The 100 billion dollar man?

In the last 50 years in America the number of children living in single-mother families increased from 8% to 26%. 34% of American children now live separately from their biological father.

Last year the first study into the direct financial costs of this shift to single-mother families was released. It found that the median household income of married couples with children was $65,906 but only $27,244 for single-mothers with children. 39.3% of single mothers lived in poverty compared to only 8.8% of father-present families.

The researchers looked at 13 public welfare programmes aimed at those living in poverty, such as food stamps, energy assistance and rental assistance, and found that $100 billion per annum was being spent to support single-mother households.

It's one more reason why the traditional family should remain the ideal - the model which a society aims for and encourages.

The Old Father

One of the best books on fatherhood is Fatherless America, by American writer David Blankenhorn. In one of the chapters of this book, "The Old Father", Blankenhorn notes that the traditional, masculine father arouses a strong, negative reaction in modern cultures.

The question is why? I'd like to set out my own answer to this, drawing on the useful source material (and many of the arguments) provided by Blankenhorn.

Gender splitting

Why has there been such a strong rejection of the Old Father? One reason is that the traditional father was strongly masculine. As Blankenhorn writes,

In essence, the Old Father is the paternal embodiment of ... what several analysts term "the masculine mystique.

Why is this a problem? The answer runs as follows. We live in a society shaped by liberal political principles. The first principle of liberalism is that to be fully human we must be self-created by our own individual will and reason. However, our sex - our manhood and womanhood - is not something that we can choose for ourselves. It is, in the terms of liberalism, a "biological destiny".

It's difficult for liberals to accept the idea that our lives might be influenced in an important way by something unchosen like the sex we are born into. They prefer to believe that traditional sex roles are oppressive social constructs which can be overcome. They think that we are liberated when we throw off the "confines" of such sex roles, by achieving genderlessness (androgyny) or better yet by reversing traditional sex roles.

Blankenhorn provides a large number of good quotes illustrating this kind of liberal thought process. For instance, Carolyn Heilbrun claims in her book Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1993) that,

our future salvation lies in a movement away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles and modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen.

This is simply a very orthodox liberalism in which gender is thought of as a "prison" because gender roles are not "freely chosen" by the individual.

Another interesting quote is Judith Lorber's call for "the eradication of gender as an organizing principle of post-industrial society" and the "restructuring of social institutions without a division of human beings into the social groups called 'men' and 'women'."  Lorber is so concerned here to show that gender difference is merely an outmoded social construct, that she puts the words men and women in inverted commas and refers to them as "social groups".

Susan Moller Okin spells out the liberal view in these terms:

A just future would be one without gender. In its social structures and practices, one's sex would have no more relevance than one's eye color or the length of one's toes. No assumptions would be made about "male" and "female" roles; childbearing would be so conceptually separated from child rearing and other family responsibilities that it would be a cause for surprise, and no little concern, if men and women were not equally responsible for domestic life or if children were to spend much more time with one parent than another. (Justice, Gender and the Family, 1989)

In this quote Susan Moller Okin is calling for gender to be made so entirely irrelevant that it would be both surprising and concerning if mothers spent more time with their babies than fathers did (and note again the placing of the terms male and female in inverted commas).

Finally, there is family therapist Frank Pittman's warning that "Heavy doses of masculinity are unquestionably toxic, and no longer socially acceptable."

So liberals reject the Old Father because they are led by their first principles to reject traditional sex roles. Blankenhorn adds a further twist to this idea by noting that many theorists are especially opposed to the male sex role because they believe that it is the origin of "gender splitting" - in other words, that it's masculine fathers (rather than feminine mothers) who trigger the masculine identity of their sons and feminine identity of their daughters.

That's why family therapist Olga Silverstein specifically targets the male sex role when urging us to seek "the end of the gender split", as "until we are willing to question the very idea of a male sex role ... we will be denying both men and women their full humanity." (Our very humanity is at stake! ... as liberals see it, anyway.)

What is the conservative response to all this? I won't launch into a full-scale criticism of the liberal attitude to gender at this point. I'll simply point out that science has already proven that differences in male and female behaviour can be at least partly attributed to differences in the biological natures of men and women. So liberals are going against both nature and reason in claiming that gender differences are a social construct which can be overcome.

Paternal authority

There's a second major reason why the Old Father arouses a hostile response in modern Western societies. David Blankenhorn perceptively recognises that,

At bottom, much of this assault [on the Old Father] centers on the problem of paternal authority: the use of power by fathers in family life and in the larger society.

Why should paternal authority be such a problem? Again, we have to go back to liberal first principles for an answer. Liberals believe that we should be subject only to our own individual will and reason, but this means that liberals can only accept forms of authority that they themselves have consented to or contracted with. Unchosen forms of authority are made illegitimate by liberal first principles.

That's why early forms of liberalism were often so hostile to the power of kings and priests, as the authority of both was unchosen. The eighteenth century writer Denis Diderot captured this hostility perfectly in his famous saying that,

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

But it's not only kings and priests who wield unchosen authority. So too do fathers. We don't vote to accept our father's authority, nor do we formally assent to it. Instead, we are simply born into our father's dominion. Our own reasoned preferences don't come into it at all.

So it's little wonder that the Old Father should provoke such opposition within a liberal culture. As Blankenhorn describes it,

The Old Father wields power. He controls. He decides. He tells other people what to do. He has fangs. This aspect of his character generates suspicion and resentment ... This is the heart of the matter. Many contemporary critics view authority ... as synonymous with male identity itself.

Blankenhorn provides quite a number of examples from within popular culture in which the authority of fathers is feared or reviled. For instance, in 1993 Oliver Stone produced a television miniseries, "Wild Palms", in which there is a struggle in Los Angeles in the year 2007 between liberal humanists and malignant totalitarians. The humanists call themselves "Friends" in contrast to the totalitarians who call themselves "Fathers".

There is also the case of Sara Maitland who in describing "every dark thing that father means" confesses her desire to "cast out the Father in my head who rules and controls me ...This frightens me; I want to protect my father and my love for him. I do not want to kill him, to see him dead. I want to set the man free from having to be a father."

From the sphere of "high" culture there is also the viewpoint of poet Adrienne Rich, who believes that our unjust society is a Kingdom of the Fathers, which stands for "rapism and the warrior mentality".

Of course, the tension created by paternal authority is not only a product of liberalism. It exists also because it's an authority which is so close to home, so personal: if it's wielded unwisely it touches an especially raw nerve.

This is a point focused on by Blankenhorn who notes that "antagonism toward paternal power seems to go with the territory of fatherhood." Although maternal authority also exists, the father's power is "more rule-oriented, more emotionally distant, more aggressive, more physically coercive, more instrumental, and therefore more overtly severe."

This means, in Blankenhorn's words, that there is a "necessary but potentially explosive tension between father and child. Much of this tension is rooted in the fact that the child both craves and resents authority. So does culture."

Blankenhorn continues by eloquently rebutting those who think the solution to the question of paternal authority is to destroy it. He writes,

Here is a core irony of fatherhood. If having a father fosters anger in children, having no father fosters greater anger. If fathers generate tension and ambivalence in children that is hard to resolve, fatherlessness generates cynicism and confusion that is much harder to resolve.

If paternal authority it problematic, abdication of paternal authority is tragic. Yes, a fathered society must struggle with the inherent tensions of domesticated masculinity. But a fatherless society must accept the consequences of undomesticated masculinity: mistrust, violence, nihilism.

Adrienne Rich is wrong. Ultimately, rapism and the warrior culture mentality represent the kingdom of the fatherless, not the fathers. Male predation is not the synonym, but rather the necessary antonym, of encultured paternity.

Bringing it together

Liberals, therefore, reject the Old Father on two grounds. First, for liberals it is illegitimate to base parenting on traditional gender roles. Second, liberals don't easily accept unchosen forms of authority, including paternal authority.

So liberals need to find a way to avoid gender splitting on the one hand, and to overcome paternal authority on the other. One logical way of doing this is to have a single parental role shared by both sexes, but based on the mother, rather than the father.

Back in 1982 this is exactly what Sara Ruddick urged in her book Rethinking the Family. In this work Ruddick tells us that she looks forward,

to the day when men are willing and able to share equally and actively in transformed maternal practices ... On that day there will be no more 'fathers,' no more people of either sex who have power over their children's lives and moral authority in their children's world ... There will [instead] be mothers of both sexes.

This must have seemed a radical proposal back in 1982. Yet we can't laugh at it, or dismiss it as "going too far", because it has already become the accepted attitude to fatherhood.

In the mainstream media it is now assumed that a good father, an involved father, is one who takes on a traditional mothercare role, especially hands-on babycare tasks. It is also assumed that because the Old Father did not engage much in these tasks that he was uninvolved in family life.

It's not even considered that the Old Father contributed to his family in an important way by going to work to provide an income, by teaching discipline and morals, by actively guiding and socialising his children and by providing emotional stability and physical protection for his family.

