only "alimony" sounds bad, sounds parasitic, so it is better to call it something else--"maintenance, rehabilitation, severance pay--whatever you want to call it." The quoted words are from Betty Friedan's It Changed My Life, p. 326--following this: "Alimony? Forget it--it's a sexist concept, and doesn't belong in a women's movement for equality." The simplest way, of course, is just to call the money Dad gives Mom "child support." The Second Stage, p. 74. Quoted in Sylvia Ann Hewlett, When the Bough Breaks, p. 199. Why not especially in the days of full employment, when men didn't have to fear loss of a job, which was guaranteed by the Soviet constitution? The War Against Women, pp. 29f. If something good is found in the evidence (women's increasing orgasmic response decade after decade, according to Kinsey's evidence complied during the era of the feminine mystique) it is said to be owing to feminism. The 1920s are the "era of feminism" (FM, 327). When Ms. Friedan is grinding a different axe on p. 100 Ms. Friedan tells us feminism "ended as a vital movement" in 1920. Ms. Friedan lauds the education of the women enjoying this increased orgasmic response, since she thinks education is the key to women's emancipation and self-actualization. However, the education which did produce the good orgasmic response was the bad education provided by the "sex-directed educators" excoriated in Chapter 7 for reconciling women to marriage and maternity, which Ms. Friedan wishes to believe detrimental to orgasmic response, though Kinsey's statistics prove the contrary. Feminine Mystique, p, 135. Feminine Mystique, p. 136. Jeanne Cambrai, Once Is Enough, p. tk It Changed My Life, p. 238. P. 42. The Second Stage, p. 322. Andrew Morton, Diana: Her True Story (London: Michael O'Mara, 1993), p. 143. Dalma Heyn, The Erotic Silence of the American Wife (New York: Turtle Bay Books, 1992), p.38; emphasis added. Mother Daughter Revolution, p. 14: "Many African-American girls manage to hold on to their voices and their belief in themselves in adolescence, more so than white or Latina girls. To do so, they draw on strong family connections and communities, and on the role that women play in those families, and communities...." P. 130: "Within parts of the African-American community, mothers who might be considered authoritarian also produce responsible, assertive daughters. John Campion and Pamela Leeson, Facing Reality, p. 5. Ibid., p.35. London Daily Mail, 17 June, 1995. Playboy, January, 1992, p. 55. Los Angeles Times, 28 August, 1994. Los Angeles Times, 25 May, 1994. 12 April, 1995.