Archive for the 'Having children' Category

Choice 4 Men and the Glenn Sacks show

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 16, 2005
in Abortion, Feminism, Having children, Men and Masculinity, Men's Movement and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 316 Comments

Glenn’s promo for this Sunday’s show is up. I’m going to be debating the concept of "Choice 4 Men" with Glenn and columnist Amy Alkon.  Here’s the promo:

Nationally syndicated advice columnist Amy Alkon believes that men, like women, should have reproductive rights. Condemning women who get pregnant intentionally and "turn casual sex into cash flow sex," she notes:

"In no other arena is a swindler rewarded with a court-ordered monthly cash settlement paid to them by the person they bilked…Penelope Leach, in her book Children First, poses an essential question: ‘Why is it socially reprehensible for a man to leave a baby fatherless, but courageous, even admirable, for a woman to have a baby whom she knows will be so?’…the law, as written, encourages unscrupulous women to lure sex-dumbed men into checkbook daddyhood."

The "Choice for Men" movement seeks to give unmarried fathers the right to relinquish their parental rights and responsibilities within a month of learning of a pregnancy, just as mothers do when they choose to give their children up for adoption.

Feminist Gender Studies professor Dr. Hugo Schwyzer, Ph.D calls Choice for Men "profoundly offensive," noting that it "seeks to give men the right to evade responsibility for the children they help to conceive."

I’ve been very clear on this issue, especially in this post during last summer’s Amy Richards controversy.  I said then, and still believe now, the following:

Every man who ejaculates inside a woman, whether or not contraception is used, is signalling his willingness to become a father. If men are not ready and willing to raise a child conceived through an act of sex, they are morally responsible for refraining from sex…

I’m not familiar with Alkon.  I’ve been reading through the material on her site today, and she seems like a fairly standard "libertarian feminist".  I can’t say we’ll disagree on everything, but on this issue, we will.  This will mean that in some very real sense, I may be taking her on from the right, at least in my insistence that the only real choice that a man deserves in this situation is whether or not to have sex in the first place.  After that decision has been made, I am adamant that he, jointly with the woman with whom he briefly partnered — is morally (and financially) responsible for any and all outcomes from that initial decision.  Even if those outcomes last a lifetime.

Whatever your views, please consider calling into the show on Sunday afternoon.

Clarification

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 10, 2005
in Christianity, Feminism, Having children and Marriage
. 21 Comments

I have nothing positive to say about last night’s Colombia-USA friendly.  To be fair, the South Americans had their "B" team on the field, but apparently some of the top Yanks were absent as well.  The USA played superbly; in all my years of watching them, I’ve never seen the Americans so crisp and fast and focused.  Honestly, Colombia was lucky that the score wasn’t worse than 3-0, USA.  Still, we had fun, though it was a bit odd to have an international match played in a run-down old football stadium in far-off Fullerton.

Perhaps rightly, I’ve been taking some heat (particularly at Amanda’s place and from her commenters) over this sentence from Tuesday’s post:

I’ll catch some flak for this, but in my opinion one of the greatest gifts a  husband can give his wife is the freedom to choose to what degree she wishes to remain in the public sphere after they’ve had children.

Deja Pseu wrote:

Aside from the economic limitations and the inherent privilege indicated here, there’s the idea that a wife’s "freedom to choose" is something that resides with the husband, which is his to give or withhold. *That* bugs the living crap outta me.

Well, put that way, the idea causes me similar distress — and was not what I intended to convey.  Let me see if I can clarify.

Biology necessitates that women, rather than men, give birth.  (Even the most ardent anti-essentialists will presumably make that concession.)  Few would argue that the burden of pregnancy is borne equally by men and women.  Even after birth, assuming that a mother is interested in breast-feeding (among other things), she is better equipped biologically to care for her newborn.  As time passes, of course, her "advantages" (or burdens, depending on your perspective) decrease to the point where all of the tasks of nurturing and caring for a child might be equally well-performed by a father.

In more families than not, it is going to be preferable to have the mother work as the primary care-giver for very small children.  This may be because of cultural pressures; it may be because of innate preferences, it may be some combination of the two.  Each couple will have to work this out for themselves, of course.  Some may choose a counter-cultural approach in which the male partner assumes the primary care-giving role.  I certainly have no problem with that!

My concern is with the attitudes that so many men bring to fatherhood.  Far too many men — we don’t have to look far for this — still refuse to take an equal role in parenting their children and performing other domestic tasks. I think my generation of fellas is getting considerably better at this, but both hard evidence and anecdotal observation tends to suggest we males have a ways to go. 

But back to my inflammatory sentence.  Folks, I ought to have made it clear that my views came out of a Christian perspective.  As I’ve written before, I’m convinced that Ephesians 5:21 is the greatest sentence in Scripture on marriage:

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

From the standpoint of radical mutual submission, marriage is the willing and voluntary surrender of one’s freedom to one’s spouse.  Spouses become, in a very real sense, guardians and defenders of each other, each with claims on the other’s time and effort and flesh.  Paul writes elsewhere:

The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.