To put this another way, there is no longer a recognised masculine role for men within the family. Effectively a distinctive fatherhood has been abolished as a social ideal. Men can now either be one part of a motherhood team, or else simply not be recognised for their efforts by the culture they live in.

Liberty & fatherhood

The liberal principle is that to be fully human we have to be self-created by our own individual will and reason. If true, this means that that the liberty to be unimpeded in our individual will is what makes us human. Liberty of will therefore becomes the trump card of politics.

Liberty of will, expressed simply as "liberty", is an attractive slogan. There are even conservatives who wish to make it a one word definition of conservative politics.

I hope, though, that what I've written above serves as a warning to conservatives not to accept the current understanding of "liberty of will" too lightly. The logic of this concept, as currently understood, requires a radical transformation of society, including the effective abolition of fatherhood.

Nor does "liberty of will" really deliver a true sense of freedom to the individual. Is abolishing our gender identity - our sense of manhood and womanhood - really felt as a personal freedom? Is it really a freedom to restrict men's participation in the family to a feminine role?

Liberty of will just doesn't work as a sole reigning principle of politics. It doesn't correctly define what is worthy and what is necessary within a social order. It cannot even deliver the one thing it promises, namely individual freedom.

Conservatives, then, will be exactly those people who reject the idea that "liberty of will" is the sole determining principle of politics. If masculine fatherhood is an impediment to individual will, conservatives will not automatically sacrifice fatherhood to remove the impediment.

This is because the worth and the necessity of fatherhood is not reasonably measured just in terms of its effect on liberty of will. Fatherhood has its own importance, residing elsewhere: in the security provided to mothers and children by a strong, protective father, in the transmission of moral values through paternal authority, and in the successful socialisation of boys to a productive and well-directed manhood through fatherly role models.

(First published at Conservative Central, 18/01/2005)

Premier Brumby: children don't need fathers

I won't often get the chance to praise Ted Baillieu, the Liberal Party leader here in Victoria.

He is very much a liberal, rather than a conservative, on most issues. However, he did draw a line in the sand in a parliamentary debate on Tuesday.

Premier Brumby put forward legislation giving greater access to IVF for single women and lesbians. Ted Baillieu argued against the proposal, arguing that IVF should only be available to married or de facto heterosexual couples:

Kids deserve the basics. Every child has got a father and mother and I think that ought to be the starting point.

Premier Brumby countered by claiming that the legislation was in the best interests of children:

Good parenting was about giving children unconditional love, he said, not necessarily the family structure into which they were born.

I suppose that at first glance Brumby's statement might sound nice and open and accepting. But the logic of it is not so sweet. If all a child needs is unconditional love, then any kind of family arrangement can be argued for. A child could be brought up without a mother by two men, or by a host of unrelated adults in a commune, or by a mother and her various boyfriends and so on.

What is especially damaging is that, by Brumby's logic, fathers are no longer necessary to their children. By passing legislation which deliberately creates fatherless families, the state is officially approving the idea that men aren't needed by their children.

In a letter in today's Age, one single mother defended exactly this idea:

For more than a decade I was a single mother. My fiance and I split when I was 16 weeks' pregnant. My daughter has never met him. She has only one legally recognised parent - an extremely proud, loving mother ...

Ted Baillieu suggests that the Assisted Reproductive Technologies Bill is wrong to open up fertility treatment to same-sex couples and single women as children will somehow be disadvantaged if they are born into such families.

My daughter is now 12 ... She has certainly not missed out by not having a father.

There is a popular TV show airing in Australia at the moment called Find My Family. On a recent episode a daughter who had not met her father since she was a small girl was finally reunited with him. It was touching to watch, and it made the claim that children can happily be denied contact with a father seem dubious. As the show's website puts it:

So many Australians have grown up without a mother, father, brother or sister, and often that absence leaves a gaping hole in their identity.

On Find My Family, long-lost loved ones are reunited and that hole is filled with tears of joy.

What would happen if men really accepted that their children would be equally well off without them? Wouldn't couples be more likely to divorce during difficult times in a marriage? Wouldn't men invest less time and energy in the raising of their children?

Premier Brumby's idea is best suited to a society in which men have only a sporadic connection to family life, and in which women bear the greater burden of both childcare and paid work.

There are women who realise what is at stake and who are willing to argue strongly for the paternal role. Here, for instance, is Stephanie Dowrick writing in support of fathers:

...fathers matter. And, good or bad, the effects of their parenting will go on reverberating throughout their children's lifetime ...

....[parents] will also have roles that are specific and distinct. When two adults become parents for the first time, the new father may best support both the baby and his unfolding sense of himself as a father by giving most of his support to the new mother: meeting her needs so that she can meet the inexhaustible needs of her new baby.

This requires considerable selflessness. Yet it is being able to step up and play this essential role that will set the tone for fatherhood ahead and for his individual strength and confidence.

As children grow older, the role that fathers play changes fast. Even with both parents in the workforce, fathers still often "represent" the outside world and its values more powerfully than mothers do. How fathers interpret the outside world and bring it home to their children through discussions and especially through example sharply impacts on the way children see themselves in the social universe.

What Dad values and believes, where Dad gives his time, how Dad offers or withdraws his encouragement or interest, how Dad deals with disappointment or conflict, whether Dad is able to be consistent and reliable, when and how Dad "takes charge", the willingness with which Dad takes responsibility, and how loving Dad is to Mum: these are all factors that will have a huge impact on the psychological development of children.

But perhaps nothing matters more than for a man to recognise while he is in the thick of it just how important family life is to him, and he to it.

Consider the difference in attitude between a man who shares this positive assessment of his own role and a man who, like Premier Brumby, believes that families are just as well off without a father.

The difference is profound and is likely to have far-reaching consequences for society.

Fatherless America

I recently came across the book Fatherless America by David Blankenhorn. Published in 1995, it's too good to adequately discuss in a single column. For now, I just want to cover the most important section of it.

In the chapter "The New Father", Blankenhorn discusses the way that fathers are now meant to be. He believes that the ideal of the new father is androgynous, that "fatherhood without the masculinity" is what is being aimed for.

There is now an assumption that "parenting" is what women have traditionally done - the hands on care and nurture of children - and that a good father is therefore a man who shares or takes over this mothering role.

Blankenhorn has no trouble finding authorities who promote this vision of a non-masculine fatherhood. For instance, he quotes James Garbarino, the president of an institute for the study of child development, who asserts,

To develop a new kind of father, we must encourage a new kind of man .. If we are to rewrite the parenting scripts to emphasize nurturing and the investment of self in children's lives, we need to ask, "Why can't a man be more like a woman?"

Similarly, Diane Ehrensaft in Parenting Together openly endorses the idea of men and women "mothering" their children together. Then there is Andrew M. Greely who states bluntly that society should administer a "dose of androgyny" to men and "insist that men become more like women". One textbook on family life reassuringly claims that "androgyny would be especially beneficial to men".

A necessary fatherhood?

To his credit, David Blankenhorn immediately identifies one of the main dangers in this vision of a new, non-masculine fatherhood: it makes men unnecessary within a family. Blankenhorn puts it a little more academically, writing that,

At bottom, the New Father idea presupposes the larger thesis that fatherhood is superfluous. In this respect, the New Father is indistinguishable from the Unnecessary Father.

If there is no distinctly masculine role for fathers, then the most that men can do is to help out with mothering tasks. But this is not a necessary role. It could be done successfully by a single mother, or by two women living together.

Which raises a critical question. Why would intellectuals insist that there is no distinctly masculine role for men as fathers? Blankenhorn argues that,

undergirding the entire New Father model is the imperative of gender role convergence. The essence of this imperative is the removal of socially defined male and female roles from family life.

I think he's right. Liberals, who currently dominate the political class, believe that we should be self-created by our own will and reason. This means that they don't like the idea that we should be defined by things we haven't chosen for ourselves. One thing we don't get to choose for ourselves is our sex. This means that liberals wish to deny or remove the traditional influence of gender on our identity and behaviour. And this includes overthrowing "gendered" roles within the family. Hence the liberal preference for "gender role convergence".

Blankenhorn actually lays out a very similar argument to this. He writes that there are two ideas which are supposed to replace socially defined gender roles.

The first is "the moral importance of personal choice - the belief that choosing freely among family behaviors is not simply a possible means to something good but is itself something good." This is, in other words, the liberal idea that it is a moral good to choose for ourselves our role within the family, rather than accepting a traditional role.

The second is "an ideal of human development based on a rejection of gendered values ... In part, the imperative of role convergence simply urges the reduction or elimination of sex specialization within the family. But in a larger sense, the imperative warns that any notion of socially defined roles for human beings constitutes an oppressive and socially unnecessary restriction on the full emergence of human potentiality."

Blankenhorn really gets to the heart of the issue here. The liberal political class believes we must be self-defined rather than socially defined, or else we are oppressed and restricted in expressing our humanity.

The critical moment

We now arrive at what I think is the most interesting part of the book. Blankenhorn has already traced the acceptance of the "unnecessary father" back to the idea that we must be self-defined and therefore should choose our own family roles and reject socially defined gender roles.

