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In the Matriarchal System the reproductive unit consists of the mother and
her offspring, the father playing a marginal role, wandering into and out
of the "family," subject to dismissal at the mother's bidding. The central
fact about this kind of family is its naturalness. Roman jurists spoke of
maternity as a natural fact, "natura verum," and of paternity as merely a
matter of civil law. "In all but a few species," writes Sarah Hardy, "females
are permanent residents in social groups, males mere transients." This is
the reproductive arrangement of all lower mammals. It has been the reproductive
arrangement of the human race itself until recently. Its biological backup
is awesome--what Margaret Mead meant by saying the female role is a "biological
fact."
It is the reproductive pattern which re-emerges in times of social catastrophe.
When men are killed on battlefields or cast into prisons, female-headed families
carry on. When there is divorce, the mother takes custody of the children.
When ghetto males sit on curbsides and get stoned, ghetto females and children
stay home and watch T.V. The matriarchal family may result from catastrophe,
but it may also result from doing nothing, from biological and social drifting.
It is always on standby, always waiting to resurface and re-establish itself.
It is what society lapses into when the upkeep and maintenance of the patriarchal
system is neglected. It is the pattern which is re-emerging at the present
time under the aegis of the feminist/sexual revolution.
It is the pattern found in surviving Stone Age societies. A 19th century
German ship's doctor described the situation in the German African colony
of Cameroon thus:
With a large number
of tribes, inheritance is based on maternity. Paternity is immaterial. Brothers
and sisters are only the children of one mother. A man does not bequeath
his property to his children, but to the children of his sister, that is
to say, to his nephews and nieces, as his nearest demonstrable blood relatives.
A chief of the Way people explained to me in horrible English: "My sister
and I are certainly blood relatives, consequently her son is my heir; when
I die, he will be the king of my town." "And your father?" I inquired. "I
don't know what that means, 'my father,' answered he. Upon my putting to
him the question whether he had no children, rolling on the ground with laughter,
he answered that, with them, men have no children, only women.
"Originally," writes
W. Robertson Smith, "there was no kinship except in the female line and the
introduction of male kinship was a kind of social revolution which modified
society to its very roots." "Kinship through females," says John McLennan,
must be a more archaic system of relationship than kinship through males--the
product of an earlier and ruder stage in human development than the
latter--somewhat more than a step farther back in the direction of savagery.
To prove its existence on such a scale as to entitle it to rank among the
normal phenomena of human development, is, we may now say, to prove it the
most ancient system of kinship." "Wherever non-advancing communities are
to be found," he informs us, "--isolated in islands or maintaining their
savage liberties in mountain fastnesses--there to this day exists the system
of kinship through females only." "The maternal totemic clan," writes Robert
Briffault in reference to this female-headed reproductive unit and to the
larger matrilineal ties it creates,
was by far the
most successful form that human association has assumed--it may indeed be
said that it has been the only successful one....All human associations that
have subsequently arisen have been bound by loose and feeble ties compared
with the primitive maternal clan. Political organizations, religious theocracies,
States, nations, have endeavored in vain to achieve real and complete social
solidarity. They are artificial structures; social humanity has never succeeded
in adequately replacing the primitive bond to which it owes its existence.
Even those loyalties which took its place have now to a large extent lost
their reality, and individualistic interests rule supreme. Human society
finds itself in the precarious position of being no longer held together
by those bonds of sentiment which constitute the distinction between a social
group and an aggregate of individuals.
The term "family"
properly refers to the male-headed patriarchal unit. "The relations arising
out of the reproductive functions, which constitute the only analogue of
social relations to be found in the animal world," says Briffault,
differ conspicuously
from those generally connoted by the term "family." That term stands, in
the tradition of civilised societies, for a group centering round the interests,
activities, and authority of a dominant male. The husband is the head of
the family; the other members of the group, wife and children, are his dependents
and subordinates. The corresponding group arising out of the reproductive
functions among animals presents no trace of that constitution. It consists
of the mother and her offspring. The male, instead of being the head and
supporter of the group, is not an essential member of it, and more often
than not is altogether absent from it. He may join the maternal family, but
commonly does not. When he attaches himself to the female's family his
association with it is loose and precarious. He has no functional place in
it. The parental relation is confined to that between mother and brood. Paternity
does not exist. The family among animals is not, as the human family is supposed
to be, the result of the association of male and female, but is the product
of the maternal functions. The mother is the sole centre and bond of it.
There is no division of labour between the sexes in procuring the means of
subsistence. The protective functions are exercised by the female, not by
the male. The abode, movements, and conduct of the group are determined by
the female alone. The animal family is a group produced not by the sexual,
but by the maternal impulses, not by the father, but by the mother.
"In the great majority
of uncultured societies," writes Arthur Evans, "women enjoy a position of
independence and of equality with the men and exercise an influence which
would appear startling in the most feministic modern civilized society."
