Unce Sam’s Harem III
I began this discussion with a promise to elucidate the question of Ms. Palin's candidacy. In general, I have been pointing out that by nature, tradition, and revelation, the sexes have been assigned quite different functions. It has been alleged, without much foundation, that the Catholic Church has abandoned this tradition to champion the "right" of a woman to a career, but whatever "rights" women may hold in this respect are fulfilled, in Catholic thought, by a religious vocation. I do want to make it clear that I am writing about the natural family and the Christian tradition, not about everyday reality today that may well make it inconvenient or undesirable for women not to pursue a profession or go to work. God help a poor woman who has to depend on the fidelity, diligence, and maturity of an American male under the age of 75! In some cases, a woman who has no profession has made herself helpless and deprived herself of the second-best social life that is often the only one available. As I explained earlier, I do not like automobiles, computers, telephones, television, and air travel, but to live without these things I could not be a writer or editor and could never escape from Rockford, either in thought or in deed.
Nonetheless, women are not forced to choose politics as a profession--if it can be called that--nor are we forced by circumstances to vote for them. But, even if we were so inclined, we might make a distinction between unmarried women without children and wives and mothers whose first responsibility is to their children. I have had women friends who, when they had children, cut down their hours as teachers, physicians, lawyers, in order to spend the proper amount of time with the children, and, as their children grew up and left the house, slowly resumed their careers. By the way, these adjustments naturally cost women a good deal in seniority, and more than all of the disparity between the salaries of men and those of women is accounted for by the interruptions caused by children and changes in a husband's job. I say "more than all" because Affirmative Action laws see to it that women are overcompensated. But, the schedule of a mayor, governor, or President is inflexible, requiring more than a full 40 hours. Our local mayor was widely condemned when he took a good deal of time off to deal with the birth of a child with serious disabilities. One other consideration is the fact that a Christian wife is supposed to obey her husband. In the past, there have been problems when sons, bound to obey their fathers, were elected to office, but how much more serious is the case of a wife.
Let us then look at the traditional and natural structure of husband-wife relations.
The Patriarchy
Feminists, looking back at the traditional sex roles of 19th and 20th century Europe and the Americas, have often written sneeringly of “the patriarchy,” and anti-feminists have responded by explicitly defending patriarchy or by discussing male dominance in terms of the rigid hierarchy of baboons. But human social life has little in common with that of the boorish baboon, and “patriarchy,” as the word suggests, refers properly not to the virtually universal tendency toward male dominance but to societies in which the fathers and senior males rule over the family and tribal structure with sovereign authority.
Our image of patriarchy inevitably comes from Old Testament patriarchs like Abraham and Jacob, but in every known society, men occupy most of the highest niches of power and prestige. Masculine authority depends in part on the superior strength of the male sex but also on masculine hormones that predispose men to take part in competitive and violent behavior. But, given the creativity of the human race, the type and extent of that power varies greatly, from the easily familiarity of pygmy husbands and wives to the rigidity of Chinese men who bound their wives feet to make them more dependent. Nothing could be more foolish—or more dangerous--than an attempt to reestablish the family practices of nomadic shepherds or to create a theonomy based on Old Testament law.
It is dangerous to speak to broadly, but, in general, sexual distinctions are more marked in developed civilizations than in primitive societies. At the same time, the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome--and of Medieval Europe—developed traditions and rules that required respect for mothers and wives, sisters and daughters. Men controlled the government, and, while they may have ruled (theoretically) their children as absolute monarchs, their authority over wives was, as Aristotle says, political rather than monarchical in the sense that it was limited by law, custom, and respect.
In the Anglo-American tradition of Common Law, the status of wives was defined by the principle of coverture, which meant that the wife's legal identity was merged with that of her husband. When Hamlet is taken to task for addressing his stepfather as “mother,” he replies: “Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh, and so, my mother.” (IV.3. 54-55) As Blackstone observes: "By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law...the very legal being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least is incorporated or consolidated." Justice Hugo Black's oft-quoted statement that "the old common-law fiction that the husband and wife are one...has worked out in reality to mean...the one is the husband" is a smart-aleckism --typical of modern jurists who refuse to look at an issue in any light but that provided by current fashion, and it rests upon the assumption--the most degrading imaginable--that women have allowed themselves to be enslaved, throughout human history, by men. Patriarchal institutions are a two-way street, and if men less experienced than Bumble supposed they had the power to control the lives of their womenfolk, they were, in so thinking, obliged to support and protect them. One is free to dislike the terms of this division of labor but not to misrepresent it as one-sided tyranny.
