The Family Versus Feminism

by John Dombrowski

What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman
by Danielle Crittenden
Simon & Schuster, 1999
203 pp.

Danielle Crittenden, a young wife and mother, and a professional journalist, has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Ladies Home Journal. Too young to have experienced life before the feminist movement and the sexual revolution in the U.S., she has produced a volume which is as powerful an antidote to the toxic effects of those phenomena, as one is likely to find outside of religious literature and the sacraments. She does not write from the perspective of religious insight—at least not ostensibly—but for that very reason she is likely to be that much more effective in reaching the young women of today. She points out that the feminist writers of the past third of a century—almost all childless and unmarried—together with the opinion-molding cabal behind them, created a generation of women far less happy, sure of themselves, or fulfilled than that of their grandmothers.

It is not only that the frustration gap between expectations and achievement has grown far larger, but that the basic laws of human nature have been violated and ignored. Women and men, the author convincingly demonstrates, have different, biologically determined roles, and through urging them to be (inevitably imperfect) imitations of men, the mass media have produced an angry hive of frustrated worker bees.

We have to seriously reexamine our opinions toward the so-called traditional marriage that we rejected in favor of the egalitarian but less enduring modern . . . . Feminist critics . . . damn any attempt to salvage, or reexamine traditional marriage as...an actively subversive attempt to “turn back the clock” on woman’s achievements . . . . Such critics believe . . . there should be no assigned roles for either sex.

This elimination of all gender distinctions, creating neuter men and women, has been the cornerstone of the women’s movement since the late 1960’s. Nothing enrages feminists more than demonstrating, logically and historically, that men and women have very distinct and complementary roles demanded by human nature and the good of society—not to mention the happiness of children, and the permanence of marriage. Among other things, what the woman’s movement has done is to provide an excuse for shirking the duties of fatherhood. If men . . . are made to understand that there role as father is interchangeable with the mother’s—or for that matter, with the baby-sitter’s or the day-care worker’s—what compelling reason do men have to remain with their families? . . . What feminist vision of marriage amounts to is that every marriage should resemble a gay marriage . . . . Both “partners” should occupy the same roles within and outside the home.…

    The female partner doesn’t really need her male partner in this unisex utopia . . . . Nor does the male partner really need his female partner. He can get take-out Chinese food and (for rather longer) girlfriends.

    According to United States Government statistics, such relationships last on the average of ten months. The average length of a first marriage before divorce is nine years. This period becomes shorter for each subsequent marriage, on the average.

    The reason that good marriages last is that each spouse enjoys a supporting, and complementary, role of the other. Before 1970, a husband also stuck around long after the wife’s youthful beauty faded because this was the expectation of his wife, his children, his relatives, his neighbors, and society in general. To do anything else would have been to court disapproval, if not outright condemnation for weakness of character, irresponsibility, and a lack of a sense of honor. Thanks largely to the feminists, and to the manipulators of the mass media, men and women are no longer ostracized for walking away from their vows and obligations.

What if he’s feeling resentful, or trapped, or bored, or sexually listless, or financially overburdened? His children might be passing through some sullen and unrewarding phase, his house might be constantly messy . . . and his wife might be cranky and tired all the time . . . What holds him there? . . . And then there’s that smart, attractive, and above all, unencumbered young woman down the hall from his office. Hey, it could be great—for him. He might feel guilty for a while. . . . when the kids come around looking mopey-eyed, but . . . society around you tells you that you are foolish for putting up with what doesn’t make you happy . . . for what doesn’t feel right for you . . .

    The author expresses a wistful longing and awe for the kind of marriages that existed before she was born. This was a time when the highest aspiration of most women was to be a full-time housewife with her life fully focused on the well-being of her husband and children. The marriage was “give-and-take rather than quid-pro-quo.” For about thirty-five years, all the mass media, and especially women’s magazines—together with teachers at every level from kindergarten to graduate school—have taught girls that they ought to have higher aspirations than those of housewives and mothers; that “they can be anything they want to be.” They were convinced that not only should they focus on their careers, but on their own needs and desires—and on their sexual freedom. Marriage is something they might consider after the age of thirty, after they have formed and found themselves.

