One thing that never ceases to amuse me is how feminists are constantly derided as being unromantic, a view which presumes that nothing is more enticing and romantic for women than being treated like a pussy-dispensing servant that gets paid back with occasional flowers and pats on the head. From Sara at F-Words, I see that Idaho lawmakers don’t even try to conceal that they think marriage and motherhood are special traps laid just for women.
Thayn said more two-parent homes and fewer working mothers could be both a social and economic boon. The Emmett Republican sees the breakdown of the traditional family structure as the root of societal ills such as drug abuse, crime and domestic violence.
That’s why, as chairman of the Idaho House of Representatives’ Family Task Force, he and others are considering controversial solutions such as repealing no-fault divorce laws and finding ways to encourage mothers to stay home with their children.
He’s not even trying—the very idea that making it much, much harder for women to escape abusive marriages by denying them their own income and the right to divorce defies all common sense and reason. It’s almost like he doesn’t give a shit, or maybe figures the best way to reduce domestic violence is to make it so hard to get out that women just accept it and quit fussing over it. It’s a common thread throughout this article, the idea being that the cure for divorce is not to reduce the number of bad marriages, but make it impossible for women to leave them. And that the best way to “strengthen marriages” is to strengthen male privilege and the sense that you can do whatever the fuck you want to your wife, with the knowledge that she has to take it because she’s not allowed to leave.
Controversially, the group is using the typical family of 1950 as its benchmark, though Thayn says it’s simply a baseline and not a suggestion that families were perfect in 1950.
But they were more unhappy than people are now, so if making people—especially women—unhappy is your goal, then 1950 is a great benchmark.
Few women today would trade places with the typical 1950s woman and mother, the one fervently idealized by so-called “pro-family” groups. In the 1950s, women didn’t approach parity with men in education and, guess what, their housework time was constant — despite having new “time-saving” technologies. This was the era in which birth rates soared and doubled the time devoted to child care. And with women assigned to endless tasks of the home, men shouldered the full responsibility of supporting the family economically. One dire consequence was that one in four Americans in the mid-1950s lived in poverty. By the end of the 1950s, one in three American children lived in poverty.
Not surprisingly, researchers in the ’50s found that less than one in three married couples reported being happy or very happy with their relationship. Compare that to today, when 61 percent of married Americans report themselves to be “very happy” in their marriage. Part of the sour spouse problem of the ’50s was that many couples didn’t really want to be married to each other. Often, they were trapped into marriage by unintended pregnancy. With no sex-ed, no birth control, no legal abortion — the exact legislative agenda of today’s pro-life movement! — teen birth rates soared, reaching highs that have not been equaled since: there were twice as many teen mothers in the ’50s than today.
Is, as the Idaho lawmakers are implying, forcing women out of the workplace and into the home, a great way to help reduce poverty? Depends on if you think families do better economically when their household income is cut nearly in half. Common sense would dictate that two incomes is better than one for keeping the household solvent, and the facts back up common sense.
Postponing or planning marriage and children have allowed women to get a foothold in the workforce. And this has led to important benefits: They have made their families wealthier. Today, the rate of poverty is half what it was in the 1950s. In fact, now if a husband is the sole breadwinner the family is four times more likely to be poor than one in which the wife brings home an income too. Dual income homes earn nearly two-thirds more than that of families in which the husband alone works. Consequently, the percentage of children living in poverty has decreased 50 percent since 1959.
Dangling visions of middle class life over people to try and encourage women to give up work is a seedy bait-and-switch tactic. The disappearing middle class phenomenon has more to do with conservative public policy that encourages the rich to hoard all the wealth than anything else, and from what I understand, feminism has helped to keep the American middle class as we know it afloat by increasing the number of wage earners per household.
“Divorce is just terrible,” Rep. Dick Harwood, R-St. Maries, said. “It’s one of Satan’s best tools to kill America.”
If you’re against divorce itself, of course, what you want to do is embrace feminism, which makes marriages more flush with cash (less fighting over money) and puts spouses on a more egalitarian level (less abuse from him and smoldering, passive aggressive resentment from her).