"Women," he adds,
had a very high
status in the Stone Age, as we have seen. Archeology, myth and comparison
to still existing nature societies all point to their dominant position.
He quotes Jacquetta
Hawks:
There is every
reason to suppose that under the life conditions of the primary Neolithic
way of life, mother-right and the clan system were still dominant [as they
had been in the paleolithic period], and land would generally have descended
through the female line. Indeed, it is tempting to be convinced that the
earliest Neolithic societies throughout their range in time and space gave
woman the highest status she has ever known.
The matriarchal
family pattern is being restored by the welfare system, by the feminist/sexual
revolution, by women's growing economic independence and by the legal preference
for mother-custody following divorce. Writing of the educated and economically
independent women created by women's liberation, Elizabeth Nickles and Laura
Ashcraft say, "The Matriarchal woman who finds that her relation with a man
is undermining her sense of self-esteem will not consider it necessary to
cling to the relation for the traditional reasons, and she will have the
self-sufficiency to stand on her own." Because "the Matriarchal woman" can
afford it, she reverts to the mammalian/matriarchal family pattern. The choice
is hers; the father has nothing to say about it. She knows she has the chivalrous
support of lawmakers and judges who suppose that a biological fact needs
the help of lawyers, whereas merely social arrangements such as the marriage
contract do not--these can be set aside if Mom decides they should be set
aside. The result: educated, economically independent women have a divorce
rate five times greater than the fifty percent divorce rate of other women.
The man who marries such a woman will find himself without bargaining power
and, if his wife chooses, without children, without home, without a large
part of his future income. "In the coming matriarchy," continue Nickles and
Ashcraft,
families will be
thought of as sets of divers individuals rather than homogeneous social clusters,
and the definition of "family" will broaden to include many kinds of living
arrangements, as is happening now without widespread social recognition.
We may see the advent of the rotational family, in which there is no single,
stable cast of characters for a lifetime, but rather a series of
individuals--male and female- -who will be added to or phased out of a
continually reconstituted family unit as the needs, interests, and emotional
commitments of the couple, individual, or group dictate. The first five years
of a woman's adult life may be spent living with male and female roommates;
the next five years with a male mate; the next five with a husband and a
child; the next three with two female friends, and so on. This pattern is
already emerging, but when it occurs on a large scale, we will see the rotational
family replacing the nuclear family as the status quo.
The family pattern
is called "rotational," but it does its rotating around the fixed figure
of Mom, who remains at its center while males make their entrances, do their
orbiting, and make their exits. It is the pattern of the Hopi Indians, of
whom Fred Eggan gives the following description:
The central core
or axis of the household is composed of a line of women--a segment of a lineage.
All the members of the segment, male and female, are born in the household
and consider it their home, but only the women normally reside there after
marriage. The men of the lineage leave at marriage to reside in the households
of their wives, returning to their natal home on various ritual and ceremonial
occasions, or in case of separation or divorce, which is frequent. Into the
household in turn come other men through marriage....The household revolves
about a central and continuing core of women; the men are peripheral with
divided residences and loyalties.
A. I. Richards
calls this pattern the "institution of the visiting husband or the visiting
brother," and remarks that the pattern is characterized by unstable marriages:
"A man who cannot stand the situation in his wife's village leaves and goes
elsewhere. This might be described as the solution of the detachable husband."
It is the pattern of the ghettos, where illegitimacy now exceeds 50 percent
and where men and boys grow increasingly roleless and violent--and where
women live in poverty and complain of their insufficient subsidization. It
is the pattern of increasing numbers of households in the larger society.
According to the Washington-based National Center for Policy Alternatives,
40 percent of girls in school today will be heads of households. "Ten percent
of the nation's families are headed only by a woman," writes Joreen, "but
40 percent of the families classified as poor have female heads." Implying,
naturally, that society should do more to help these poor Moms and their
kids. The matriarchal days of the Stone Age are thus nostalgically described
by feminist Marilyn French:
From 3.5 million
years ago to about 10,000 years ago, was a peaceful period, when "marriage"
was informal, casual.... Yes, there was a garden and in it we gathered fruits
and vegetables and sang to the moon and played and worked together and watched
the children grow. For the most part life was good, and we made art and rituals
celebrating our participation in the glorious spectacle and process of life
within nature.
Referring to those
same happy days, feminist Evelyn Reed writes,
A woman did not
need a husband as a means of support; she was herself economically independent
as a producing member of the community. This gave women, like men, the freedom
to follow their personal inclinations in sex relations. A woman had the option
of remaining for life with one husband, but she was not under any legal,
moral or economic compulsion to do so.
This freedom was destroyed with the advent of class society, private property
and monogamous marriage.
It was destroyed
by the advent of class society, private property, monogamous marriage and
the creation of wealth and civilization which stable marriage made possible.
The promiscuity which characterizes the matriarchal system denies men a secure
role within families and the motivation provided by that secure role. The
absence of that motivation is why the ghettos are the mess they are--why
the women of the ghettos enjoy the "freedom to follow their personal inclinations
in sex relations," but find that the families in which they enjoy their freedom
are impoverished and underachieving. Ms. Reed lauds the freedom of such women.
