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Why Feminists Still Don't Get It Right
| Article
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10379 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
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12 / 1986 |
6,501 Words |
| Author
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Brigitte Berger
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It may very well be that the ideal of a family consisting of father, mother, and children, embedded in the supporting networks of a community and sustained by a tradition of moral standards, is being rediscovered at just the moment when it is about to disappear. Such occurrences are not as rare in history as one might think. More than 300 years ago, the French philosophe Berenard Le Bovier de Fontenelle observed: "We sometimes find the truth concerning problems of considerable importance. But the misfortune is that we never know we have found it." The inability of our civilization to recognize the institutions and structures conducive to its continued existence and to combat the forces that work toward its subversion is one of the saddest testimonies of the spiritual poverty and lack of will of our age.
Today we find two contradictory trends juxtaposed:the reconfirmation of the salutary role of the nuclear family in individual and social life on the one hand and the persistence--if not increase--of patterns of behavior destructive of it on the other. Until recently, our civilization concentrated its attention on what was required to realize the ideal. We have lately resigned ourselves to describing the patterns of behavior most commonly found without relentlessly exploring their origins and their wider implications. Judging these patterns of behavior to be beyond control and beyond moral judgment, we have elevated them as the new norm. Paralyzed by the latter and reluctant to act on behalf of the ideal, our civilization drifts toward the creation of new social realities that the majority of Americans not only do not want but emphatically reject.
To prevent this drift from continuing its destructive path, it is necessary to identify the contemporary forces feeding it. To this end, this article focuses on the rise of the feminist concept of "liberated motherhood," its class location, and its political potential. In placing this concept within the liberal traditions of individualism and statism, we may understand not only the sources of liberalism's pervasive antifamily bias but also why the new feminist politics of liberated motherhood still don't get it right. Finally, the article explores ways of looking at the family that reflect the values and hopes of the great majority of Americans. As it becomes evident that the family, and a particular family at that, is central to the vision of life most Americans hold, some reflections on what kind of society we want to live in are in order. For without the presence of a strong nuclear family, the vision of the good life will be difficult to realize.
The Juxtaposition of Opposing Trends
Why the country continues to be concerned about the family is not difficult to understand. The data documenting current demographic trends are depressingly familiar: the falling birthrate (except among unwed teenagers and selected groups of immigrants); the phenomenal increase of single-parent households (today one-fifth of the nation's children reside with one parent only); the persistent high divorce rates and the impact of their fallout upon the lives of women and children; the increasing number of children, particularly under three years of age, who grow up in households where mothers are working; the exploding number of teenage pregnancies and the decision of these unwed, unemployed, and unemployable young women to set up independent households; the persisting high rates in child homcide, suicide, drug use, and delinquency; and the general decline in parent-child interaction
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