He then quotes one supporter of this view, Mark Gerzon, who celebrates this self-defining principle of family life because,

Couples may write their own scripts, construct their own plots, with unprecedented freedom ... a man and a woman are free to find the fullest range of possibilities. Neither needs to act in certain ways because of preordained cross-sexual codes of conduct.

Blankenhorn notes that this is "a vision, ultimately, of freedom". He is right: liberals, no matter whether they are left-wing or right-wing in their politics, usually justify their beliefs with the claim that they promote individual liberty. Blankenhorn is also right when he goes on to note that the liberal concept of liberty has an undeniable appeal and that it is an orthodoxy within American (he could have said Western) culture. He writes,

In many ways, it is a bracing, exhilarating vision, bravely contemptuous of boundaries and inherited limitations, distinctly American in its radical insistence on self-created identity. It draws upon the American myth, the nation's founding ideals; it echoes much of what is best in the American character. It is the vision of Whitman in his "Song of the Open Road":

From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines.
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute.

There is so much to commend in this vision. It is the reigning ethos of much of contemporary American culture.

And here we have that crucial juncture which separates liberals and conservatives. A liberal will at this point stick to his vision of individual freedom, and deal with negative social consequences as they arise (or ignore them). A conservative, though, will too much value what is being lost, and will question a "freedom" which destroys an important human good.

Which way does Blankenhorn go? He decides for conservatism. He declares of the liberal vision that,

... as a social ethic for fatherhood, I dispute it.

I dispute it because it demands the obliteration of precisely those cultural boundaries, limitations, and behavioral norms that valorize paternal altruism and therefore favor the well-being of the infant.

I dispute it because it denies the necessity, and even repudiates the existence, of fathers' work: irreplaceable work in behalf of family that is essentially and primarily the work of fathers.

I dispute it because it tells an untrue story of what a good marriage is. In addition, I dispute it because it rests upon a narcissistic and ultimately self-defeating conception of male happiness and human completion.

The last point is, I believe, of tremendous significance. Can we really as men achieve a sense of self-completion, of fulfilling our natures, if we accept the role of a genderless self-defining individual, with no necessary place within a family as father or husband? I can't help but agree with David Blankenhorn that the answer is no.

Fool's gold

I'd like to finish by quoting some of the conclusion to the chapter on "The New Father". I think these excerpts show the quality of thought and expression that exists throughout Fatherless America. Blankenhorn writes,

The human child does not know or care about some disembodied abstraction called "parent." What it needs is a mother and a father who will work together, in overlapping but different ways, in its behalf...

Ultimately, the division of parental labor is the consequence of our biological embodiment as sexual beings and of the inherent requirements of effective parenthood ...

In service to the child and to the social good, fathers do certain things that other people, including mothers, do not do as often, as naturally, or as well ...

Historically, the good father protects his family, provides for its material needs, devotes himself to the education of his children, and represents his family's interests in the larger world. This work is necessarily rooted in a repertoire of inherited male values ...

... androgyny and gender role convergence reflect the ultimate triumph of radical individualism ... it is the belief, quite simply, that human completion is a solo act. It is the insistence that the pathway to human happiness lies in transcending the old polarities of sexual embodiment in order for each individual man and woman to embrace and express all of human potentiality within his or her self ... Now each man, within the cell of himself, can be complete ...

This idea, so deeply a part of our culture, is fool's gold. It is a denial of sexual complementarity and ultimately a denial of generativity ... Especially for men, this particular promise of happiness is a cruel hoax. Like all forms of narcissism, its final product is not fulfilment but emptiness.

I hope that it's possible to glean the quality of David Blankenhorn's writing from these excerpts. He has written a detailed, insightful and eloquent book which still stands nearly a decade after its first appearance as a most compelling defence of traditional fatherhood.

(First published at Conservative Central, 21/11/2004)

Feminism ... just ... got ... worse ...

Penny Red is angry:

You bloody traitor, Kathleen Parker. You weak-willed, belly-showing traitor.

What would make a young socialist feminist so mad? How could Kathleen Parker so enrage her?

Penny Red is upset that Kathleen Parker wrote a column in defence of men and fatherhood. Parker's column is worth reading in its entirety, but it ends on this note:

As long as men feel marginalised by the women whose favours and approval they seek; as long as they are alienated from their children and treated as criminals by family courts; as long as they are disrespected by a culture that no longer values masculinity tied to honour; and as long as boys are bereft of strong fathers and our young men and women wage sexual war, then we risk cultural suicide.

In the coming years we will need men who are not confused about their responsibilities. We need boys who have acquired the virtues of honour, courage, valour and loyalty. We need women willing to let men be men – and boys be boys. And we need young men and women who will commit and marry and raise children in stable homes.

I think this is exceptionally well put. Penny Red, though, intensely dislikes the quote because she thinks it is right that men are marginalised, that culture disrespects and dishonours masculinity, and that men and women engage in a sex war.

Here is how Penny Red responds to Kathleen Parker:

Women have been raising children alone for centuries untold, and, since feminist liberation, we have been enabled to provide for ourselves and our children on a more basic level. If that alienates men from their traditional roles of breadwinner and head of the table then too bad. I was raised by a single mother who was also a part-time lawyer; it did me no harm whatsoever, and I fully intend to be one myself one day.

... So, precisely in what way do children ‘need’ fathers - or is it, in fact, fathers who need children? ... The plain fact is that now that women are allowed to financially provide for themselves, we no longer need husbands to raise children effectively, if, indeed, we ever did. What women could do with, fundamentally, are wives –other people, male or female, to share the load of domestic work and money-earning in a spirit of genuine support and partnership. When more men can stomach seeing themselves in the role of 'wife and father', then we’ll have a basis for negotiation.

This is bad enough, but it gets worse. Penny Red goes on to state that a child is only the mother's - that the father has no rights at all when it comes to a child. She is willing to balance this view by stating that the father is therefore under no obligations, financial or otherwise, to the child:

Why is it unarguable that a man should support his offspring? With state help, most women are perfectly capable of doing so on their own ...

... Before they are their own, my kids will be just that - mine - and my money will pay for the nappies and school shoes.

So sorry about your balls, guys, but before they are their own these babies are ours, and they will remain ours whilst they are born from our bodies. We would be only too delighted for you to help us – genuinely help us – with the work of raising the next generation, but fatherhood is a privilege, not a right. If you’re truly man enough to be a wife and father, bring that to the table and we'll talk.

How should men respond to this? There are a couple of ways I think are unhelpful. The first is to get angry and resentful toward women in general. Not all women are Penny Reds. In my own neighbourhood of Melbourne there are many genuinely lovely young women who still represent a more traditional womanhood. The best comeback to the Penny Reds is to find such a woman and live happily with her.

However, it's not helpful either to entirely ignore women like Penny Red. She represents a trend within modernism which has real influence within our culture. If we take the attitude that it's most masculine just to shrug off women like Penny Red, we allow the situation to get worse. A real advantage we have as men is the ability to apply ourselves in a concentrated way to a problem in order to solve it. We shouldn't leave it to sympathetic women like Kathleen Parker to take on the problem of feminism. It should be our aim to work patiently and perseveringly to entirely rid our culture of the negative influence of feminism.

How do we do this? There are at least four ways to argue persuasively against Penny Red's politics.

The first is simply to point out the factual errors. On average, children raised by single women don't do as well as those raised in more traditional families. Nor do most single mothers manage to do well financially on their own. The provider and protector roles of men are not yet redundant, in spite of the role of the state in supporting single motherhood.

The second approach is to point out just how unliveable Penny Red's politics are. Feminism has reached the point at which feminists themselves are rarely able to follow their own principles in practice. For instance, Penny Red declared early in her post that she intended to become a single mother. However, later we learn that she has left herself considerable wriggle room:

I love my partner deeply and would be thrilled to bear a child who carried half of his genetic material. If we are still together at the time my child is born I will be only too happy for him to help me raise it, for him to share legal guardianship and for my child to call him ‘dad’. And this is not because it’s his moral or genetic right, but because I’m lucky enough to have met an emotionally and domestically literate man who I think would make a wonderful parent. But I want him around because he's a fantastic person, not because my kids need a male parent. And if he doesn't want to be involved, I'll manage.

So she does have a male partner and she would be "thrilled" to bear his child and she thinks he would make a "wonderful" parent and she would like her child to call him "dad". But the fact of his being male is just ... well, fortuitous. What seems clear is that Penny Red does want to live with the father of her child, in spite of all her arguments that men are superfluous.

Which leads on to the third problem with her politics. Penny Red, despite wanting to live with the father of her child, has undercut her own position in such a relationship. If men and women were really to believe the arguments that she makes, then how could a woman keep a man in a long-term relationship? If a man no longer believes his role as a father is a necessary one, and if he believes that he has no obligations to a child which, after all, is his wife's and not really his, then a woman is going to have to work overtime to keep him around. She is going to have to really exert herself to keep him happy.

To put it another way, when a man believes that his children are his own in a significant way, and that their welfare depends on his masculine role within the family, then he is much less likely to leave in a crisis. A woman in such a relationship can relax a bit, knowing that her husband has reasons to stay.

