Remembering the Mothers who Might have Been

Once again it is Mother's Day, the day we have set aside in North America to honour our mothers and show them our appreciation with breakfasts in bed, chocolates, roses, and the canned sentimentality of Hallmark cards. This Mother's Day I would like for us to take the time to remember the mothers who might have been or at least one particular subset of that group. There are many factors that might intervene to prevent a woman from becoming the mother she would otherwise have been – early death, physical infertility due to illness or injury, entering a convent and taking a vow of celibacy, finding her erotic attraction limited to that of the Sapphic variety, etc. The might-have-been mothers I wish for us to think about today, however, are those who entered womanhood capable of bearing children, with the natural desire that they would one day do so, but who were deceived by the lies of the enemy of motherhood and femininity, feminism.

These victims of feminism have been on my mind as of late, ever since I learned that one of the iconic figures of second-wave feminism would be coming to town to speak later this week. As you may be aware, a few years ago a prominent Jewish family in Winnipeg that made its fortune in telecommunications, talked the government into dropping millions of the taxpayers’ dollars into constructing a monstrous eyesore near the Forks in the heart of the city. It is officially called the Canadian Museum of Human Rights but regarded by various groups who feel that their own historic suffering has been slighted or overlooked by the planners of the museum as being just another monument to the Jewish Holocaust. There will be an official opening later this year but already lectures are taking place there. On the fourteenth of May, the guest speaker will be Dr. Germaine Greer. I learned about this, oddly enough, in an opinion piece published by the Winnipeg Free Press on the third, written by an Athena Thiessen who objects to Greer’s appearance at the CMHR because Greer does not accept that people like Thiessen, who rejected the male body parts their Y chromosomes gave them for the imitation female body parts surgery could provide, are real women. Although this has nothing to do with my topic I cannot help but note the irony that the person making this complaint has adopted the Greek name of Minerva, goddess of wisdom.

Dr. Germaine Greer is an Australian born academic who became a feminist luminary in 1970 with the publication of her book The Female Eunuch. Although the title could mislead one into thinking she was writing about female genital mutilation of the barbaric type practiced in many African countries and certain suburbs of Toronto, a subject she did tackle in a later book, it was actually a diatribe about how traditional gender roles and the traditional family had deprived women of their sexuality. The book became a best-seller and its author hit the lecture circuit and became the darling of the media. She developed the reputation of being men’s favourite feminist. Her wit, sharp tongue, and foul mouth undoubtedly contributed to this, as did the fact that while she was a Marxist academic she was not a cold, doctrinaire, intellectual like Simone de Beauvoir. Nor did she give the impression of having just flown in from a Walpurgisnacht’s revel with the devil on Bald Mountain like Betty Friedan. Most importantly, the message which she both preached and modelled to young women, about finding their sexuality through multiple lovers and an avoidance of commitment and pregnancy happened to coincide perfectly with the adolescent fantasies of a generation of males who did not want to and in many cases refused to grow up.

Greer wrote several other feminist books but in 1999 put out The Whole Woman, a direct sequel to The Female Eunuch. In this book she made some interesting admissions. For example she wrote “In The Female Eunuch I argued that motherhood should not be treated as a substitute career: now I would argue that motherhood should be regarded as a genuine career option, that is to say, as paid work and as such an alternative to other paid work”. (p. 260) While this is not exactly a recantation and to equate motherhood with “paid work” is still demeaning it indicates that Greer had had something of an epiphany.

The personal struggle that lay behind this came out in an article that appeared in the inaugural issue of a women’s magazine, Aura, that was launched by Parkhill Publishing in Britain the following year. The headline was “I Was Desperate for a Baby and I have the Medical Bills to Prove It”. I have been unable to track down the full text of the article probably due to the fact that Aura seems to have folded after the first two or three issues, but Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer discussed it shortly after it appeared, quoting Greer as confessing “I still have pregnancy dreams waiting with vast joy and confidence for something that will never happen”. (1) Krauthammer wisely commented that Greer was a victim of her ideology, “In modern times we suffer not for our sins (sin having been abolished) but for ideology”, and that she was not the only one.

As a movement, second-wave feminism or “Women’s Lib” was not united in its vision of what it wanted to accomplish. Some hoped to achieve women’s independence of men, others aimed at women’s social, political, and economic equality with men. Some wanted to advance women as a class, others wanted to “emancipate” women as individuals. Then there were those who merely preached hatred of men and demanded a revolutionary overthrow of the family and in some cases of sexual reproduction itself. What the feminists did agree upon was that whatever their future goals for women were, the traditional ideal of woman as wife and mother stood in their way and had to go. They demanded that abortion be made “safe and legal” and so paved the highway to the future they wished to build with the blood and bones of millions of unborn children. In this, they resembled the Communist movement, the Marxist ideology of which many of their founders shared, but their message to young women was expressed in the language of liberal capitalism. They told young women that the path to finding and fulfilling themselves lay in the pursuit of ambitious, high-paying, careers, and that if they still wanted a husband and children they would have plenty of time for that later.

