Can't we beat this?

Lauren Sandler is an American woman who advocates that women should have no more than one child. She does so on the basis that more than one child hampers a woman's autonomy and so it is liberating for women to have just the one.

Here is a sample of her writing:

What if, for those who didn’t feel otherwise compelled to have more kids, they decided instead to opt for greater pleasure and autonomy, for other opportunities for personal advancement and self-fulfilment?

...To be sure, low fertility accompanies a weak economy without fail. But to blame the markets for what happens in our bedrooms misses a radical reshaping of our worldview. It’s not just the economy, it’s liberation. The pursuit of happiness has emerged as our new national ideology, trumping the age-old belief that parental duty is the very definition, of adulthood.  Some think it’s the height of selfishness; I say it’s progress.

...Over the past century, adulthood has come to promise more than just duty, but pleasure...we envision a liberated existence, one of satisfaction and fulfilment, a life built upon intentionality and individualism rather than obligation and role-filling. This liberated adulthood exists at odds with parenting...Instead of making a choice to enlarge our families based on stereotypes or cultural pressure, we can instead make that most profound choice our most purely independent one. It might even feel like something people rarely associate with parenting: it might feel like freedom.

That is exactly the kind of outlook you'd expect to emerge from within an advanced liberalism. If the aim is to maximise your individual autonomy, then you're going to have a problem when it comes to family life. Family life makes demands on us. It requires stable commitments that restrict what we might choose to do at any particular time. Family life, in other words, impedes our autonomy.

So what do liberals do? They try to recast the family to make it fit in better with autonomy. They can do this in a variety of ways. A commitment to family life can be delayed. Divorce can be made easier. There might be calls for the having of children to be "fitted around" a woman's life rather than be a core aspect of it. Lauren Sandler's solution is to have the absolute minimum number of children.

(A more radical solution would be to have no children at all; and the most radical solution is to simply live alone.)

The important thing to recognise is that within the framework of liberalism it doesn't make sense to commit to large families.

A traditionalist movement would therefore have a very considerable demographic advantage. If we were able to maintain a more traditional culture of family life, we would almost certainly have a much higher fertility rate than the surrounding liberal culture.

(Of course, that would only be an advantage if we were able to educate our children along traditionalist lines rather than having them become the next generation of liberals.)

Lauren Sandler's views are more evidence of what a dead-end road liberalism is for the society which adopts it. If we can operate within a different framework we will have a strength that liberalism lacks.

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The state drifts ever closer in Scotland

This is a disturbing development:

Under the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill, every child from birth will be given a “named person”, charged with keeping an eye on that child’s interests until it reaches adulthood.

Every child will be assigned a named individual by the state to oversee the interests of that child. This role, of overseeing the interests of a child, once fell naturally to the parents of that child.

What is this named individual going to do? According to the Bill, the named person is responsible for:

doing such of the following where the named person considers it to be appropriate in order to promote, support or safeguard the wellbeing of the child or young person—

(i) advising, informing or supporting the child or young person, or a parent of the child or young person,

(ii) helping the child or young person, or a parent of the child or young person, to access a service or support, or

(iii) discussing, or raising, a matter about the child or young person with a service provider or relevant authority

The politicians who have queried the measure seem most interested in how a personal relationship will be developed between the named person and the children they are responsible for:

SNP MSP John Wilson asked how children would be made aware that they had a named person, and how that named person would be identified to the child.

"How do we make sure that this named person is actually identified to the young person, and the young person has the confidence and the ability to actually directly speak to that named individual?" he said.

Conservative MSP Jackson Carlaw suggested the measure is "a very huge enterprise".

"How many named persons do you anticipate there will be? What will the turnover be in named persons? And how in practice does that really establish a bond of confidence on which people feel they can rely?" he asked.

The main intent seems to be to have a personal contact between a child in need and one named individual responsible for the child's welfare. For children from highly dysfunctional families who are in some kind of danger, that might be a good idea.

But it's an unnecessary and dangerous extension of the role of the state to have a named individual for every child. Can we really trust the modern administrative state to direct its intervention only to those children in real danger, once an administrative structure and authority has been established over all children? Especially when the role of the named individual is defined so broadly, as being to promote the wellbeing of the child they have been appointed to look after.

It's dangerous too to have such a measure at a time when the family is being redefined in a way that diminishes the importance of the "filial" connection between child and parent. This is not the time to further undermine the significance of biological paternity in establishing in normal circumstances both authority and responsibility in relation to a child.

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So what do the German green youth want?

The German Greens get a bit over 10% of the vote. They are apparently one of the more radically leftist parties around. Last month, their youth wing passed a resolution called "Queer your world". When I begin quoting it, you'll understand how radical it is. But at the same time it can also be seen as fitting in with trends in modern society.

Here is the part where sex distinctions are discussed:

8.9 Overcoming the sexual binary

The categories "man" and "woman" are social constructs, but the idea of two sexes does not accord with reality. We understand a human not as a person who is subject to a lifelong gender identity as a man or a woman. Our goal is to create a society in which everyone can freely decide for themselves which gender identity they would like to adopt. As Green Youth we argue for the diversity of gender identities to be finally recognised. A first step to envisage this is a third option when specifying sex to government agencies and in official documents. There should also be the opportunity to refuse to specify. Our perspective is that specifying gender should completely disappear as a category.

Such ideas are no doubt attractive to those homosexuals who do not have a clear identity as men or women. But they also fit in with the liberal idea that our lives should be individually self-determined and that predetermined qualities, such as our sex or our race, are artificial social constructs that should be made not to matter.

The Green Youth resolution is more radical than the typical liberal attitude: when liberals want to make our sex not matter they do so by advocating unisex parenting and such like rather than wanting the categories of man and woman to be abolished. In some ways, though, the Green Youth position is the ultimate expression of the liberal position: it demands a diversity of freely chosen sex identities to replace the binary of man and woman.

And is the Green Youth position all that much more radical than where liberalism has taken us when it comes to our communal identities? For Westerners, at least, these identities have been declared to be social constructs and abolished in the name of diversity. The Green Youth want to complete the job already begun in a liberal society and abolish our identities as men and women in the same way.

The Green Youth also have ideas on how marriage could be "queered":

3.3 As Green Youth we reject the privileging of marriage between "man" and "wife" and are committed to a family contract that allows all people to express their love equally and to take responsibility for one another. Since intimate relationships exist outside heterosexual and monogamous partnerships, it must be finally legally recognised when non-heterosexual couples or people living in polyamorous relationships or female friends take over the care of children together. Queer people shouldn't be discriminated against any longer in tax law nor in adoption law. In respect to this, we also demand that more than two people should legally qualify to be regarded as parents of a child. Family is when people care for each other and take on responsibility. We therefore demand that any form of family is supported and valued by society and before the law to the same degree. However the protection of marriage should no longer be anchored in the Basic Law. We want to abolish marriage as a state institution. Families deserve state protection, not marriage.

What's to be said of all this? First, note how open-ended the definition of family has become. It is just any arrangement of people who care for each other. And note the radical consequences of accepting such an open-ended definition. You can have any number of people being recognised as the parents of a child; you can have groups of friends becoming parents to a child; you can have polyamorists doing the same. The link to biological paternity and maternity is entirely disregarded, as is the role of motherhood and fatherhood. Literally any form of family will do.

Again, this is a more radical expression of ideas that are already fairly mainstream within a liberal culture. A lot of people now understand marriage to be a "love ceremony" and that tends to suggest the idea that a family can be anything. An Australian newspaper columnist, Andrea Burns, expressed the modern view well when she wrote:

the days of the white bread, nuclear family are over. There are many ways to commune, love and create a home ... It’s inconsequential who makes up that circle of love...

There is a weakening or a loosening of ties in all this. Just consider the definition of family offered by Sam Page as executive director of Family Relationship Services Australia:

The definition I like now is whoever you share your toothpaste with, that’s your family.

I'm not sure that toothpaste sharing quite measures up to fulfilling your masculine nature in the role of a husband and father, or the biological relationship of paternity connecting father and child, or the complementary union of a man and a woman within marriage and family.

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Roebuck on women and marriage

Alan Roebuck has written a post at The Orthosphere on what the attitude of men toward women and marriage in a liberal culture ought to be. I think it's very good, particularly in outlining why marriage continues to be of importance. It's not just that the arguments are compelling, but that he models a spirited response to the difficulties of the age.

There was some debate in the comments about advice that Alan Roebuck gives to men facing divorce; that perhaps is inevitable given the difficulty of men in that situation (i.e. no easy solutions).

