Uncle Sam’s Harem
The nomination of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate (a phrase suddenly suggestive) has reopened the question not only of women in politics but a woman's role in society. I am finishing a book, tentatively titled Thicker than Water, sketching out a political order based more on blood-ties and marriage than on theoretical individualism. I am going to post up a few bits from one chapter as background to why I believe it is wrong for women to be in politics at all.
From the Introduction:
The institutions of marriage and family, though they exhibit some variations throughout human experience, are universal. Despite constant efforts to find evidence of societies without one or the other, an honest person, even one who hates the whole idea of marriage and family, has to conclude that they have been, up till now, a part of the human condition. They are not merely useful inventions, devised to accommodate self-interest or survival: They are rooted in our most basic passions and affections that are wired into our nervous system and triggered by hormones. Under most normal circumstances, a human mother (like her primate cousins) will love her baby and hate any creature that attacks it.
In the modern world, we think of marital households as places where men, women, and their offspring sleep and spend some of their free time and the family itself as an institution created by law and subject to complex regulation that circumscribes what can be done, but in pre-modern societies families were virtually sovereign states within the tribe, kingdom, or empire in which they existed. A family’s external relations with other families was somewhat constrained by law and tradition, though even in homicide cases, blood revenge is, perhaps, as common as trial by jury. But domestically, the family was a often law unto itself, with the exception that many societies have prohibited incestuous sexual relations and homicide within the household.
Most modern political and social theories--Freudianism and Marxism--call for the elimination of the traditional family. Not all attacks upon the family are as bold as the frontal assaults launched by the master theorists of political and social revolution. The founders of liberalism also took a dim view of the family’s broader responsibilities. Liberals, in emphasizing the liberated individual and his right to pursue his own destiny, have generally opposed the peculiar legal status of marriage and family and favored liberalized divorce and inheritance laws as well as the economic and political liberation of married women. They were not explicitly opposed to the family per se any more than they would have admitted that they were opposed to Christianity per se. Their object, so they claimed, was merely to liberate individuals from the shackles imposed by religious fanaticism and patriarchal authority.
I am using “liberal” in the traditional (or “classical”) sense to refer to writers, parties, and movements that emphasized individual liberty and the free market at the expense of tradition, inherited privilege, and established religion. In Britain, the godfather of liberalism is John Locke, and his spiritual heirs (among whom there are, admittedly, many important differences) include Adam Smith, Tom Paine, William Godwin, and John Stuart Mill. In America today, the purest classical liberals are the advocates of free markets and free trade who describe themselves as libertarians, when they tend toward anarchism, and conservatives, when they speak on behalf of those who hold great wealth and influence.
John Locke’s entire political theory was grounded in his opposition to the patriarchal view of government advocated by Bossuet, King James VI & I, Sir Robert Filmer, and other advocates of monarchical rights. While Filmer traced the origin of sovereign authority back to the power held by biblical patriarchs over their extended families and ultimately to Adam, Locke set aside all such traditions and adopted the theory of the Social Contract. Although there are many variations on contract theory, they usually say, generally, that men originally lived in a state of nature, without either law or order. Political authority, private property, and even social institutions such as marriage came into existence as the result of an agreement or contract, made by early men who were tired of the inconveniences of uncivil society. Though Locke did not directly attack the family itself, he did advocate the right of divorce, once children were grown, and the implications of his thought, logically working their way out across the centuries, have been to regard the family as a useful, though not essential social institution.
Marriage 1: Pagans
No revolution--political, social, or economic--has been so sweeping and destructive as the legal revolution that has turned marriage from an indissoluble merging of identities into an unenforceable contract between competing individuals.
Marriage may begin in a contract (traditionally the agreement is more often between the families than between the boy and girl), but it is, as Hegel put it, "a contract to transcend the standpoint of contract." There are societies in which marriage decisions, at least in principle, are left exclusively either to the potential spouses or to both sets of parents.
More often, the situation is more ambiguous. In the United States, for example, parents have the power to delay the marriage of minor children, but they may neither arrange nor permanently prevent a union. In 2008 there was a great controversy over a sect of “Fundamentalist Mormons” that arranged marriages between older men and women in their teens. An unspoken assumption of much of the commentary was that it must be illegal for minor women to marry even with parental consent. Although some of the allegations against the sect were certainly shocking, the age of many of the girls would not have shocked early Americans. In colonial Virginia, parental consent was necessary for a minor to get married, but with consent a girl of twelve could become a bride. Even today, although marriage laws vary from state to state, it is not unusual for a girl of 16 to be able to marry with parental consent. In Pennsylvania, girls and boys under 18 need parental consent and have to pay a fee, while minors under the age of 16 need the consent both of the parents and of a Judge of the Orphans Court. In Utah, parental consent and permission from the Juvenile Court is required. In Texas, where the marriages took place, parental consent on an official form or an order from the district court is sufficient.