The final approach is the most important. What Penny Red has done is to apply, in a radical way, liberal autonomy theory to the lives of women. If the key aim in life is to be autonomous, then why wouldn't a woman assert that her child is her own and not someone else's? Why wouldn't she want to negotiate a role for the father on her own terms? Why wouldn't she claim that fathers are unnecessary and that she as a woman can manage on her own?

So if we really want to undermine feminism in Western culture we have to attack at the root of the problem - by decisively rejecting liberal autonomy theory. This means rejecting the idea that individual autonomy is the overriding, organising principle in society. We need to confidently assert other goods as well, including (as Kathleen Parker does) what is good for the survival of our own tradition.

Rebecca West part 1

I'm reading a biography of Rebecca West, a prominent feminist and socialist writer of last century.

I've only read the first few chapters, but already there's much to comment on. West's parents met on board a ship to Australia; her father became a conservative writer in Melbourne in the 1880s. Rebecca, the youngest of three daughters, was born after the family had returned to the UK to live in Glasgow.

Unfortunately, the parents' marriage wasn't close and the father left the family when Rebecca was eight. The consequences were predictable: all three daughters became, when still in their teens, radical feminists.

It's such a common pattern: a spirited and intellectual daughter is abandoned by her father and becomes a feminist activist. This, for instance, is what the biography tells us of West's feminist friend Dora Marsden:

Dora and Rebecca shared certain searing family experiences. Dora's father had left the family when she was eight, after years of a strained marriage, causing extreme financial hardship ...

There are plenty of more recent examples of feminist women with similar backgrounds. Germaine Greer once wrote a book entitled Daddy, We Hardly Knew You. Gloria Steinem said of her father that he "was living in California. He didn't ring up but I would get letters from him and saw him maybe twice a year." Jill Johnston wrote frequently about her missing father who never tried to contact her. Kate Millett adored her father but when she was thirteen he abandoned the family to live with a nineteen-year-old. The father of Eva Cox left the family to pursue a relationship with a pianist "leaving an embittered wife and a bewildered and rebellious daughter".

Why would paternal abandonment provoke feminist activism? It's often said that a father embodies within a family the outside social order. So if the father fails the daughter, it makes sense that the daughter would set herself against this order.

It's possible too that for a proud young woman the loss of status brought about by paternal abandonment cuts deeply; she believes she has been robbed of the place she rightfully deserves to occupy in society by untrustworthy or unreliable men.

The lesson for conservative men is clear enough: we shouldn't underestimate how important our role is in our daughter's lives, not just in personal terms, but also in influencing the attitude of our daughters (and sons) to society itself.

To return to Rebecca's biography, although the family now lacked money she was provided with a scholarship to a private school; she distinguished herself as a student but left the school at the age of sixteen when she contracted tuberculosis.

She recovered and attended drama school, intending to become an actress, but she failed in her efforts. In 1911 she began writing for The Freewoman, an English feminist magazine.

The following year she met the 46-year-old novelist H.G. Wells. He already had both a wife and a mistress, but she pursued him. She got a kiss out of him, but he told her that he wasn't interested in an affair with her. She travelled to France and Spain and twice attempted suicide. She wrote a letter to Wells, which included the following lines:

Dear H.G.,

In the next few days I shall either put a bullet through my head or commit something more shattering to myself than death ... I am always at a loss when I meet hostility, because I can love and I can do practically nothing else ... You've literally ruined me ... I would give my whole life to feel your arms around me again ... Don't leave me utterly alone.

I've included these lines because they run so much against one of the currents of feminist thought, namely that men have no necessary role in a woman's life ("a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle", "I might want a man but I don't need a man" etc). Rebecca West did need a man in her life, to the point that she felt "ruined" when left "utterly alone".

In 1913 Wells' mistress left him and he offered the position to Rebecca West. She accepted.

As for the feminism of the period, it seems to have generated the same kind of tensions in its principles that it does today. For instance, in 1913 The New Freewoman declared to its readers:

Women's movement forsooth ... Why does not someone start a straight nose movement ... or any other movement based upon some accidental physical contournation.

In other words, the magazine set up to lead the women's movement believed that the category of "woman" was insignificant, a mere accident of physiology.

Rebecca West wasn't one who followed through with the idea that "woman" was an artificial category; for instance, she praised her feminist friend Dora Marsden for being an "exquisite beauty," a "perfectly proportioned fairy," and so "flower like". She appears to have appreciated the distinctly feminine qualities of her friend, at the same time that her feminist magazine was suggesting that womanhood could be dismissed as a merely accidental attribute of a person.

Tony Abbott: conservative words, liberal policies

Tony Abbott is one of those Liberal Party types who seriously believe that they are representing both the liberal and conservative traditions.

This attempted marriage of liberal and conservative thought doesn't work. In practice, the shift is always toward liberalism.

Abbott gave a speech on the weekend to the Young Liberals convention in which the mixture of genuinely conservative thought and radically liberal policies was especially gruesome.

Here is the Burkean conservatism:

As conservatives, we have Burke’s sense that a successful society involves keeping faith with those that came before and those that will come after us. Our instinct is to respect and cherish our country and its institutions because they have helped to make us what we are ... We never lightly change the things that really matter and, when change is necessary, try to change as little as possible.

This would be great if it were reflected in Liberal Party policy. But it's not. It's not reflected in the Liberal Party immigration policy which Abbott supports. Nor is it reflected in Abbott's view on family:

Similarly, we can’t be judgemental of people who are trying to make the most of the circumstances they find themselves in. Supporting families shouldn’t mean favouring one family type over others. We have to resist yearning for “ideal” families and “traditional” mothers. Every family is a source of nurturing and security for its members. All parents are striving for the best for their children. There can be no antediluvian thoughts linking childcare and women neglecting their children during the working day. Whether formal or informal, for parents in the paid or the unpaid workforce, at least some childcare is the absolutely essential means for most parents to give their children a decent standard of living and to have a fulfilled life.

I wouldn't mind if Abbott had simply said that we shouldn't be judgemental toward people who find themselves in less than ideal circumstances, that there is a place for childcare and that many single parents work hard for their children and so on. He's gone much further than this, though, and endorsed the radical position which claims that there are many family types, each as good as the other. ("Supporting families shouldn't mean favouring one family type over others ... Every family is a source of nurturing and security for its members ...")

Abbott has effectively committed himself to the idea that fathers are not essential to family life, and that the connection between mother and baby is not as important as it was once believed to be. These are ideas which don't make for a stability of family life nor for a determined commitment to parenting (if my role as a father makes no difference to the quality of family life, then why would I make such an effort?).

Abbott has rejected a defence of a traditional culture of family life, in favour of a brave new world of more fluid relationships. Yet he still claims the mantle of Burkean conservative:

Today’s anxieties are less that Australia might become an economic backwater but that we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The next successful prime minister will tap people’s yearning to be a community as well as an economy; to belong as well as to succeed. A Liberal who understands the importance of the social fabric and the part Burke’s “little platoons” play in it is more likely to provide this than a Labor leader addicted to bureaucracy.

Again, fine words, but to set people the task of "belonging" after the natural forms of community have been torn away is probably not what Edmund Burke had in mind.

So what has gone wrong in Abbott's politics? Why has his reading of Burke done so little good?

One problem is that Abbott still takes as his central principle the liberal ideal of "freedom". In the liberal philosophy, freedom is understood to mean the unimpeded individual will. We are supposed to be, within the limits of order, free to choose in any direction.

In this view, individuals are free when they are unencumbered by ties of ethnicity, or by traditional family roles, or by the authority of fathers, or by ideals of masculinity or femininity.

I don't accept this understanding of freedom, and so I can't cheer on Abbott when he says:

Because we place our faith in the common sense and decency of every human being, we think that people should be free. This preference for freedom would be almost revolutionary in the Labor Party but it is an article of faith for us. We are the freedom party but it is freedom on ethical foundations that we support, in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, because it offers the surest path to a better society.

Abbott has written elsewhere that "The Liberal Party’s animating principle is freedom". Once you accept "freedom", understood in terms of liberal philosophy, as the "animating principle" of your politics, then the things that matter aren't likely to be upheld, no matter how much Burke you read.

Which brings me to a final point. If Abbott lived at a time when the unspoken understanding of things was conservative, rather than liberal, then Burkean conservatism might have led to something better. But, as Lawrence Auster has pointed out, a Burkean reverence for a received understanding of things has radical consequences when liberalism has begun to dominate as a tradition.

Here is Auster writing about the British columnist Theodore Dalrymple:

I gather that what Dalrymple wants to bring back is an appreciation of non-conceptual Burkean prejudice, the wisdom of the accumulated experience of society, adherence to habit and tradition. The problem is that this Burkean outlook can only work in a society that has a sound and functioning tradition. In a society that has been transformed by leftist ideological radicalism, as Britain has been, Burkeanism is worse than useless, because the received habits and prejudices that it seeks to preserve are the habits and prejudices of the dominant left. It is for this very reason that British "conservatism" has been so helpless to hold back the ever advancing tides of cultural leftism since World War II and particularly in the ruinous period of Blair. Indeed, under the leadership of David Cameron, conservatism has defined itself as simply a type of left-liberalism, which is the natural destination of Burkean conservatism under a left-liberal order.