If you haven't already read it, I encourage you to do so:

Can Man Live Traditionally?

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A man who supports his family now a bad thing?

The Sydney Morning Herald has run an article by a senior writer, Mike Wade, complaining about the survival in Australia of.... the male breadwinner.

Yes, the idea of a male breadwinner is offensive to contemporary liberalism:

An economic dinosaur lives on in Australia: the male breadwinner. Despite decades of sweeping social and economic change he's survived surprisingly unscathed. And there's evidence our male breadwinner model is especially potent.

Researchers have found the male breadwinner is proving much more resilient in Australia than many comparable countries...
 

Why the panic about male breadwinners? It seems that new research shows that only a minority of mothers with young children choose to work full-time:

The male dominance over full-time employment is most pronounced among parents with small children. About 85 per cent of all fathers with a youngest child under the age of five work full-time - but for mothers in that category, the rate is about 19 per cent.

There are also signs the long-running increase in female participation rate, under way since the 1960s, has stalled. The proportion of women aged 15-64 in the workforce is now lower than it was four years ago.
 

I've pointed to this trend many times at this site: in my workplace there are no women with children of any age who work full-time - they are all part-timers (about a third of Australian women overall return to full-time employment in the long-run).

What do liberals think the solution is? Here's one suggestion:

Patricia Apps, professor in public economics at the University of Sydney, argues that if childcare worked more like the school system, women's workforce participation would surge...
 

She wants the care of children to be entirely socialised. And then we get this comment from Mike Wade:

The dominance of the male breadwinner means men have far more retirement income than women because they spend more time working. The superannuation industry estimates nearly 90 per cent of women have insufficient super to support a comfortable standard of living in retirement.
 

Mike Wade might feel woozy having to recognise the fact, but the super that husbands earn will help to support those 90% of women. It is family income, not husband income.

How did we get to the stage where it's thought wrong for men to go out to work to support their families and wrong for mothers to look after their own young children?

Well, part of the answer is that liberals believe that career is more important than family. And one reason for this is that they believe that women achieve more autonomy - more independence from men - through careers. Sweden's EU minister, Birgitta Ohlsson, recently attacked housewives on the basis that:

Having your own money is a source of both power and independence for women.
 

So if career is necessary for "equal freedom" then that is what liberals will push for: they will want more career involvement from women and less from men. It doesn't really matter to the political class if women are choosing to work part-time, that is considered the wrong outcome and so action is taken to get a different result.

There are any number of problems with all this. For instance, if independence really is the aim then why marry in the first place? And if you value autonomy above all else, then why have children? Little wonder that in Sweden, where such liberal values have been pushed the hardest, a record 47% of people live alone.

And the liberal view glosses over the fact that we are not just interchangeable units of labour, but men and women, and that part of our fulfilment in life comes through distinct paternal and maternal roles.

And is it really in women's overall interests to discourage a culture of the male breadwinner? Won't larger numbers of women just end up going out to work to support an unemployed partner? Won't there be fewer men earning that superannuation to support women in their retirement?

But, most of all, what kind of society pushes against men working to support their families?

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Fourth generation socialist families!

Owen Jones is a young left-wing writer from the UK. He describes himself as a fourth generation socialist. His grandfather was a member of the Communist Party and his parents were Trotskyists.

So what happens when you grow up in such a socialist family? Well, for one thing you don't call your mum "mum":

That tweet was made in the context of Owen Jones describing his mother's commitment to feminism.

It's that idea again that we should be self-defining and therefore we shouldn't be defined by a traditional or inherited or natural role like that of mother. Therefore, Owen is not allowed to call his mother "mum".

It's a logical application of the theory, but it suggests that the theory itself is misguided and that self-definition is not always and everywhere the principle to be followed.

Hat tip: David Thompson

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A feminist explains her problems with family

An Australian research agency has found that 42% of Australian women rate family as their highest life goal, well in front of security, prosperity or an important life.

The result is disconcerting to feminist Clementine Ford. But why?

The gist of her answer is that there's nothing wrong with wanting a family, but it's something that should be created around you rather than something you pursue as a life goal. If it's a life goal then it's something that defines you as a person and robs you of autonomy. Men, according to Clementine Ford, don't have family as a life goal and are therefore free to live exciting, important and prosperous lives.

In her own words:

There's nothing wrong with desiring family or considering the formation of it as integral to your life happiness. Certainly, wanting nothing more than to have children and a familial environment in which to raise them is as admirable a pursuit as any other.

But firstly, 'family' is generally considered to be something that happens around men rather than a life goal that they pursue. Men are enabled by social values to pursue the 'important' lives, the exciting lives, the prosperous lives women are evidently eschewing, because it's understood that for men these choices aren't incompatible with having a family.
 

This is such a curious belief system. It rests in part on a misguided envy of the lives of men, who are perceived to be free to live important, exciting and prosperous lives (it would be like a man seeing a group of happy, beautiful young women and thinking enviously that they had it made - hopefully, good sense would kick in and banish the thought, but Clementine seems to be sticking with her moment of envy. Note too that even though she gets to have a relatively cushy job as a freelance writer, she still believes that the average labouring man gets a free pass compared to her.)

Nor does Clementine understand how important family is to most men. Getting married and having children is a life goal for most men, one that men do self-consciously pursue.

Clementine has also bought into liberal autonomy theory: the idea that we should not be defined by predetermined factors like biology or custom (and therefore motherhood), but by things we choose for ouselves (such as career). She complains:

Children, and the act of having them, is still seen as something that elevates women into personhood.

Their childless lives are precursors to their real purpose - having babies, and discovering what it is Their Bodies Were Meant To Do...mothers also...suffer the indignity of being assumed to have lost an essential part of their autonomous identities as women...

By all means, women should make family central to their lives if that's their choice. But it's dangerous to view it as a life goal, as an act that will secure happiness at the expense of the pursuits that will secure freedom, independence and autonomy.
 

Look how clearly she states it: a woman's life goal must be freedom, independence and autonomy. And that's not something you get from family.

She has so much bought into the idea of individual autonomy that she refuses to recognise the shared purposes of husbands and wives. And so you once again get curious ideas like the following:

But secondly, the cost of raising children is still significantly high enough for women that encouraging them to view it as a goal - something they pursue and achieve, rather than something created and managed around them - has potentially damaging consequences. Unfortunately for women, the financial burden of caring for children still falls overwhelmingly to them.

Leaving aside the gender pay gap that affects most women working in salaried positions, their prospects for retirement are bleak. Women's superannuation, already estimated to be about half that at retirement age as men's, is damaged further by being out of the workforce for long periods of time.
 

Clementine here repeats her belief that family should be something "created and managed" around women, rather than something they set out to achieve. She also believes that a married woman will be harmed compared to men by the loss of superannuation. But how? Does she think that the husband reserves his superannuation for himself only, leaving the wife to fund herself out of her own?

Clementine Ford seems to be trying to find a way to give women permission to have a family, whilst keeping freedom, independence and autonomy as their life goal. But if you were sincere about the pursuit of freedom, independence and autonomy then you wouldn't marry, regardless of whether you were a man or a woman. You would stay single.

What Clementine Ford needs to recognise is that not everyone sees autonomy as the sole, overriding good in life. She should not assume that men see it as the overriding good and get the freedom to pursue it. She should recognise too how odd it is, first, to see husbands and wives as not pooling financial resources and, second, to think that family can be "created and managed" around people, rather than being a life goal in itself.

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Nick Clegg calls traditional family "absurd"

Nick Clegg is the leader of the Liberal Democrats in Britain. The Lib Dems are perceived as a centrist party, standing between Labor and the Conservatives. But I agree with the following comment from "Norm" in the Daily Mail:

As a young man many many years ago I thought the liberals stood between labour and the tories but in actual fact they are more extreme than either. The sooner they are condemned to history the better.
 

The latest example of this radicalism is a speech given by Nick Clegg to a party conference on the issue of women. Clegg wants women to be "free to realise their potential". But what does this mean? Clegg has decided that people realise their potential by having an upper middle-class profession: by being a lawyer or doctor or journalist or politician.

Therefore, Clegg sees motherhood not positively as part of how women fulfil themselves, but negatively as a potential hindrance to a career in the higher professions.

And so Clegg complains that at the moment it is mostly women rather than men who take a year of maternity leave to be with their children. Taking a year to be with her newborn, complains Clegg, means a disruption to a woman's career:

It’s heartbreaking to watch women who feel forced to lower their ambitions for themselves. And it’s heartbreaking to see fathers missing out on being with their children.

