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In the Matriarchal System the reproductive unit consists of the mother
and her offspring, the father playing a marginal role, wandering into
and out of the "family," subject to dismissal at the mother's bidding.
The central fact about this kind of family is its naturalness. Roman
jurists spoke of maternity as a natural fact, "natura verum," and of
paternity as merely a matter of civil law. "In all but a few species,"
writes Sarah Hardy, "females are permanent residents in social groups,
males mere transients." This is the reproductive arrangement of all
lower mammals. It has been the reproductive arrangement of the human
race itself until recently. Its biological backup is awesome--what
Margaret Mead meant by saying the female role is a "biological fact."
It is the reproductive pattern which re-emerges in times of social
catastrophe. When men are killed on battlefields or cast into prisons,
female-headed families carry on. When there is divorce, the mother
takes custody of the children. When ghetto males sit on curbsides and
get stoned, ghetto females and children stay home and watch T.V. The
matriarchal family may result from catastrophe, but it may also result
from doing nothing, from biological and social drifting. It is always
on standby, always waiting to resurface and re-establish itself. It is
what society lapses into when the upkeep and maintenance of the
patriarchal system is neglected. It is the pattern which is re-emerging
at the present time under the aegis of the feminist/sexual revolution.
It is the pattern found in surviving Stone Age societies. A 19th
century German ship's doctor described the situation in the German
African colony of Cameroon thus:
With a large
number of tribes, inheritance is based on maternity. Paternity is
immaterial. Brothers and sisters are only the children of one mother. A
man does not bequeath his property to his children, but to the children
of his sister, that is to say, to his nephews and nieces, as his
nearest demonstrable blood relatives. A chief of the Way people
explained to me in horrible English: "My sister and I are certainly
blood relatives, consequently her son is my heir; when I die, he will
be the king of my town." "And your father?" I inquired. "I don't know
what that means, 'my father,' answered he. Upon my putting to him the
question whether he had no children, rolling on the ground with
laughter, he answered that, with them, men have no children, only
women.
"Originally,"
writes W. Robertson Smith, "there was no kinship except in the female
line and the introduction of male kinship was a kind of social
revolution which modified society to its very roots." "Kinship through
females," says John McLennan, must be a more archaic system of
relationship than kinship through males--the product of an earlier and
ruder stage in human development than the latter--somewhat more than a
step farther back in the direction of savagery. To prove its existence
on such a scale as to entitle it to rank among the normal phenomena of
human development, is, we may now say, to prove it the most ancient
system of kinship." "Wherever non-advancing communities are to be
found," he informs us, "--isolated in islands or maintaining their
savage liberties in mountain fastnesses--there to this day exists the
system of kinship through females only." "The maternal totemic clan,"
writes Robert Briffault in reference to this female-headed reproductive
unit and to the larger matrilineal ties it creates,
was by far the
most successful form that human association has assumed--it may indeed
be said that it has been the only successful one....All human
associations that have subsequently arisen have been bound by loose and
feeble ties compared with the primitive maternal clan. Political
organizations, religious theocracies, States, nations, have endeavored
in vain to achieve real and complete social solidarity. They are
artificial structures; social humanity has never succeeded in
adequately replacing the primitive bond to which it owes its existence.
Even those loyalties which took its place have now to a large extent
lost their reality, and individualistic interests rule supreme. Human
society finds itself in the precarious position of being no longer held
together by those bonds of sentiment which constitute the distinction
between a social group and an aggregate of individuals.
The term
"family" properly refers to the male-headed patriarchal unit. "The
relations arising out of the reproductive functions, which constitute
the only analogue of social relations to be found in the animal world,"
says Briffault,
differ
conspicuously from those generally connoted by the term "family." That
term stands, in the tradition of civilised societies, for a group
centering round the interests, activities, and authority of a dominant
male. The husband is the head of the family; the other members of the
group, wife and children, are his dependents and subordinates. The
corresponding group arising out of the reproductive functions among
animals presents no trace of that constitution. It consists of the
mother and her offspring. The male, instead of being the head and
supporter of the group, is not an essential member of it, and more
often than not is altogether absent from it. He may join the maternal
family, but commonly does not. When he attaches himself to the female's
family his association with it is loose and precarious. He has no
functional place in it. The parental relation is confined to that
between mother and brood. Paternity does not exist. The family among
animals is not, as the human family is supposed to be, the result of
the association of male and female, but is the product of the maternal
functions. The mother is the sole centre and bond of it. There is no
division of labour between the sexes in procuring the means of
subsistence. The protective functions are exercised by the female, not
by the male. The abode, movements, and conduct of the group are
determined by the female alone. The animal family is a group produced
not by the sexual, but by the maternal impulses, not by the father, but
by the mother.
"In the great
majority of uncultured societies," writes Arthur Evans, "women enjoy a
position of independence and of equality with the men and exercise an
influence which would appear startling in the most feministic modern
civilized society." "Women," he adds,
had a very high
status in the Stone Age, as we have seen. Archeology, myth and
comparison to still existing nature societies all point to their
dominant position.