This, of course, was a lie, because women have a much more limited window of opportunity to reproduce than men do, with the optimal child-bearing years coinciding with those in which an ambitious career is usually established, to say nothing of the fact that abortions, even “safe and legal” ones, do not exactly enhance fecundity. So, many young women, bewitched by the message of “you can have it all”, put off their dreams of motherhood only to find that when they finally arrived at the date they had set aside in their planner for their appointment with Mother Nature, she, justifiably insulted at being put off so long, stood them up.

In The Whole Woman, Greer wrote that “The immense rewardingness of children is the best-kept secret in the western world.” (p. 415) The only people trying to keep what is otherwise universal knowledge a secret, however, were feminists like Greer herself, who did an excellent job of keeping it a secret from themselves. While it is a pity that Dr. Greer learned this “secret” too late for it to do her any good, I must say that I feel far more sorry for all those women who will never know the joys of motherhood because they bought into the lies she peddled.

These are the mothers who might have been and this Mother's Day, let us remember them as well.

(1) http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer051500.asp

The Authority of Fathers

Authority has been in decline in Western civilization for centuries. The liberal dogma of individualism is widely accepted as received truth, despite the many ways in which it conflicts with observable reality. The authority of kings as God’s ministers of justice, the Apostolic authority of the Church, and the authority of all other traditional, social institutions, has been badly eroded. This is true even in the case of the most basic social institution of them all, the family. Parental authority in the family has come under severe attack, an attack which has intensified over the last century. This is especially true of patriarchal authority – the authority of fathers.

God said “Honour thy father and thy mother”. We have dedicated one day of the year each to our parents with which to honour them with our lips. We honour our mothers in May. Now, on the third Sunday of June, it is our fathers turn to have a day of their own. Having “honoured” our parents, we consider our duty to be done, and promptly ignore them for the rest of the year. For some reason I think this is not what God had in mind when He issued the first commandment with a promise.

Much of the blame for the recent decline in respect for fathers and their authority must be laid at the feet of television. The invention of television was a tremendous step in the development of propaganda techniques. It made it possible for moving pictures and accompanying sound to be broadcast throughout a region and viewed by people in their own homes. Television's potential as an instrument of social change was immediately apparent to social engineers and political radicals.

How are fathers usually depicted on television? Does television support the traditional role of the father as an authority figure in the family?

No. If a television program is about a traditional, middle-class, nuclear family, the father figure is typically portrayed as a boorish buffoon, the least intelligent person in the family, who only asserts his fatherly authority when he is obviously in the wrong. If, by chance, television portrays a father differently, that father is usually a sensitive “new male” and a political liberal or the family as a whole is an “alternative family” of some sort.

Can there be any doubt that this is done on purpose to undermine patriarchal authority?

This raises the question of why anyone would want to undermine the authority of fathers, creating instability in the family, leading to social chaos. The fact that someone does is indisputable. The question is why.

The answer to that question ultimately lies in the reason why the authority of the father in the family is important to society. Before we look at that, however, we should note that there is a prominent left-wing movement in society which has historically defined itself in opposition to father-authority. This same movement attacks motherhood as being an inferior choice for women to the pursuit of ambition and self-fulfillment in a professional career outside the home.

This movement is called feminism.

Feminism and Patriarchy


The technical term for the authority of fathers within the traditional family is patriarchy. This word comes from combining the Greek word for father with the Greek word for “rule”. Patriarchy, is the nominal enemy of the feminist movement.

I threw the qualifier “nominal” in for two reasons. The first reason is that what feminists mean when they use the word “patriarchy” is not what the word actually means. We will return to that momentarily. The second reason is that a good argument can be made that the real enemy of feminism is not patriarchy at all but rather femininity.

If that statement sounds outrageous to you then please bear me out as I attempt to explain what I mean by it. While the feminist movement cloaks its goals in the language of “rights”, “equality”, “dignity” and other such vapid totem expressions (1) its true goal, if we can judge from the positions it takes, the actions it calls for, and the policies it supports, is to eliminate femininity and masculinize women. Feminists accuse their opponents of believing that men are superior to women. This, however, is a classic case of what Dr. Freud called projection. The belief that men are superior to women is in fact the core belief of feminism.

Look, for example, at the absurdly titled “Women’s Liberation Movement” of the 1960’s. This movement demanded a number of things, such as universal government-provided daycare and the full legalization of abortion.