Even in the old Common Law tradition, man and wife were not so merged that women had no legal identity. The wife’s position was not that of a possession but of her husband’s ward. She could, for example, maintain property rights, though they were limited by her husband’s authority. The implications of coverture and related notions, however, were broad, extending to questions of property, inheritance, divorce, and even criminal prosecutions. Husbands and wives were not permitted to give evidence in court for or against one another. Since a criminal conspiracy requires two parties, a married couple could not be convicted of conspiring together. As one person, in the eyes of the law and of the church, husband and wife could not sue each other in tort. This principle was invoked as late as 1953 in an English case where a master was held accountable for his servant’s negligence that resulted in injury to the servant’s wife. Within a decade legal reformers were eliminating this last vestige of coverture in British law.
The husband, at least in law, was the presumed master of the house and, consequently, could be held liable for his wife's torts, including those to which she had been liable before marriage, and for misdemeanors and certain felonies that were performed in his presence and could thus be presumed to be done under his orders. In cases like that of Mr. Bumble, the husband's complicity did not have to be proved, and he, rather than the wife, was subject to punishment. Until about 1890 an American wife injured in a vehicular accident could not recover damages from a third party if her husband’s driving contributed to the accident. In some rulings, coverture was cited, but in others, when the principle of coverture had been more or less abandoned, it was argued that in marriage a wife had put herself under her husband’s protection. One way of looking at this is to say that some part of the older Christian understanding of marriage as a merger of identities survived the decay of coverture.
Coverture was concerned primarily with property rights. Under English law a single woman could make contracts, sue in her own name, and manage her own property; however, once she married, such rights were merged into her husband's legal identity. The wife's dowry was put under the control of her husband who, although he could not alienate the property, did not have to account for the rents or income. On the other hand, "the husband is bound to provide his wife with necessaries by law, as much as himself; and if he contracts debts for them, he is obliged to pay them.....If the wife be indebted before marriage, the husband is bound afterwards to pay the debt."
A wife was entitled to inherit a third of her husband's property, and this guarantee restricted the husband's right to alienate this property, unless the wife was willing to sign away her dower rights. (In South Carolina my own wife had to go through this puzzling ceremony on the two occasions we sold property.) These are, of course, broad generalizations, since Anglo-American law not only changed over time but also adapted itself to the folkways and attitudes of the different colonies in the New World.
In a successful marriage between responsible persons, such an arrangement, so far from being burdensome, had many advantages, not the least of which was that it discouraged the couple from quarreling about financial decisions. In a traditional society, even a reckless husband could be checked either by the resentment of his wife's male relatives or by community disapproval, and a woman's dowry was a concrete manifestation of the honor paid her by her family. This attitude is not restricted to Christian nations. In ancient Athens, for example, male authority was balanced by a sense of family honor that included the dignity of a married daughter. In Menander's play (4th century B.C.) Epitrepontes (the arbitrators), the point of the comedy is a father's resentment of the way hs son-in-law is squandering money, and he tells his daughter that the husband of a rich wife should consider himself her slave.
Coverture is e a dead letter in American law--as dead as the Christian understanding of marriage--but those of us who claim to be "conservative" and "Christian" must treat with skepticism any argument that would justify women in seeking and exercising political power. There are extraordinary circumstances, inevitably. Imagine a frontier town in which no man is willing to preach the Gospel or keep the town's records. We do not live in such a society, and there is no point in pretending that we do. There is no lack of male incompents and scoundrels from which to choose the rogues who will oppress and exploit us. The least we can do is to monopolize the shame of politics.
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Dr.Fleming I have I always trusted you as an intellect.I was pleased to read in the recent Chronicles that you have the good taste to sip George Dickel and read Raymond Chandler.Your credentials have solidified with the bright but uninformed minds(young and old)that I expose to your articles.A forty something friend read "Uncle Sam's Harem" and immediately assumed only a cloistered fellow would have such lack of self-censorship to utter such forbidden truths.Bull,I said,the man drinks Dickel...he' s "old school"(a compliment in our crowd).My friend now wants to read more.A true story.Carry on,sir.