As a father, I find the outdated assumption that men should go out and work and women should stay at home and look after the children frankly absurd.
 

So Clegg has brought himself to believe that the traditional pattern of family life, in which a mother looks after her children whilst the father works to provide, is "absurd".

If Clegg is really so interested in the "absurd" perhaps he should consider the following:

i) It is absurd to assume that people realise their potential by being a lawyer or a politician or one of the other higher professions. In part, that's because 95% of the population will never be those things. So 95% of the population is excluded from ever realising their potential under Clegg's definition.

That Clegg's definition is absurd is brought out in the part of his speech where he talked about a visit he and his wife made to a girls' school in Ethiopia:

And despite the poverty, despite the conditions, the young girls we met there dreamed big. Every single one of them wanted to be an engineer, or a doctor, or a lawyer. One even said she wanted to be Prime Minister. I said I had no doubt she could achieve it.

To think that girls like those Lynne and I met in Ethiopia might have their ambitions crushed just because they are girls – that they might die younger and live their lives in poverty and servitude – is devastating.
 

So even Ethiopian girls living in poverty are being brought up to believe that the realisation of their lives consists in becoming engineers or doctors or lawyers.

ii) If it really is the case that people realise their potential by becoming doctors or lawyers then why claim it is heartbreaking for men to miss out on being with their children?

We're being asked to cheer on the idea of women not taking any time off work to be with their children, but at the same time to think it heartbreaking if men don't take time off work to be with their children.

In fact, if Clegg is right about how people realise themselves, then nobody should look after children. Even if we give the job to childcare workers, that is a lower rather than an upper profession. So the people who do that job never get to realise who they are. Isn't that then a fundamental inequality in society?

iii) Clegg's view is therefore absurdly short-sighted. If we realise ourselves through a higher professional career, and if being a parent is an obstruction to be avoided, then people will no longer be as committed to raising the next generation.

It is already the case that the number of women reaching the age of 45 and remaining childless has doubled from about 10% to 20%.

I doubt, though, if Clegg will be worried about the effect of his beliefs on the future prospects of his nation. After all, he has openly rejected the idea of a national good, or for that matter any kind of common good. Clegg likes the idea of an atomised society as he believes it allows for a more self-defining life.

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Hesitating at the brink?

It's rare for liberals to recognise the negative consequences of a liberal culture. So I was interested to read an article from The Daily Beast/Newsweek in which the decline of the traditional family is presented as a looming problem (hat tip: Elusive Wapiti).

The gist of the article is that the U.S. is now beginning to follow the pattern in Europe of having below replacement levels of fertility. The authors seem to recognise that liberalism is spawning a postfamilial culture in which the creative classes in the big cities are beginning to choose solo living over a commitment to family.

Amid this shift, the childless and even the partnerless life has gained something of a cultural cachet, with some suggesting they represent not just a legitimate choice but a superior one. It’s a burgeoning movement that’s joined cultural tastemakers, academics, neo-Malthusians, greens, feminists, Democratic politicians, urban planners, and big developers. Unlike families, whose members, after all, are often stuck with one another, University of Santa Barbara psychology professor Bella De Paulo praises singles as enjoying “intentional communities” and being more likely “to think about human connectedness in a way that is far-reaching and less predictable.”

In his provocative 2012 book Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, Eric Klinenberg writes that for the hip urban professionals who make up the so-called creative class, living alone represents a “more desirable state,” even “a sign of success and a mark of distinction, a way to gain freedom and experience the anonymity that can make city life so exhilarating.” Certainly, the number of singletons has skyrocketed: more than half of all adults today are single (a group that includes divorcées and widows and widowers), up from about one in five in 1950.
 

That's hardly surprising. If you buy into liberal ideology, you'll believe that the primary good in life is individual autonomy. And if you want to maximise your autonomy then you won't want to commit to fixed relationships and responsibilities that come with marriage and children; nor will you want to make individual sacrifices to uphold the larger traditions you belong to; nor will you want to follow a "pre-ordained" path of family and children rather than your own unique, self-determining lifestyle.

You can see such thoughts in various comments in the article. For instance, the psychology professor quoted above praises singles as creating "intentional communities" and "less predictable" forms of connection with each other. The implication is that those who marry and have children are just following a predetermined script (and therefore lose status as autonomous beings), in contrast to the deliberate, consciously made relationships made by singles.

Similarly, one of the single women rejected the idea of pregnancy because she didn't want to relinquish "sole ownership of one’s own body." Another one reacted badly to her friends marrying and moving to the suburbs because it seemed too much like a set, pre-ordained life path: “It’s very orderly, like if you put them in different clothes, it could be the 1950s.”

The authors do note that this single woman constituency is a good thing for leftist politics in the sense that it creates a voting bloc for the Democrats. But they worry that if fertility rates fall that the U.S. will be stuck in the same position as the European countries, in having a welfare state saddled with higher costs and a smaller tax base. They also worry that by not having children liberals will be a declining force in the U.S.:

But if singletons are swelling as a voting bloc and interest group now, the demographics of childlessness mean that they’re likely to lose out in the long term...

In the long run, notes Eric Kaufmann, the author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, high birthrates among such conservative, religious populations as Mormons and evangelical Christians will slant our politics against the secular young, childless voting bloc as well. Even among generally liberal groups like Jews, the most religious are vastly out-birthing their secular counterparts; by some estimates roughly two in five New York Jews are Orthodox—as are three in four of the city’s Jewish children. If these trends continue, and if these children share their parents’ politics—two big ifs, to be sure—even the Democratic stronghold of Gotham will be pulled rightward.

This prospect would pose dangers to our society as a whole, and singletons in particular, including a potential reversion to a more rigidly traditionalist worldview. But perhaps most damaging would be declining markets and a hobbled economy in which governments are forced to tax the shrinking workforce to pay for the soaring retirement and health expenses of an increasingly doddering population

...In the coming decades, success will accrue to those cultures that preserve the family’s place, not as the exclusive social unit but as one that is truly indispensable. It’s a case we need to make as a society, rather than counting on nature to take its course.
 

I suspect that the real reason why the liberal writers of the article are hesitant to take the leap into a postfamilial culture is the argument I bolded - they understand at some level that such a culture has no future. But what can they do about it? They mostly propose more liberalism as a solution to a problem created by liberalism in the first place. If they were serious about the issue they would have to rethink aspects of liberal ideology and culture. As The Elusive Wapiti puts it:

The problem lays in the attitudes of the millions of men and women who share Ms. Jordan's attitudes. Attitudes that produce billions of perfectly rational self-interested choices subsequent to those attitudes. Try as they may, liberalists cannot deny the effects of dynamiting the family, erasing gender differences, consecrating individual autonomy as the acme of human values, and making children a fashion accessory (that are permitted to enter into this world unmurdered only if they're wanted). As a result, we have a society where "family" and "marriage" are defined so broadly as to be near-meaningless, "men" and "women" are legally interchangeable, sub-replacement fertility, and acting as though "it's all about me" isn't the acme of narcissism but a commonly accepted social norm.

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Rachel Cusk: a very modern divorce

Earlier this year writer Rachel Cusk published a book about the break up of her marriage.

The bare details of the marriage are as follows. When she met her husband he was a human rights lawyer and she was a successful writer. They had two daughters together but she didn't want to stay home, so he quit his job in order to raise the girls whilst pursuing work in a creative field (as a photographer specialising in social injustice).

She seemed to have everything that a feminist woman might want in a marriage. Her husband was clearly dedicated to liberal causes and he was also willing to put his career second to hers and to focus on the home as a "hands on dad". He made gourmet meals for her and he also kept up his own interests, holding numerous well-received photographic exhibitions.

What went wrong? It seems that the problem was not his discontent but hers. She seems to have been conflicted about the blurring of gender roles in the marriage, not wanting to do the traditional thing, but not liking the new one either.

Her unwillingness to take on a motherhood role she explains as follows:

Call yourself a feminist, my husband says. And perhaps one of these days I'll say to him, yes, you're right. I shouldn't call myself a feminist. I'm so terribly sorry. And in a way, I'll mean it. She wouldn't be found haunting the scene of the crime, as it were; loitering in the kitchen, in the maternity ward, at the school gate. She knows that her womanhood is a fraud, manufactured by others for their own convenience; she knows that women are not born but made. So she stays away from it, like the alcoholic stays away from the bottle. So I suppose a feminist wouldn't get married. She wouldn't have a joint bank account or a house in joint names. She might not have children either, girl children whose surname is not their mother's but their father's, so that when she travels abroad with them they have to swear to the man at passport control that she is their mother.