Laws and customs vary, but the obvious differences may disguise a general tendency: Even in 21st century America, most young people expect to obtain the consent of their parents, even if that consent is only grudging and formal, while, at the other end of the spectrum, in those traditional societies where the children are supposed to have no say whatsoever, literature and folktales abound in stories of elopements and cautionary tales designed to warn parents against too stringent enforcement of their rights.
While marriage, whether monogamous or polygynous is virtually universal, the power to regulate marriage has been vested in various institutions: family, the civil community, and (in Medieval Christendom) in the Church. In the simplest and undoubtedly oldest system, whatever power is not held by bride and groom is entrusted to their families. Athenian and Roman fathers could betroth daughters but not sons against their will, though eventually Roman law required the consent of both parties. However, no son who wished to receive a generous inheritance would willingly offend his father.
At Athens consent of the bride was not needed and, if she were an epikleros (roughly, an heiress) she was required to marry a close relative of her late father, to prevent the property from passing out of his lineage. Maintaining the bloodline and its property were of primary concern to ancient Greeks, but Greek literature paints a less coercive picture than the law courts. In the Odyssey, young Nausicaa seems pretty confident of her ability to twist daddy around her finger, and Greek myths and literature are filled with affectionate husbands and wives . Aristophanes’ Lysistrata assumes Athenian and Spartan men will quit killing each other, if their wives will once withhold marital favors. Sophocles’ Antigone is an epikleros engaged to her maternal cousin, and, though the marriage is clearly arranged, the couple are fond of each other. We know too little of Greek domestic relations to make sweeping statements except to say that Plato, in doubting the possibility of marital love, was as usual not expressing the common sense of his people.
By the late republic at least, Roman parents consulted their daughters on the choice of husbands….In his Lex Julia, the Emperor Augustus, eager to encourage the growth of the Roman population, forbade parents to prevent or discourage their children from marrying. Later enactments gave girls the right to marry without their guardian’s consent. An 8th century Byzantine law reaffirms, however, the necessity of obtaining the consent of both families.
Among the barbarians who invaded the empire, the Visigoths--like most Germanic peoples--expected to arrange the marriages of their children, but according to the Visigothic Code (III. I.3), a girl who had been betrothed by her parents but eloped with another would, along with her husband, be put into the hands of the betrothed. If her family relented, then they had to pay a penalty to the disappointed fiancé.
In the later Middle Ages cynical young men found it convenient to elope with a young woman, only to have the marriage annulled on the grounds of parental non-consent. The Church, in attempting to curb this practice, took the dangerous step of upholding marriage without parental consent, but the alternative tended to reduce marriage to a legal formula whose terms could be evaded by an unscrupulous young Romeo..
Unlike most other contracts, the marriage bond is entered into in the expectation that it will be permanent and irrevocable. This was true even in the later Roman republic, where divorces were common and easy to procure. The permanency of marriage was and is sealed with the arrival of children whose needs are provided for by husband and wife. Since each child is, in genetics as well as in folklore, half of each parent, it is in the interest of both spouses to maintain the union and to care for the earthly bits of their own immortality. Ancient pagans understood this well. Plutarch expresses this unity rather poetically. "For nature mixes us through our bodies, that take a part of each partner and blending them in common, she produces an offspring that is common to both, so that it is not possible to distinguish one's own part from the spouse's contribution."
The sexual bond, while it is nourished in the pleasures of the bed and in intimate companionship, is essentially procreative, and while the procreative aspect of both sexuality and marriage can be overemphasized, as it has been by some celibate theologians, those who attempt to divorce children from erotic pleasure are missing the point. It is only in the creation of children that man and woman succeed in the mystical goal of sexual experience: the merging of identities that is at the origin of all human civility:
Et mulier coniuncta viro concessit in unum.... ....prolemque ex se videre creatam
tum genus humanum primum mollescere coepit
And woman joined together with man went into union, and they saw their offspring created from themselves then the human race first began to soften.
Aristotle, Lucretius, and Plutarch, pagans all, appear to echo, or rather anticipate, the Christian ideal, by which man and wife became one flesh.
Entries(RSS)
Great summary. Tacitus also (sec. 18 of Germania) says that the pagan Germans had strict marriage codes; unlike others to the East, did not practice polygamy; and rarely engaged in adultery (which might be a bit of romanticism on the part of Tacitus). The families presided over the marriages, which involved the symbolic interchange of gifts, "sanctified by mystic rites under the favor of the presiding deities of wedlock."
