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"For many women," says feminist Dr. Alice Rossi, "the personal outcome of
experience in the parent role is not a higher level of maturation but the
negative outcome of a depressed sense of self-worth, if not actual personality
deterioration." "The heart of woman's oppression," says Shulamith Firestone,
"is her childbearing and childrearing roles." The predicament of these mothers
is trebly pitiable when they are single heads of families. Single mothers
complain especially of poverty--theirs and that of the children they drag
into the Custody Trap to keep them company and give them a "role." They aver
that the patriarchal family is a prison for the mother; but the mother is
far more restricted, impoverished and miserable in a female-headed family,
with reduced income and no partner to share responsibilities with. There
exists a medium sized library of books with titles like Women and Children
Last, Poor Women, Poor Families, and Working Your Way to the Bottom: The
Feminization of Poverty, whose message is that society must do something
to rescue single mothers. The overriding concern of this literature is the
need for more money for Mom, so that her mother-love may have the wherewithal
required for its proper functioning. No question, the poverty is a problem.
According to Betty Friedan, "Statistics indicate that a child in a family
now in poverty, headed by a man, has a fifty-fifty chance of getting out
of poverty by his or her maturity--but that a child in a poverty family headed
by a woman has no chance." Divorced women, according to MS. magazine, have
the lowest household incomes of any group of women. "Worldwide," according
to Kathleen Newland, "between one-quarter and one-third of all families are
supported by women; and worldwide, these families are leading candidates
for poverty and hardship."
But poverty is not the only problem, or the worst. 80 percent of children
in psychiatric clinics come from female-headed homes. Single women family
heads have the highest rate of disease compared to all other women, far higher
than the never married. They report "less satisfaction with their lives than
Americans in any other marital status, including widows and women who had
never married."
Writing of the problems of female heads of families, Barbara Gelpi, Nancy
Hartsock, Clare Novak and Myra Strober say, "Associated with such extreme
hardship is the high incidence both of health problems and of troubles with
older children among these families." The same point is made by Deborah K.
Zinn and Rosemary Sarri:
Women also encountered
a variety of serious problems with their older children. More than one-third
were called to school in 1982 for special conferences, and 21 percent reported
that their children had been suspended at least once. A small number of children
had been expelled, referred to the juvenile court, committed to institutions,
and/or victimized by crime. The numbers, although small, exceeded those one
would expect to observe in an average family.
Girls in female-headed homes have more problems in sex role and personality
development and in handling aggression. Father-deprived sons frequently
exhibit aggressive behavior, lack of social responsibility, a variety of
intellectual defects, high delinquency potential, tendencies toward
homosexuality, difficulties in interpersonal relations and low need for
achievement. More than one third of the children from female- headed homes
drop out of school.
Divorce researchers
Judith Wallerstein and Joan Kelly were struck with the pervasive sadness
they encountered among 6-to-8- year-olds in female-headed families--a sadness
not seldom transformed into rage at the mothers. E. Mavis Hetherington found
that mothers in father-absent homes have more psychiatric symptoms than mothers
in intact homes. According to Patricia Paskowicz, one-third of children of
divorce living with their fathers seem pleased with their situation, compared
with only one- tenth of those living with their mothers. Women heads of families
are less marriageable. "I am a nice- looking, 28-year-old divorced woman,"
one of them writes to Dear Abby. "I have no trouble getting dates, but my
problem is that every man I date runs to the nearest exit when I tell him
I have three kids....The last four men I dated seemed interested in me--
until I told them I had three children. After that I never heard from them
again." A child living in a female-headed home is ten times more likely to
be beaten or murdered. According to USA Today, while working married women
have the best health of any group of women, single mothers, working or
unemployed, have the poorest. According to Irma Moilanen and Paula Rantakallio,
fatherless children are much more likely to develop psychiatric problems--boys
three times as likely, girls four times. According to Sara McLanahan and
Larry Bumpass, Women who were raised in female-headed families are 53 percent
likelier to have teenage marriages, 111 percent likelier to have teenage
births, 164 percent likelier to have premarital births, 92 percent likelier
to experience marital disruptions.