But if what you’re against is men having to actually work for their wives’ affection, then I suppose he has a point. Divorce has gone down with feminism going up, but at what cost?! Men having to take out trash and learn to eat pussy—it’s truly a terrible loss. But if men could go into marriage confident that their wives can’t get out, then all these little emasculating nods to the notion that women are human beings and marriage is a partnership, not a master/slave relationship, could go by the wayside.
There’s little doubt reading this article that it’s not broken families that bother the legislators so much as the loss of male privilege. They tie no-fault divorce and the availability of day care together as two giant causes of “broken” marriages, which says to me that what they think is broken is a world where women have legal and financial freedom.
All this I’ve said before, but it bears repeating: What’s amazing to me is how much men have to give up to retain privilege over women. From a self-interested perspective, it’s fucking stupid for men not to embrace the egalitarian model. Feminists pushed through no-fault divorce and women’s employment opportunities, and men were by and large beneficiaries of the system along with women. It doesn’t really help men to have to go through a horrific court process to get a simple divorce, and of course men benefit greatly when they have that second income coming into the home. Reducing access to day care is going to be a huge hassle for women, but it will be for men, too, because if their wives still work, they have to join the child care juggle, and if their wives end up giving up the jobs, those men will feel the economic pinch. Most men aren’t stupid about this, by any stretch, either. Most Republican men I know even don’t fuss over their wives working, because the benefits to them outweigh the supposed benefits of having a dependent, submissive spouse.
For this reason, Democrats and liberals would be wise to embrace the full court press for government child care benefits from birth onwards. Head Start is a good start, but why not have universal federal day care? It seems to me that it’s like universal health care as a double whammy of being smart politically and being smart about society. Making day care as easy for parents as public school would be immediately and universally popular, like Social Security or other widespread government entitlement programs, and the more of those there are for the Democrats to have to defend against greedy, tax-slashing-for-the-rich Republicans, the better they look in elections. That it’s a gendered issue shouldn’t be a big deal; you can expect men to probably resist it more than women up front (loss of male privilege), but once the gains are obvious to men, they’ll be right up there with women in unwillingness to give it up.
39 Responses to “Nah, but federal daycare would strengthen the family unit”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
But (sputter sputter), federal day care is SOCIALISM! Why do you hate America?
Here’s a quote from “Our Country’s Future”:
Strange that the wingnuts are using 110-year-old talking points and still getting credit for a “new approach.”1950??!!!???
Yeah, nothing’s changed since 1950.
Hey, Canada, you want another province? Please, help yourself.
Yeah. Cause as an African-American woman living Atlanta, I cannot tell you how much I missed not living in the 1950’s.
hint: thismuch.
Actually, day care is much easier for working parents than public school. Paying for it is hard, but the schedule doesn’t have lots of surprise days off, half-days, teacher training days. Daycare doesn’t expect someone to be at home until 8:30AM and after 3PM. You don’t generally have to deal with patchwork childcare until the kids start Kindergarten.
I am really privileged to have a fantastic daycare provider, but even regular daycare is geared towards a workday, not a 1950’s style mom’s day/week or an 1880’s agricultural year.
But yeah, free universal public day care on a school schedule would be much better financially than the current arangement.
Let’s just go to the booklet, shall we?
Yesterday Charlie found at Goodwill an old pamphlet entitled “The Digest of Hygiene for ‘Mother and Daughter’ A Digest for Women and Growing Girls, which Completely Covers the Field of Sex Hygiene.”, published in 1948 by Hygienic Productions- home office Wilmington, Ohio. This was its thirty-third printing and “prepared from Information Compiled by Eminent Medical and Hygiene Authorities of Three Continents”. On the back, there is an ad for a corresponding “MANUAL of Hygiene for Father and Son”. Both “perfect for every modern-day home”…
Chapter Topics:
1. No Substitute for Common Sense!
2. Children’s Early Sex Problems
3. Difficult Age of Puberty
4. Treatment for Habit of Masturbation
5. The Female Reproductive or Sex Organs
6. The Male Reproductive or Sex Organs
7. Process of Monthly Menstruation
8. ‘Change of Life’ or Menopause
9. Harmony in Your Marriage
10. Making a Success of Married Life
11. Rhythmic Control of Conception
12. How to Determine Pregnancy
13. Should You Bear More Children?
14. How Your Childrn Are Born
15. Care During Pregnancy Important
16. Mother’s Care During Confinement
17. Do You Want Boys or Girls?
18. Abortions Are Very Dangerous
19. Suggestions for Controlling Leucorrhea
20. Care of the Female Sex Organs
21. Causes of Frigidity in Women
22. Causes of Sterility in Women
23. Women’s Sexual Duties to Husband
24. Diseases Affecting Women
25. The Facts About Modern Sterilization
26. How to live a Long Happy Life
27. Keeping Health and Beuaty After Forty
28. Venereal Diseases on Increase
29. Put Marriage on a Sound Foundation
Amanda, if you’d like, I can photocopy this lil gem and send to you; this is both unbelieveably hysterically funny and terribly sad. That ANYONE believed this crap is astounding- that it was reprinted at least 32 times is horrifying. And from reading it, it would seem that many people still believe this stuff.
Teh menz might not go along with their solons. Remember, men like getting divorces every once in a while, too. Trophy wives. And teh menz also like their 42″ flatscreen HDTVs and other expensive gadgets. I suspect that what abolition of no-fault divorce will result in is more never-married couples.
Ditto, Roxie, even though I never lived in the south in the 1950s, I’ve got enough stories from family to know better. Why o’ why do they keep idolizing this time period? Well, aside from the obvious male privilege. Is it the Nick at Nite reruns of Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver? Have they no real clue that it’s FAKE? I suppose that if they got their way they’d also implement the two separate beds policy, so, you know, people would only have sex when it’s time for baby making.
Odd antecedent to that, my grandparents not only had two separate beds, they slept in separate ROOMS. I believe the idea was so the kids didn’t know what they were doing, but, as my dad explained, it was kinda stupid when the kids put together my grandfathers footsteps down the hall and the subsequent bed squeaking.
” never-married couples”
Yup, those are mentioned too, as a “what to say when your child mentions a woman going to have a baby and she isn’t even MARRIED!!”. Their advice:
Explain thus: “Some people like to do it just because their bodies want it- but their bodies don’t know what is good for them. That is why we have to be so careful with our bodies until we are ready for marriage and a home… Every baby should have 2 parents who are married and love each other.”
Awww, isn’t that SWEET?
Okay, I stole this from Molly Ivors posting at Atrios, but only because I didn’t know it was on YouTube:
“Business Time” — Flight of the Conchords
Sorry, but the cluelessness of the Conchords cracks me up every. single. time.
At moments of dire brain-arrest like this one, where my faculties fall short of the emphatic reaction demanded by the situation”, I’m glad people like The Editors have put it succinctly and well:
Women drive like this, but men drive like THIS!: The social sciences: (almost) the only profession in which you get paid for trolling! (11/07/2007)
*to prevent head explosion and/or hairdo collapsing like a poorly made souffle.
Amanda, the fact that men benefit from egalitarian systems is quite irrelevant. To be more specific, the perceived gain by the asshole at issue is greater than any domestic, economic or social gains that an egalitarian society can give him. This is seen in racial discrimination scenarioes. Several studies involving hidden cameras give real-world examples of persons of color turned away or pushed out of sales, retail or real estate. This HAS to hurt the salesperson, especially in mixed or minority-majority neighborhoods. But they do it anyway.
The satisfaction of creating a me-first social hiearchy is far, far too alluring to pass up. Why do people make money in the first place? To pay for necessities and luxuries, sure, but after those are mostly secure, you make money to make yourself more important. That is a greater drive than the other two for people that have the first two down.
So it is with racism. So it goes with misogyny.
oh my Louise! I would love to read that!
Ultra Magnus, my grandparents had it down to a science. They had beds in two separate rooms both within the master bedroom. No sneaking past the kids’ bedrooms to be heard. Though with seven kids, I suspect their children eventually figured out that Mom and Dad had to be doing something.
Every baby should have 2 parents who are married and love each other.”
yeah, nice platitude, book. But failing that, which goes first? Baby, married parents, or love each other (happy) parents?
because depending on which you pick, you advocate either abortion, divorce, or psychological and/or physical abuse of both spouses and children.
“One of Satan’s best tools to kill America”
I need this on a t-shirt.
I WANT THAT “WIFE” PICTURE!!!
Where did you get it? Is it OK to use it?
I thought romance was supposed to be the gilding of the cage you describe. I guess it only glitters about as much as aluminum foil that soaks in water too long.