He quotes
Jacquetta Hawks:
There is every
reason to suppose that under the life conditions of the primary
Neolithic way of life, mother-right and the clan system were still
dominant [as they had been in the paleolithic period], and land would
generally have descended through the female line. Indeed, it is
tempting to be convinced that the earliest Neolithic societies
throughout their range in time and space gave woman the highest status
she has ever known.
The matriarchal
family pattern is being restored by the welfare system, by the
feminist/sexual revolution, by women's growing economic independence
and by the legal preference for mother-custody following divorce.
Writing of the educated and economically independent women created by
women's liberation, Elizabeth Nickles and Laura Ashcraft say, "The
Matriarchal woman who finds that her relation with a man is undermining
her sense of self-esteem will not consider it necessary to cling to the
relation for the traditional reasons, and she will have the
self-sufficiency to stand on her own." Because "the Matriarchal woman"
can afford it, she reverts to the mammalian/matriarchal family pattern.
The choice is hers; the father has nothing to say about it. She knows
she has the chivalrous support of lawmakers and judges who suppose that
a biological fact needs the help of lawyers, whereas merely social
arrangements such as the marriage contract do not--these can be set
aside if Mom decides they should be set aside. The result: educated,
economically independent women have a divorce rate five times greater
than the fifty percent divorce rate of other women. The man who marries
such a woman will find himself without bargaining power and, if his
wife chooses, without children, without home, without a large part of
his future income. "In the coming matriarchy," continue Nickles and
Ashcraft,
families will be
thought of as sets of divers individuals rather than homogeneous social
clusters, and the definition of "family" will broaden to include many
kinds of living arrangements, as is happening now without widespread
social recognition. We may see the advent of the rotational family, in
which there is no single, stable cast of characters for a lifetime, but
rather a series of individuals--male and female- -who will be added to
or phased out of a continually reconstituted family unit as the needs,
interests, and emotional commitments of the couple, individual, or
group dictate. The first five years of a woman's adult life may be
spent living with male and female roommates; the next five years with a
male mate; the next five with a husband and a child; the next three
with two female friends, and so on. This pattern is already emerging,
but when it occurs on a large scale, we will see the rotational family
replacing the nuclear family as the status quo.
The family
pattern is called "rotational," but it does its rotating around the
fixed figure of Mom, who remains at its center while males make their
entrances, do their orbiting, and make their exits. It is the pattern
of the Hopi Indians, of whom Fred Eggan gives the following
description:
The central core
or axis of the household is composed of a line of women--a segment of a
lineage. All the members of the segment, male and female, are born in
the household and consider it their home, but only the women normally
reside there after marriage. The men of the lineage leave at marriage
to reside in the households of their wives, returning to their natal
home on various ritual and ceremonial occasions, or in case of
separation or divorce, which is frequent. Into the household in turn
come other men through marriage....The household revolves about a
central and continuing core of women; the men are peripheral with
divided residences and loyalties.
A. I. Richards
calls this pattern the "institution of the visiting husband or the
visiting brother," and remarks that the pattern is characterized by
unstable marriages: "A man who cannot stand the situation in his wife's
village leaves and goes elsewhere. This might be described as the
solution of the detachable husband."
It is the pattern of the ghettos, where illegitimacy now exceeds 50
percent and where men and boys grow increasingly roleless and
violent--and where women live in poverty and complain of their
insufficient subsidization. It is the pattern of increasing numbers of
households in the larger society. According to the Washington-based
National Center for Policy Alternatives, 40 percent of girls in school
today will be heads of households. "Ten percent of the nation's
families are headed only by a woman," writes Joreen, "but 40 percent of
the families classified as poor have female heads." Implying,
naturally, that society should do more to help these poor Moms and
their kids. The matriarchal days of the Stone Age are thus
nostalgically described by feminist Marilyn French:
From 3.5 million
years ago to about 10,000 years ago, was a peaceful period, when
"marriage" was informal, casual.... Yes, there was a garden and in it
we gathered fruits and vegetables and sang to the moon and played and
worked together and watched the children grow. For the most part life
was good, and we made art and rituals celebrating our participation in
the glorious spectacle and process of life within nature.
Referring to
those same happy days, feminist Evelyn Reed writes,
A woman did not
need a husband as a means of support; she was herself economically
independent as a producing member of the community. This gave women,
like men, the freedom to follow their personal inclinations in sex
relations. A woman had the option of remaining for life with one
husband, but she was not under any legal, moral or economic compulsion
to do so.
This freedom was destroyed with the advent of class society, private
property and monogamous marriage.