The catalogue of miseries associated with female-headed families could be
extended without limit. (See the Annex to Chapter I.) Mother-custody has
been the choice of divorce courts for a century. It is, as the foregoing
paragraphs show, a tried-and- failed arrangement. It does not benefit women.
It drags them into poverty and depression. It does not benefit children.
It drags them into the same poverty and into a greater likelihood of educational
failure and delinquency. It devastates men by depriving them of their children
and their role. Dr. Lenore Weitzman's assertion that divorce bestows upon
men a standard of living 42 percent higher than they enjoyed while married
is a puerile falsehood which is not made less absurd by repetition.
Betty Friedan believes that society asks "little" of women. The little refers
most importantly to the obligation of wives to bear legitimate children.
A wife's reneging on this obligation ought to forfeit her right to subsidization
and social approval. The primary reason for marriage, formerly made explicit
in the priest's instructions to the groom and bride in the marriage ceremony
in the Book of Common Prayer, is the procreation of children. Men undertake
the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood primarily for the purpose
of procreating these children, who are properly called "legitimate" by reason
of having a father and because society, in order that it may not be burdened
with the social costs described in the foregoing paragraphs, recognizes the
importance of their having a father. The social crisis indicated by the title
of the present book and the social pathology indicated in Chapter I have
resulted from the failure of the legal system to safeguard the Legitimacy
Principle.
The high correlation between crime and fatherless families is indisputable.
According to the Los Angeles Times,
The nation's prison
population jumped by a record 46,004 inmates in the first six months of 1989,
for a total of 673,565 men and women behind bars, the Bureau of Justice
Statistics said. The increase broke the record not only for half-year increases
but also was higher than any annual increase recorded during the 64 years
the government has counted prisoners, the bureau said. The 7.3% surge in
prison population during the first half of 1989 was brought about by increases
of 7% in the number of men imprisoned and 13% in the number of women, the
bureau said. Since 1980, the number of state and federal prisoners serving
sentences of more than one year--known as sentenced prisoners--more than
doubled from 315,974.
Not much can be
done now about the damaged lives of the mostly fatherless children who grow
up to become these incarcerated prisoners, or the less damaged lives of the
larger numbers who avoid incarceration. These less-damaged people survive
the high-crime ages, 14-to-24, and enter middle age as underachieving, confused,
unhappy adults, permanent semi-casualties with weakened families of their
own. What needs to be done is to stop the flow of messed-up kids through
the pipeline running from the divorce courts and into female-headed families,
through pathological childhoods into disruptive adolescence and demoralized
adulthood--the process now in full swing and programmed to continue into
the next Garbage Generation in the 21st century.
The failure of the judges and policymakers responsible for most of these
female-headed families to understand their responsibility for them and for
the disruption, crime, demoralization and illegitimacy they produce derives
from the disastrous but natural mistake of supposing that because the
female-headed family form is biologically based, whereas the father-headed
family form is merely a social creation, society ought to support the
biologically based form by choosing Mom for custodian of the children in
case of divorce. They cannot grasp the idea that the reproductive pattern
found among lower animals is unsuitable for humans.
The fact is that the family, like the civilization it makes possible, is
an artificial creation. Civilization is artificial. And fragile. Patriarchal
civilization came into existence when men became equal sharers in human
reproduction. The biological marginality of the male required that this sharing
should be buttressed by artificial social supports, the most important being
society's recognition of fathers as heads of families. The present destruction
of the father-headed family is felt to be justified by the sacredness of
motherhood, which causes judges and lawmakers to acquiesce when women demand
that their marriages be terminated and that they be made heads of families.