What did feminism hope to gain from such things?

It is the nature of things, that the consequences of sexual intercourse are not divided equally between men and women. A man can walk away from it with no lasting consequences other than moral and spiritual ones. This is not true of a woman. Pregnancy occurs within the female body and if a woman becomes pregnant that means nine months of bearing the growing child within her womb, and then, because the child is born dependent, a much longer period of nursing and raising the child.

The traditional way in which society addressed this situation was through moral and civil regulations that demanded that men shoulder their fair share of the burden of raising the next generation. Society demanded that men marry the women who bore their children and that they provide for their wives and children.

Feminism, however, took the radically opposite position that the situation should be alleviated by having government daycare freely available to all mothers and by allowing women to terminate their pregnancies at whim. Thus, a woman would be able to walk away from sexual intercourse with no lasting consequences other than moral and spiritual ones, just like a man.

What clearly lies behind the feminist position here is the idea that it is far better to be a man – to be able to walk away from sex with no baggage – than to be a woman. Therefore in the name of equality, the government must artificially make it possible for a woman to be like a man.

Feminism, which purports to be a serious movement seeking the redress of injustices against women, is in reality little more than a feminine equivalent of the mindset of a poorly raised, hormone-driven, adolescent boy.

There was, of course, another motivation that lay behind feminism’s demand for tax-funded daycare and abortion. If women were allowed to terminate unwanted pregnancies whenever they so desired and to have government institutions raise their children for them, then women could pursue careers outside the home and not be hindered, in competition with men in the workplace, by the burden of raising children.

This, however, just further illustrates my point. Feminism’s idea that finding self-fulfillment in careers outside of the home would be better for women than staying home and being wives and mothers is a manifestation of the idea that men are superior to women. For what was feminism saying here if not that the work men did outside the home in order to support their families, was more meaningful and important, than what women did in bearing and raising children?

In all of this feminism displayed an immature mindset that is only explicable as a counterpart to the irresponsible attitudes that were becoming popular among the male population at the time, brought upon in part by the naïve progressive notion that advances in the development of technology had rendered the maturity and responsibility society demanded of both sexes in the past to be obsolete.

Wisdom is something that people gradually gain as they mature and get older. This is as true of societies as it is of individual persons, and for this reason it is the uttermost foolishness to disregard the accumulated wisdom of the past. Society’s traditional response to the difference between the sexes in natural consequences to sexual intercourse was not based upon the idea that men had gotten the better end of the deal than women. For that idea would itself have to include the idea that it is more desirable to live entirely for yourself and to sleep around with no commitments to anyone than to settle down and raise a family. That is an idea which reflects immaturity and selfishness rather than wisdom. Traditional societies were wisely, more concerned with making men behave maturely, responsibly, and wisely, than making it easier for women to behave immaturely, irresponsibly, and foolishly.

Traditional societies also displayed wisdom in assigning roles to men and women. These roles differed from society to society and at different stages in the development of a particular society in accordance with economic, political, and social circumstances. Whatever the circumstances, however, the difference between the role assigned to men and that assigned to women was centred around the basic fact that women get pregnant and bear children which they give birth to and nourish, and men do not. Societies guided by ancient tradition are too wise to treat this difference as trivial. Whatever else women might do can never be more important to a society than the bearing and raising of the next generation. Therefore, whatever role a society assigns to women, it will be one that does not hinder or interfere with motherhood.

Thus, in a society which survives by hunting and gathering, the role of gathering is assigned to women because it allows them to stay near the camp with the children and the role of hunting is assigned to men. When agriculture becomes the dominant means of survival the roles change to accommodate the new economy as they do again when mercantile trading and industrial manufacturing are developed. These changes affect the kind of labour required of both men and women. What does not change is that the labour required of women is that which least conflicts with motherhood.

Feminists refuse to see the wisdom in this. Instead, they see traditional gender roles, including the roles of father and mother, as a system of societal organization designed to benefit all males by oppressing all women. This is what feminists mean when they use the word “patriarchy”. (2)

Patriarchal authority is essential to Western Civilization

The term patriarchy, however, more accurately refers to the authority of fathers than to a supposed millennia-long conspiracy on the part of all men to oppress all women. The authority of fathers has come under attack, not only from feminists, but from revolutionaries of all stripes. Painter, novelist, and social critic Wyndham Lewis, wrote in the 1930s that the father is the enemy of all revolutionary movements because he “has been cast to represent authority”. (3)

A father’s authority exists and is exercised within the family. The family is the basic building block from which all societies are built. It is the smallest, most organic, form of social organization that exists. Other offices of authority within Western societies tend to be patterned after a father’s authority. Sir Robert Filmer, in his Patriarchia, argued from the authority of fathers to the natural authority of kings.