    According to the author, for the past twenty years or so, the vast majority of young American women has been following the advice of the feminists of their mothers’ generation which came of age in the 1960’s.

    With the notable exception of the devoutly religious, these women have felt very strongly that they have the right—if not the obligation—to spend a decade or two making the most of their sexual freedom, which the feminists had fought so hard to obtain. To marry in their early twenties would be a betrayal of the cause—as would any notion of giving primacy to settling down and focusing on family life in preference to pursuing career goals or “discovering” themselves.

    The concept of chastity—let alone purity or virginity—is seen as a tool of male domination which had kept all previous generations of women subservient and submissive to men. If the author is correct, these women don’t blush at hopping into bed with a man they met earlier in the day. She presents a picture of college men seldom asking coeds for a date. The usual pattern is for a group made up of roughly equal numbers of each gender to get together for an evening of entertainment—and pair off for the rest of the night. The girls do not hesitate to get drunk—apparently on the assumption that this does less harm to their reputation than if they were to copulate soberly with their partner for the evening. They are usually disappointed if their new mate does not call them after the first night—which is what usually happens.

When a woman is young and reasonably attractive, men will pass through her life with the regularity of subway trains; even when the platform is empty, she will expect another to coming along soon. No woman in her right mind would want to commit herself to marriage so early . . . . She may tell herself how important it is to be exposed to a wide variety of men before deciding on just one. When dating a man, she’ll be constantly on the alert to the possibility of others. Even if she falls in love with someone, she may ultimately put him off because she feels just “too young” for anything “serious” . . . But . . . past thirty, she may find herself . . . wondering if there hasn’t been a derailment . . . . When a train does finally pull in, it is filled with misfits . . . who won’t commit themselves to a second . . . date; neurotic bachelors with strange habits; sexual predators . . . newly divorced men taking pleasure where they can; embittered scorned men who feel vengeful; . . . men . . . too weak, or odd, to have attracted any other woman’s interest. The sensible decent . . . men a woman rejected at twenty-four . . . all seem to have gotten off at other stations.

Or...a woman might find herself caught in a relationship . . . or living with a man she doesn’t want to marry . . . Maybe the man she loves is utterly bewildered by her sudden demand for a wedding . . . .

Actually the urge for children and . . . a husband . . . a home and family life often come on so gradually . . . at around the age of twenty-six or twenty-seven . . . . She starts noticing the mothers all around her—especially young, attractive mothers . . . .

Alas it is usually at precisely this moment . . . that men make themselves most absent . . . Men will outlast her . . . will be attractive and virile into their fifties . . . . Moderately attractive bachelors in their thirties . . . have their pick of companions . . . .

This disparity . . . is something feminists rather recklessly overlooked when they urged women to abandon marriage and domesticity in favor of autonomy and self-fulfillment outside the home . . . . The thirty-three-year-old single woman who decides she wants more . . . than her career cannot so readily walk into marriage and children; by postponing them, all she has done is to push them ahead to a point in her life when . . . she has less . . . power to attain them.

    The millions of unmarried American women in their thirties— many of whom now realize that they will likely never marry—have reason to be nostalgic about the way things were before 1960. According to a U.S. Government study, 98% of women then marrying for the first time had no carnal knowledge of any man prior to the one they were marrying. The average age for the first-time brides was twenty. Nine-tenth of women age 25 through 29 were married (compared to about half today). And the duration of marriages contracted at that time has been greater than at any time since. This was all before Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique persuaded millions of young women that they could never be happy in traditional roles. For thirty-five years the feminists have had their way. The author interviewed many contemporary young women and found that while most of them would not identify themselves as feminists, they had absorbed the feminists’ agenda and took it for granted.
    A twenty-year-old . . . was planning to have children outside of marriage because . . . a husband might “threaten her individuality.” Another stopped dating a man she loved because neither of them was willing to make concessions to the other’s career plans. With few exceptions, the students expressed quite casual attitudes about sex. They spoke of their affairs with detachment and became passionate only when discussing their ex-lovers’ reluctance to do the dishes. Virtually every young woman . . . put her job aspirations ahead of any hopes for marriage or children. Each . . . .worried that too serious an attachment to a man, or worse, to children might compromise her sense of who she was.