It was destroyed
by the advent of class society, private property, monogamous marriage
and the creation of wealth and civilization which stable marriage made
possible. The promiscuity which characterizes the matriarchal system
denies men a secure role within families and the motivation provided by
that secure role. The absence of that motivation is why the ghettos are
the mess they are--why the women of the ghettos enjoy the "freedom to
follow their personal inclinations in sex relations," but find that the
families in which they enjoy their freedom are impoverished and
underachieving. Ms. Reed lauds the freedom of such women. But there is
a complementary freedom which is denied them. If they exercise their
freedom to be promiscuous, they cannot enter into a stable and binding
contract to share their reproductive lives with men who need to rely on
their loyalty and chastity as a precondition for having legitimate
children and stable families. Once women get the freedom to make the
marriage contract non-binding, then they may suppose they have the
"option" of either remaining for life with one husband or of not so
remaining, but since the husband has no comparable option--the woman's
freedom includes the freedom to throw the man out and take his children
from him (and in the American matriarchy to take part of his paycheck
as well)--the man is forced to share the woman's view of the marriage
as non-binding. He becomes roleless and de-motivated, likely to become
a drifter or a disrupter of society, likely to be regarded by women as
poor marriage material, to be pointed to by feminists as proving the
anti-sociality of males and the need for more feminism.
"If motherhood and sexuality were not wedged resolutely apart by male
culture," says Adrienne Rich (she means wedged resolutely together),
"if women could choose both the forms of our sexuality and the terms of
our motherhood or non-motherhood freely, women might achieve genuine
sexual autonomy." Quite so. Women are choosing it and thereby wrecking
the patriarchal system. It is the declared purpose of feminists
(including Ms. Rich) to do so. "Our liberation as women and as
lesbians," write Barbara Love and Elizabeth Shanklin,
will never be
accomplished until we are liberated to be mothers. Until we have the
power to define the conditions under which we exercise our biological
potential, until we define for ourselves the role of motherhood to
include the power to determine the conditions of motherhood and to
determine the environment in which our children are reared, we have no
real choice. And until we have choices, we are not free.
The legal
system, which divorces the parents of l.2 million children every year,
and the welfare system which subsidizes the needs of 700,000 children
born to unmarried mothers each year, are helping them to achieve this
freedom--and passing the costs on to the shrinking numbers of
patriarchal families. Only a fraction of those costs consists of
immediate money payments. "The vast majority of neurotics," writes John
MacArthur, "both children and adults, grew up in homes where there was
no father, or the father was absent or weak, and the mother was
domineering." A disproportionate amount of child abuse takes place in
female-headed families. According to Neal R. Pearce, "there is a strong
correlation between the single-parent family and child abuse, truancy,
substandard achievement in school and high unemployment and juvenile
delinquency." Most victims of child molestation come from single parent
households or are the children of drug ring members. The pattern among
victims parallels that among offenders. Researchers at North Florida
Evaluation and Treatment Center report that "the pattern of the child
molester is characterized by a singular degree of closeness and
attachment to the mother." Feminist Carolyn Shaw Bell proposes "a
special tax to pay for the total welfare benefits of families headed by
women, and sufficient to increase these benefits so as to wipe out the
income differential between poor children with only a mother and
well-off children with two parents. The tax would be levied on all
men." Feminists believe that the patriarchy ought to subsidize its own
destruction by paying women to create fatherless families. According to
Martha Sawyer, a Ph.D candidate at Howard University, the costs of
these fatherless families should be paid by "the most advantaged
category, monied white men." Paid, that is, by men who retain a niche
in the patriarchal system which creates the wealth.
"What would it have been like," ask feminists Monica Sjoo and Barbara
Mor,
if patriarchy
had never happened? To get an idea, we have to comprehend the first law
of matriarchy: Women control our own bodies. This would seem a basic
premise of any fully evolved human culture; which is why primate
patriarchy is based on its denial.
The process of redefinition begins with women reclaiming total sexual
and reproductive autonomy; for if the female body can be controlled or
used, in any way, from the outside--via exploitive definitions or
systems--then so, it follows, can everything else. (The definition and
use of the female body is the paradigm for the definition and use of
all things; if the autonomy of the female body is defined as sacred,
then so will be the autonomy of all things.) Patriarchal men have tried
to pretend that males can be "free" while females can be dominated and
enslaved; just as white imperialists have pretended that they can be
"independent and soulful" beings in private life, while publicly
colonizing and brutalizing darker peoples.
The most significant thing about this statement of "the first
law of
matriarchy" is that it is asserted categorically, without reference to
the marriage contract. It assumes without even bothering to assert it,
that marriage confers no rights on husbands. It must be obvious to most
men--though it is clearly not obvious to these women--that this female
sexual autonomy rules out the possibility of using the family as a
system for motivating males. Such is the state of things said
(correctly) by Sjoo and Mor to have existed prior to the creation of
patriarchy a few thousand years ago, and such is again becoming the
state of things as patriarchy melts away. It was to prevent this state
of things that patriarchy was created, a central feature of it being
society's guarantee of the Legitimacy Principle--every child must have
a father. The present situation, which has created the Garbage
Generation, results from society's delinquency in refusing to implement
this guarantee.