What she's saying here is that she's an inconsistent feminist. Feminists say that womanhood is a social construct created by men to oppress women; therefore, a consistent feminist would have nothing to do with the traditionally female sphere. But she couldn't stay away altogether, she found herself "loitering" in it, by having children, getting married and even spending some time in the kitchen. She continues:

My father advanced male values to us, his daughters. And my mother did the same. What I lived as feminism were in fact the cross-dressing values of my father. So I am not a feminist. I am a self-hating transvestite.

She was brought up by both parents to follow male values. She is a transvestite in the sense that she is a woman dressed in these male values imparted by both her father and mother.

I find this sad, but it's probably not that unusual. I doubt that most women are conflicted to the same degree as Rachel Cusk but I get the sense that plenty of women can't easily accept a wholly feminine identity. It strengthens my determination to bring up my own daughter in a way that she knows how much I value what women bring to the world as women.

Rachel Cusk then writes,

I remember, when my own children were born feeling a great awareness of this new, foreign aspect of myself that was in me and yet did not seem to be of me. It was as though I had suddenly acquired the ability to speak Russian: I didn't know where my knowledge of it had come from.

To act as a mother, I had to suspend my own character, which had evolved on a diet of male values. I was aware, in those early days, that my behaviour was strange to the people who knew me well. It was as though I had been brainwashed by a cult religion. And yet this cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. It reflected nothing about me: its literature and practices, its values, its codes of conduct, its aesthetic were not mine.

So for a while I didn't belong anywhere. I seemed, as a woman, to be extraneous. And so I did two things: I reverted to my old male-inflected identity; and I conscripted my husband into care of the children. My notion was that we would live together as two hybrids, each of us half male and half female. He gave up his law job, and I gave up the exclusivity of my primitive maternal right over the children.

The birth of her children awoke a womanly aspect of herself which changed her, but it was alien to the sense of self she had cultivated up to that point. So when she tried to be a mother she felt she belonged nowhere: she couldn't embrace motherhood as it conflicted with the values she had been brought up with and she couldn't live according to the values she was brought up with whilst in the role of a mother. So she handed the motherhood job to her husband and reverted to her "old male-inflected identity".

So why didn't that then work? Rachel Cusk explains it this way:

I had hated my husband's unwaged domesticity just as much as I had hated my mother's; and he, like her, had claimed to be contented with his lot.

Why had I hated it so? Because it represented dependence.

She didn't like the idea that her husband was dependent on her. Her own self-identity was that she was a "compartmentalised" human being, by which she seems to mean an "isolated unit" that stands by itself without the need of completion from anyone else. She saw this as the ideal, and so couldn't respect her husband as her equal for not attempting the same thing:

My notion of half was more like the earthworm's: you cut it in two, but each half remains an earthworm, wriggling and fending for itself. I earned the money in our household, did my share of the cooking and cleaning, paid someone to look after the children while I worked, picked them up from school once they were older. And my husband helped. It was his phrase, and still is: he helped me. I was the compartmentalised modern woman, the woman having it all, and he helped me to be it, to have it. But I didn't want help: I wanted equality. In fact, this idea of help began to annoy me.

Why couldn't we be the same? Why couldn't he be compartmentalised too?

And so I felt, beneath the reconfigured surface of things, the tension of the old orthodoxies. We were a man and a woman who in our struggle for equality had simply changed clothes. We were two transvestites, a transvestite couple – well, why not? Except that I did both things, was both man and woman, while my husband – meaning well – only did one. Once, a female friend confessed to me that she admired our life but couldn't have lived it herself. She admitted the reason – that she would no longer respect her husband if he became a wife.

But is she really as "compartmentalised" as she makes out? If you read extracts from the book (here and here) there is still a yearning for a complete family life and for a male presence in her life. And she is not entirely immune from feeling the pull of maternal feeling for her children. In the aftermath of the divorce, when the children are upset, she writes:

When my children cry a sword is run through my heart. Yet it is I who am also the cause of their crying. And for a while I am undone by this contradiction, by the difficulty of connecting the person who acted out of self-interest with the heartbroken mother who has succeeded her.

Perhaps it is not such an easy thing to hold together a modernist view of identity and relationships.

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Why did the ACLU stamp out a father-daughter dance?

A school in Cranston, Rhode Island, wanted to hold a father-daughter dance. But the ACLU objected and the dance has been scrapped.

The reasons for outlawing a father-daughter dance are interesting, as it shows the liberal principles we are all ruled by at work.

a) Making our sex not matter

Liberals hold that what matters most is individual autonomy - the power to self-determine. Therefore, whatever can't be self-determined becomes an impediment to human freedom. Our sex is predetermined and not self-determined and therefore, under the logic of liberalism, must be made not to matter.

The Cranston parents' association had organised a father-daughter dance for the boys and a mother-son visit to a baseball game for the boys. The choice of these events assumed that our sex does matter - that girls will generally be more interested in a dance, and boys in a baseball game. The ACLU felt that the school was therefore acting against liberal principles; what the ACLU wants the school to do is to actively overturn such ideas about gender.

Here is what the ACLU had to say on the issue:

The controversy that has suddenly arisen in a political campaign over father-daughter dances in Cranston is old news – the matter was amicably resolved with school officials over four months ago. And it was resolved for a simple reason: the school district recognized that in the 21st Century, public schools have no business fostering the notion that girls prefer to go to formal dances while boys prefer baseball games. This type of gender stereotyping only perpetuates outdated notions of 'girl' and 'boy' activities and is contrary to federal law.

"PTOs remain free to hold family dances and other events, but the time has long since passed for public school resources to encourage stereotyping from the days of Ozzie and Harriet. Not every girl today is interested in growing up to be Cinderella – not even in Cranston. In fact, one of them might make a great major league baseball player someday."
 

And in another letter the ACLU states:

In sum, we hope that the school district will work to discourage, not promote, the sort of typecasting activities inherent in the baseball and dance events for school students.

Note that this is not just an isolated case of political correctness - the ACLU believes it has federal law on its side.

If there is an established ideology in the U.S. it is liberalism.

b) Diversity

The ACLU brought the complaint against the father-daughter dance on behalf of just one single mother. The single mother claimed that her daughter had no male figure in her life who she might be able to attend with and therefore she was excluded from the dance.

From the ACLU letter:

The variety and diversity of family structures in this day and age counsel against gender-limited events like this...reversion to a more stereotypical format results in the unintentional isolation of some children, preventing some single parents, and those in other non-traditional families, from being able to attend events with their children.

As it happens, the child could have gone to the dance - the school was even willing to allow the mother to attend with the daughter. But that didn't satisfy the ACLU, presumably because a father-daughter dance implies that the traditional family (one with a father) is a norm or standard. The ACLU wants a "family neutral" structure - one in which no particular type of family is given a higher standing.

Again, that's to be expected from a liberal organisation. If you put individual autonomy as your highest good, then you'll want a "variety and diversity of family structures" to make it seem as if you can self-determine how you arrange your family relationships. And no one choice is to be preferred, as that would then raise impediments to an individual's autonomy.

So the traditional family can't be preferred, as it's singular rather than diverse and fixed rather than fluid, and as giving it a higher standing would make some choices less valid than others, which to the liberal mind is discriminatory.

But the liberal position runs into considerable difficulties. One of these is that a liberal is likely to believe that each family type is as good as the other and that all that matters is that members of these family types love each other. But if true this would mean that there is no significant difference between a family with a father in it and one without a father.

It's a momentous moment in the life of a civilisation. If this idea takes hold, that fathers don't add anything to a family that couldn't be supplied by a mother alone - if people really come to believe this - then men are likely to drift away from paternal responsibilities. Why make big sacrifices if there is no benefit in doing so?

A community has to make a decision on this. The Cranston community wanted to reaffirm the importance of the father-daughter relationship by organising the dance and not surprisingly drew fire from a liberal organisation like the ACLU for doing so.

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Shulamith Firestone: making sex not matter

Shulamith Firestone has died. In 1970 she was at the cutting edge of second wave feminism, with the publication of her book The Dialectic of Sex.

She was a genuinely radical intellectual in the sense that she took the generally accepted principles of her time to their logical conclusion in one big leap.

The principle she took to a radical conclusion was this: that our sex (i.e. the fact of being a man or a woman) should be made not to matter.