But there is a complementary freedom which is denied them. If they exercise
their freedom to be promiscuous, they cannot enter into a stable and binding
contract to share their reproductive lives with men who need to rely on their
loyalty and chastity as a precondition for having legitimate children and
stable families. Once women get the freedom to make the marriage contract
non-binding, then they may suppose they have the "option" of either remaining
for life with one husband or of not so remaining, but since the husband has
no comparable option--the woman's freedom includes the freedom to throw the
man out and take his children from him (and in the American matriarchy to
take part of his paycheck as well)--the man is forced to share the woman's
view of the marriage as non-binding. He becomes roleless and de-motivated,
likely to become a drifter or a disrupter of society, likely to be regarded
by women as poor marriage material, to be pointed to by feminists as proving
the anti-sociality of males and the need for more feminism.
"If motherhood and sexuality were not wedged resolutely apart by male culture,"
says Adrienne Rich (she means wedged resolutely together), "if women could
choose both the forms of our sexuality and the terms of our motherhood or
non-motherhood freely, women might achieve genuine sexual autonomy." Quite
so. Women are choosing it and thereby wrecking the patriarchal system. It
is the declared purpose of feminists (including Ms. Rich) to do so. "Our
liberation as women and as lesbians," write Barbara Love and Elizabeth Shanklin,
will never be
accomplished until we are liberated to be mothers. Until we have the power
to define the conditions under which we exercise our biological potential,
until we define for ourselves the role of motherhood to include the power
to determine the conditions of motherhood and to determine the environment
in which our children are reared, we have no real choice. And until we have
choices, we are not free.
The legal system,
which divorces the parents of l.2 million children every year, and the welfare
system which subsidizes the needs of 700,000 children born to unmarried mothers
each year, are helping them to achieve this freedom--and passing the costs
on to the shrinking numbers of patriarchal families. Only a fraction of those
costs consists of immediate money payments. "The vast majority of neurotics,"
writes John MacArthur, "both children and adults, grew up in homes where
there was no father, or the father was absent or weak, and the mother was
domineering." A disproportionate amount of child abuse takes place in
female-headed families. According to Neal R. Pearce, "there is a strong
correlation between the single-parent family and child abuse, truancy,
substandard achievement in school and high unemployment and juvenile
delinquency." Most victims of child molestation come from single parent
households or are the children of drug ring members. The pattern among victims
parallels that among offenders. Researchers at North Florida Evaluation and
Treatment Center report that "the pattern of the child molester is characterized
by a singular degree of closeness and attachment to the mother." Feminist
Carolyn Shaw Bell proposes "a special tax to pay for the total welfare benefits
of families headed by women, and sufficient to increase these benefits so
as to wipe out the income differential between poor children with only a
mother and well-off children with two parents. The tax would be levied on
all men." Feminists believe that the patriarchy ought to subsidize its own
destruction by paying women to create fatherless families. According to Martha
Sawyer, a Ph.D candidate at Howard University, the costs of these fatherless
families should be paid by "the most advantaged category, monied white men."
Paid, that is, by men who retain a niche in the patriarchal system which
creates the wealth.
"What would it have been like," ask feminists Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor,
if patriarchy had
never happened? To get an idea, we have to comprehend the first law of
matriarchy: Women control our own bodies. This would seem a basic premise
of any fully evolved human culture; which is why primate patriarchy is based
on its denial.
The process of redefinition begins with women reclaiming total sexual and
reproductive autonomy; for if the female body can be controlled or used,
in any way, from the outside--via exploitive definitions or systems--then
so, it follows, can everything else. (The definition and use of the female
body is the paradigm for the definition and use of all things; if the autonomy
of the female body is defined as sacred, then so will be the autonomy of
all things.) Patriarchal men have tried to pretend that males can be "free"
while females can be dominated and enslaved; just as white imperialists have
pretended that they can be "independent and soulful" beings in private life,
while publicly colonizing and brutalizing darker peoples.
The most significant thing about this statement of "the first law of matriarchy"
is that it is asserted categorically, without reference to the marriage contract.
It assumes without even bothering to assert it, that marriage confers no
rights on husbands. It must be obvious to most men--though it is clearly
not obvious to these women--that this female sexual autonomy rules out the
possibility of using the family as a system for motivating males. Such is
the state of things said (correctly) by Sjoo and Mor to have existed prior
to the creation of patriarchy a few thousand years ago, and such is again
becoming the state of things as patriarchy melts away. It was to prevent
this state of things that patriarchy was created, a central feature of it
being society's guarantee of the Legitimacy Principle--every child must have
a father. The present situation, which has created the Garbage Generation,
results from society's delinquency in refusing to implement this guarantee.