"It would not be far-fetched," writes Evelyn Ackworth, "to describe the
whole conception of the Welfare State as a matriarchal approach to a
problem of social life." Exactly. The Welfare State has teamed with the
feminist/sexual revolution to replace the patriarchal family with the
older matrilineal unit. The ghettos provide the textbook example:
Now here's how
it is [writes black feminist Patricia Robinson]. Poor black men won't
support their families, won't stick by their women--all they think
about is the street, dope and liquor, women, a piece of ass, and their
cars. That's all that counts. Poor black women would be fools to sit up
in the house with a whole lot of children and eventually go crazy,
sick, heartbroken, no place to go, no sign of affection--nothing.
Ms. Robinson's
complaint is that men won't love, honor and protect their
families--which is patriarchy. She cannot see that the first law of
matriarchy has deprived these men of families and therefore of the
motivation which would keep them working. When Othello becomes
convinced of his wife's unchastity he bids farewell to his profession:
"Othello's occupation's gone!"
Here's an example of how the Promiscuity Principle [identical with the
first law of matriarchy] works, from Ann Landers' advice column in the
Los Angeles Times of l November, 1988:
DEAR ANN: I'm
writing this letter in the hope that you can help me. You have access
to the best doctors and I am ashamed to talk to anybody I know.
I recently had a baby but I don't know who the father is. She looks
like me. I had sex with Guy No. 1 on May 7, Guy No. 2 on May 14 and 15
and Guy No. 3 on May 27. I had my last period on May 1.
I never had any problem with my pregnancy and the baby came right on my
due date, which was Feb. 7. She is adorable and I don't regret having
her, but I would sure like to know who the father is.
My friends tell me I'm entitled to support money but I can't bring a
guy into court unless I'm pretty sure I know what I'm talking about.
Thanks for your help, Ann.
The Promiscuity
Principle entitles her to paternity suit income. It is her right to
control her own sexual behavior--including the right not to use
contraceptives--and to impose the economic costs upon one of her sex
partners--if the District Attorney can round up her playmates, compel
them to take blood tests, and identify the lucky one. Then her sexual
irresponsibility will pay off and reinforce society's acceptance of the
first law of matriarchy, otherwise known as the Promiscuity Principle.
The identified boyfriend will be reduced to years of involuntary
servitude for the benefit of another person--slavery.
The feminist will insist that the boyfriend is equally responsible with
the mother for the procreation of the illegitimate child and therefore
equally bound to pay for its costs. Not so in the patriarchal system.
Patriarchy divides women into good and bad, those who accept the Sexual
Constitution (sexual law-and-order, monogamy, the Legitimacy Principle,
the double standard, etc.) and those who reject it. This woman rejects
it, and she is "bad" because she denies to a man the possibility of
having responsible sex with her even if he wants to. Her unchastity
deprives her child of a father and deprives men of the possibility of
being a father to her children. She can have a sexual relationship only
with a man as irresponsible as herself. She is a sexual Typhoid Mary
who has inflicted illegitimacy upon a child and seeks to ameliorate
what she has done by demanding to be paid for it. She will plead as
justification that "there is no such thing as an illegitimate child,"
signifying there is no such thing as an unchaste woman.
Ramsey Clark assures us that "Women are not a threat to the public."
This woman is. She has procreated a fatherless child several times more
likely to become a delinquent. If the courts adopt the proposals of
Senator Moynihan and Professor Barbara Bergmann and other feminists to
garnish the paycheck of her child's father, he will become a less
employable, less motivated, less marriageable, less productive member
of society. He may drop out of the taxable/garnishable economy
altogether and enter the underground economy, or become parasitic upon
a female AFDC recipient--the pattern found in millions of ghetto
households. The program for making men economically responsible for
procreation outside of the Sexual Constitution has the effect of making
them irresponsible within it. (Also it doesn't work--most men will
evade its sanctions.)
The workability of the patriarchal system requires the regulation of
female sexuality, including the enforcing of the double standard. In no
other way can men participate meaningfully in reproduction. A woman
violates the Sexual Constitution by being promiscuous. A man violates
it by refusing to provide for his family. The new feminist sexual order
proposes that women shall be free to be promiscuous and that the social
disruption thereby created shall be made tolerable by compelling men to
provide for non-families. But men cannot be held responsible for female
irresponsibility if this irresponsibility prevents them from having
families to begin with; and it is for this reason that patriarchy holds
a man responsible only for the subsidization of a wife, a "good" woman
who accepts the Sexual Constitution and her obligation under it to bear
only legitimate children. The historical development of this
arrangement in the second millennium B. C. is thus described by Dr.
Gerda Lerner:
As we compare
the legal and social position of women in Mesopotamian and Hebrew
societies, we note similarities in the strict regulation of women's
sexuality and in the institutionalization of a sexual double standard
in the law codes. In general, the married Jewish woman occupied an
inferior position to that of her counterpart in Mesopotamian societies.