Female headship of families is disastrous. Mom, whose role is a biological
fact, doesn't need society's props; Dad, whose role is a social creation,
does. Society must use the strength of the mother-infant tie not as a lever
for wrecking the two-parent family, but as a prop for preserving it--by
guaranteeing to the father the headship of his family and the custody of
his children. Then mothers, knowing that divorce will separate them from
their children and from Dad's paycheck, will reconcile themselves to accepting
the patriarchal, two-parent family arrangement. Marriage will be stabilized.
There will be no feminization of poverty, no general acceptance of the
female-headed family and its social pathology. By society's guarantee of
father custody the roles of both spouses are re-affirmed, children are brought
up in two-parent families, and society can hope for the kind of stability,
creativity and productivity found in societies with stable families, societies
such as that of the Victorian age and contemporary Japan. When Margaret Mead
speaks of the female role as a biological fact she refers to the mammalian
female role. The female role in patriarchal, civilized society is every bit
as artificial as the male role. "What is now called the nature of women,"
wrote John Stuart Mill in 1869, is an eminently artificial thing." He meant
the nature of patriarchally socialized women. What is called the nature of
man is, in patriarchal society, equally artificial. Mill himself was an
artificial thing--if he hadn't been, his books wouldn't be worth reading.
Civilization is an artificial thing, something men and women chafe under,
as Freud explained in Civilization and Its Discontents, because civilization
is built on repression and frustration--and the toleration of frustration,
a toleration motivated by the sexual law-and-order of family living which
ties sexuality to long-term goals, to the past and the future, to ancestors
and descendants, to home and children. There is no way to motivate males
to accept the coercion-imposed frustration feminists and the divorce courts
want to inflict on them by compelling them to subsidize ex-families, and
that is the reason why, in the words of Louis Roussel,
What we have seen
between 1965 and the present, among the billion or so people who inhabit
the industrialized nations, is...a general upheaval in the whole set of
demographic indicators.
In barely twenty years, the birth rate and the marriage rate have tumbled,
while divorces and illegitimate births have increased rapidly. All these
changes have been substantial, with increases or decreases of more than fifty
percent. They have also been sudden, since the process of change has only
lasted about fifteen years. And they have been general, because all
industrialized countries have been affected beginning around 1965.
This is why, in
other words, we have a Garbage Generation growing up in female-headed households.
The feminist-sexual revolution is an attempt to get back to the pre-patriarchal
pattern of the Stone Age, to mobilize and unleash the discontents resulting
from civilization's demand that women accept sexual law-and-order. (Civilization
makes even more onerous demands upon men, as men's 7 or 8 year shorter life-span
shows. For all of which, women and men both live longer under patriarchy
than under matriliny.)
What's in it for women? Stable marriage and its economic and status advantages.
The task of the patriarchy is (1) to convince women that these advantages
are the quid pro quo they get for participation in the patriarchal system
(acceptance of sexual law- and-order, sharing their reproductive lives with
men) and are not otherwise obtainable; (2) to convince lawmakers and judges
that they must support the patriarchal family rather than trying to create
a divorce-alternative to it.
This divorce-alternative, this disastrous idea now held by the legal system
(and of course by feminists) that divorce ought to provide ex-wives with
the same benefits that marriage provides to wives, is the chief underminer
of patriarchy. "The idea of compensatory payment," says Mary Ann Glendon
in discussing the French synonym for alimony,
is to remedy "so
far as possible" the disparity which the termination of marriage may create
in the respective living conditions of the spouses....It depends on the
establishment of the fact of a disparity between the situations of the ex-
spouses, and its aim is to enable both of them to live under approximately
equivalent material conditions.
The idea of the
"compensatory payment" is to transfer money from the possession of the male
who earns it to the possession of a female who does not earn it and who has
no claim to it other than her status as a Mutilated Beggar. "Compensatory"
for what? For the withdrawal of the services which during marriage justified
her enjoyment of a 73 percent higher standard of living? Why doesn't her
withdrawal of services justify the husband in withdrawing his services? Why
should they both live "under approximately equivalent material conditions"?