    The author contrasts the unrealistic and doomed ambitions of young women in their early twenties with the sorrow and agony of women around their mid-thirties who come to the conclusion that happiness and fulfillment have eluded them. The men they long to marry have negative reactions to how the girls have spent their previous decade or two. Besides, these men find a new crop of beauties in their early twenties arriving on the scene each year with much less emotional baggage. These men have also developed habits of irresponsible pursuit of pleasure and are unlikely to be willing to take upon a burden of permanent responsibility.

In another era, a thirty-three-year-old . . . might have already lived through a depression and a world war and had several children . . . .Yet these modern thirty-somethings . . . will take pains to avoid . . . . anything that smacks of a permanent commitment. The strange result is . . . couples . . . willing to share everything . . . just as long as it comes with the right to cancel the relationship at any moment.

    The author points out two specific attributes of women which doom feminists and those who have bought into their propaganda to frustration and bitterness. The first is the biological clock which, around the age of twenty-seven, belts a woman with a body blow as she suddenly realizes she is longing to have children—at the very moment that the current man in her life will seek younger female companionship at the first hint of a desire on her part for a long-term commitment. The second is one that hits even the most dedicated and ambitious professional woman—including law-firm partners, physicians, and bankers—the moment she realizes it is time to turn the baby over to a nanny or day-care worker, in order to return to her office.

    Before she had children . . . she was critical of her female colleagues who did . . . When she herself became pregnant, she believed that her return to work after maternity leave would present, at most, some scheduling problems . . . In the first months after the baby arrives . . . a pleasant fog descends upon the brain; it takes three or four trips back inside before you can leave the house . . . .* * *

    She has gone to work . . . to be free of domestic worries but she is no less consumed by them, even at a distance . . . .

    Babies, of course, . . . in no way “fit into” any career, . . . they can never be . . . ”convenient.”

    What isn’t familiar . . . to women raised to believe in the importance of their work is just how much a child will dominate a mother’s mind. The woman with a slightly enlarged belly who announces that she plans to return to her office six weeks . . . (or) two years after her baby is born may genuinely believe she will . . . She is . . . revealing . . . how much she really knows about what is about to wallop her . . . Suddenly you can’t stop thinking about your child . . . ..* * *

So long as we insist upon defining our identities . . . in terms of our work, so long as we try to blind ourselves to the needs of our children and harden our hearts . . . we will continue to feel torn, dissatisfied and exhausted . . . .We are the most radically equal generation of women in human history and we have collided with one of the oldest facts of our sex . . . The guilt we feel for neglecting our children is a by-product of our love for them . . . .

    Danielle Crittenden does not shy away from stating boldly what women in all cultures have known since the beginning of human life— but which has been denied by the opinion-molding cabal and its hired feminists for four decades—that certain feminine emotions are both natural and good. Among these are the “traditional feminine desire to be protected and provided for;” the desire to bear children fathered by a man loved and looked up to; the desire for a mutually monogamous life-long commitment; the desire to focus her life on the happiness of her family.

    From the viewpoint of those who largely control U.S.—and Western-World—public opinion, all these desires have an enormous drawback: They would strengthen the family and double the birthrate. This would contribute to what they consider (as verbally expressed to this reviewer in the 1960’s) “the world’s greatest problem: over-population.”

    The author is bold enough to answer Sigmund Freud’s ultimate question: “What does a woman want?!”

We want the warm body next to us on the sofa in the evenings; we want the noise and embrace of family around us; we want, at the end of our lives, to look back and see . . . that we have loved and been loved, and brought into this world life that will outlast us. * * *

Marriage . . . is about more than signing a lease, splitting bills, sharing chores, and professing a vague sort of long-term commitment; it’s about more than . . . spending weekends together—or deciding what color to paint the walls; it’s about more, even, than happiness and contentment and compatibility. It is about life and death, blood and sacrifice, about this generation and the next, and about one’s connection to eternity.

John Dombrowski is a writer and an historian.

Back to Catholic Faith July/August 1999 Table of Contents

Back to Catholic Information Center on Internets Main Periodical Page