Read the newspaper columns of even the best conservatives in Britain today. They are unable to wage an effective intellectual and moral battle against the forces of destruction, because of that same British/Burkean dislike of first principles to which Dalrymple appeals--that distaste for conceptual thinking and clear distinctions that renders the conservatives so weak and watery.

Only a conceptual, rational conservatism, a conservatism that attempts to discover and articulate the essential truths of man and society, can fight back effectively against the dominant leftist ideology and its false principles.

But why is Deveny wrong?

Catherine Deveny woke up one morning, opened her newspaper and found out that athlete Jana Pittman had changed her last name to Rawlinson. Deveny could not, at first, understand what had happened:

Then it dawned on me. She has got married, bizarre enough in itself these days, and changed her last name to her husband's. What an anachronism ...

Wake up! We are in 2007. Women are no longer owned by their father and then their husband. So why are some women still changing their surnames? And why do some men still want them to? It's sad, it's misogynous, it's archaic, it's insecure and it's unnecessary.

Why would you do something so drastic simply because you decided to delude yourself it was easier? Because you are deeply insecure, deeply conservative or deeply stupid. And in deep denial.

Deveny is pretty free with the insults here, so it's not surprising that she attracted a largely hostile response. Most of the criticism, though, focused on her bitterly aggressive style, rather than on her argument.

So why might a woman change her name on getting married? Is she simply a deluded victim of the patriarchy in doing so? Or are there other ways of explaining this custom?

Paternal pride

Societies generally don't have to worry about connecting mothers with their children.

It's possible, though, to have a situation in which men father children, but then don't stay around to help raise and socialise them.

This is roughly what happens within black American families. About 70% of children within the black community are born to single mothers. The social consequences for both mothers and children aren't good; there is an increase in poverty, crime, drug use and gangs.

There is a rational purpose, therefore, in encouraging men to stay. And one way of doing this is to appeal to the instinct men have to feel a pride in paternity, including a pride in family lineage.

My own father often discusses the history of our family (sometimes considerably embellished) and he is obviously concerned to keep the family name going. If you grow up as a boy in such an atmosphere you absorb a basic expectation: that you will marry, father children and do your best to raise them so that they too can successfully carry on the family tradition.

The idea that you would reproduce simply as a sperm donor for a single mother just doesn't match expectations.

That there is a benefit in women encouraging male participation in family life is borne out by research into the "marriage gap" in America. There is a growing divide between upper class women, who continue to believe that paternal investment in family life is important, and lower class women, who are more likely to become single mothers, or remain de facto, or divorce and remarry:

America really has become two nations. The old-fashioned married-couple-with-children model is doing quite well among college-educated women. It is primarily among lower-income women with only a high school education that it is in poor health...

Virtually all — 92 percent — of children whose families make over $75,000 are living with both parents. On the other end of the income scale, the situation is reversed: only about 20 percent of kids in families earning under $15,000 live with both parents ...

Educated, middle-class mothers tend to be dedicated to what I have called The Mission, the careful nurturing of their children’s cognitive, emotional, and social development ... It’s common sense, backed up by plenty of research, that you’ll have a better chance of fully “developing” your children — that is, of fulfilling The Mission — if you have a husband around.

It is the better educated and more ambitious women who most want to keep the father of their children around. They are seeking a high level of paternal investment and they're more likely to be successful if men are encouraged in their instincts toward a pride in paternity and lineage.

A counter-argument might be that a woman could achieve the same desired effect by having her children adopt her husband's family name whilst she retains her own. This is, as I understand it, the custom in some countries such as The Netherlands. It seems, though, that once the children adopt the father's last name, many women find it simpler to also change their own name, and some feel that it improves the sense of family unity if they too share their husband and children's surname.

Status seeking

A while back feminists decided to introduce the term "Ms" as a title for both married and unmarried women. It didn't work. Most women still prefer to use the title "Mrs" after marriage.

The most obvious reason for the failure of "Ms" is that many women still associate marriage with status, and that "Mrs" therefore denotes a positive status compared to either "Ms" or "Miss".

Similarly, it's possible that for some women a change of surname on marriage is another marker of increased status.

Is it rational to encourage this form of status seeking? It depends on what you think of marriage. If, like Catherine Deveny, you're hostile to marriage, then you won't approve of the link between marriage and status. However, if you believe that that marriage is of overall benefit, it does become reasonable to encourage such "marital status seeking" amongst women.

A romantic gesture

You can't ignore heterosexuality in all this. Think of the psychology of relationships between men and women. A man perceives that a woman has something to give. He pursues her and tries to win her over.

A woman in yielding makes herself vulnerable. She gives herself in trust to the man; she places herself in his care.

For a man, there is a kind of thrill in the realisation that the woman has voluntarily consented to yield to him.

At no time is this interplay between men and women likely to be more intense than when we marry. The sense of feminine yielding is much more likely to lead to women changing their name (and residence and even their religion) than vice versa.

Do women experience this as an oppression? I don't think so. For some women, the romantic interplay is intoxicating. They try to heighten the effect by making the act of yielding more dangerous: they place themselves in the care of "bad boys" who can't be trusted to do the right thing.

The columnist Andrea Burns wrote recently about her own addiction to bad boys:

Maybe there is something addictive in the poison relationship? ... I'm talking about a feeling we get that is so powerful we just can't keep away. These boys who treat us so bad, but make us feel so good are everywhere ... No one wants to date a nice, boring bloke. That's just not exciting.

If anything, the "thrill" that women get in yielding and trusting needs to be drawn in at times (which seems to be the theme of various Jane Austen novels).

The problem for Deveny is that these kind of feminine romantic gestures run counter to the official political programme of female independence and autonomy. It's difficult, though, to entirely suppress heterosexual instincts. Most women make some sort of compromise between their heterosexuality and feminist politics; Deveny is too strident to accept a compromise position.

Melbourne study backs dads

Does the role of fathers within families matter? Very much so, according to a recent study:

Adolescent education expert Bill Jennings said the growing epidemic of "fatherlessness" – where dads were increasingly absent either physically or emotionally – had led to negative patterns in young men, such as suicide, violence and drug abuse.

Mr Jennings studied 434 male students across two Victorian schools in year 10 and again in year 11.

His interim findings showed boys' self-confidence was raised when their dads showed interest and were involved in their lives.

With self-confidence came long-term success, Mr Jennings said.

"Boys are more likely to prosper if they have a male role model in their corner, and ideally that's their dad," Mr Jennings said.

The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that our ideal of family life, the one that we aim for as a society, should include fathers. Fathers should be considered an integral part of family life.

Whilst on the topic of family, there were several articles in Saturday's Age on falling marriage rates in Australia. I found two aspects of these articles striking. The first was the finding that women who marry nearly always have children: only 8% of married women don't have children, and this is mostly due to infertility. In contrast, a quarter of women in de facto relationships don't have children:

Dr Birrell says the social relationship for a female in a couple family — marriage or de facto status — is an important indication of fertility levels.

The data shows striking differences between fertility of wives — who have more children — and live-in partners, which suggest a different calibre of relationship might be struck in those relationships.

Between 40 and 44, nearly a quarter of women in de facto relationships, for example, had no children. Only 8 per cent of wives in this category, however, were childless and this was likely to reflect infertility rather than choice, according to the research.

And again:

Building on previous studies on partnering using earlier census data, Birrell and co-researcher Genevieve Heard stress the continuing strong linkage between fertility and marriage, pointing to the almost near-universal outcome for married women to give birth, bar medical infertility, by the time they reach their early 40s.

In contrast, their analysis found women of similar age in de facto relationships not only had fewer children than those who were married, but had much higher proportions of childlessness. Between 40 and 44, nearly a quarter of women who were co-habiting had no children.

The other striking aspect of the articles was the information on the number of people remaining single:

Stunningly, as their biological window to give birth without the aid of IVF was closing, more than a quarter of women aged 40 to 44 were neither smug marrieds nor in de facto relationships.

When one of these single women is profiled she is described as having "noticed the diversity of people's living circumstances these days". I think this is too blase a way to put things. We aren't really dealing with more options here, but with frustrated instincts to partner. The statistics don't give a sense of the personal loss involved.

The European New Man

In my last post I wrote about the push to introduce a paid maternity scheme in Australia. It happens that there are people on the right who are arguing in favour of this movement. They believe that paid maternity schemes are designed to support motherhood, the family and choice in family life.

I wish such conservatives would take a look at Europe. Paid maternity schemes have operated for many years in Europe. We therefore know both the philosophy behind these schemes, and what they are leading toward.

What is happening in Europe is not an extension of choice for women to look after their children, but the imposition by the state of a single new model of family life, one which is openly anti-maternal and which seeks to create a genderless model of parenthood.

Why change the family?