Good addition. Tacitus does not so much romanticize the Germans as clean them up to stress the contrast with the Romans of his own day. Of course, the evidence is insufficient. But thanks for reminding me of a passage I should insert a reference to.
Excellent introduction, Dr. Fleming. The title is genius. Perhaps water represents all of the political and moral philosophies that have dominated our discourse since the 17th century. Some thoughts:
1) I particularly enjoyed reading Aristotle's On Politics as an introduction to understanding the state as an organic institution that begins with the husband/wife and master/servant relationship instead of the ideological imposition of nationhood that is so prevalent today.
2) I wonder why more Christians do not see the contradiction in subscribing simultaneously to the philosophy of individualism and to the traditional Christian teachings on marriage and the family.
If it is appropriate (and convenient), perhaps you could sketch a brief outline of what exactly will be in the book.
Who is going to publish this hot potato?
Edward
The reason why so many "christians" don´t see the contradiction in subscribing to the philosophy of individualism is because most of them don´t even know what the christian tradition and the bible teaches.
Most them think infallible statements become fallible over time, disregarding ancient wisdom
Aristotle is still the best guide to these questions. When I return from the Randolph Club, I can post a chapter outline. By the end of the day, I'll post a few pages on Christian marriage. To Dr. Red, I cannot imagine, which is why I have been sitting on much of this for 15 years. If Chronicles has to publish it, we will. This is the book I had written most of when I decided to take out the critique of liberalism and turn it into a separate book, The Morality of Everyday Life. This book will give a positive account of how people function in pre-liberal societies. In fact, I have thought of calling it Illiberal Opinions, a title I may use for a series of related articles in Chronicles. Truth to tell, I have grown a bit tired--as is obvious--of commenting on the passing political scene.
Dr. Fleming:
I hope you will include some commentary on developments in 20th-century American business and labor law as contributory to the destruction---and I deliberately use that word---of the American family. From what I understand, the multinational-corporate Lords have often worked hand-in-glove with the political elites to rearrange matters economic to their benefit at the expense of families.
Your servant,
Lord Karth
Lord Karth is right. It was big business republicans who originally promoted the idea of working women. I'm not sure how of that I will include, since my main objective is to show positively how healthy societies once functioned.
"Truth to tell, I have grown a bit tired–as is obvious–of commenting on the passing political scene."
You are right to become tired. I am very young but I also am tired. The reason why Chronicles is so vital, though, is because it refuses to limit itself to the meaningless undulating motions of modern American politics. After taking so many college course about this very subject, I can only conclude that it simply does not make a man more wise or even knowledgeable in any meaningful sense to study party policies and polls. Only a fool would dedicate the capacities of his mind to the continual analysis of McCain, Palin, and Obama. If you must talk about Palin at all, however, it is good that you use her as a segue to Aristotle. Quite a feat I dare say.
Dr. Fleming @ 8 writes:
"It was big business republicans who originally promoted the idea of working women."
If I may make so bold, Dr. Fleming, I seem to recall reading about young women being the first choice of operatives in the New England factories of the early 19th century. Since they were young and unattached, they could be relied upon to take orders and do as they were told.
If I recall properly, the interesting part is that their primary reason for leaving was getting married.
Women were generally the preferred type of worker in small-detail-oriented factories right up through World War 2. (At that point, the demands of war production drew them into what was more typically considered "heavy industry".) If you like, I can take a look through my small library and list some of the sources for you.
I hope this is of some small assistance.
Your servant,
Lord Karth
It was also big business and government that jointly made it a "firing offense" for anyone to question feminist or racist orthodoxy.
More would I, but I like my job and prefer to keep it.
When I was a child, there was yet a faint echo of a special calling among women for the vocations of teacher and nurse. Three female teachers in our community remained unmarried throughout their careers. All three of them, after their retirement, married. I have written of one of these women, Miss Leamon, who continued to pray for former student, so we would learn, long after her retirement. Several teachers in our community married but had no children, primarily because their "children" were their students. Many of the nurses who worked for what was then the Baptist Hospital in our region did not marry but lived in dormitories provided by the hospital. By the coming of the 60's, however, even this faint echo had died away.
Possibly Thomas Fleming's book will answer the question I'm about to pose. But meanwhile, I find myself wondering something.
Dr. Fleming writes: "I believe it is wrong for women to be in politics at all." Does this mean women in formal political positions, or does it also apply to unofficial power-behind-the-throne women such as Madame de Pompadour? What does Dr. Fleming think of reigning female hereditary and quasi-hereditary monarchs, whether despotic (Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great) or constitutional (Queen Victoria, Elizabeth II)?