"It would not be far-fetched," writes Evelyn Ackworth, "to describe the whole
conception of the Welfare State as a matriarchal approach to a problem of
social life." Exactly. The Welfare State has teamed with the feminist/sexual
revolution to replace the patriarchal family with the older matrilineal unit.
The ghettos provide the textbook example:
Now here's how
it is [writes black feminist Patricia Robinson]. Poor black men won't support
their families, won't stick by their women--all they think about is the street,
dope and liquor, women, a piece of ass, and their cars. That's all that counts.
Poor black women would be fools to sit up in the house with a whole lot of
children and eventually go crazy, sick, heartbroken, no place to go, no sign
of affection--nothing.
Ms. Robinson's
complaint is that men won't love, honor and protect their families--which
is patriarchy. She cannot see that the first law of matriarchy has deprived
these men of families and therefore of the motivation which would keep them
working. When Othello becomes convinced of his wife's unchastity he bids
farewell to his profession: "Othello's occupation's gone!"
Here's an example of how the Promiscuity Principle [identical with the first
law of matriarchy] works, from Ann Landers' advice column in the Los Angeles
Times of l November, 1988:
DEAR ANN: I'm writing
this letter in the hope that you can help me. You have access to the best
doctors and I am ashamed to talk to anybody I know.
I recently had a baby but I don't know who the father is. She looks like
me. I had sex with Guy No. 1 on May 7, Guy No. 2 on May 14 and 15 and Guy
No. 3 on May 27. I had my last period on May 1.
I never had any problem with my pregnancy and the baby came right on my due
date, which was Feb. 7. She is adorable and I don't regret having her, but
I would sure like to know who the father is.
My friends tell me I'm entitled to support money but I can't bring a guy
into court unless I'm pretty sure I know what I'm talking about. Thanks for
your help, Ann.
The Promiscuity
Principle entitles her to paternity suit income. It is her right to control
her own sexual behavior--including the right not to use contraceptives--and
to impose the economic costs upon one of her sex partners--if the District
Attorney can round up her playmates, compel them to take blood tests, and
identify the lucky one. Then her sexual irresponsibility will pay off and
reinforce society's acceptance of the first law of matriarchy, otherwise
known as the Promiscuity Principle. The identified boyfriend will be reduced
to years of involuntary servitude for the benefit of another person--slavery.
The feminist will insist that the boyfriend is equally responsible with the
mother for the procreation of the illegitimate child and therefore equally
bound to pay for its costs. Not so in the patriarchal system. Patriarchy
divides women into good and bad, those who accept the Sexual Constitution
(sexual law-and-order, monogamy, the Legitimacy Principle, the double standard,
etc.) and those who reject it. This woman rejects it, and she is "bad" because
she denies to a man the possibility of having responsible sex with her even
if he wants to. Her unchastity deprives her child of a father and deprives
men of the possibility of being a father to her children. She can have a
sexual relationship only with a man as irresponsible as herself. She is a
sexual Typhoid Mary who has inflicted illegitimacy upon a child and seeks
to ameliorate what she has done by demanding to be paid for it. She will
plead as justification that "there is no such thing as an illegitimate child,"
signifying there is no such thing as an unchaste woman.
Ramsey Clark assures us that "Women are not a threat to the public." This
woman is. She has procreated a fatherless child several times more likely
to become a delinquent. If the courts adopt the proposals of Senator Moynihan
and Professor Barbara Bergmann and other feminists to garnish the paycheck
of her child's father, he will become a less employable, less motivated,
less marriageable, less productive member of society. He may drop out of
the taxable/garnishable economy altogether and enter the underground economy,
or become parasitic upon a female AFDC recipient--the pattern found in millions
of ghetto households. The program for making men economically responsible
for procreation outside of the Sexual Constitution has the effect of making
them irresponsible within it. (Also it doesn't work--most men will evade
its sanctions.)
The workability of the patriarchal system requires the regulation of female
sexuality, including the enforcing of the double standard. In no other way
can men participate meaningfully in reproduction. A woman violates the Sexual
Constitution by being promiscuous. A man violates it by refusing to provide
for his family. The new feminist sexual order proposes that women shall be
free to be promiscuous and that the social disruption thereby created shall
be made tolerable by compelling men to provide for non-families. But men
cannot be held responsible for female irresponsibility if this irresponsibility
prevents them from having families to begin with; and it is for this reason
that patriarchy holds a man responsible only for the subsidization of a wife,
a "good" woman who accepts the Sexual Constitution and her obligation under
it to bear only legitimate children. The historical development of this
arrangement in the second millennium B. C. is thus described by Dr. Gerda
Lerner:
As we compare the
legal and social position of women in Mesopotamian and Hebrew societies,
we note similarities in the strict regulation of women's sexuality and in
the institutionalization of a sexual double standard in the law codes. In
general, the married Jewish woman occupied an inferior position to that of
her counterpart in Mesopotamian societies. Babylonian women could own property,
sign contracts, take legal action, and they were entitled to a share in the
husband's inheritance. But we must also note a strong upgrading of the role
of women as mothers in the Old Testament....This is quite in line with the
general stress on the family as the basic unit of society, which we have
also noted in Mesopotamian society at the time of state formation.