Babylonian women could own property, sign contracts, take legal action,
and they were entitled to a share in the husband's inheritance. But we
must also note a strong upgrading of the role of women as mothers in
the Old Testament....This is quite in line with the general stress on
the family as the basic unit of society, which we have also noted in
Mesopotamian society at the time of state formation.
The more
important point is the upgrading of the role of men as fathers--which
is to say the strengthening of the family's weakest link, the father's
role, which depends in turn upon "the strict regulation of women's
sexuality" which today's feminists seek to get rid of. The "time of
state formation" [read: the creation of civilization] was the time
which stressed the family as the basic unit of society, just as today's
social and sexual anarchy is the time which stresses women's desire to
wreck the family and return to "beena marriage,...a form of marriage
which allows the woman greater autonomy and which makes divorce easier
for her." This is the arrangement Ann Landers' correspondent is
interested in, one with sexual freedom and no responsibilities-- plus
the advantage of having bill-paying men around as long as they behave
themselves and accept second class status.
"The various laws against rape," says Dr. Lerner, "all incorporated the
principle that the injured party is the husband or the father of the
raped woman." Feminists think this is outrageous. What it signifies is
that the protection of female chastity is normally the function of the
husband or the father--in contrast to the feminist Promiscuity
Principle which declares that a woman's reproductive life is entirely
her own business. The ancient Mesopotamian and Hebrew societies Dr.
Lerner refers to stipulated that the law would interfere when the
husband or father could not handle his own family matters, and when he
delegated the responsibility to the state. The underlying difference of
opinion between the feminist view and the
Mesopotamian/Hebrew/patriarchal view is whether society should be
understood as composed of families or of individuals. Those who today
believe the latter might be asked whether sexual behavior is better
regulated in the ghettos on the basis of the Promiscuity Principle than
it was in the Kingdom of Hammurabi on the basis of the Legitimacy
Principle. The Legitimacy Principle can only operate if its
implementation is in the hands of men who conceive of it as operating
to preserve their families and their meaningful role within them. It is
the purpose of feminism to deny men this role.
Nothing has changed in four thousand years. In ancient Mesopotamia, as
in the United States today, women were more concerned with maintaining
their sexual autonomy, men more concerned with maintaining the
integrity of families, and per corollary the regulation of female
chastity upon which the family depends. What Hammurabi's legislation
shows is what contemporary lawmakers fail to see--that the Sexual
Constitution is a male creation and must be supported by males. Men,
not women, are the ultimate guardians of morality; and while men may
delegate the responsibility to women (as in the Victorian age), when
women subvert the moral order, men must reassert their responsibility
to restore it.
"The discoverers of the matrikinship system," says Evelyn Reed,
correctly
inferred it to be a survival from a prefamily period when, as some put
it, "fathers were unknown." They reasoned that cases where kinship ties
and the line of descent passed through the mothers, without recognizing
fathers, were evidence that the matriclan had existed before the
father- family. The matrikinship system persists up to our times in
many primitive regions, even where fathers have become known.
This persistence
is, of course, the chief reason why these regions are primitive.
Jamaica is a another textbook case. "Many Jamaican women live alone,"
says Honor Ford Smith, artistic director of Sistren, a women's cultural
organization there.
When I say
alone, what I mean is live without a man. It's often one woman with a
lot of children in the house. But unlike many societies there has been
a tradition of women being able to live without men and without living
within the bosom of the extended family. So that there's been a
tradition of independent women living on their own, but the price that
traditionally women have paid for that is that they then have to become
the sole supporters of their children....But it brings with it certain
benefits in the sense that unlike in the Middle East, or say Asia, some
other countries, it's possible to not be ostracized for having many
sexual partners, it's possible to live a little independently, to dress
in certain ways, to move differently than has been traditionally
possible in European or Asian societies.
Jamaican women
practice the first law of matriarchy and thereby deny a meaningful role
to males, many of whom become anti- social:
The situation of
women has gotten worse in many ways. If you look at some of the
so-called traditional indicators of progress, which is employment,
etc., the situation of women hasn't gotten any better. It's got
worse....In terms of the streets, in times gone by, in days of yore,
women controlled the streets. Now the streets is not a woman's domain.
Violence of Jamaican society which is virtually taken for granted by
everybody. I myself am looking for a place to live with grills [iron
bars over the windows for security] everywhere at the moment....For a
lot of women it is a matter of you can't go out of the house after six
o'clock, you must get home before dark, if you go to the theatre they
have a special six o'clock matinee which is almost completely attended
by women because that is the time when they have to go out. So that is
a situation which has gotten much worse, too....Of course the level of
sexual violence has increased so much that now the streets are not the
domain of women, certainly the docks aren't.
The violence is
male violence, a fact heavily emphasized in feminist propaganda, which
calls it patriarchal violence. But these violent males are not
patriarchs; they are exiles from the patriarchal system, males denied a
meaningful role by the first law of matriarchy. "The role of the male,"
says George Gilder, "is the Achilles' heel of civilized society....The
man still needs to be tamed." The man's violence needs to be tamed, no
doubt, so that his energies may channeled into a useful direction
rather than becoming destructive. But the taming and channeling are
impossible without a meaningful male role; and since the first law of
matriarchy denies men that meaningful role, the female is as much in
need of taming as the male.