Women, as the feminists say truly (for a change) have always worked, as wives and mothers taking care of the home and family business. Read Xenophon's Oeconomicus for a portrait of a model Greek wife who is something like an American farm wife 100 years ago. Poorer women have sometimes had to work out of the home, particularly before marriage. After marriage, it would have taken desperation to send a woman under the control of another man. When women, until 50-60 years ago, embraced a serious profession, it usually involved nurturing--teaching, nursing, doctoring, etc., and in the USSR they were the pediatricians, while men occupied high status positions as surgeons and specialists--something of a parallel to America in the 50's, when women were schoolteachers but men were coaches and principals. This was a distant echo of the "separate spheres" argument that emerged during the social break-down of the 19th century. I thank Lord Karth for his offer which I would be delighted to accept. In haste, must leave for airport, and will post more on Monday.
Scott (#11) makes an excellent point. I should put in a plug here for the classical liberals, who have always preached a "wall of separation" between government and business interests. While Dr. Fleming has elsewhere noted the problems stemming from liberal philosophy, the classical liberals have made an unassailable case against state-corporatism.
Chesterton writes in What's Wrong With the World:
Gudge, the plutocrat, wants an anarchic industrialism; Hudge
the idealist, provides him with lyric praises of anarchy. Gudge
wants women-workers because they are cheaper; Hudge calls
woman's work "freedom to live her own life."...Above all
Gudge rules by a coarse and cruel system of sacking and
sweating and bi-sexual toil which is totally inconsistent with
the free family and which is bound to destroy it; therefore
Hudge, stretching out his arms to the universe with a prophetic
smile, tells us that the family is something that we shall soon
gloriously outgrow...
Tom, as always, your analysis is right on, brilliantly written, irrefutable, etc. Now let me tell you about my 23-year-old granddaughter who is a combat medic in the 82nd Airborne and about to be deployed somewhere in harm's way in that god-forsaken area of the world we should be much less involved with. I have said to my students, my family and friends for many years that you must support only wars that you are willing to send your sons to fight. It's irrelevant that you might be willing to go, but sending your son is a different thing. How about a woman? The one who has always called me "Grandpa's Sweet Baby?" Here's the point--I'm not being maudlin, or even sentimental. She is a tough girl, and fully capable of standing up against her old gramps. So, we deal with the world as it is (as you know better than almost anybody) and it's rather futile to talk about whether women should be involved with politics. The Greeks, after all, were wrong about a lot of things.
Blackstone stated that there are three great relations of "private life". They are husband-wife, parent-child and master-servant. The status of husband is "head of household", the natural guardian of the children in family.
Around the turn of the century, in a fit of angst, the courts were determined to give women right to custody of children, and declared that natural guardianship and "head of household" were shared leadership positions in family. (Flint v Flint, Mn in 1895). This egaltarianist view, imposed on the courts in violation of the seperation of powers declared that marriage was an egaltarian institution, and most specifically, natural guardianship once held only by the father was to be shared. Whenever an institution is formed with two co-leaders, we have a form of government called "anarchy", thus is the legal communities view of family government in western society. God's order, or dilineation of authority rested on family governments headed by the husband, and or father. America today is matriarchal, and the State is the mother's head of household.
Matriarchal society is regressive and primitive. Western civilization's chaos and decline is rooted in the legal establishments claims to fix God's mistake in creating family government with a single head of household and natural guardian of children as defined in Mosaic law, Roman Civil law, enshrined in the magna carta, the English Common Law and the American Constitution. The legal community's courts became the final authority, the arbitrator for all familial problems, and in doing so have made all children wards of the state. Marriage is no longer a religious institution, with the state defining and protecting the person's right to contract and enter marriage, they have become a hidden third party. Marriage is no longer a "civil contract, so far as the law is concerned", to quote Mn statute (Chapter 517), marriage is an adhesion contract. The state is the guardian of children, and the state is the final determinate of child custody and property redistribution agent. In adhesion contracts, the hidden third party has all authority and ownership. The "at will" contract can be severed without trial, and the state can assign property, disaward children like a slave at auction.
How is it that a co-guardian, co-head of household has the authority to place the children in the arms of the STate to make determinations of price for auction, merely based on judicial whim without a shred of subject matter jurisdiction. Dissolution, the severing of a civil contract, or divorce, the dissolving of a marital vow, are treated in law as one in the same, without regard to the religious freedoms for the religions that defined marriage. Marriage was not invented by the Supreme Court, no matter what Retired Justice Ms O'Conner could invent.