You are far too kind. Desipere in loco, as a great poet once said. I also slum it with Evan Williams and hobnob with Highland Park. Speaking of old school, there is a nice overproduced song by John Conlee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GtMNKd3e24
Masculine authority depends in part on the superior strength of the male sex but also on masculine hormones that predispose men to take part in competitive and violent behavior.
Dr. Fleming, will you be discussing the other factors upon which masculine authority depends? Would a concern for justice or something pertaining to the ability to reason be included in that list? I know St. Thomas talks about the latter in explaining the authority of the husband over the wife, and he has been criticized on that account.
Another beautiful piece, Dr Fleming. When I hear folks argue against the classical patriarchy of the West, they often bring up the fact that it seems to exclude women not only from the world of politics, but from the arts as well. Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and Flannery O'Connor each never married, and it is hard to imagine their art being the same had they done so. Do you see any truth in this claim?
Thanks, Tom, for emphasizing the legal distinction between ward and chattel, which is a useful one.
What we can say, too, is that the economics of motherhood for women have not really changed much in the last century; what has changed is the idea that women (as potential mothers), deserve some protection--to encourage and reassure them that their time at home tending to children is valued and will not imperil their old age. As it is, our divorce laws undermine a family subtly from the very beginning of any American marriage, and the vulnerability of women is just one way; there are plenty of injustices done to fathers, too, of course.
There is little overall distinction to be made between males and females on IQ scores, though their aptitudes are not evenly distributed--women being more verbal on average and men being more mathematical and analytical. Nonetheless, either sex has on average sufficient analytical power to be rational. Other factors enter in. By brain development, hormones, and experience, women seem to become more one-sided in their loyalties and less capable of seeing the other party's point of view. What do fairness and competitive excellence mean to a mother whose child is defeated in a competition or threatened somehow. In politics and war, some women become ferociously competitive and recognize no restraining rules. This is a long story, which I outlined in The Politics of Human Nature. The long and the short of it is that women are perfectly capable of rational thought and behavior, though reason is sometimes suspended for the higher cause of defending the family, either real or metaphorical.
Now, I should say in fairness that I meet rational men mostly in books and have had the pleasure and honor of knowing a fair number of intelligent and reasonable women. But in most conditions of life, males will dominate over females, because of their greater strength, higher levels of testosterone, and a basic wiring that makes them seek power. One aspect of any decent society, then, will be the social system--marriage and family--that protects not only mothers and children but also values premarital chastity in women. Promiscuous girls are less likely to become good mothers--sleeping around is a hard habit to break--but they also encourage men to devalue marriage and to suspect the legitimacy of their children. I do not know a single example of a healthy society (that is one that survived and thrived) in which women, at all stages of life, were not by and large protected.
Leo#1 writes :"A forty something friend read “Uncle Sam’s Harem” and immediately assumed only a cloistered fellow would have such lack of self-censorship to utter such forbidden truths."
Yes, I must say that Tom Fleming and his friends have more guts than a packing house when it comes to speaking the truth. One of the things that distinguishes Chronicles and the Rockford Institute from so many conservative popularizations is their understanding of time and place. They know the world is an old place and has been around a long time, they know that other developed societies have come and gone, they know cultures experience the same stages of growth and decay that individuals must face in a brief lifetime. They don't panic, they keep their heads, they act like grown men and civilized women, and are aware of eternity. It is really quite an extraordinary group given the times, and I am sometimes surprised they have not been persecuted more than they have been. Pray for them and be thankful we still have living men and women like them to admire.
What feminists and the rest of the modern world do not realize is that, once you remove the Christian and ancient understanding of woman's place in society, there is nothing preventing our culture from retreating into what barbarism. After Christianity is eliminated, the 'rights' justification will begin to fade away as well. Then men will realize that they are much more powerful than women (which was always true) and they will retake their former patriarchal roles, except this time there will be no Christian or pagan virtue behind it. This is because men will have already been indoctrinated into egalitarianism and therefore will treat women as ruthlessly as they will treat other men. Perhaps we already have something like this in America. You cannot beat a man's nature out of him.