According to Carl Williams, head of California's Workfare program, the
unmarried teen-age motherhood resulting from the first law of
matriarchy burdens the welfare system and contributes to illiteracy. 60
percent of California women under 30 who are now on public assistance
began receiving welfare as teen-agers. 57 percent of them cannot read,
write, add or subtract well enough to get a job or train for one.
The males procreated by these sexually liberated females, males
exploited in feminist propaganda as illustrating male anti- sociality,
could better be used as illustrations of female socialization. A survey
of 108 rapists undertaken by Raymond A. Knight and Robert A. Prentky,
revealed that 60 percent came from female-headed homes, that 70 percent
of those describable as "violent" came from female-headed homes, that
80 percent of those motivated by "displaced anger" came from
female-headed homes.
The first law of matriarchy implies the right of one woman to undermine
the marriage of another woman. According to Laurel Richardson, a
Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University, many liberated
professional women prefer affairs with married men-- they're less
time-consuming. Unfortunately for them, however, they usually get so
involved that they "lose control" over the relationships, which "end up
benefiting the men more than the women," surely no part of any
feminist's intention.
The first law of matriarchy is good for the abortion business. It is
projected that 46 percent of today's teen-age girls will have had an
abortion by the age of 45.
Thanks to the first law of matriarchy, births out of wedlock have
increased more than 450 percent in thirty years, with obvious
consequences for the welfare system. According to Gary L. Bauer,
We know that women who receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC) benefits when they are less than 25 years old remain dependent
on AFDC for long periods of time. In fact, 70 percent received AFDC for
at least five years; more than one-third got it for at least 10 years.
Raised in an environment in which fathers don't provide for their young
and dependency on government is assumed, few children will develop the
skills of self-sufficiency, or even the concept of personal
responsibility. Young men will not strive to be good providers and
young women will not expect it of their men. Family breakdown becomes
cyclical, out-of-wedlock births become cyclical, poverty and dependence
becomes cyclical. And the culture of poverty grows.
Bauer quotes Charles Murray:
For the young
woman who is not pregnant, "enabling" means she does not ask, "Do I
want a welfare check badly enough to get pregnant?" but rather, "If I
happen to get pregnant, will the consequences really be so bad?"
The existence of an extensive welfare system permits the woman to put
less pressure on the man to behave responsibly, which facilitates
irresponsible behavior on his part, which in turn leads the woman to
put less reliance on the man, which exacerbates his sense of
superfluity and his search for alternative definitions of manliness.
The pattern is not confined to the lower orders. It underlies equally
the reluctance of educated men to marry educated women, producing
feminist complaints about the refusal of males to make stable and
reliable commitments to women. The same male reluctance underlay the
flurry of panicky articles appearing in 1986 on the subject of the
"marriage crunch," the unmarriageability of educated women in their
thirties. These educated women enjoy the freedoms, economic and sexual,
coveted for them by the feminist movement, but they find themselves (as
men too find themselves) without marriages and families. At the time,
feminist Georgie Anne Geyer wrote a piece under the title "'Why Don't
You Get Married?': Shorthand for Curbing Woman's Function." Ms. Geyer
describes herself as enraged by the pressures put on women to marry:
We are talking
here about woman as function. We are talking here about fulfilling
others' ideas about what one should be fitted for and for what one
exists. Worse, we are talking here not about love, faith or goodness,
but about fitting into the structures that others decide for you. We
are talking about control.
To put it frankly, this kind of "concern" about one's chances at
marriage is about ways of controlling women.
Marriage can be one kind of love, and at best it certainly is one of
the two or three greatest kinds. But when dealt with in terms of
controlling a woman, it becomes the antithesis of love and fulfillment.
Controlling a
woman, she says. But the man equally submits to control; and one of the
persistent demands of feminists is that the woman's emancipation from
control by divorce shall not emancipate the man, but obligate him to
make her "independent" of him by giving her alimony and child support
money. The statistics on the unmarriageability of educated and
economically independent women are factual. Ms. Geyer resents them
because they suggest the advisability of women accepting a degree of
sexual regulation. She wants female behavior thought of "in positive
and freeing terms rather than in negative and controlling terms." One
might describe a train which jumps its tracks as behaving in a
"positive and freeing" way and a train which remains on the tracks as
behaving in a "negative and controlling" way. The feminist would
respond that women are not machines, but the comparison will stand for
all that. Women (and men) require socialization as much as trains
require rails if they are to avoid catastrophe. Controlling women (and
men) is not the "antithesis" but the precondition of "love and
fulfillment" as well as of social stability and civilization.