There are large numbers of liberals who support some version of this principle. It flows from a belief that the overriding good in life is freedom defined as individual autonomy. If you think that an autonomous, self-determining life is what counts, then you'll see whatever is predetermined as being an impediment to be overcome. Given that sex distinctions are predetermined, it follows logically that liberals will want to make such distinctions not matter.

Where Shulamith Firestone differed from much of the liberal left was this. Left liberals usually argue that sex distinctions are social constructs and therefore can be socially deconstructed. Firestone however accepted that sex distinctions are based on real biological differences. She therefore concluded that nature had to be overcome if sex distinctions were to be abolished.

She wrote:

...the end goal of feminist revolution must be...not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally....reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would born to both sexes equally, or independently of either...

Firestone wanted to free women from the tyranny of being biologically female. She saw it as a tyranny because she believed in autonomy as the great good in life; she did not think that a woman could be autonomously independent when she was subject to pregnancy and then the nuture of children. She thought that this inevitably made women dependent on men for support.

And so Firestone took a very hostile view toward pregnancy; toward women looking after dependent children; and toward the act of sex which led to these things. She wanted to bust up the biological family and replace it with artificial procreation.

These views did not create a happy life for Firestone. In the 1980s she suffered from mental illness and she died alone, not being discovered for a week after her death.

Her fault was not to examine the underlying principles she was working with closely enough. She did not see motherhood, or family, or marital love as goods in themselves, goods which were not always to be subordinated to the pursuit of a radical, individualistic autonomy. She operated with a reductionist account of the human good, one which distorted her view of what might be valued in life, and so she failed to see politics as an application of wisdom and experience to the ordering and weighing of a range of possible goods.

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W.L. George - when a male feminist gets it wrong

We sometimes forget that feminism is now a very old political movement. There were feminist writers in the early 1800s, but it seems to have been picked up at an institutional level by about the 1860s. The first wave reached a peak of radicalism in the years before WWI.

One of the male feminists of this radical pre-War period was an English writer by the name of W.L. George. He wrote a tract called Feminist Intentions which I want to look at. George began his piece as follows:

The Feminist propaganda...rests upon a revolutionary biological principle. Substantially, the Feminists argue that there are no men and that there are no women; there are only sexual majorities. To put the matter less obscurely, the Feminists base themselves on Weininger's theory, according to which the male principle may be found in woman, and the female principle in man. It follows that they recognize no masculine or feminine "spheres", and that they propose to identify absolutely the conditions of the sexes.

George recognises that the feminist programme is a revolutionary one in that it aims to overturn the principle of two distinct sexes, male and female. Sex is to be made not to matter, in keeping with the liberal principle that what is predetermined is an impediment to individual autonomy.

George's second paragraph is also worth reading:

Now there are two kinds of people who labor under illusions as regards the Feminist movement, its opponents and its supporters: both sides tend to limit the area of its influence; in few cases does either realize the movement as revolutionary. The methods are to have revolutionary results, are destined to be revolutionary; as a convinced but cautious Feminist, I do not think it honest or advisable to conceal this fact. I have myself been charged by a very well-known English author (whose name I may not give, as the charge was contained in a private letter) with having "let the cat out of the bag" in my little book, Woman and To-morrow. Well, I do not think it right that the cat should be kept in the bag. Feminists should not want to triumph by fraud. As promoters of a sex war, they should not hesitate to declare it, and I have little sympathy with the pretenses of those who contend that one may alter everything while leaving everything unaltered.

That last sentence is a good insight. Are there not many Westerners who sign on to a radical liberalism without recognising what they are bringing down in the process?

And George is not entirely faultless here either. He expected that feminism would "strengthen the race"; and that it would improve the character of both men and women. I wonder what he would say if he could travel forward in time and witness ladette behaviour, or the thugging up of men, or the declining fortunes of the Western family and the Western peoples:

Therein lies the mental revolution: while the Suffragists are content to attain immediate ends, the Feminists are aiming at ultimate ends. They contend that it is unhealthy for the race that man should not recognize woman as his equal; that this makes him intolerant, brutal, selfish, and sentimentally insincere. They believe likewise that the race suffers because women do not look upon men as their peers; that this makes them servile, untruthful, deceitful, narrow, and in every sense inferior.

Similarly, George thought that if traditional marriage were abolished that it would liberate men and women to have unions based on love alone - he didn't foresee the coarsening of relationships and the instability of family life that would result:

Their grievances against the home...are closely connected with the marriage question, for they believe that the desire of man to have a housekeeper, of woman to have a protector, deeply influence the complexion of unions which they would base exclusively upon love, and it follows that they do not accept as effective marriage any union where the attitudes of love do not exist.

Next comes an argument that time has proven to be utterly wrong. George says that the feminists of his time wanted women to be economically independent, in part, because it would then allow women to choose the best men as mates and that this would have a eugenic effect - which would then benefit the race:

Under Feminist rule, women will be able to select, because they will be able to sweep out of their minds the monetary consideration; therefore they will love better, and unless they love, they will not marry at all. It is therefore probable that they will raise the standard of masculine attractiveness by demanding physical and mental beauty in those whom they choose; that they will apply personal eugenics.

The men whom they do not choose will find themselves in exactly the same position as the old maids of modern times: that is to say, these men, if they are unwed, will be unwed because they have chosen to remain so, or because they were not sought in marriage. The eugenic characteristic appears, in that women will no longer consent to accept as husbands the old, the vicious, the unpleasant. They will tend to choose the finest of the species, and those likely to improve the race. As the Feminist revolution implies a social revolution, notably "proper work for proper pay", it follows that marriage will be easy, and that those women who wish to mate will not be compelled to wait indefinitely for the consummation of their loves. Incidentally, also, the Feminists point out that their proposals hold forth to men a far greater chance of happiness than they have had hitherto, for they will be sure that the women who select them do so because they love them, and not because they need to be supported.

Something like the opposite has happened. The emphasis on being independent and career focused has led many upper class women to delay family formation and then either to settle in a panic or else fail to reproduce; nor does it seem to be true that when women no longer need men to provide for them that they then select men of mental and physical beauty.

George next tells us that feminists want to loosen the marriage tie. However, they want the man to continue to pay even if the woman chooses to divorce as:

The rebels must accept situations such as the financial responsibility of man, while they struggle to make woman financially independent of man.

George then starts to dream of a utopian future:

Personally, I am inclined to believe that the ultimate aim of Feminism with regard to marriage is the practical suppression of marriage and the institution of free alliance. It may be that thus only can woman develop her own personality, but society itself must so greatly alter, do so very much more than equalize wages and provide work for all, that these ultimate ends seem very distant...

....in common with many Feminists I incline to place a good deal of reliance on the ennobling of the nature of the male.

George is claiming that all the sacrifices men make for women as husbands and fathers has the ultimate effect of suppressing a woman's personality. So why would a man make such sacrifices if the effect is a negative one?

And can it really be said that a feminist sexual revolution has ennobled the nature of the male? It's more likely that it is we who look back to George's era and notice a stronger culture of masculine nobility that what we have today.

George also noticed that some feminist women of his time wanted to lay claim to children as theirs alone, with the father having no rights:

One feature manifests itself, and that is a change of attitude in woman with regard to the child. Indications in modern novels and modern conversation are not wanting to show that a type of woman is arising who believes in a new kind of matriarchate, that is to say, in a state of society where man will not figure in the life of woman except as the father of her child. Two cases have come to my knowledge where English women have been prepared to contract alliances with men with whom they did not intend to pass their lives,--this because they desired a child. They consider that the child is the expression of the feminine personality, while after the child's birth, the husband becomes a mere excrescence. They believe that the "Wife" should die in childbirth, and the "Mother" rise from her ashes. There is nothing utopian about this point of view, if we agree that Feminists can so rearrange society as to provide every woman with an independent living...

George did not have a high opinion of the New Woman - the radical feminist women of his own time:

The "New Woman", as we know her to-day, a woman who is not so new as the woman who will be born of her, is a very unpleasant product; armed with a little knowledge, she tends to be dogmatic in her views and offensive in argument. She tends to hate men, and to look upon Feminism as a revenge; she adopts mannish ways, tends to shout, to contradict, to flout principles because they are principles; also she affects a contempt for marriage which is the natural result of her hatred of man.

But, like most revolutionaries, he thought this was a necessary transitory stage and that new social conditions would then create a more ideal type of woman. In his words:

The New Woman is like a freshly painted railing: whoever touches it will stain his hands, but the railing will dry in time.