The more important
point is the upgrading of the role of men as fathers--which is to say the
strengthening of the family's weakest link, the father's role, which depends
in turn upon "the strict regulation of women's sexuality" which today's feminists
seek to get rid of. The "time of state formation" [read: the creation of
civilization] was the time which stressed the family as the basic unit of
society, just as today's social and sexual anarchy is the time which stresses
women's desire to wreck the family and return to "beena marriage,...a form
of marriage which allows the woman greater autonomy and which makes divorce
easier for her." This is the arrangement Ann Landers' correspondent is interested
in, one with sexual freedom and no responsibilities-- plus the advantage
of having bill-paying men around as long as they behave themselves and accept
second class status.
"The various laws against rape," says Dr. Lerner, "all incorporated the principle
that the injured party is the husband or the father of the raped woman."
Feminists think this is outrageous. What it signifies is that the protection
of female chastity is normally the function of the husband or the father--in
contrast to the feminist Promiscuity Principle which declares that a woman's
reproductive life is entirely her own business. The ancient Mesopotamian
and Hebrew societies Dr. Lerner refers to stipulated that the law would interfere
when the husband or father could not handle his own family matters, and when
he delegated the responsibility to the state. The underlying difference of
opinion between the feminist view and the Mesopotamian/Hebrew/patriarchal
view is whether society should be understood as composed of families or of
individuals. Those who today believe the latter might be asked whether sexual
behavior is better regulated in the ghettos on the basis of the Promiscuity
Principle than it was in the Kingdom of Hammurabi on the basis of the Legitimacy
Principle. The Legitimacy Principle can only operate if its implementation
is in the hands of men who conceive of it as operating to preserve their
families and their meaningful role within them. It is the purpose of feminism
to deny men this role.
Nothing has changed in four thousand years. In ancient Mesopotamia, as in
the United States today, women were more concerned with maintaining their
sexual autonomy, men more concerned with maintaining the integrity of families,
and per corollary the regulation of female chastity upon which the family
depends. What Hammurabi's legislation shows is what contemporary lawmakers
fail to see--that the Sexual Constitution is a male creation and must be
supported by males. Men, not women, are the ultimate guardians of morality;
and while men may delegate the responsibility to women (as in the Victorian
age), when women subvert the moral order, men must reassert their responsibility
to restore it.
"The discoverers of the matrikinship system," says Evelyn Reed,
correctly inferred
it to be a survival from a prefamily period when, as some put it, "fathers
were unknown." They reasoned that cases where kinship ties and the line of
descent passed through the mothers, without recognizing fathers, were evidence
that the matriclan had existed before the father- family. The matrikinship
system persists up to our times in many primitive regions, even where fathers
have become known.
This persistence
is, of course, the chief reason why these regions are primitive.
Jamaica is a another textbook case. "Many Jamaican women live alone," says
Honor Ford Smith, artistic director of Sistren, a women's cultural organization
there.
When I say alone,
what I mean is live without a man. It's often one woman with a lot of children
in the house. But unlike many societies there has been a tradition of women
being able to live without men and without living within the bosom of the
extended family. So that there's been a tradition of independent women living
on their own, but the price that traditionally women have paid for that is
that they then have to become the sole supporters of their children....But
it brings with it certain benefits in the sense that unlike in the Middle
East, or say Asia, some other countries, it's possible to not be ostracized
for having many sexual partners, it's possible to live a little independently,
to dress in certain ways, to move differently than has been traditionally
possible in European or Asian societies.
Jamaican women
practice the first law of matriarchy and thereby deny a meaningful role to
males, many of whom become anti- social:
The situation of
women has gotten worse in many ways. If you look at some of the so-called
traditional indicators of progress, which is employment, etc., the situation
of women hasn't gotten any better. It's got worse....In terms of the streets,
in times gone by, in days of yore, women controlled the streets. Now the
streets is not a woman's domain. Violence of Jamaican society which is virtually
taken for granted by everybody. I myself am looking for a place to live with
grills [iron bars over the windows for security] everywhere at the moment....For
a lot of women it is a matter of you can't go out of the house after six
o'clock, you must get home before dark, if you go to the theatre they have
a special six o'clock matinee which is almost completely attended by women
because that is the time when they have to go out. So that is a situation
which has gotten much worse, too....Of course the level of sexual violence
has increased so much that now the streets are not the domain of women, certainly
the docks aren't.
The violence is
male violence, a fact heavily emphasized in feminist propaganda, which calls
it patriarchal violence. But these violent males are not patriarchs; they
are exiles from the patriarchal system, males denied a meaningful role by
the first law of matriarchy. "The role of the male," says George Gilder,
"is the Achilles' heel of civilized society....The man still needs to be
tamed." The man's violence needs to be tamed, no doubt, so that his energies
may channeled into a useful direction rather than becoming destructive. But
the taming and channeling are impossible without a meaningful male role;
and since the first law of matriarchy denies men that meaningful role, the
female is as much in need of taming as the male.