Let's consider a specific case. Brandon Tholmer, 29, killer of four
women, suspected killer of eight others. Tholmer is illegitimate, but
that's OK, because, as Ms. Phyllis Chesler says, "every child has the
right to be wanted." It doesn't occur to Ms. Chesler that the best way
of insuring this right is for him to have a father who would want him,
protect him and provide for him. Anyway, Tholmer's Mom practices the
first law of matriarchy and her kid is a killer. The jury which
convicts him takes only an hour to decide that he should not go to the
gas chamber, because of his "upbringing." According to a juror "there
was nobody who took any interest in him. He had suffered most of his
life." He came from a broken home and from the age of 8 was kicked out
into the street at night. At age 11, he was put in a juvenile detention
home by Mom, later sent to a state industrial school for stealing and
loitering. He is "borderline retarded," a convicted mentally disordered
sex offender, a rapist, a sodomite, an arsonist, a burglar. Blaming his
"upbringing" signifies that the blame lies elsewhere, as indeed it
does--with the acceptance by Tholmer's Mom and by society of the first
law of matriarchy.
Another case. Dean Philip Carter is convicted of killing three women
and suspected of killing two others. The evidence against him is
overwhelming and his attorneys don't even try to refute it:
Relying instead
[says the Los Angeles Times of 29 January, 1990] on an attempt to save
him from the death penalty, defense attorney Howard Gillingham called
21 witnesses to testify about Carter's troubled childhood.
21 witnesses
show that he had a troubled childhood and therefore is less culpable.
Quite so. But who, then, is culpable for having inflicted the troubled
childhood upon him? Part of the answer is to be inferred from the Los
Angeles Times' assertion that Carter was "born the illegitimate son of
a half-Eskimo woman in Nome, Alaska, on Aug. 30, 1955." Mom accepted
the Promiscuity Principle and exercised her right to impose
illegitimacy upon her boy, which placed him at greater risk of becoming
a criminal, as the documentation given in the Annex to Chapter I shows.
Another case. Arlene W. of Wisconsin. "In the summer of 1977," writes
feminist Phyllis Chesler, "Arlene W. met Red E. Early in 1978 Arlene
became pregnant." Patriarchal socialization would have taught Arlene
the importance of pre-nuptial chastity and would have prevented the
tragedy which now unfolds. But patriarchal socialization is made
inoperative by the first law of matriarchy.
Early in 1979, Red's paternity was established by the Welfare
Department....Visitation was allowed....Red was physically abusive to
both Arlene and [their daughter] Andrea during several visits. Arlene
decided to refuse further visitation.
In the fall of 1980, Red legally demanded overnight visitation twice
monthly. Judge John E. McCormick told Arlene to "give a man a second
chance." He ordered visitation for one weekend day and one half
weekday. Visitation began. At this point, Andrea started "acting out"
behavior: aggressive hitting, crying, clinging, not sleeping, wetting
herself, vomiting. Andrea complained of being hit by her father--and
marks were detectable....The hospital report concluded that Andrea had
been sexually abused....Arlene fled Wisconsin to her brother's home in
the state of Washington....Police arrived with a warrant for Arlene's
arrest. They separated her from her daughter, denied her bail and the
use of the telephone, and jailed her for four days....Feminists,
ministers, psychiatrists, incest victims, experts, academics, jurists,
the department of social services--all launched a campaign against
Arlene's extradition. Arlene's unedited "Chronology of Events"
documents the profound isolation and vulnerability of a battered,
unwed, and welfare dependent mother who has discovered paternal incest,
and the state's absolute refusal to believe or assist her.
What the events document is the importance of not being an unwed
mother. They also document the damage inflicted upon Arlene and Andrea
by the first law of matriarchy and the incapacity of the legal system
to patch up the mess created by Arlene's and Red's unchastity. Arlene
is represented throughout Ms. Chesler's account as a victim. In fact
she created her own miseries and those of her daughter.
The enforcing of the patriarchal sexual constitution in 1978 would have
guaranteed, not infringed Arlene's autonomy, would have clarified her
responsibility for the consequences of her sexual behavior--those she
later tried (with the help of Ms. Chesler, and the feminists,
ministers, psychiatrists, etc.) to blame society for. The whole thrust
of Ms. Chesler's argument is that society should bail her out, thus
legitimizing her unchastity in 1978. Little Andrea, whose life has been
blighted by her mother's irresponsibility in disregarding the
Legitimacy Principle, is put on display and her sufferings lamented in
order to assist Ms. Chesler's program to further undermine the sexual
constitution and the Legitimacy Principle and to promote more single
motherhood, more feminism, more Andreas.
Ms. Chesler's point that the legal system is incompetent to do much for
Arlene and Andrea is valid enough; but she chooses not to see how the
mess she describes is created not by patriarchy but by the failure of
patriarchy to regulate Arlene's behavior in 1978--by society's
acquiescence in the first law of matriarchy.