Hmmm. Didn’t these idjits stop to think that no-fault divorce and the existence of women’s shelters - brainchildren of those ebil feminists - have stopped many MEN from being murdered (by their trapped, desperate wives)? ‘Tis true. A paper authored by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers tells us that both spousal homicide and suicide of married women has dropped dramatically since the 1970’s.
In The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz (IMO that should be required reading in high schools), Coontz notes that “what we really miss about the 1950’s” was the economic expansion, the fact that good-paying jobs were easy to get (for white men, anyway) and crime rates were low. To me the obvious humanitarian thing to do, which would probably strengthen families anyway, is to work for economic justice rather than chase some anti-feminist pipe dream of the nukuler famblee.
“Divorce is just terrible,” Rep. Dick Harwood, R-St. Maries, said. “It’s one of Satan’s best tools to kill America.”
What an idiot. the citizenry elects people like this and you wonder why I want to drastically reduce the governments control over your and my lives. If the leftist state butts into everbodies lives, it’s a good thing. If the rightist state buts into everybodies lives it’s a bad thing.
Maybe if the state would just BUTT OUT OF EVERYBODIES LIVES we could all do as we please and be left alone.
Nearly every man that propounds such stupidity has a woman with him, nodding along.
That pisses me off more than what the men themselves say. Without women’s cooperation, these men would have only half the audience they have now.
YES! Kate, 100% agreement. I just want to slug their fucking bobbleheads right off their idiotic shoulders.
If you really wanted to go back to the 1950s, of course, you’d have to make employers promise to supply health coverage, ensure job security and raise wages by 4% above the rate of inflation every year…
But no, beating up on women is the part that stands out as important.
Agree, Kate. These males wouldn’t have even 5% of the audience they have now without women’s cooperation.
J sub D, liberals are the only ones who want a small government. Neocons want a big government.
People who opposes abortion are also opposed to women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, and disablility rights. Anti-choice activism goes hand in hand with sexism, racism, heterosexism, and xenophobia.
If there is anyone that thinks feminists are unromantic, then they need take a look at this thread from October 15 on Feministing (it’ll give them a reality check):
http://feministing.com/archives/007915.html
“Maybe if the state would just BUTT OUT OF EVERYBODIES LIVES we could all do as we please and be left alone.”
Yay! Unregulated poisoned toys for ALL THE WORLD’S CHILDREN!!!
Smell the Capitalism, Baby!…
Oh, yes, Mike! And ALL the cities of America could have high childhood asthma rates, like Sacramento does. Mmm, the smell of particulates in the morning.
In 1950 women were considered property as were children and that’s why cops thought it was ok for them to be beaten by their husbands. The bat sh-t right wingers still think this is acceptable. Ah yes the good old days.
I know I’m kinda slow on the uptake, but until I read this post and its links, I always figured that “pro-family” was ‘winger code for “anti-sex,” since pretty much everything they did was about making sexuality as punitive as possible.
But I realize that when an asshole like Thayn calls himself “pro-family,” he really does mean it–it’s just that he’s referring to a type of family structure that would have been considered extreme (to put it charitably) even back in the 50s–himself as the shepherd and the rest of the family as his herd (is this where the phrase “animal husbandry” came from? (1)). Of course he doesn’t like laws or changes in social convention that might encourage members of his herd to wander off. Bet if you proposed a law that women had to get tatooed with an owner’s mark at marriage, he’d go along with it.
(1) As in the Tom Lehrer line: “He practiced animal husbandry. Until they caught him at it.”
Sorry, I’m having a geek moment:
IIRC, it’s the other way around. Originally, the word “husband” referred to someone who owned land and farm animals — it was later that it was applied to marriage. That’s why we still have that construction in the marriage ceremony of “man and wife.” In the old usage, to say “husband and wife” would make no sense. It would be like saying “farmer and wife” in every marriage ceremony.
Yeah, divorce is just terrible when one or both parties set out for a game of Egyptian Rat Screw, without the cards or Egyptian parts and just lots of screwing, resulting in “rat” being too mild an insult for the royally screwed party or parties to even think of using. Ethical lawyers try to prevent the screwing contest. The ethical ones. But there are plenty of unethical lawyers for unthinking clients.
No, I do not actually know the rules of Egyptian Rat Screw.