According to Carl Williams, head of California's Workfare program, the unmarried
teen-age motherhood resulting from the first law of matriarchy burdens the
welfare system and contributes to illiteracy. 60 percent of California women
under 30 who are now on public assistance began receiving welfare as teen-agers.
57 percent of them cannot read, write, add or subtract well enough to get
a job or train for one.
The males procreated by these sexually liberated females, males exploited
in feminist propaganda as illustrating male anti- sociality, could better
be used as illustrations of female socialization. A survey of 108 rapists
undertaken by Raymond A. Knight and Robert A. Prentky, revealed that 60 percent
came from female-headed homes, that 70 percent of those describable as "violent"
came from female-headed homes, that 80 percent of those motivated by "displaced
anger" came from female-headed homes.
The first law of matriarchy implies the right of one woman to undermine the
marriage of another woman. According to Laurel Richardson, a Professor of
Sociology at Ohio State University, many liberated professional women prefer
affairs with married men-- they're less time-consuming. Unfortunately for
them, however, they usually get so involved that they "lose control" over
the relationships, which "end up benefiting the men more than the women,"
surely no part of any feminist's intention.
The first law of matriarchy is good for the abortion business. It is projected
that 46 percent of today's teen-age girls will have had an abortion by the
age of 45.
Thanks to the first law of matriarchy, births out of wedlock have increased
more than 450 percent in thirty years, with obvious consequences for the
welfare system. According to Gary L. Bauer,
We know that women who receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)
benefits when they are less than 25 years old remain dependent on AFDC for
long periods of time. In fact, 70 percent received AFDC for at least five
years; more than one-third got it for at least 10 years.
Raised in an environment in which fathers don't provide for their young and
dependency on government is assumed, few children will develop the skills
of self-sufficiency, or even the concept of personal responsibility. Young
men will not strive to be good providers and young women will not expect
it of their men. Family breakdown becomes cyclical, out-of- wedlock births
become cyclical, poverty and dependence becomes cyclical. And the culture
of poverty grows.
Bauer quotes Charles Murray:
For the young woman
who is not pregnant, "enabling" means she does not ask, "Do I want a welfare
check badly enough to get pregnant?" but rather, "If I happen to get pregnant,
will the consequences really be so bad?"
The existence of an extensive welfare system permits the woman to put less
pressure on the man to behave responsibly, which facilitates irresponsible
behavior on his part, which in turn leads the woman to put less reliance
on the man, which exacerbates his sense of superfluity and his search for
alternative definitions of manliness.
The pattern is not confined to the lower orders. It underlies equally the
reluctance of educated men to marry educated women, producing feminist complaints
about the refusal of males to make stable and reliable commitments to women.
The same male reluctance underlay the flurry of panicky articles appearing
in 1986 on the subject of the "marriage crunch," the unmarriageability of
educated women in their thirties. These educated women enjoy the freedoms,
economic and sexual, coveted for them by the feminist movement, but they
find themselves (as men too find themselves) without marriages and families.
At the time, feminist Georgie Anne Geyer wrote a piece under the title "'Why
Don't You Get Married?': Shorthand for Curbing Woman's Function." Ms. Geyer
describes herself as enraged by the pressures put on women to marry:
We are talking
here about woman as function. We are talking here about fulfilling others'
ideas about what one should be fitted for and for what one exists. Worse,
we are talking here not about love, faith or goodness, but about fitting
into the structures that others decide for you. We are talking about control.
To put it frankly, this kind of "concern" about one's chances at marriage
is about ways of controlling women.
Marriage can be one kind of love, and at best it certainly is one of the
two or three greatest kinds. But when dealt with in terms of controlling
a woman, it becomes the antithesis of love and fulfillment.
Controlling a woman,
she says. But the man equally submits to control; and one of the persistent
demands of feminists is that the woman's emancipation from control by divorce
shall not emancipate the man, but obligate him to make her "independent"
of him by giving her alimony and child support money. The statistics on the
unmarriageability of educated and economically independent women are factual.
Ms. Geyer resents them because they suggest the advisability of women accepting
a degree of sexual regulation. She wants female behavior thought of "in positive
and freeing terms rather than in negative and controlling terms." One might
describe a train which jumps its tracks as behaving in a "positive and freeing"
way and a train which remains on the tracks as behaving in a "negative and
controlling" way. The feminist would respond that women are not machines,
but the comparison will stand for all that. Women (and men) require socialization
as much as trains require rails if they are to avoid catastrophe. Controlling
women (and men) is not the "antithesis" but the precondition of "love and
fulfillment" as well as of social stability and civilization.
Let's consider a specific case. Brandon Tholmer, 29, killer of four women,
suspected killer of eight others. Tholmer is illegitimate, but that's OK,
because, as Ms. Phyllis Chesler says, "every child has the right to be wanted."