There is a logic to the European innovations. The Europeans, like the West in general, follow a liberal orthodoxy. The starting point for this liberalism is the idea that our status as humans is contingent: that we only become fully human when we are self-determining (when we are self-created by our own will and reason).

This means that the more independent and autonomous we are, the more fully human we become. However, it appears that some people are more independent and autonomous than others. Therefore, there is a human inequality which must strike liberals as an unbearable injustice, as it seems to exclude some people from being treated as fully human.

Liberals have decided that women are an oppressed group lacking in such a status, as their role as mothers is biologically determined, rather than a uniquely chosen path, and as they are financially dependent on a husband. Therefore, gender equality requires that women be liberated from the maternal role so that they are free to pursue a professional career to the same extent as men.

To achieve this aim, liberals have to argue that the traditional maternal role of women isn't natural, but is an oppressive construct, one which is "discriminatory", "sexist" and a product of mere "prejudice".

Liberals also need to find a new way to raise children. Part of the European solution is to massively fund childcare centres. However, to care for babies up to a year old, women are provided with paid maternity leave, so that the cost of women staying at home is "socialised" and connected to their professional life. Women are no longer to be provided for privately by a husband within a family.

The second stage

But this is not the end point. If women are taking even twelve months off work, it means that they are not, in terms of liberal assumptions, equal as humans to men. It is still their careers, not men's, which are being interrupted by "sexist" assumptions that it is women who should mother babies.

So the Europeans have now advanced to a second stage in which there are attempts by governments to persuade (or coerce) men to take an increasing part of the maternity leave. It is hoped that men will eventually take half, so that there is no distinction between the parental role of men and women.

Which brings me to exhibit A. In February 2007 the EU brought out a paper titled "Bringing Men to Equality and Worklife Balance". It includes a "Decalogue for men" with the following preface:

Men, it's up to you: equality starts at home! The traditional division of gender roles is no longer relevant in a modern society looking for more equality and justice.

Note that there is no promotion of choice here. The traditional option is being firmly discarded on the basis of liberal ideas about equality and justice. The idea of distinct gender roles is considered immoral.

Men are encouraged in the decalogue to take up paternal leave because:

More freedom and autonomy lead to a better mutual understanding ... Your independence should not only be economic and professional but also domestic ... Do you believe in freedom and justice? Put these values into practice at home ... Become a role model for your children. Help release the next generation from old-fashioned stereotypes. You will set the basis to create responsible citizenship from your example.

Here we have the usual liberal concerns with autonomy and independence. Note too the implication that those of us following a more traditional pattern of family life are not good role models and are irresponsible citizens.

Later (p.17) traditional gender roles are associated with violence:

The eradication of gender-based violence will foster a good working environment and allow people to work as a team. If an organisation does not respect the autonomy of its staff or does not show public support for such autonomy, its silence may lead to suspicions of its collusion.

There is another section of the paper titled "How to boost cultural change". It states:

Most women ... in European society today ... work outside the home ... This deep change has been accompanied by public policies and appears as a response to women's wish to be financially independent. It is a great advance.

Nevertheless ... men have not taken up their share of responsibility in family life ... If the prejudice remains that women are still responsible for most of the domestic and family tasks, how could they possibly devote themselves to their careers as much as men do?

Achieving equality between men and women ... poses a great challenge to traditional gender notions held by men and women and questions individual behaviours as well as culture.

The paper goes on to list various European media campaigns designed to challenge masculine behaviour. For instance, in France a new men's magazine was launched: "Robin - the magazine of the sensitive male". In Latvia a daily newspaper organised a discussion under the title "Men are not crying".

Next, in the section of the paper titled "Paternity Leave," we are told:

Childbirth is a human fact that particularly affects working mothers, as they are the ones who usually interrupt their careers to take care of the new born. But this is not a role they have to undertake, as fathers are perfectly able to do it as well.

The arrival of a child is recast here as an "interruption" to a woman's life, which she might like to avoid, particularly as there is no special motherly bond to her baby, with dad being a perfectly adequate substitute.

Companies across Europe are beginning to implement such ideas about genderless parenting. Microsoft in Norway has a "Daddy package" in which women are encouraged to take shorter leave, whereas men are "requested" to take six months. Executives are expected to be "role models" in following the package.

Further suggestions made in the paper to achieve the EU's aims include tax reductions and priority in public contracts for organisations which comply with the EU model.

Response

What, though, if liberals are wrong in all this? What if our status as humans is not contingent but is invested in us, as the sum total of all that we are, including our distinct identities as men and women?

In this case, there would be no inequality and no injustice in men pursuing a masculine role within the family and women a feminine role. Instead, such roles would be thought of positively as a means to self-fulfilment for men and women.

Do Australian women consider traditional roles to be unequal or unjust? According to a recent Australian Institute of Family Studies survey the answer is generally no. The survey found that "Australian parents seem comfortable in traditional gender roles" and that:

A focus on breadwinning rather than childrearing by fathers was not seen by mothers as a lack of participation in fatherhood, but reflected their role as a good father.

In the eyes of mothers who strongly believed that small children needed their mothers to be at home with them all of the time, a partner who 'worked hard' and was a 'good provider' enabled them to stay home and fulfill this crucial mothering role - and in their eyes fulfill a crucial aspect of fatherhood.

It seems reasonable to conclude from this that governments ought to be aiming to make it possible to support a family from a single wage. This requires not only the achievement of certain wage rates, but also an effort to restrict the costs of housing, education and taxation and to provide extra assistance for families through tax breaks or special payments.

This, at least, ought to be conservative policy. Those who remain wedded to liberal autonomy theory will probably continue to think it moral to support paid maternity leave, but conservatives ought to know and reject the radical consequences of such a measure.

Women & coercive autonomy

A recent research project conducted by the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) found that:

Australian parents seem comfortable in traditional gender roles - mother as the primary caring role and the father the breadwinning role - at least while their children are of preschool age.

The AIFS is the official government body charged with research on the family. It reports directly to the minister responsible for family affairs.

The AIFS report found further that:

Almost all the mothers reported that when they first had children, they arranged to stay home with the children as primary carer, perhaps returning to work on a part-time basis when the children were old enough to be left in the care of others ...

Eventually, though, many mothers reported that there is a point where their partners begin to talk to them about returning to work and the advantages of additional income for the family budget.

So women are choosing to stay at home until their husbands talk to them about returning to work to help with the family finances.

What's even more significant is that,

A focus on breadwinning rather than childrearing by fathers was not seen by mothers as a lack of participation in fatherhood, but reflected their role as a good father.

In the eyes of mothers who strongly believed that small children needed their mothers to be at home with them all of the time, a partner who 'worked hard' and was a 'good provider' enabled them to stay home and fulfill this crucial mothering role - and in their eyes fulfill a crucial aspect of fatherhood.

Compare this traditional view with the following "Mother's Day" story from the Melbourne Age:

Monday May 14 2007 'Punished' for having children

Rights chief renews push for paid maternity leave.

Australia's human rights chief says women are being 'punished' in the workplace ... Renewing a bid for paid maternity leave to be put on the Federal Government's agenda, the president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, John von Doussa, said failure to set up a universal scheme was 'unfortunate policy' and plainly wrong ...

"Women are getting punished for the simple fact that they, genetically, are those with the function to produce the next generation ... Why should they suffer the penalty?"

The remarks come as up to 60 women's groups prepare to meet in Melbourne next month to build momentum on the issue.

[Mr Von Doussa} said a more comprehensive plan was needed ... to secure better female participation in the workforce.

So the situation appears to be this. The information arm of the state is reporting that women want to care for their young children themselves and that they wish to be supported by a hard-working husband to do so. The human rights arm of the state, though, is advocating something quite different: that what counts is women's workforce participation rate, and that women should be funded by paid maternity schemes to care for their children.

What can explain the discrepancy? I believe it comes down to the liberal idea that what matters most is individual autonomy. We are human, in this theory, because we are creatures capable of self-determination. Therefore, the aim of politics is to ensure that we aren't impeded in our life choices, but can act as autonomous agents in creating our self-identity, in establishing our values and in pursuing our life aims.

The problem with autonomy theory is that it would only work coherently in practice if people really did choose autonomy as their highest good. People, though, generally don't view autonomy as a sole, overriding good in their lives. Therefore, there is a conflict within the theory.

For instance, the theory would work coherently if women were both unimpeded in choosing their identities, values and life aims, and if they then chose to maximise their autonomy by seeking financial independence through careers and bureaucratic paid maternity schemes.

But this is not what women are choosing. Women are identifying and prioritising goods other than autonomy; they might, for instance, in wanting to be supported by a husband, be valuing the love and commitment expressed through the husband's provider role; or the masculine role modelling this provides for their sons; or they might value the anchor such a role provides for their husbands, brothers and sons in terms of family and career commitments.

So the liberal theory in practice has an internal contradiction. Autonomy is supposed to lead to women choosing their own life aims, but autonomy is also supposed to lead to women living a maximally autonomous life. When women choose to sacrifice a degree of autonomy in the service of some higher good, then the two principles can't easily be combined.