Western society is matriarchal. It has only one result.... the quick march to death. It kills the culture, it kills civil society and it destroys nations. Matriarchy's don't last long, and all ancient ones died a very violent death. Matriarchy's are violent, as a result of state imposed disorder. Their unraveling at the core with the death of the family eventually bankrupts a society and gives impetus to greater government power. A dictatorial power must arise in order to quell disorder and end dissent.
John W. is absolutely right. Matriarchal society and the absence of the father are worse than regressive; they are characteristic of pre-caveman societies. Just yesterday I happened to be writing a dissertation intended as a letter of well-wishes for a couple of my friends whose parents meant well and understood the horrors of the modern world but seemed inclined to shelter them at least as much with money as with Christianity. I made five brief points about marriage, which I'll sum up even more briefly:
1. If you believe marriage is primarily for the pleasure of those contracting it, you are at a high risk for divorce.
2. If you believe the patriarchal model of society is a tool to oppress women and stop them from realizing their full potential, you are at a high risk for divorce.
3. If you do not consider what your respective families or sometimes even your friends think of one another and cannot conceive of a harmonious welding together, you are at a high risk for divorce.
4. If you believe divorce and remarriage is a morally acceptable option, you are at a high risk for divorce.
5. If you are not at least seriously critical of cinema and television, you are at a high risk for divorce.
On #2, I wrote:
"The patriarchal society has its origins in the father staying by the mother while the infant is still suckling, offering care and protection while she is still weak. This basic model was a prerequisite for society to rise above the level of cave-dwellers, the repressive (sometimes extremely) so monogamy touted in traditional Western morality allows for an even higher civilized expression (even if it is not always lived up to), and the rapid degradation of industrial society since the onslaught of second-wave feminism, which sought to destroy this model, should make it clear that no society can survive long without it. If the role of women in the family is perhaps understated, then husbands must do all that they can to love their wives and see to it that they are supported in their difficult tasks. (In industrial society, this also means not spending too many hours at the office, even if that would advance his career and bring in more money for the family.)"
Jon W. said
"Western society is matriarchal. It has only one result…. the quick march to death. It kills the culture, it kills civil society and it destroys nations. Matriarchy’s don’t last long, and all ancient ones died a very violent death. Matriarchy’s are violent, as a result of state imposed disorder. Their unraveling at the core with the death of the family eventually bankrupts a society and gives impetus to greater government power. A dictatorial power must arise in order to quell disorder and end dissent."
This is all very interesting and naturally appeals to my prejudices on the subject, but just for grins, could you name a couple of these ancient matriarchies that died violent deaths?
I am glad to see Chesterton mentioned in this discussion. I know he said something (in perhaps A MISCELLANY OF MEN) along the lines of "It isn't that women aren't good enough for politics; but that politics isn't good enough for women."
Put me down for a copy once it is published.
I'm sorry but I think you're argument against women in politics is rather flimsy and suggests that women anywhere but in "supportive" roles is non-Christian but then you raise the spectre of another shibboleth and that is that that Christianity and individuality are not supportive of one another; problem here is that Christ does not save "families" he saves "individuals". Please refer to the New Testament at http://www.christianity.org
Sue
Interesting, but purely theoretical because, unless western civilization is overthrown or sinks by its own folly,
women will continue to hold public office in our culture.
Yes, but what is it that MADE Western civilization this way? It is literature, Mr. Smith. Books. That is where people get their ideas from, for good or for ill. If our civilization DOES prevail, it will be in no small part due to the efforts (the writing, rather than the votes) of Dr. Fleming and his kind.
I think we must distinguish between two questions: 1) how to act in the world in which we find ourselves, and 2) On what principles should a just pagan or faithful Christian society be founded. In these columns, I am addressing primarily the second question. As for the first, it is simply monstrous that women have been so degraded by our culture that they are seduced into joining the military, where--as anyone can tell you--they are sexually exploited. We love our children and kinfolks, even when they are led astray, but in understanding how they got to be in the fix they are in, we should not for one moment imagine that a society that encourages, for example, adultery, divorce, and drug addiction, is wholesome.
It is not simply the Greeks that did not permit women in politics but all the cultures that lie behind our own, including the US down to World War I (roughly). As a constant reader and student of the New Testament and the early Fathers, I do not need to follow a link to know that the Christian tradition is entirely opposed to putting women in leadership roles, either in the church or in politics. In arguing against this plain truth, liberal Christians are actually saying they reject the teachings of Christ, His Apostles, and the earliest traditions of Christianity in favor of silly Enlightenment philosophes and the 20th century traditions that have got us into the terrible mess we are in. From a prudential point of view, Margaret Thatcher probably did far more good than harm, but we must also be clear that she was acting on Liberal principles and setting a bad example.