It doesn't occur to Ms. Chesler that the best way of insuring this right
is for him to have a father who would want him, protect him and provide for
him. Anyway, Tholmer's Mom practices the first law of matriarchy and her
kid is a killer. The jury which convicts him takes only an hour to decide
that he should not go to the gas chamber, because of his "upbringing." According
to a juror "there was nobody who took any interest in him. He had suffered
most of his life." He came from a broken home and from the age of 8 was kicked
out into the street at night. At age ll, he was put in a juvenile detention
home by Mom, later sent to a state industrial school for stealing and loitering.
He is "borderline retarded," a convicted mentally disordered sex offender,
a rapist, a sodomite, an arsonist, a burglar. Blaming his "upbringing" signifies
that the blame lies elsewhere, as indeed it does--with the acceptance by
Tholmer's Mom and by society of the first law of matriarchy.
Another case. Dean Philip Carter is convicted of killing three women and
suspected of killing two others. The evidence against him is overwhelming
and his attorneys don't even try to refute it:
Relying instead
[says the Los Angeles Times of 29 January, 1990] on an attempt to save him
from the death penalty, defense attorney Howard Gillingham called 21 witnesses
to testify about Carter's troubled childhood.
21 witnesses show
that he had a troubled childhood and therefore is less culpable. Quite so.
But who, then, is culpable for having inflicted the troubled childhood upon
him? Part of the answer is to be inferred from the Los Angeles Times' assertion
that Carter was "born the illegitimate son of a half-Eskimo woman in Nome,
Alaska, on Aug. 30, 1955." Mom accepted the Promiscuity Principle and exercised
her right to impose illegitimacy upon her boy, which placed him at greater
risk of becoming a criminal, as the documentation given in the Annex to Chapter
I shows.
Another case. Arlene W. of Wisconsin. "In the summer of 1977," writes feminist
Phyllis Chesler, "Arlene W. met Red E. Early in 1978 Arlene became pregnant."
Patriarchal socialization would have taught Arlene the importance of pre-nuptial
chastity and would have prevented the tragedy which now unfolds. But patriarchal
socialization is made inoperative by the first law of matriarchy.
Early in 1979, Red's paternity was established by the Welfare
Department....Visitation was allowed....Red was physically abusive to both
Arlene and [their daughter] Andrea during several visits. Arlene decided
to refuse further visitation.
In the fall of 1980, Red legally demanded overnight visitation twice monthly.
Judge John E. McCormick told Arlene to "give a man a second chance." He ordered
visitation for one weekend day and one half weekday. Visitation began. At
this point, Andrea started "acting out" behavior: aggressive hitting, crying,
clinging, not sleeping, wetting herself, vomiting. Andrea complained of being
hit by her father--and marks were detectable....The hospital report concluded
that Andrea had been sexually abused....Arlene fled Wisconsin to her brother's
home in the state of Washington....Police arrived with a warrant for Arlene's
arrest. They separated her from her daughter, denied her bail and the use
of the telephone, and jailed her for four days....Feminists, ministers,
psychiatrists, incest victims, experts, academics, jurists, the department
of social services--all launched a campaign against Arlene's extradition.
Arlene's unedited "Chronology of Events" documents the profound isolation
and vulnerability of a battered, unwed, and welfare dependent mother who
has discovered paternal incest, and the state's absolute refusal to believe
or assist her.
What the events document is the importance of not being an unwed mother.
They also document the damage inflicted upon Arlene and Andrea by the first
law of matriarchy and the incapacity of the legal system to patch up the
mess created by Arlene's and Red's unchastity. Arlene is represented throughout
Ms. Chesler's account as a victim. In fact she created her own miseries and
those of her daughter.
The enforcing of the patriarchal sexual constitution in 1978 would have
guaranteed, not infringed Arlene's autonomy, would have clarified her
responsibility for the consequences of her sexual behavior--those she later
tried (with the help of Ms. Chesler, and the feminists, ministers, psychiatrists,
etc.) to blame society for. The whole thrust of Ms. Chesler's argument is
that society should bail her out, thus legitimizing her unchastity in 1978.
Little Andrea, whose life has been blighted by her mother's irresponsibility
in disregarding the Legitimacy Principle, is put on display and her sufferings
lamented in order to assist Ms. Chesler's program to further undermine the
sexual constitution and the Legitimacy Principle and to promote more single
motherhood, more feminism, more Andreas.
Ms. Chesler's point that the legal system is incompetent to do much for Arlene
and Andrea is valid enough; but she chooses not to see how the mess she describes
is created not by patriarchy but by the failure of patriarchy to regulate
Arlene's behavior in 1978--by society's acquiescence in the first law of
matriarchy.