The reality is that, over time, a liberal society enforces the "maximally autonomous life" principle, even if this means coercively limiting the "choose your own life" principle of autonomy. Hence, it's likely that a liberal state will implement paid maternity schemes in the service of independent female careerism, rather than allow women to follow their preference of taking the motherhood role itself as the organising principle and being supported financially by a husband rather than by public paid maternity schemes.

The result might be termed "coercive autonomy". We lose the chance to choose the very things that are most important to us and which we hold to be the higher goods and all in the name of autonomy.

Fathers, autonomy, models

Personal political is the website of an Australian lesbian feminist who is raising a young son with a female partner. She recently wrote an entry on the topic of role models for boys. I found it interesting in revealing some of the ideological contradictions at play.

The writer is clearly into autonomy theory. This is the mainstream idea within liberalism that what matters is that we remain unimpeded (and therefore autonomous) in choosing to do or be anything we wish. The emphasis is usually on the self-determining, self-creating individual.

The writer's brother gave her son a book about boys who have achieved great things. Her instinctive feminist response to the book is this:

It's a strange kind of book. I mean, does anyone - including boys - really need to be told that "boys can do anything"?

This is the usual feminist assumption that since autonomy is what matters, and since men have power in society, that men must have autonomy.

However, the writer then backtracks and adds:

Which isn't to say that boys face no obstacles in being and becoming anything they want to be ...

This comment clearly reveals the writer's commitment to autonomy theory. But why backtrack? If I reproduce the quote in full, the answer is revealed: she believes that boys are restricted by masculinity itself:

Which isn't to say that boys face no obstacles in being and becoming anything they want to be - or even in getting to the point where they might feel a wish to somehow step outside of the accepted masculine constraints.

One thing to note here is that autonomy theory turns something that most men take to be a positive (their masculinity) into a negative (as masculinity is thought of as a constraint on being anything you want to be).

This is an undesirable feature of autonomy theory but not a contradiction. The contradiction comes at the end of the entry when we learn that the writer doesn't really want her son to be anything he wants to be after all. The writer has definite preferences for her son which she is actively guiding him toward. In her own words:

... we do take care to point out to Olle positive examples of men and boys. What, for me, is a positive example? I suppose it does incorporate men doing atypical things like dance ... I lean towards drawing his attention to men who are able to use their bodies with sensitivity, men who are expressive and intellectually creative, as a counterweight to all the bottled-up boofheads who get the mainstream kudos in our society.

What happened to the "be anything" ideal? The writer is here being quite particular in pointing out what she takes to be ideal types of character and behaviour for her son to follow, and reprehensible types to be shunned.

So even someone who is highly committed to autonomy theory doesn't stick to it in a consistent way in practice. The instinct to raise a child according to a positive ideal of character and behaviour proves too strong after all.

This means that the important issue, the one normally hidden by an emphasis on autonomy, is what a worthy ideal for boys is. There doesn't have to be a single, simplistic answer, of course, but nor is it helpful to deny the reality that such ideals will be brought forward.

The other area of ideological confusion in the entry concerns role models. The writer tells us, first, that she doesn't like the notion of role models. She believes that the formation of gender is much more complex than copying masculine or feminine behaviour. Therefore, she doesn't believe that her son, by having no father, is missing out:

That is, of course, why the claim that sons of lesbians are missing the essential role model has always struck me as nonsense.

Again, she then quickly backtracks when she adds:

(Which is different from the proposition that boys need men in their lives.)

So boys don't need a paternal role model, but they do need men in their lives.

Later, though, she states:

I don't think parenthood requires anything especially different from mothers or fathers.

I suppose this could all fit together subtly. It's not easy to put together, though. If there is no purpose to gender in our closest and most formative relationships (with our parents) then why do boys need men in their lives at all? In other words, if it's not important to our socialisation whether our primary carers are male or female, then why should it matter to our socialisation if our lesser relationships involve males or females?

I might be wrong, but I wonder if the writer is trying to justify her son having no father, without drawing the very radical conclusion that men aren’t needed in family life.

This, though, is the logical conclusion to draw: if two women are as likely to raise a son as successfully as a father and mother, then fathers aren’t necessary to family life. If men and women were truly to believe this, then the intrinsic motivation for men to feel responsible to stay with their families, and for women to encourage them to do so, is considerably weakened.

In short, the writer isn't able to present a view of gender and parenting which is both moderate and coherent (and she does seem to be trying to be moderate).

Fatherhood, lineage, identity

Katrina Clark's mother was a feminist who, at age 32, wasn't sure she would ever marry and have children. So she had herself artificially inseminated instead.

The feminist mother was considered "a pioneer, a trailblazer for a new offshoot of the women's movement" for making this decision. Her act of deliberately creating a fatherless family, though, had serious repercussions.

First, it left the daughter with a "lonely, tired mother" who struggled to make ends meet living on food stamps.

Worse, it left the daughter confused and angry. The problems weren't so great when Katrina was small, though sometimes she would:

daydream about a tall, lean man picking me up and swinging me around in the front yard, a manly man melting at the touch from his little girl. I wouldn't have minded if he weren't around all the time, as long as I could have the sweet moments of reuniting with his strong arms and hearty laugh. My daydreams always ended abruptly; I knew I would never have a dad.

Note just how gendered her daughterly instinct is. She didn't just long for a parent who happened to be male, but for a manly father who would respond emotionally to her as a girl.

This girlhood dream could not be fulfilled by a female parent; it required not only a man to fill the role, but a strongly natured man who, for his part, felt a reciprocal fatherly instinct to be charmed by his daughter.

Things got worse for Katrina. Her mother moved into a kind of group household, made up of a number of unrelated adults and their children. This didn't give Katrina a sense of living in a complete family:

I would stay in my room, listening to Avril Lavigne and to Eminem's lyrics of broken homes and broken people. I felt broken too.

There was also the problem which arose when Katrina reached the natural stage of developing her sense of identity. Having no father, and no knowledge of a father, she was left with "the puzzle of who I am".

She writes of her need to know where she came from and what her history was, and of the confusion of not knowing her biological roots.

She wanted "a sense of roots" so badly that she decided to track down her biological father, even if this required 10 years of intensive work. As it happens, she succeeded in her search after just weeks.

Having finally established a relationship with her biological father she felt at last a "relief about my own situation". She writes of him that,

I'm certain he has no idea how big a role he has played in my life despite his absence -- or because of his absence ... I feel more whole now than I ever have.

We live in times when fathers are seen to be optional within a family. Children, it is claimed, only need a loving home, which might be just as easily provided by women alone.

Katrina's story, though, suggests that this view is false. Katrina is telling us that fathers are missed within families: that they are missed by lonely mothers who struggle financially; that they are missed by children who long for a paternal and not just a parental relationship; and that they are missed by children who don't have knowledge of a paternal lineage, and whose identity is therefore left confused and incomplete.

So men are never truly going to be made redundant by new reproductive technologies. The social ideal ought to remain, as per tradition, to maximise the number of children who grow up with the benefit of living with a father.

Our attention ought to be directed more to encouraging a good practice of fatherhood within Western culture, rather than denying men a necessary place within the family.

In defence of Caitlin

Caitlin Flanagan is a controversial figure in America, but hardly heard of here in Australia.

She's rubbed some feminist women up the wrong way by defending stay at home motherhood (admittedly she sometimes does this provocatively, as if courting publicity).

She was interviwed in the Sunday Herald Sun last week (Mother knows best 10/12/06), and acquitted herself reasonably well. I was interested to read that:

She grew up in Berkeley ... the daughter of a professor of English and a housewife whose homely presence she idolised - so much so that she was traumatised when her mother returned to work as a nurse when Flanagan was 12. "To my thinking, my mother's change of heart constituted child abandonment, plain and simple."

It's refreshing that Caitlyn Flanagan should think back to her own childhood and the importance of her mother to it, rather than conveniently ignoring such realities as modern society generally prefers to do.

The journalist interviewing Caitlyn Flanagan, Julia Llewellyn Smith, does end her piece with an admission that Flanagan is good at raising unpalatable truths. She writes:

As much as it pains her detractors, there are many women who are taking her message to heart. After all, some of her views - that when both halves of a couple work, their home may be neglected; that the achievements of the women's movement "have been bought at the expense of poor women, often poor brown-skinned women"; that men who want to share equally in the housework are not the kind of men most women want to marry - are undeniably true, if unpalatable.

However, the sharpest observation is the one made by Caitlin Flanagan in response to the following from Julia Llewellyn Smith:

One of the most troublesome aspects of Flanagan's views is her idealisation of the nuclear family, and the assumption that husbands are not only high earners but also faithful and supportive. Fine, I argue to push this as the ideal, but so many marriages end in failure because the husband runs off with another woman.

Caitlin Flanagan replies:

"It's the great risk of marriage, the eternal risk a woman takes," she says, shaking her head dolefully. "It used to be that when a man did that, there was a very high cost. He would be shunned by polite society. But now the attitude is, 'Oh, divorce is normal, adult life is messy.' So we've made it safe for men to do that and I would posit it to you that one of the things that made it safer was feminism, which said, 'Women don't need men to raise children.'