"Matriarchal society is regressive and primitive."
I would like to learn of some specific examples to support that claim. I think at least three indisputable examples are needed here.
Or was it just a malevolent fantasy?
Is it seriously proposed to take the vote away from women because they did not have it anywhere before about 1914?
I know more about England than other countries. Lord Birkenhead moved the Bill to give women the vote in 1918.His argument had nothing to do with liberal ideals or human rights. He argued that since the latter part of the 19th century inventions such as the telephone and the typewriter, the growth of the nursing profession, the increase in female education in the universities, and the vast extension in the number of schools had together so changed the role of women in society that their not having the vote had become an anomaly--a contradiction that just could not be tolerated any longer. The Tories of 1918 mostly agreed with Birkenhead and the points are even more true today.
In my opinion, based on experience, the growing number of women in professional and business life continues to be an unmixed blessing.
@27: "I would like to learn of some specific examples to support that claim."
Apart from our own, the only examples of matriarchal societies are ones that were easily subdued and destroyed by superior civilizations, because they could not rise above hunter-gatherer mode. As for the self-actualisation of women and its "unmixed blessing," I would like to hear an explanation of how the present conditions of literature and interdisciplinary departments at universities is in any way evidence that extra female presence is an "unmixed blessing."
Further, I had a boss not long ago that told me she voted for Nicolas Sarkozy (God help her) over Ségolène Royal partially because she "didn't want a woman to be president" of France. I think she was quite wrong, speaking in the abstract, to vote for the former, but her logic was understandable.
The idea that patriarchal societies are more materially successful is simply not true in the modern world (even if it was true a few thousand years ago). There is ample evidence from country by country regressions to show that one of the single strongest predictors of economic growth is the education of girls and their participation in the political-economy. Societies that do not do this (Afghanistan, much of the Middle East, tribal Africa) fail utterly and completely. In contrast, societies generally begin to develop economically when they open their educational institutions and workplaces to women. This is also true, as has been amply demonstrated by data, because if women have incomes children fare better. As it turns out, men go to cities, drink away their children's income, commit adultery and ignore their families, and so, if they get all the money in the family, the children will be neglected. Completely contrary to the welfare queen steryotype, women in poor countries tend to spend more of their income on children's health and education needs (for boys and girls) and thereby raise more educated and prosperous human beings. In post-industrial wealthy societies the dynamics are different.
In short, a gender equal society will produce more economic growth and will thereby crush any gender unequal society in the political / economic realm, because, in practice, men are quite often neither sufficiently righteous nor sufficiently competent to run things alone.
However, economic growth and political power are not the only, or most, important things in the world.
I completely agree at a family level that just because laws and policies that favor women's advancement produce a materially better society, we should not believe ideologies of 'self actualization' and try to adopt some system of 'equal rights' in our homes and families. This does lead to the psychological degeneration of children, and to failed marriages. But, for patriarchy to be valid, men have to be accountable per the Apostle Paul.
It is far from being obvious that working couples are always better off, even materially, than a traditional married couple. The cost of transportation, business attire, eating out, and daycare is not inconsiderable. Some 10+ years ago, I read a study that indicated that a working wife had to earn something close to $20,000 per year just to break even. Of course the monetary cost to society--in terms of prisons, counseling, divorce, state-subsidized daycare is also significant. This assumes that no one actually cares about the poor kids growing up without a mother around the house or the damages that can be measured by rates of adolescent depression, suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, promiscuity, and illegitimacy. The idea that Americans are somehow "better off" today than they were in 1950 is not preposterous only to people who can only count but not weigh the costs and benefits. For Christians, however, there can be no question of which side they are on.
Let me clarify - first of all, for all the economic and moral reasons TJF articulates in #30, I work and my wife works only very little. She takes care of our kids full time. I turn down higher paying job options to take a job that allows me to spend maximum time at home.
Secondly, I do not think America is better off today than it was in the 1950's.
But I do think America in, say, the early 20th century after women got the right to vote and began to join the work place is better off than the tribal border between Afghanistan and Pakistan where women have no education, legal rights or economic options. These places are certainly patriarchies. That is the point of my post - a counter to the points made in #18.
Back to America since the 1950's, I agree we have a problem for all the reasons noted here - but I am suggesting that the problem, particularly for poor children, is not what the women are doing but what the men are not doing (and with a state that sends them to too many wars and taxes working people too much). And therefore the solution has less to do with restricting or disincentivizing women from leaving the home to find work than with figuring out how to motivate the men to do their duties (which TJF admirably does in The Morality of Everyday Life).