The pattern being promoted by feminism is well summarized by a recent Canadian
study of female offenders:
Among its findings in a survey of 100 women arrested, the majority had early
sexual involvements, with over 40 percent reporting their first intercourse
to have occurred between the ages of 10 and 15. Two thirds had children,
but almost as many had never been married, and less than one in 10 was married
at the time of her arrest. The majority, then, were single or divorced mothers.
Most came from broken homes, with 73 percent of the women reporting problems
such as one parent being absent all the time, divorce, foster homes, alcohol
problems and child abuse. Mentally disturbed parents were common--indeed,
female criminals had psychiatric problems in their immediate family twice
as often as did male criminals. The authors speculate that "for women to
break out of the traditional female role of compliance and passivity and
become criminal they have to be products of a more disturbed background."
In response to suggestions that the feminist movement has brought "a new
era of emancipated female offenders showing some of the same patterns as
male offenders," the authors acknowledge many similarities. For example,
about the same percentage of female criminals commit violent offenses as
do males (although "women's victims more so than men's have trouble defending
themselves--for example, children, intoxicated, asleep, infirm").
The authors resist describing women criminals as "emancipated," but what
their study does describe--sexual promiscuity, divorce, women who act
increasingly like men--are familiar results of the sexual revolution.
The problems created by the first law of matriarchy were predictable--female
promiscuity and illegitimacy, male rolelessness and anti-sociality. With
more illegitimacy, come more second generation crime, more educational failure,
more demoralization, less motivation, less productivity, reduced self- esteem,
less commitment to the future as evidenced by reduced accumulation of stabilizing
(and garnishable) assets such as real estate, annuities, pensions, stock
portfolios, savings accounts, insurance. More sexual confusion, more hedonism,
more infantilism (of which non-commitment is a variety), more emotional
shallowness. And, of course, in consequence of all of these, more family
breakdown, more family non-formation, more demands for freebies from the
government's Backup System (welfare, day care, workfare, wage-garnishment
as a means of financing families--with the consequence of yet further fear
of commitment to family living). And so on, without end, each attempt by
the Backup System to patch up the mess created by family breakdown working
to further undermine the male role, and with it the family.
"If women were really people," wrote Ms. Friedan in 1973, "-- no more, no
less--then all the things that kept them from being full people in our society
would have to be changed." "Full" means something like "without sex-role
socialization." Along with the abandoning of this socialization for girls,
there has been a complementary abandoning of the sex role socialization of
boys. The results can be witnessed by anyone who takes a stroll across one
of today's high school campuses. Such a stroll reveals that a majority of
girls have become shallow, sassy tarts, a majority of boys little better
than slobs with little self-discipline, little frustration-tolerance, little
character, little inner-direction. Back in 1963, when Ms. Friedan unleashed
feminism upon us with her book The Feminine Mystique, she said that her ideas
"may disturb the experts and women alike, for they imply social change."
The change has gone on long enough to permit an evaluation. Are women happier?
Are men? Are children better mannered, better socialized? Is there more
premarital sexual activity? More venereal disease? More single motherhood?
More shacking-up? More adultery? Is the family more stable? Is educational
performance superior to what it was in the early 1960s? (Remember that the
original "new life plan for women" was a program of education.) Are there
fewer school dropouts? Is the level of public debate more civilized, more
mature? Are better young people choosing teaching as a career and providing
youth with better instruction and better role models? Are the streets safer?
Do the media reflect a growing refinement of taste and morality? Are more
or fewer women living in poverty? In substance abuse? Are the relationships
between the sexes more refined and civilized or more cynical, trivial and
exploitive? Is there more or less cheating in classrooms, business relationships
and tax forms and everywhere else? Have the costs of welfare, police and
government increased or decreased? Do we get more or less in services for
our tax dollar? Is there more or less trash deposited on our beaches? Are
public parks more or less inviting places of recreation? Does the legal
profession eat up more or less of our earnings? Is service more or less courteous
than it was a quarter of a century ago? Social change indeed. There is no
area in which the undermining of sex role socialization has not been disastrous.
Here is the way today's women are coming to perceive their responsibilities
towards society and society's responsibilities to them. The speaker is Byllye
Avery, Director of the National Black Women's Health Project: "I have a right
to life, to a house, education, job, food, a good, high quality standard
of living, and a right to control my reproduction." This is the fruition
of Ms. Friedan's program to make women stand on their own feet--and make
demands upon others.
Let us now turn from the two-hundred-million-year-old biologically based
mammalian/matrilineal reproductive arrangement and examine the patriarchal
system which succeeded it a few thousand years ago and made civilization
possible--the artificial, fragile patriarchal arrangement designed to elevate
male sperm- providers into fathers and to allow them an equal share in human
reproduction. It is the purpose of the feminist/sexual revolution to do away
with this manmade superstructure built on the foundation of female reproductive
biology and to restore the original mammalian/matrilineal arrangement--a
purpose only vaguely perceived by a minority of radical feminists and as
yet uncomprehended by the patriarchal males whose responsibility it must
be to restore and stabilize it.
Chapter
I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Annex to chapter I
Additional note
References
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