George then floats another idea, which is that women should wear a uniform:

One tentative suggestion is being made, and that is a uniform for women.

He seems to have associated an interest in appearance with sexually distinct feminine women - something which contradicted the idea of making the sexes the same. Hence a uniform for women.

Finally, George finishes with this:

Thus and thus only, if man will readjust his views, expel vir and enthrone homo, can woman cease to appear before him as a rival and a foe, realize herself in her natural and predestined role, that of partner and mate.

That strikes a false note. For a man to expel vir (manliness) and enthrone homo (humanliness) is not a readjustment of his views - it is overthrowing his own sex and his distinct identity as a man. Here again is the radical insistence on abolishing sex distinctions.

And George "readjusts" the truth by claiming that women traditionally appeared to men as rivals and foes, and only by getting with the feminist programme can women finally become partners and mates. The traditional understanding was not that men and women were foes but that they had interdependent and complementary roles; it is feminism which has institutionalised the idea that men and women are competing for power in the cause of maximising an individualistic autonomy.

One thing I hope this post has demonstrated conclusively is that feminism did not begin with Germaine Greer, nor even with Simone de Beauvoir. It existed in a radical form long before these women arrived on the scene. And the aim has been much the same, namely to make sex distinctions not matter; to maximise female independence and autonomy; and to promote relationships on female terms.

The sad thing is that George believed his feminist programme would strengthen the race, ennoble men and women, and create a more loving culture of relationships. In this he has been proved disastrously wrong.

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What is the Swedish family being replaced by?

If you want to be a self-defining, autonomous individual then you won't like the set character of the traditional family. It will be thought of as restrictive, as not offering enough choice. So the trend in liberal societies is to leave the family undefined.

It's the same old story - whatever is predetermined is thought to be oppressive and in need of deconstructing.

I was reminded of this by an article in the Herald Sun on the way family has been taught here in Victoria. As long ago as the 1980s it was decided that it was better to leave the family only vaguely defined:

"What I've found is that in the 1970s and early-'80s, the curriculum authors tried to hang on to that very traditional notion of the nuclear family," Ms Farrelly said.

"By the time they got to the '80s, they conceded this wasn't going to wash, and they got quite anxious."

Instead of then exploring different types of family units, Ms Farrelly said the educators came up with really quite weird definitions such as "groups of people who share things".

"Then family just disappeared. The course (now) focuses very much on the individual," she said.

So there's another liberal definition of the family to add to the list: "groups of people who share things".

That's a bit like a recent definition of the family by the director of Family Relationship Services Australia who said,

The definition I like now is whoever you share your toothpaste with, that’s your family.

So is this vaguely defined family really going to catch on? Are we going to see all sorts of permutations and combinations of people choosing to share things together?

The indications right now are that that's not what's happening. If we take a look at Sweden, which has pioneered the changes to family life, something else is emerging:

What you can see is that 47% of Swedish households are comprised of only one person. That's such a striking statistic. Next highest is Norway on 40% and then Germany on 39%. The UK is 34% and the US is 27% (low compared to the Europeans, but in 1950 the figure for America was only 9%).

So liberalism is moving us not so much toward the new undefined family as toward solo living.

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Apparently I'm a pocket of resistance

Laura Wood has an interesting post up at The Thinking Housewife about an American study into men with stay-at-home wives.

The study has the ominous title "Marriage Structure and Resistance to the Gender Revolution in the Workplace." The three authors of the study summarise their research as follows:

In this article, we examine a heretofore neglected pocket of resistance to the gender revolution in the workplace: married male employees who have stay-at-home wives. We develop and empirically test the theoretical argument suggesting that such organizational members, compared to male employees in modern marriages, are more likely to exhibit attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that are harmful to women in the workplace.

Liberal academics, it seems, are hunting out "pockets of resistance" to the "gender revolution". The naughty counterrevolutionaries are those men, like myself, who are willing to support a wife at home.

But they do rule out a purge of counterrevolutionary men from the workplace:

Clearly, organizations should not seek to control the marital status of their male employees, for example, by means of selection. To do so would be unjust, likely illegal, and perhaps, bad business.

Well that's nice to know, but it's interesting that the three academics even consider the idea that "organisations" might try to "control the marital status of their male employees".

It's more evidence that liberal society isn't neutral when it comes to such matters. Liberal society has a notion of the good, one that, as the authors of the study are happy to admit, requires a revolutionary transformation of society.

Just another reminder that we are not living in socially conservative societies, we are living in liberal revolutionary ones.

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New model vs old model

Alicia Geddes is an Australian woman who looked forward to motherhood ("The Sum of Us" Melbourne's Child, June 2012):

I dreamt about being home with my baby full-time ... when the two red lines appeared on the pregnancy test we were ecstatic.

But there was a major hitch. Her husband wasn't able to afford the mortgage repayments on his salary. She was going to have to go back to work not just part-time but full-time:

My dreams of full-time motherhood were shattered.

She wasn't alone in her situation:

I asked my mothers' group how they met financial demands. Some were lucky enough to have plenty of money, while others had saved up before becoming pregnant to take a year off work. None said they planned to stay at home full-time after their child turned one. Would they if they were able to financially? Surprisingly, most said yes.

Things didn't go well when the time came to leave her young child for paid work:

As I doted over my newborn son, the end of paid parental leave loomed and the prospect of missing many firsts - first crawl, first step, first word - was heart-rending. How would I be able to concentrate on work when I would be missing my son so much?

Jealousy brewed towards more affluent friends ... I found myself resenting my husband, my parents and anyone else I thought could have saved me from returning to work but didn't. I became teary, angry and anxious. I hated myself for these feelings and stopped enjoying my son.

She did eventually find a solution. She and her husband moved back in with her parents, which allowed them to rent their house and meet their mortgage repayments. She is, for the time being, happy to be able to spend time with her son.

Alicia Geddes's story illustrates the problems with the new liberal model of family life. This new model of family life is based on the following logic:

i) The highest good is to be an independent, autonomous, self-determining individual.

ii) Therefore individuals cannot be defined in terms of family; our predetermined sex must be made not to matter; and women must be made independent of men.

iii) Therefore women are oppressed in the role of motherhood and liberated in the role of careerist. A career gives women an identity outside of family; it makes her financially independent of men; and it is an androgynous role in which our sex doesn't matter.

iv) Therefore women's lives should be organised around careers and not family. If women do stay at home after having children, they should be supported to do so by the state or by their employers rather than by their families; it should be for a limited time only; and as an ultimate aim men should take just as much of the paid leave as women.

The new model assumes that motherhood is at the heart of women's oppression. Paid parental leave was established not so much to allow women to be mothers but to organise women's lives around the workplace rather than the family.

In Australia, for instance, the argument for paid parental leave was set out by Elizabeth Kath back in 2003. She held that the oppression of women:

derives from their traditional reproductive role and that the introduction of paid maternity leave should be introduced as a means to transform this traditional role.

... Feminists have long recognised that the traditional view of women's role in society is an oppressive one. Shulasmith Firestone's declaration that "the heart of women's oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles" expresses a commonly held view amongst women's liberationist advocates.

Alicia Geddes did not find the motherhood role oppressive but fulfilling. But in the new model of family life, there is no family support for her to stay at home to look after her children. There is only the paid parental leave provided by the employer or state. And this is only intended to allow her to be at home for a limited time before she returns to her "proper" role of careerist.

If women do want to have a real choice to be full-time at home, then they need to turn toward a more traditional model in which there is family support for them to do so. This would mean, amongst other things:

a) Arguing for a living wage for men, i.e. a wage on which a family can be supported.

b) Not being triumphalist about the decline of men in education and employment. After all, the men who are declining in these spheres are no longer going to be able to support a family on their wage.

c) Not supporting an open borders policy, which excludes some men from the professions (as overseas students are able to buy their way into courses and then dominate the professions) and which tends to drive down the wages of unskilled men.

d) Encouraging men to commit to careers, as good for their future families, rather than discouraging them from doing so by suggesting that a high male wage is oppressive to women.

e) Rejecting the idea that an individualistic, self-determining lifestyle is an overriding good; instead, permitting people to accept that we are social creatures and naturally interdependent.

In Australia, too, we need to address the issue of housing costs. Our economy has been geared, in part, to speculative investment in housing. Although there were some winners from this, there's a point beyond which prices can't rise any further and in the meantime many families do find it harder to meet mortgage repayments.