“The satisfaction of creating a me-first social hiearchy is far, far too alluring to pass up. Why do people make money in the first place? To pay for necessities and luxuries, sure, but after those are mostly secure, you make money to make yourself more important. That is a greater drive than the other two for people that have the first two down.”
Well, there has to be a large number of people who prefer equal societies, otherwise the civil rights revolution of the last 40 years probably would not have got so far.
Here in Australia we have state-funded daycare, and it does work very well for us. I can’t imagine not having it, I’d be stuck at home all day watching daytime TV! We get different percentages of our childcare paid for, depending on our situation. I get “100%”, (In reality more like 80% of the total cost, it’s “100%” of what the government deems the childcare centres should charge, but it’s still wonderful) because I am a single parent working fulltime. The percentage works off how desperately you need to put your children in care. If I were not working, I would get a much smaller amount, for ‘respite’ care. Even that is a godsend for non-working mothers. It’s good for the mother and child if she has a break sometimes. If we didn’t have this I could not afford to work. I enjoyed your article very much. I was one of those women trapped living with a macho male because I felt it was my duty. No more 50s housewife for me!
I’m with you on wanting full equality for women and opposing moves by republicans to make divorce more difficult and force women back into the domestic servant/sex toy box. you lose me though when you start pushing for federal childcare from the time kids are little, if only because I would never *ever* trust those bastards to raise my kids. it’s bad enough that our public school system is a sick sad joke whose primary purpose is teaching obedience and conformity instead of actually educating kids, can you even imagine how much worse it’d be if they had even more control over kids lives?
federal funding for community-based childcare programs would be another story, for me at least, but asking the government to become directly responsible for raising children instead of parents (fathers included) doing that work seems to me like one giant step towards fascism.
You’d think so, but then, these are the same imbeciles that keep voting Republican despite their own best interests…
Lynx -
There’s good day care and bad day care, good schools and bad schools. More funding = more chance of it being better.
And no one’s forced to put their kids in daycare.
That was easy, wasn’t it?
mnemosyne @ 29: Thanks.
It may be the other way around, but it does seem to connect with the idea of wife-as-breeding-stock, no?
If the Republicans were interested in having low divorce rates and happy marriages both, they’d be looking more into making marriage more difficult. Enforced waiting periods, mandatory counseling, things like that - so that people don’t marry someone they met last month and get divorced two years and a child later.
But we can’t have women running around unattached. So that kind of solution to the “divorce problem” is never considered. Only how to keep people hanging on to miserable marriages.
“Few women today would trade places with the typical 1950s woman and mother, the one fervently idealized by so-called “pro-family” groups.” After reading various histories (my favorite is Stephanie Coontz’s “Marriage, a History”) you realize it’s even more difficult to go back than people like Thayn imagine since the women of the 1950s were to a surprising degree actively, and even enthusiastically participating in a social experiment in nuclear family-building and Ozzie and Harrieting.
And for nearly ten years it… sort of worked in the sense that, with a sense that they were creating a new world, they were able to wallpaper over some extraordinarily gross “side effects.”
But expecting it to work again *by fiat* just because it once worked *by agency* is just worse than unproductive. Especially since even all the good will, enthusiasm, and sacrifice in the world wasn’t able to sustain it the first time, even for its inventors! And if, like Idaho, you’re going to try jamming it down people’s throats it’s going to have, um, unintended consequences.
For instance would anyone in their right mind marry someone knowing that if he was unable to uphold his vows and obligations, even assuming they were undertaken in good faith, that she’d have neither the economic means nor the legal recourse to get her and her children to safety and stability? Would anyone in his right mind want to marry someone who’d take chances like that? The point being it’s hard to imagine such legislation *strengthening* marriage. (And it’s not like there’s no historical precedent. In the 1900s many middle- and upper-class women agonized and/or chose not to marry at all for fear their husbands would turn out to be drunks or deadbeats or otherwise bad eggs.)
Cool post, Amanda.
To me the obvious humanitarian thing to do, which would probably strengthen families anyway, is to work for economic justice rather than chase some anti-feminist pipe dream of the nukuler famblee.
Aarrrrrggggggggghhhhhhh! The LOGIC! It burnzzzzz!
*evil demons shrieking in pain*
/snark