As Steve Sailer has pointed out, there are significant differences between men and women in IQ scores. Men are over-represented on both the tail ends of the bell curve (i.e. among cretins and geniuses).
Among people with an IQ of 130 (the minimum required to enter Mensa) men outnumber women 2:1. At an IQ of 160 it is 30:1.
Just the other day I had to listen to a lecture about the old legal status of women. Nobody in the room gave serious thought to why the old legal system was set up this way by intelligent men who treated their wives far better than most moderns do. The system's survival into the 20th century was a source of wisecracks about those backward Southerners. I'm glad Dr. Fleming is finally making this a two-sided debate.
That being said, coverture seems much better as a principle for Christians than a legal fact. Under coverture, what recourse does a woman have if her marriage malfunctions and her kin are indifferent? Is it right to leave her without legal recourse? The modern system may be worse, but that doesn't justify the old system's gap between noble ideal and human reality. Is there some sort of golden mean between the two?
"That being said, coverture seems much better as a principle for Christians than a legal fact. Under coverture, what recourse does a woman have if her marriage malfunctions and her kin are indifferent? Is it right to leave her without legal recourse? The modern system may be worse, but that doesn’t justify the old system’s gap between noble ideal and human reality. Is there some sort of golden mean between the two?"
I can't answer for Dr. Fleming, but I see two answers to this. In the first place, if the woman is a truly virtuous woman in the old system, she would likely have connections to others than only her family and her husband through, for example, the local parish. In the second place, sometimes things just don't work out and some people are doomed to be martyrs. "Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled."
I regret referring in general terms to IQ scores because, even though my overall point was simply to point out that women are capable of rational thought, the discussion can be so quickly derailed. IQ scores are a composite and to evaluate them properly one has to look at the components. Mr. Sailer is doubtless a fine man, but not someone to introduce as an expert in a serious discussion.
Let us set aside the technicalities of coverture and look more generally at the juridical position of women in pre-Christian societies. Naturally, men, women, and children could be enslaved or abused by conquerors or oppressors but when these systems functioned well women were always under someone's legal protection. Whether we look at Athenian law or Roman law, women's rights were looked after by their families. It is individualism that has set women "free" to be exploited.
It's my understanding that coverture only existed in the common law tradition, not in continental legal systems. Is that correct? If so, exactly what were the rules governing these issues in the civil law tradition, and which set of rules was, in your opinion, better?
This was an eye-opening article (somehow I missed that fascinating line when I read Hamlet), but coverture can't be the only moral system if it never prevailed in many Christian (including most Catholic) nations.
I spoke of coverture because it is the principle that was introduced into the US. French and Italian laws, derived partly from Germanic custom and partly from Roman law, were as strict and changed more slowly. One could still kill an adulterous wife in Italy down to something like 1970. Naturally, both the French Revolution and its offshoot, the Italian Risorgimento, aimed at liberating women but in both cases the plotters were libertines whose motives were transparent.
One way of looking at these questions is to take up the extreme cases. For example, if one wanted to prove that the family is a universal institution, one could take up all the extreme cases cited by feminists and dismiss them one by one. In the case of women's position in society, one can say that until the 20th century women were probably freest in the Roman Empire, which provided all sorts of legal protections for recovery of dowery, and released wives, up to a point, from the patria potestas, but there was no question of women running for office, serving in the army, voting, or doing any of the million and one things women do today. I was once teaching a Latin class to college students and discussing some of these questions, when an older feminist (about 55) began carping. I pointed out that a middle class Roman woman was not subject to sexual abuse, much less rape. She responded that rape was "the price we have to pay for our freedom." Rather insensitively, I corrected her and pointing at the pretty young students, said "No, ma'am, it is the price THEY have to pay." Women cannot be independent. They can either be protected by men who love them or abused by men who do not. In America, we have chosen the latter course.
Anyone interested in my discussion of laws and customs regulating the beating and killing of bad wives?
TJF: That would be a very interesting topic indeed, though it may attract assorted fruits and nuts into the discussion.
Dear Dr. Fleming,
Thank you for your reply.