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The Julia attitude

Barack Obama ran a "Life of Julia" campaign recently which attracted a lot of criticism. Julia is a (fictional) white American woman who goes through life being supported by government welfare policies rather than through a family. She does have one child at age 31, but apart from that Julia lives her life as an individual supported by the state.

It's not surprising that left-liberals would feel comfortable promoting such a life, given that their ideal is an autonomous individual whose life conditions are to be made equal by a state bureaucracy. But there was less support for such a vision of life on the right. Andrew Bolt wrote:

Beyond parody. Barack Obama’s latest ad boasts how a single woman can be married to the government for life.

And from James Taranto:

The most shocking bit of the Obama story is that Julia apparently never marries. She simply “decides” to have a baby, and Obama uses other people’s money to help her take care of it.

...In 1999 Lionel Tiger coined the word “bureaugamy" to refer to the relationship between officially impoverished mothers of illegitimate children and the government. “The Life of Julia” is an insidious attack on the institution of the family, an endorsement of bureaugamy even for middle-class women.

It's interesting that the American left should be ramping up the idea of replacing family support with state welfare at exactly the moment such a model is failing in Europe. There are European countries now facing a serious debt crisis because of excessive government spending (even in Australia the average worker is now paying $5000 a year in taxes to support welfare spending).

It's interesting too that left-liberalism has continued moving left to the point that Barack Obama's advert is now more radical than the views expressed by feminist Germaine Greer back in 1991. Greer wrote back then that "Most societies have arranged matters so that a family surrounds and protects mother and child" and she complained of "our families having withered away" with relationships becoming "less durable every year".

There is no such sense of lament about a woman being supported by the state rather than by a family in the Obama adverts.

I should point out that you can find the "Julia" attitude in various places. For instance, yesterday I was reading an article in the Melbourne Herald Sun about superannuation. The gist of the article was that women are facing a bleak financial future because when they opt out of the workforce to have children they lose a few years of superannuation contributions.

The assumption is that women are not part of a family and have to support themselves. The thought never even occurs to the writer of the article that the husband's super fund will help support the family - instead, the assumption is that men's super is used for men and women's for women, therefore if women have less they are missing out:

"Countless Australian mothers are paying the ultimate sacrifice for their commitment to family, with many neglecting their financial futures in favour of other responsibilities around the home," Suncorp Life head of superannuation Vicki Doyle says...."

What do those with the Julia attitude then propose? They believe that women should get free superannuation payments:

We have argued for some time that paid parental leave should include a superannuation component and that a super 'baby bonus' or a return to work super bonus after a career break could go some way to addressing the issue.

And here we come to a serious flaw in this whole attitudinal shift. On the one hand, a society needs to keep its men motivated to work. But the Julia approach undermines this motivation, by seeking to make women financially independent of their husbands.

Let me put this another way to try to clarify it. A society needs its men to believe firmly that they are necessary to a family as providers. If that belief breaks down then that society will inevitably decline. But Western society is taking the attitude that women should be autonomous of men and rely instead on government welfare for support.

So the West is relying on individuals to hold two contradictory beliefs or values. We are supposed to believe of women that they exist as individuals without family support, but of men that they should continue to work to support women.

There are already some in the men's movement who believe that the situation should be equalised by no longer expecting men to be providers, i.e. by matching a "Julia" attitude with a corresponding "Julian" attitude.

Traditionalists would remove the contradiction the other way - by not thinking of women as autonomous Julias reliant on state welfare, but rather as wives and mothers supported within a family.

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Why did school authorities want this mural painted over?

A reader sent me a link to the following story. Liz Bierendy is a 17-year-old student at a school in Rhode Island in the U.S. She painted a mural for her school depicting the progression of a boy from childhood to adulthood. Have a look at the mural below:

Pilgrim High School mural, Warwick Rhode Island, by Liz Bierendy

It seems that school authorities saw the mural and felt it to be offensive. They ordered that part of the mural should be painted over.

Can you guess why? Here's a clue: the "offensive" part of the mural is the bit at the end.

The authorities did not like Liz Bierendy's portrayal of the family. According to Liz Bierendy she was told that portraying a man getting married to a woman and forming a family,

may be offensive to some people because it is not how society views a family anymore because some people may not grow up with a mother and the whole marriage type thing may be a religious symbol.

I am tempted here to write "Really?" about a thousand times. But I should know better. I have explained in detail myself why liberals have issues with the standard traditional family. I shouldn't be surprised if liberals treat seemingly innocent depictions of the family as being too suspicious to be rendered into art.

The mural was only saved when a higher official, a school superintendent, stepped in and used his authority to allow the mural to stand in its current form:

The section of the mural featuring the family was ordered painted over by school officials. Bierendy said she was notified prior but she was still "pretty upset." The Superintendent of Warwick Schools Peter Horoschak has since stepped in and asked that the student be allowed to finish the mural however she sees fit.

Bierendy says she is going to take the weekend to “think about this,” and on Monday she will decide how to finish the mural.

In a statement released by Superintendent Peter Horoschak he said "some of the members of the Pilgrim High School community suggested that the depiction of a young man’s development from boyhood through adulthood as displayed may not represent the life experiences of many of the students at Pilgrim High School."

Update: I've just read some comments in a local newspaper about the issue. Most readers are supportive of the mural, but those few that are against really do believe that the mural is an attempt to impose religion or "religious values" in public schools.

Is the American left really going to go down this path and view the family as a "religious symbol" that must be kept out of public life?

It's a serious development as a society needs a stable culture of family life to prosper, but public authorities will not be able to promote such a culture if it is deemed to be a "religious value" that cannot be favoured within public settings.

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Troubling signs in the U.S.

A Republican state senator in Wisconsin, Glenn Grothman, has introduced a bill which requires,

"the Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board to emphasize nonmarital parenthood as a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect."

It's a bold way of highlighting some of the social problems that are connected to the growth in fatherless families.

I don't know if it's a good political tactic or not. But what is certainly clear is that Wisconsin has an issue when it comes to fatherless homes. In the linked article it states that one third of parents in Wisconsin are single - that's clearly unsustainable. And it turns out that in Milwaukee, the largest city in Wisconsin, 62% of children are raised in single parent households. That's an incredible figure - and one that ought to be ringing alarm bells.

But what has been the reaction to Glenn Grothman? The reaction has not been "Yes we have a major problem that needs to be fixed but I'm not sure about your methods of confronting the issue". The reaction has been very different - and troubling.

If you look at the comments to the Yahoo article (3,300 of them) the most common arguments are as follows:

• Grothman is simply a moron
• The reason for single motherhood is women fleeing abusive men
• Grothman shouldn't tell people how to live
• My children did OK with a single mum so what's Grothman talking about?
• There are women who become single mothers through widowhood so Grothman is ignorant
• It's all the fault of dead-beat dads

There are a few commenters who recognise growing fatherlessness as a social problem but they're a small minority.

Similarly, the opinion piece in the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel is titled "Quality, not quantity, of parents is what counts". The writer, Amy Turin, argues:

Sen. Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend) would like to put an end to the scourge of single-parent households or at least demonize these loving families that do not suit his preconceived notion of what a family should be. Recent legislation proposed by Grothman would require single-parent household status to be considered a risk factor for child neglect and abuse.

She believes that support for a family with a father in it is just a "preconceived notion of what a family should be". She finishes her opinion piece by calling Senator Grothman "prejudiced" and "out of touch with today's realities" for supporting the traditional family.

I find this response troubling because it shows the extent to which a culture supporting a traditional family life has been lost in parts of the U.S. The values and beliefs supporting a stable family life are no longer there. And the idea of a state subsidised single mother model of family life is being treated as a norm and a right rather than as an exception.

When you have 62% of children being raised in single parent households in a large city like Milwaukee then it's predictable you're going to have trouble. In the UK, for instance, a government review has found that a majority of the most dysfunctional families are fatherless and that each such family costs the public US$118,000 a year. The majority of rioters in the 2011 London riots were also from fatherless homes.

As for Milwaukee, that city has been hit by a spate of "wildings" in which groups of young black men suddenly gather and attack whites:

Large groups of young African-Americans engaged in widespread fighting at the fair midway, and then attacked white fairgoers as they headed home for the night. More than 30 were arrested, and seven officers were injured.

Would that many violent people coincidentally show up at one place at the same time, or are mobs like this forming with the help of social networking sites? We asked that question about the melee at Mayfair in January, and now we're left to wonder again. These incidents are not isolated if they keep happening.