In Matthew 5, Jesus issues a strong stricture against divorce, but that stricture in context has far less to do with restricting women's behavior than it does with rebuking the practice by which men abandon their families.
I agree entirely with C that the counsels of perfection are not always practical in this world. To illustrate, I hate automobiles and TV and computers. I use all three in moderation because to reject them would not permit me to withdraw to 1850 but would only prevent me from doing some useful or enjoyable things. As for Matthew, I don't think the stricture is aimed primarily either at restricting women or preventing men from abandoning their families. It is a moral and spiritual affirmation of marriage that Paul will later more fully articulate. Finally, I hope C will agree that we do not have to choose between Hollywood and Hottentots. No society has ever been perfect; perhaps no society has never been even remotely good. But in choosing the direction of our lives and in analyzing political programs, we do need to begin with the first principles. The hard part is to develop a refined casuistry in applying them. I'll add an addition to this discussion.
I am still waiting for some actual ,historical examples of matriarchal societies being overpowered by superior, male dominated societies. I think this was a pseudo scientific generalization of the kind I though Chronicles despised, but I am willing to be corrected.
I do believe that the Catholic Church holds that women should have a fair chance to achieve positions of leadership in politics, business, and the professions.
PS There is no known case of a matriarchal society or even one in which women held rights and powers comparable to men. Even in the US, where the courts and legislatures have invented and attempted to enforce womens "rights," men dominate overwhelmingly in every institution where political and economic power are concentrated: the Supreme Court, Congress, the White House, CEO's of big companies, the NFL and NBA. Only a few kooks on the ultra-left would dare to suggest that matriarchies have existed outside of poetry and fiction. There are societies in which a man's property passes to his sister's son, but this has been correlated with high rates of infidelity, which give rise to uncertainty about paternity. In any event, women are no more influential in matrilineal than in patrilineal cultures.
PPS whatever a few silly bishops may have to say in recent years, the Church has never made any such pronouncement, which would contradict Her teachings going back to Christ and His apostles. This is a very dead horse, and to beat it will only disturb the maggots and raise a stink.
I have been doing some reading about the Mosuo by the Mosuo Project. Apparently the characterization of the Mosuo people as a matriarchy by the popular media is inaccurate.
Feminists have propagated a great deal of nonsense about matriarchy. Some have written glowingly about the status of Iriquois women, this despite the fact that visitors to Iriquois settlements were appalled at the degradation women submitted to in a society where they did all the work and the men had all the fun (hunting game and killing the Delaware). I spent some time going over the evidence while writing my first book.
Dr Fleming confirms what I thought about matriarchal societies. They have a place in myth, fantasy, and sometimes in science fiction.
According to the statement of the Catholic Church to the Beijing Conference of Women in 1995: "A woman has a right to choose between having a profession, being a mother and simultaneously carrying on a profession, and being being a mother and dedicating all her activity to the home."
That seems clear enough, and unless there is an authoritative statement to the contrary, I would infer that in carrying on a profession a woman has the right to rise to a position of leadership if her work merits it--according the the Catholic Church.
C in #s 29 & 31 makes several fundamental mistakes.
First: modern schooling is not remotely education. Education has to do with formation not information. Modern schooling has to do with programming modern people to be good little consumers and workers, "to do", in John D.s words, "perfectly what their parents did imperfectly". It consists, overwhelmingly in propaganda, brainwashing, and vocational training. And not that there is anything wrong with vocational training as everyone needs to earn a living, but it is not education. There is no longer any "Art" in a Bachelor of Arts degree, just a bunch of droning lecture hours.
Second: "economic growth" is measured in dollars which have been multiplying exponentially since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913 in order to transfer the wealth of this country to the likes of John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, etc and heirs. The dollar has depreciated in value about 98% since then. A dollar today is not the same thing as a dollar yesterday and they cannot logically be compared. Things and dollar bills, the frenetic quest for which so many are over-occupied, do not make real growth. How many people have made pilgrimages to and been inspired by the Sears Tower or a modern freeway cloverleaf versus say the Cathedral of Notre Dame, or the remains of Roman aqueducts, or Roman and Greek theatres. With all the economic growth we have had, why are so many people so worried by the economy; why are so many people just a pay check away from losing everything they have? With all the economic growth we have had, why, in the face of mere weather, do so many people flee from CITIES, not just beach shacks, but cities like Houston and New Orleans? Economic growth, if anything it seems to me, should mean an eventual accumulation of lastingly valuable, ie well made, useful, beautiful, inspiring things, both material and spiritual, by individuals, families, and communities. I don't see this!