The pattern being promoted by feminism is well summarized by a recent
Canadian study of female offenders:
Among its findings in a survey of 100 women arrested, the majority had
early sexual involvements, with over 40 percent reporting their first
intercourse to have occurred between the ages of 10 and 15. Two thirds
had children, but almost as many had never been married, and less than
one in 10 was married at the time of her arrest. The majority, then,
were single or divorced mothers. Most came from broken homes, with 73
percent of the women reporting problems such as one parent being absent
all the time, divorce, foster homes, alcohol problems and child abuse.
Mentally disturbed parents were common--indeed, female criminals had
psychiatric problems in their immediate family twice as often as did
male criminals. The authors speculate that "for women to break out of
the traditional female role of compliance and passivity and become
criminal they have to be products of a more disturbed background."
In response to suggestions that the feminist movement has brought "a
new era of emancipated female offenders showing some of the same
patterns as male offenders," the authors acknowledge many similarities.
For example, about the same percentage of female criminals commit
violent offenses as do males (although "women's victims more so than
men's have trouble defending themselves--for example, children,
intoxicated, asleep, infirm").
The authors resist describing women criminals as "emancipated," but
what their study does describe--sexual promiscuity, divorce, women who
act increasingly like men--are familiar results of the sexual
revolution.
The problems created by the first law of matriarchy were
predictable--female promiscuity and illegitimacy, male rolelessness and
anti-sociality. With more illegitimacy, come more second generation
crime, more educational failure, more demoralization, less motivation,
less productivity, reduced self- esteem, less commitment to the future
as evidenced by reduced accumulation of stabilizing (and garnishable)
assets such as real estate, annuities, pensions, stock portfolios,
savings accounts, insurance. More sexual confusion, more hedonism, more
infantilism (of which non-commitment is a variety), more emotional
shallowness. And, of course, in consequence of all of these, more
family breakdown, more family non-formation, more demands for freebies
from the government's Backup System (welfare, day care, workfare,
wage-garnishment as a means of financing families--with the consequence
of yet further fear of commitment to family living). And so on, without
end, each attempt by the Backup System to patch up the mess created by
family breakdown working to further undermine the male role, and with
it the family.
"If women were really people," wrote Ms. Friedan in 1973, "-- no more,
no less--then all the things that kept them from being full people in
our society would have to be changed." "Full" means something like
"without sex-role socialization." Along with the abandoning of this
socialization for girls, there has been a complementary abandoning of
the sex role socialization of boys. The results can be witnessed by
anyone who takes a stroll across one of today's high school campuses.
Such a stroll reveals that a majority of girls have become shallow,
sassy tarts, a majority of boys little better than slobs with little
self-discipline, little frustration-tolerance, little character, little
inner-direction. Back in 1963, when Ms. Friedan unleashed feminism upon
us with her book The Feminine Mystique, she said that her ideas "may
disturb the experts and women alike, for they imply social change." The
change has gone on long enough to permit an evaluation. Are women
happier? Are men? Are children better mannered, better socialized? Is
there more premarital sexual activity? More venereal disease? More
single motherhood? More shacking-up? More adultery? Is the family more
stable? Is educational performance superior to what it was in the early
1960s? (Remember that the original "new life plan for women" was a
program of education.) Are there fewer school dropouts? Is the level of
public debate more civilized, more mature? Are better young people
choosing teaching as a career and providing youth with better
instruction and better role models? Are the streets safer? Do the media
reflect a growing refinement of taste and morality? Are more or fewer
women living in poverty? In substance abuse? Are the relationships
between the sexes more refined and civilized or more cynical, trivial
and exploitive? Is there more or less cheating in classrooms, business
relationships and tax forms and everywhere else? Have the costs of
welfare, police and government increased or decreased? Do we get more
or less in services for our tax dollar? Is there more or less trash
deposited on our beaches? Are public parks more or less inviting places
of recreation? Does the legal profession eat up more or less of our
earnings? Is service more or less courteous than it was a quarter of a
century ago? Social change indeed. There is no area in which the
undermining of sex role socialization has not been disastrous.
Here is the way today's women are coming to perceive their
responsibilities towards society and society's responsibilities to
them. The speaker is Byllye Avery, Director of the National Black
Women's Health Project: "I have a right to life, to a house, education,
job, food, a good, high quality standard of living, and a right to
control my reproduction." This is the fruition of Ms. Friedan's program
to make women stand on their own feet--and make demands upon others.
Let us now turn from the two-hundred-million-year-old biologically
based mammalian/matrilineal reproductive arrangement and examine the
patriarchal system which succeeded it a few thousand years ago and made
civilization possible--the artificial, fragile patriarchal arrangement
designed to elevate male sperm- providers into fathers and to allow
them an equal share in human reproduction. It is the purpose of the
feminist/sexual revolution to do away with this manmade superstructure
built on the foundation of female reproductive biology and to restore
the original mammalian/matrilineal arrangement--a purpose only vaguely
perceived by a minority of radical feminists and as yet uncomprehended
by the patriarchal males whose responsibility it must be to restore and
stabilize it.
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Annex to chapter I
Additional note
References
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