Why should there not be a "disparity" in their incomes, since the ex-husband
earns his income and the ex-wife does nothing which entitles her to share
his earnings? Vive la disparite! This "disparity" is the principal reason
she married him. Patriarchal civilization is built on this disparity. The
male devotes the greater part of his energies to creating this disparity,
believing that it will make him attractive to females and that by offering
it to one of them he can induce her to share her reproductive life with him
and thereby enable him to create a family and procreate legitimate and
inalienable children who will benefit from this disparity by having a higher
standard of living and by receiving the patriarchal socialization which will
civilize them--make them stable and law- abiding and educationally successful.
It is thus that patriarchal society puts sex to work to motivate males to
create wealth and social stability--the wealth and stability which feminists
and the legal system are undermining in order to liberate women and return
society to matriliny. The disparity which feminists and the courts want to
get rid of is virtually synonymous with the wealth of society which they
want to latch onto. They imagine that eliminating the disparity means raising
the standard of living of women rather than lowering the standard of living
of everybody. There exists no such disparity in ghettos and on Indian
reservations because the males in ghettos and on Indian reservations have
no bargaining power and no motivation to acquire it by work and self-discipline.
They lack the frustration- tolerance which sexual law-and-order and dedication
to family living make endurable. They are willing to accept the one-night
stands and the stud-status which their women are willing to offer them. And
so, alas, are increasing numbers of males in the larger society. And
policy-makers, lawmakers and judges are willing to re-order society to make
it conform to this matrilineal pattern which makes men studs instead of fathers.
And this is why there is a Garbage Generation.
Dr. Glendon tells us that French law
authorized compensation
(sometimes very substantial) for such harms allegedly resulting from the
divorce as the loss of esteem suffered by a divorced person, loneliness,
or the loss of social position by one who has become accustomed to a high
standard of living.
The divorced person
referred to is the female. She is deprived of her high standard of living.
But the ex-husband is equally deprived of his ex-wife's reciprocal services,
presumed to be of equal value to the high standard of living he bestowed
on her--or else why was she entitled to the high standard of living? If each
is deprived, and if the deprivations are of equal value, why is the woman
entitled to compensation and the man not?
In West Germany things are much the same: support of the ex- wife "is to
be determined with reference to the marital standard of living." In other
words: (1) the ex-husband is penalized by the ex-wife's withdrawal of her
services; (2) the ex-wife is rewarded (at the ex-husband's expense) for
withdrawing them. Compensation for services rendered is replaced by compensation
for services withdrawn. If the woman is to be liberated, the man must be
doubly penalized. This is the upshot of the feminist movement which a generation
ago told the American housewife to stop taking a free ride on her husband's
back, to give up her parasitism, to be independent, to stand on her own feet
and face life's challenges on her own without "special privileges because
of her sex...without sexual privilege or excuse."
The woman is said to be entitled to compensation because she suffers from
divorce. She should suffer from divorce. The man suffers more, because judges
discriminate massively against him in order to ease the suffering of the
woman. "In terms of mental and physical disease and life expectancy," says
George Gilder, "divorce damages the man far more than the woman." To say
that divorce hurts women is to say that marriage benefits women. Marriage
should and must benefit women. This is what gives men bargaining power and
therefore motivation. This is why they are willing to toil to create their
families' (and society's) wealth, why their energies and talents can be directed
into useful channels rather than disrupting society as they do where families
are headed by women. The feminist/legal program to supply women with comparable
benefits from divorce is destroying the whole patriarchal system, which works
by encouraging men to earn money so that they have something to offer women
in exchange for their accepting sexual of law-and-order. Men must have something
which will induce women to live in patriarchal, two-parent families--that
something being the disparity between men's and women's earnings. Patriarchy
makes this disparity the great bulwark of family stability. The feminist/legal
program wants to convert this disparity into a means whereby the patriarchal
two-parent family may be destroyed.
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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