"That whole notion that there was not an essential and irreplaceable role for the man of the household has made it easier for men to leave."

Which is surely true. If men are told endlessly that women can raise a child just as well without them, then it becomes easier for men to walk out on their families and for a society to casually accept the decision.

So modern women can't have it both ways. It's not reasonable to promote single motherhood and at the same time expect the male commitment to marriage to remain as strong as it was traditionally.

(I haven't read it, but Caitlin Flanagan has just had a book released in Australia: To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife.)

Rethinking fatherhood

In 1994 feminism in Australia was rampant and men could do no right. It is remarkable, therefore, to observe the shift back to a more traditional view of gender that is now underway.

In yesterday's Age, for instance, Stephanie Dowrick discussed the place of fathers within families and came up with this:

...fathers matter. And, good or bad, the effects of their parenting will go on reverberating throughout their children's lifetime ...

....[parents] will also have roles that are specific and distinct. When two adults become parents for the first time, the new father may best support both the baby and his unfolding sense of himself as a father by giving most of his support to the new mother: meeting her needs so that she can meet the inexhaustible needs of her new baby.

This requires considerable selflessness. Yet it is being able to step up and play this essential role that will set the tone for fatherhood ahead and for his individual strength and confidence.

As children grow older, the role that fathers play changes fast. Even with both parents in the workforce, fathers sill still often "represent" the outside world and its values more powerfully than mothers do. How fathers interpret the outside world and bring it home to their children through discussions and especially through example sharply impacts on the way children see themselves in the social universe.

What Dad values and believes, where Dad gives his time, how Dad offers or withdraws his encouragement or interest, how Dad deals with disappointment or conflict, whether Dad is able to be consistent and reliable, when and how Dad "takes charge", the willingness with which Dad takes responsibility, and how loving Dad is to Mum: these are all factors that will have a huge impact on the psychological development of children.

But perhaps nothing matters more than for a man to recognise while he is in the thick of it just how important family life is to him, and he to it.

This is an intelligent description of a father's role in the family, which runs counter to the general trend of writing about fatherhood for several reasons.

First, it views the father's role positively rather than negatively. A problem for men in a liberal society is that liberalism is set strongly against unchosen forms of authority (which is why the authority of kings and priests was targeted early on). Fatherhood fell within the category of unchosen forms of authority and so was often portrayed negatively in terms of repressiveness or domination.

Second, Stephanie Dowrick accepts a distinct, masculine role for fathers. The liberal view has been that gender is an oppressive social construct which should be made not to matter; therefore, much writing on the family has promoted the idea of "genderless" parenting (in which the motherhood role becomes the single unisex parental role) or of gender role reversal.

(I remember a Nescafe ad which ran on Australian TV in 1999 which had the jingle: "You can be mother when you are a man ... Open your mind you know that you can.")

We'll have to see how far the shift back to a more traditional view of gender goes, but it's a refreshing thing for the moment to find fatherhood portrayed positively as a distinct role.

Can Latham rescue fatherhood?

Mark Latham is the new leader of the Labor Party opposition in Australia.

He has recently turned his attention to what he calls a crisis in masculinity. According to Latham the identity of men has become "blurred and confused" leading to loneliness and depression.

The solution suggested by Mr Latham is that "We should foster fatherhood at every opportunity" so that men have "a real sense of belonging to society".

So far, so good. But then Mr Latham spoils it all by outlining his model of fatherhood. As one paper reported it,

Mr Latham ... said men needed to do more to recognise the significance of fatherhood.

He said he expected more men to give up work to stay home to care for children.

"Women have traditionally taken this role, but I expect in future we will have many more stay-at-home dads in Australia," he said.

"This is an important part of rebuilding male identity - recognising the significance of fatherhood."

So there you have it. Mr Latham's wants to rebuild male identity by having men take over the traditional female role of mothering children. And this is supposed to make men less confused!

Individualism

Left liberals like Mr Latham often seem willing to talk about concepts like identity and connectedness, concepts which are also important to conservatives.

The problem is that the left liberal attempt to deal with such things inevitably becomes twisted by their commitment to liberal individualism as a first principle.

Liberals want individuals to be created by their own reason and will. Our sex is not created by our own reason and will - it's something we are simply born into. Therefore, liberals quite logically try to downgrade the influence of our sex in our lives. They prefer to see gender as a mere social construct from which the individual can be liberated.

That's why liberals take such a positive view of sex role reversal. It's a kind of proof that the influence of gender is being overthrown. It is a statement that our own will and reason is unlimited by the fact of gender.

The fact that liberals are led, by their philosophy, to reject the influence over us of our sex, explains the many hostile comments by liberals to the mere existence of gender distinctions.

Gloria Steinem, for instance, has complained bitterly about "the false division of human nature into the "feminine" and "masculine"; and Jessica Bernard has campaigned against traditional masculine fatherhood in favour of "paternity without gender, fatherhood without manhood."

The Australian social commentator Hugh Mackay has even called for those who have fought against gender distinctions to have their sacrifices recognised on ANZAC Day, alongside the sacrifices of soldiers who gave their lives for their country.

For Mackay, the achievements of those who "were prepared to fight a culture war that has radically refocused our understanding of the supremacy of personhood over gender", are equal to the efforts of Australian soldiers who fought in the World Wars. (The Age, 22/3/2000)

Fatherhood

So you can see the problem for Mark Latham. His politics allows him to recognise the social dysfunction brought about by a confused male identity. However, he is committed to the idea that masculinity itself is a mere social construct and that sex role reversal is liberating and progressive.

It is therefore quite logical for Mr Latham to tie the two things together by suggesting that a crisis in masculine identity should be solved by a sex role reversal in which men increasingly become "mothers" to their children.

Most men, though, will not see it this way. They won't take the view that men and women are so interchangeable that men can simply take over a feminine role within the family.

As it happens, even after a decade or more of encouragement, men have become the primary caregiver in only 1% of Australian families.

Mr Latham has correctly identified the importance to men of a male identity, and he has correctly identified fatherhood as being crucial to this identity. But this is as far as he can go. His liberalism won't allow him to accept the idea of a distinctly masculine fatherhood, which is different to the role played in families by women.

What does such a masculine fatherhood look like? I won't attempt to give a complete answer in a short article. But there are several obvious features that can be quickly mentioned.

Firstly, fathers are ultimately the ones responsible for providing for their families. This provider role is not always well appreciated, but it is still important for families.

It has a positive benefit of allowing mothers to care for their families without the pressure of full-time work outside the home. Take the case of "Jane" as recorded by Bettina Arndt in an article on modern marriage (State of the union, The Age 15/4/2000). Jane spent 12 years looking after her two children, whilst her husband Peter worked to support the family financially. When her children were aged 12 and 10, she returned part-time to paid work, but as the article points out,

She finds she can't cope if she works more than 20 hours a week. "When I'm flat-chat and Peter is flat-chat, it's hideous. I become a shrew. It's not worth it. I didn't have children to shriek at them and blame them."

Peter is effectively helping his family as a father by protecting his wife from the pressures of full-time work. His efforts to be a provider mean that his children have a less stressed, and more gently feminine mother to care for them.

According to "Australia's foremost fatherhood researcher", Macquarie University psychologist Professor Graeme Russell, many men are aware of the importance of their efforts to be providers, despite the denigration of the role in the media. Professor Russell states that,

They [men] know the role of provider is being devalued, yet when you talk to men about this, they'll tell you they still see their work as family nurturing.

Being a provider is not the only role that fathers perform. It's also important that men support their wives emotionally. The Herald Sun relationships columnist, Toby Green, puts it well when she describes men as fulfilling "the role of nurturer to the nurturer". Toby Green says of new mothers that,

It is important, since she feels she is the lifeline to the child, that he [the father] be the chief emotional support to her. Someone needs to fill her emotional cup so she is topped up to fill that of someone else. (Herald Sun, 1/7/99)

Finally, fathers also have an important role to play in socialising their children, especially their sons. This was recognised as long ago as 1506, in an Italian play called Clizia. The daily life of a "good father" was described in this play as follows,

He [Nicomaco] passed his time worthily; got up early in the morning, heard Mass, ordered the day's food, and then saw to whatever business he had in town, at the market, or at the magistrate's office. If not, he either discussed some serious topic or other with a few friends or shut himself in his study at home to balance and tidy up his accounts. Then he dined happily with his family and after dinner talked to his son, gave him advice, helped him understand human nature, taught him how to live, in fact, with examples from the past and present.

It would be possible, of course, to add a great deal more about the masculine contribution men make to their families as fathers. Suffice it to say that Mark Latham misrepresents things if he believes that men can only contribute to families, and achieve a sense of identity and belonging, by filling the caregiving role that women now play in family life.

We still need men to successfully carry out the traditional fatherhood role that is most suited to their masculine nature and which best complements the role played by women within the family.

(First published at Conservative Central, 13/03/2004)