One more thing, I don't think it is honest to label Afghanistan and Pakistan as patriarchies. It is after all a Latin term and implies a certain freedom of action on the part of the family which I don't see anywhere, except possibly at the highest levels, in the Islamic world. It seem to me more honest to label these two countries as theocracies or maybe even anti-theocracies or even otherocracies which I don't want to print.
Various bishops and groups, as I said earlier, have uttered ridiculous statements about women nominally giving a Catholic opinion. There is a very foolish Pastoral Letter of Irish Bishops. None has any particular authority except as an expression of the opinion of those who drafted and signed the document. Scripture and tradition are eminently clear on this point, and within the older traditions--Catholic and Orthodox--a woman who wishes to pursue a profession may become a nun, but even then it is generally with the approval of her parents. I know that various stripes of liberals and radicals wish to parade their Marxism under a Catholic banner, but they are either mistaken or deliberately duplicitous. We have established a society in which women are routinely pressured into entering a workforce where they are economically and sexually exploited. It is one thing to say that circumstances often compel people to make hard choices; quite another to justify the system that creates the circumstances.
God Bless you Thomas Fleming! I would add that Locke was more malignant than you suggest.
Here my point was not to debunk Locke, which I did in Morality of Everyday Life but to point out his role in undermining the concept of the family.
I'm just catching up with this discussion. But I was wondering how Dr. Fleming would look on this section from the recent Catechism of the Catholic Church: "2433 Access to employment and to professions must be open to all without unjust discrimination: men and women, healthy and disabled, natives and immigrants."
I suppose one could say that, given that wives should work in the home, it is not "unjust" to encourage them to stay there.
The late John Paul II also wrote, in a "Letter to Women" in 1995: "4. And what shall we say of the obstacles which in so many parts of the world still keep women from being fully integrated into social, political and economic life? We need only think of how the gift of motherhood is often penalized rather than rewarded, even though humanity owes its very survival to this gift. Certainly, much remains to be done to prevent discrimination against those who have chosen to be wives and mothers. As far as personal rights are concerned, there is an urgent need to achieve real equality in every area: equal pay for equal work, protection for working mothers, fairness in career advancements, equality of spouses with regard to family rights and the recognition of everything that is part of the rights and duties of citizens in a democratic State.
"This is a matter of justice but also of necessity. Women will increasingly play a part in the solution of the serious problems of the future: leisure time, the quality of life, migration, social services, euthanasia, drugs, health care, the ecology, etc. In all these areas a greater presence of women in society will prove most valuable, for it will help to manifest the contradictions present when society is organized solely according to the criteria of efficiency and productivity, and it will force systems to be redesigned in a way which favours the processes of humanization which mark the 'civilization of love'." (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_29061995_women_en.html)
Maybe this is one of those passages of John Paul II's that, as John Zmirak once quipped, requires a 400-page book to elucidate.
In any case, it's not an infallible statement.
And the Council of Trent in the section "Holy Matrimony" still is pertinent: "The wife should love to remain at home, unless compelled by necessity to go out; and she should never presume to leave home without her husband's consent.
"Again, and in this the conjugal union chiefly consists, let wives never forget that next to God they are to love their husbands, to esteem them above all others, yielding to them in all things not inconsistent with Christian piety, a willing and ready obedience." (http://www.cin.org/users/james/ebooks/master/trent/tsacr-m.htm)
P.S. Maybe it's just that I'm an old journalist who wrote too many headlines but, Dr. Fleming, you already have the best title for your book: "Uncle Sam's Harem."
I thank John Seiler for his comments and hope to see more of him in the future. It has been years since I heard from him. There is an unbroken Christian tradition regarding the position of women in society. If some recent statements emanating from the Church seems to overturn that tradition, then we must be misreading them, as you suggest. One way to look at it is this: Supposing a society has sent women into the work place. At that point, it might be regarded as wrong to erect barriers to their entering the professions or receiving appropriate promotions and compensation. But even that would be a bit extreme, since it would be difficult to say in any given case whether a woman's career and compensation were retarded by the fact of being a woman rather than by the fact of having a husband and children, dropping out of the work force periodically, etc. I do not propose to quarrel with two Popes, but if they were to declare that the sun rises in the West, I should politely shift the conversational topic to something they know something about. The Church is not simply what some people in this generation say it is, though I know there are Catholics who take this position. Dante, who put so many Popes and Cardinals into unpleasant parts of Hell, clearly did not. The current state of the opinion in Rome is no more infallible than it was in the days of Leo X or the pornocracy. Our duty is to be humble and listen, but if a bishop or even a Pope contradicts the long-cherished traditions of the Church, we do not have to endorse his mistake. On the other hand, we should not make it an occasion of scandal. I will soon by posting a part IV, on the punishment of wives by their husbands.