Wyndham Lewis was therefore correct. The father, as the traditional authority figure in the traditional family, is the embodiment of all traditional authority in Western society and therefore the primary target of those who see traditional Western civilization as standing in the way of progress.

The attack upon patriarchal authority has never been stronger than at the present moment. The current campaign to glorify the single mother is a blatant attempt to declare fathers to be superfluous and unwanted. After traditional motherhood was bashed for decades, as being an inferior, boring option to the glamour of an ambitious career now motherhood is presented to women as an empowering choice – especially if it is out of wedlock and by artificial insemination.

Fathers are not redundant and unnecessary however. Studies have shown what common sense has always told us – that children are happier and far more likely to develop into responsible, law-abiding, socially-integrated adults, if they grow up in a home with both a father and a mother. Sometimes circumstances are such that this cannot be the case but it is madness to encourage women to deliberately have children without a father and to consider a father “optional”. That the deception of the non-importance of fatherhood has been able to spread at all is due to the modern state’s having turned itself into a surrogate husband/father.

Unfortunately there is no strong movement of resistance to these attacks nor any indication that one is about to arise. The “conservative” response to feminism today consists largely of complaints that its original “good” intentions have been de-railed by anti-male radicals or worse, attempts to use feminist ideas to bolster support for military action against the Islamic world. The “men’s movement” is a masculine equivalent of feminism. It is devoted to the idol of equality and speaks only the language of “rights”. Some Christian men’s groups have shown an interest in promoting traditional fatherhood. Many however, seem to be little more than support groups.

It is here that we see the single largest reason for the decline of fatherhood and patriarchal authority in the family and in society. Other than individual voices, both male and female, the traditionalist side has largely given up.

Why has this happened?

Authority and Responsibility

Authority and responsibility always go together. The word “father” describes a position that comes with both authority and responsibility. Traditionally, fathers would raise their sons to follow after them, in both shouldering the burden and responsibility of fatherhood, and exercising its authority wisely.

Responsibility is less appealing than authority, however, and at some point the liberating effect of technological advancement combined with the accumulation of a couple of centuries worth of liberal individualism to undermine the willingness of a great many men to take up the duties and responsibilities and burdens of fatherhood. Many of these still wished to exercise the authority – but found that in abandoning their duties they had given up their authority as well.

John Lukacs wrote:

In the 1960s American women found the predominance of the male fettering not because it was real but because it was unreal. They could not stomach those prerogatives of the male—including not only professional or intellectual prerogatives but also the protection habitually offered by the latter—that dated back to earlier centuries, when men were indeed strong. Now they saw—or, rather felt—that the men were weak. Just as the “revolt” of youth in the 1960s was, in reality, often a reaction not against “authoritarian” but against permissive fathers whom they could no longer respect, women, too, despite all of the silly slogans of “male chauvinism,” reacted against the assumption of strength and power on the part of their male counterparts, who were often weak. To be queen of a house in the times of a constitutional (that is, bourgeois) monarchy was one thing; but who would want to keep up the formal duties and the manifold responsibilities of a queen when the man of the household was but a chairman of a committee? (4)

Fatherhood still represents both authority and responsibility, and it is for that reason that so many men who dislike feminism, do not wish to stand against it from the position of defending traditional fatherhood.

Any other position, however, has already capitulated completely to the enemy.

(1) By “vapid totem expressions” I mean essentially meaningless terms that we are expected to mindlessly genuflect before whenever they are invoked by the enforced, secular, orthodoxy of the day.

(2) The feminists are not the only ones to use the word “patriarchy” to refer to a general system of male dominance. Dr. Steven Goldberg, who was the Professor of Sociology at City College of New York, in his The Inevitability of Patriarchy: Why the Biological Difference Between Men and Women Always Produces Male Dominance (William Morrow: New York, 1973) later expanded into Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance (Open Court: Chicago, 1993) uses the term patriarchy in a specialized, and therefore carefully defined, sense. He used it to refer to when all or the majority of the upper hierarchical positions in a society are occupied by males – which he argues occurs in every society. He documented the latter point from the studies of anthropologists and provided a theory as to why this was the case. He argued that societies will vary in what roles and positions are awarded the highest status, but that whatever those roles and positions are, men will have a greater interest in obtaining them then women, because men are biologically more aggressive than women. Since women are attracted to men with status, power, and wealth the incentives to compete for the highest positions will always be greater for men than for women.

(3) The quotation comes from The Doom of Youth, published by Robert M. McBride & Company of New York in 1932. This is a polemical collection of essays directed against the cult of youth. It was reissued in 1982 by Haskell House Publishers of New York.

(4) John Lukacs, A New Republic: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2004), p. 196.