NGPM,
I like the idea of a parish priest having some informal authority over family law, although I still think there must be some sort of formal court independent of kin. Perhaps an ecclesiastical court ? But I guess we're holding off on speculation until we've actually looked at past systems in detail.
@17: As I'm sure you know, technically, in Catholicism, an ecclesiastical tribunal does have the last word on the legality of a marriage, although these days the proceedings seem to be rather watered down and applied as a ceremony or, worse, a fraud. In a community with strong religious soil that would rarely be the case, and the warning of a good Confessor would usually be at least grudgingly heeded long before one would ever need to appeal to the tribunal for protection from family members (particularly if the price was excommunication and/or some other ostracisation from the community). Obviously a system of appellates and checks needs to be held in place so that an unscrupulous priest could not use his ecclesiastical authority for personal means.
But in general, Common Law and other legal systems should be flexible enough to allow for exceptions to a wide variety general rules under extraordinary circumstances, the idea being that a law exists not in itself but to promote a particular end and that a rule should not apply if it does not promote that end in a particular circumstance. This can easily touch various aspects of family law where the repercussions go beyond who lives with whom (primogeniture, agnaticism, couverture, morganaticism, etc.)
Of course you're right in that the community needs laws and courts, and not only for the protection of women. I cannot remember who said there was "no such thing as society; only individuals and families," and that will never do. Societies are expanded outgrowths of families.
NGPM: It was Margaret Thatcher! In view of the original purpose of these posts, that is certainly a humorous coincidence on which to (probably) end this thread.
I think the breakdown of chivalry in the U.S. has a lot to do with the predominant shallow "practicality" of the Yankee national character. That is why it has been less eroded in non-Yankees---Southerners and traditional Catholics.
@19: Thank you! I thought that was who it was, but I wasn't sure enough to cite her. How wonderful.
By the way, Dr. Fleming, about your question: I've enjoyed reading you on any subject since I was about 19, but since Mr. Wilson mentioned the "assorted fruits and nuts" who have appeared in these discussions, at some point could we maybe hear something from you or another Chronicles writer on the neo-Pagan « Nouvelle Droite » (which I conflated with neoconservatism until I learned it was an expression of the so-called "Traditionalist School")?
@17: Fundamentalist Calvinism tends to do that wherever it goes. Look at the havoc it wrecked on England and France. I used to think Southern Conservatives were too narrow-minded in their round condemnation of all things "Yankee" until I realised that whereas Calvinism merely corrupted England and France, it WAS the very essence of "Yankee" society.
The Nouvelle Droite is a big subject, and I am no intellectual historian. I know some of the people and am even technically an advisor to the most highbrow ND publication, the Nouvelle Ecole, but that is largely because of my relations with Alain de Benoist whom I see in Paris from time to time. At its best, the ND is a principled intellectual movement to save the West from tyranny, democracy, vulgarity, Islam, and the American Way of Life. It is anti-Christian because they see Christianity as an Oriental obsession with unity that disrupted the peaceful and tolerant world of polytheism. I tell them, every chance I get, that they might as well turn Catholic, since we have more saints and angels than the Romans had household godlets. It is a sad thing that the ND is the most important conservative movement in the West, but the fact is they fill a vacuum. I don't agree with much of what they teach, but there are aspects to Benoist's thought that converges with ours--his contempt for the unitary state and unitary sovereignty, for example, and his celebration of provincial cultures. There are several interesting non-ND French journals these days, though I rarely have time to read them. I should mention Catholica, edited by my friend Bernard Dumont, to which Claude Polin contributes, and Actualites francaises which has the participation of Christophe Reveillard. There are several others I don't receive regularly but from which I get articles from friends. If some young person who knows French would be willing to digest a few articles a month for our website, it would be very useful. The right is very fractured these days, and it is harder to maintain contacts than it used to be--ironic, non?
Before this thread disappears from the front page, my thanks to Dr. Fleming and all the commentators for this entire series. It has definitely been a learning experience for me.
If some young person who knows French would be willing to digest a few articles a month for our website, it would be very useful. The right is very fractured these days, and it is harder to maintain contacts than it used to be–ironic, non?
Dr. Fleming, what exactly would you need? I'm 23 and quite fluent in French... actually, I lived in Paris for the first six months of this year and I'm moving back pretty soon for work. You know where to reach me, right?