The black kids at the fair started by beating up each other, police said, and at closing time they turned that rage on whites outside the gates. This newspaper normally avoids mentioning the race of people involved in crime, unless it's part of a description to help apprehend someone at large.

But this incident, along with the looting and racially motivated beatings in Riverwest last month, has forced the issue. Similar wilding forced the Greek festival to move out of its northwest side neighborhood, the late Riversplash was hobbled by violence, and Summerfest this year had trouble at a hip-hop show.

Eugene Kane, himself a black American from Milwaukee, wrote:

When people start reporting they were being beaten by black people for no other reason than being white people at the State Fair, that's pretty disturbing.

It's also thuggish and disgusting.

In the comments you read of people choosing to leave Milwaukee, or not to visit, because of such violence. That then leads to a further decline as those from a more stable culture move elsewhere, leaving behind them an even higher concentration of welfare families.

My point isn't that everyone from a single mother family is going to turn out badly. That's obviously not the case. But what is true is that where you have a high concentration of single mother families, you then get a kind of matriarchal culture that is associated with poverty and violence. It is only when young men are brought into a stable role as fathers within a family, that a society reaches a level of productivity and lawfulness that allows it to secure higher civilisational outcomes.

The black American family has already experienced a dramatic decline, but the white family is trending the same way. It's a trend that has to be discouraged, which is presumably what Senator Grothman is attempting to do.

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The family - motherhood

(Another instalment of my booklet, hence the length)

What liberalism asks men to accept is that they are to be liberated from being fathers – at least fathers with a distinctly paternal role.

This explains the attitude of Sara Maitland who associates fatherhood negatively with authority. She has confessed her desire to,

...cast out the Father in my head who rules and controls me ...This frightens me; I want to protect my father and my love for him. I do not want to kill him, to see him dead. I want to set the man free from having to be a father.

That is an anti-paternal understanding of what freedom means. It is freedom from fatherhood, rather than freedom to be fathers.

You might think that motherhood would fare better. After all, the new unisex parental role is drawn from the traditional motherhood role.

But unfortunately there is a logic to liberalism by which motherhood is also reduced in status.

In part this is simply because the maternal role, just like the paternal one, is based on something predetermined rather than self-determined, namely our sex. Therefore, there are liberals like Alison Croggon who view the maternal role negatively as a restriction on the individual:

the role - rather than the task - of motherhood is an iron cage

There are liberals too who dislike the connection between motherhood and a woman’s biology.

After all, the liberal theory is that we become human through self-defining or self-determining acts.

But motherhood is something common to all females, human and non-human, as a matter of inherited biology. So it is dismissed harshly by many liberals as a mere “biological destiny”.

Motherhood also offends some liberals because it leaves women relatively dependent on others for support; rather than enhancing a woman’s autonomy it tends to reduce it.

Here is Kate Millett putting the full-blown liberal view:

In terms of activity, sex role assigns domestic service and attendance upon infants to the female, the rest of human achievement, interest, and ambition to the male. The limited role allotted the female tends to arrest her at the level of biological experience. Therefore, nearly all that can be described as distinctly human rather than animal activity (in their own way animals also give birth and care for their young) is largely reserved for the male.

If you really believed the theory, you would not want as a woman to prioritise motherhood. It loses its place at the centre of life and becomes instead a limiting and non-human activity.

What are women expected to prioritise instead? There is a simple answer: careers. Careers fit in better with autonomy theory because they can be individually chosen (i.e. they can be thought of as a uniquely chosen life path in contrast to the predetermined role of motherhood) and because they are thought to leave women less financially dependent on men.

Fiona Stewart gave voice to such liberal attitudes in 2004 when a baby bonus was introduced in Australia. She was concerned that some young women might not prioritise education and careers over motherhood:

Everyone in the youth sector was - and still is - committed to encouraging girls to see motherhood as one of many choices. To move away from the historical model of "the baby maketh the woman"...This strategy of encouraging choice over biological destiny was aimed particularly at girls from non-English-speaking backgrounds... If we have to pay women to have children...it should be done in a way that ensures that education and career still come first.

And there’s this from American professor Laura Kipnis:

For the first time in history, women are relatively free from traditional fetters. No longer is womanhood synonymous with motherhood...

...with more control over maternity, record numbers of women are now participating in the workforce, meaning that womanhood is no longer synonymous with dependency. In fact, women can now be entirely free from men should they so choose.

The language used here is typical of liberalism: motherhood is thought of as closing off choice and therefore as being a “fetter.” And it is associated negatively with dependency. What is thought to matter to women is not the freedom to marry well and have children but the freedom to live apart from men.

Australian newspaper columnist Alan Howe is another liberal who belittles motherhood as being a preordained role:

It used to be that your early 20s were an ideal time to have children. Newly married and generally expected to do little more than care for little nappy-clad economic stimulation packages, women's lives were often predetermined events.

But as educated, ambitious waves of women entered the workforce...things changed

Mothers “do little more” than care for babies complains Alan Howe. He does not, as a liberal, accord motherhood a high status.

Kasey Edwards is a Melbourne woman who was brought up to be career ambitious. She rose high in the corporate world but at age 30 ditched her career because she felt the corporate drudgery to be unfulfilling. What was she to do instead? She felt the urge to have children but resisted it on these grounds:

I'm prepared to accept that having kids could be one answer to being thirty-something and over it, but I don't want to accept that it is the answer. It seems so stiflingly predetermined to think that it doesn't matter who we are or what we have done with our lives up until now, we all have to breed in the end.

Motherhood has lost prestige in her eyes because it is not a uniquely self-created life path.

Here is a more radical interpretation of autonomy theory by an American feminist blogger:

Women, however, particularly women with children, don’t have access to the full menu of choices. In our culture “motherhood” is a kind of prison...

As for freedom from biology... there can be little argument against the notion that females bear a disproportionate burden, biology-wise...That women have to do the pregnancy is not a “cultural construct.” What Firestone and others have postulated is that until women are liberated from this burden, their personal autonomy will always be compromised...by the actual physiological process of hosting a parasite for nine months.

If the point of life really is to maximise autonomy then it makes sense to treat motherhood negatively as a limitation (a “prison” is the term used above) and pregnancy as a biological burden from which women are to be liberated.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clarke, took this negative view of motherhood. She once justified her childlessness on the grounds that,

You’ve got better things to do with your time, unimpeded.

The seeds of this anti-maternal attitude were sown early. In 1892 Elizabeth Cady Stanton made a speech to a U.S. senate committee. She told the committee that the aim of life was the “self-dependence of every soul” and that women had a “birthright to self-sovereignty.” Woman, she declared, “as an individual...must rely on herself.”

This female autonomy was to be achieved through education and careers. And, predictably, family relationships were radically reduced in status. Elizabeth Cady Stanton described them as “incidental” to life:

...it is only the incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter, which may involve some special duties...

In the introduction to a book Elizabeth Cady Stanton edited in 1881 there is a longer treatment of the same theme. She wrote of her own sex that:

Womanhood is the great fact in her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations...Custom and philosophy, in regard to woman's happiness, are alike based on the idea that her strongest social sentiment is love of children...But the love of offspring, common to all orders of women and all forms of animal life...calls out only the negative virtues that belong to apathetic classes, such as patience, endurance, self-sacrifice...

Maternal love isn’t seen as being as meaningful when you believe that independence and self-assertion are what really matter in life.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was very radically individualistic. She thought that society should be structured around “the isolation of every human soul”.

But most of us don’t share that view. Most of us do want a degree of independence, but we also want to be fulfilled in our relationships with others and we don’t care if those relationships are preordained – they still matter.

Take Lori Gottlieb. She and a friend decided “in a fit of self-empowerment” to have their children as single mothers. In doing so she went further than most women in the pursuit of a life independent of men.

But even in her case “self-empowerment” was not what she most valued. She has described a moment when she and her friend were having a picnic in a park and watching their children play:

“Ah, this is the dream,” I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then burst out laughing. In some ways, I meant it: we’d both dreamed of motherhood, and here we were, picnicking in the park with our children. But it was also decidedly not the dream. The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).

To the outside world, of course, we still call ourselves feminists and insist — vehemently, even — that we’re independent and self-sufficient and don’t believe in any of that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family.

For Lori Gottlieb, being a wife and mother are not “incidental” relationships. They were once part of her dreams and longings. And yet they don’t fit in well with the ruling ideology of our society. It’s not easy for liberal intellectuals to view motherhood as promoting female autonomy and so the maternal role, just like the paternal one, has lost status in the modern West.

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