The blind leading the blind. That’s what I think when I listen to columnists support the feminist movement (“Girls won’t get anywhere until they stop dressing as bimbos,” March 28, p.7). It amazes me to hear a new generation of young women believe the same ideology feminist leaders like Betty Friedan espoused in the ’60s cultural movement, when the facts bear the demise of the cornerstones of our civilization.
Feminists like Friedan endorsed the end of the patriarchal family, with feminist professor Alison Jagger calling the nuclear family “a cornerstone of women’s oppression: It enforces women’s dependence on men, it enforces heterosexuality and it imposes the prevailing masculine and feminine character structures on the next generation.” Gullible women bought this in the 1960’s and have suffered the consequences since then. The U.S. birth rate has plummeted from 3.9 children per woman in 1960 to 2 per woman; marriage has declined by one third; the divorce rate has doubled since 1960; and more than half of all first-born children in the United States are conceived or born out of wedlock. Studies have shown that female fertility starts to decline after age 26 and drops rapidly after age 30. The point is that many women are valuing career and work over marriage early in their lives, and it should be troublesome to all women when the facts show that fertility declines rapidly around the age when many of them start to think about marriage and children.
At the expense of feminism, we males have equally suffered. Many of us, like me, are the outcome of the destruction of the patriarchy. We have grown up without suitable role models to develop our masculinity. Fathers have been disenfranchised under a legal system that overwhelmingly supports maternal custody, with women receiving custody in 66 percent of uncontested cases and men receiving custody in 10 percent of uncontested cases.
And the source of feminism is subject to great criticism. Freidan, the modern-day leader of feminism, was a reporter for the newspaper of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, “the largest Communist-led institution of any kind in the United States,” which was targeted by Congress in 1947 as a Communist front. The Communist Manifesto itself expresses that the destruction of the family has always been central to its goal.
My point is simple: Many 1960s feminists have fallen prey to the guise of “male-dominated oppression” that Freidan extolled. Now many of those feminists have missed out on marriage and family, arguably the best path for most people to achieve meaning, purpose and happiness in their lives. The last thing I want to see is a new generation of women buy into feminism and end up bitter and depressed later in life. I am not devaluing women who choose to have a career — all I’m saying is that careers can start anytime; a woman’s natural path to happiness, through marriage and childbirth, is limited. Is the rat race really worth more than creating life and a life-long companionship of love and happiness?
David Duford SMG ’06