(It’s amazing how many folks, conservative Christians and secular progressives, fail to reflect on the radicalness of the second sentence in that passage.)

To me, this is about much more than the expectation of sexual fulfillment. It’s about a life of mutual self-sacrifice.  Frankly, looking at the way in which household chores and child-rearing duties have historically been divided, I don’t think we fellas have been pulling our weight.  We’ve demanded submission without offering it in return; we’ve asserted ownership rights over our wives without humbly offering our bodies and our lives in service in return.   Husbands and wives do guard each other’s freedom, I think — and we give each other a gift when we make it possible for the other to both be an effective parent and an active participant in the outside world. 

I’m not claiming to be an expert on marriage.  Three divorces leave me with little claim to expertise in maintaining successful relationships!  (The California legal system, on the other hand, is more familiar.)  But since my last divorce my sense of what marriage is has continued to grow and change.  I am convinced that both men and women are equally called to serve their partners.  And though each ought to surrender his or her freedom to the other, each ought to be willing to "give back" what has been given to them. It was in that spirit that I wrote the offending sentence, and in that spirit that I defend it.

I’m not sure that even the Christians among my readers, much less my secular feminist and Men’s Rights critics, will have much to agree with here.

“Shut down your wife”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 8, 2005
in Having children and Marriage
. 60 Comments

Good satire is alternatingly infuriating and enlightening.  This week’s case in point is this playful piece by Michael Lewis from Sunday’s Los Angeles Times: How to Put your Wife Out of Business.  Excerpt:

There was a brief time, from about 1985 to 1991, when high-powered males demonstrated their status by marrying equally high-powered females with high-paying jobs. That time has passed. The surest way for a man to exhibit his social status — the finest bourgeois bling — is to find the most highly paid woman you can, working in the most high-profile job, and shut her down.

Jeepers.  Even in jest, Lewis is going for a nerve. He offers his own experience as an example:

What men need, really, are role models. Other men who have done it and lived to tell the tale. Consider, for example, me. I hope I don’t need to remind the reader, but I will anyway: When we met, my wife — Tabitha Soren — was a hotshot. She walked from her offices at MTV into Times Square and people shrieked her name and bayed for her autograph. She made pots of money. She couldn’t swing a dead cat in the television business without hitting a job offer. And now — behold! Two children later, she has happily abandoned fame and fortune and is making a second "career" as a fine-art photographer.

Bonus points for those readers who remember Tabitha Soren.  I certainly do.

There’s some considerable truth in what Lewis writes, in that most of us can think of a great many examples of successful women who, usually in their thirties, choose to focus on motherhood and homemaking while opting out of their careers.  I come from a large family; I’ve got half a dozen female cousins in their thirties or early forties to whom I am very close.  All are college-educated, most had considerable success early on in their twenties.  All have had children in the past decade, and have chosen to focus their time and their energy on their families.  If they do work outside the home, they do so in a part-time or volunteer capacity.

The problem with Lewis is that even in satire, he denies his wife (and other "shut-down" women) their own agency.   (He’s got other problems, like crass class-ism, but we’ll let that be for now.)  For Lewis, opting out of the business world is not presented as something his wife (or other successful women) chose because motherhood and homemaking spoke to their real desires; rather, it is something that he (and other successful men) made possible through their own power and financial resources.   The wives’s choices are thus contingent on their husband’s high status, rather than on the wives’s genuine desire to place "family first."   Lewis is right about the end result, but vastly over-inflates men’s role in it.

Judging from the experiences of family and friends (and societal trends at large), it would be hard to deny that there are a great many successful women who choose to leave high-status jobs (at least temporarily)  in order to focus on their families.  But anti-feminists make a mistake when they assume that these women have somehow magically "seen the light" by abandoning careers for domestic bliss.  Rather, many of my female friends and family seem conscious of a kind of seasonality to their lives and to their reproductive choices.  As they aged, their priorities shifted.   But those priorities will surely shift again as their children grow and become more autonomous.  Let me assure you that my dear female cousins who are homemakers at 35 have no intention of remaining clear of public life indefinitely!   Once one has had a child, one is surely a parent forever.  But the amount of time and energy parenting requires does, thankfully, seem to decrease somewhat as children mature and grow more autonomous.

I’ll catch some flak for this, but in my opinion one of the greatest gifts a  husband can give his wife is the freedom to choose to what degree she wishes to remain in the public sphere after they’ve had children.   Obviously, if she’d like to continue to work outside the home, that will mean that he will have to take over a corresponding amount of domestic work.  (Unless they are wealthy enough to afford outside help.)  Her ability to continue to pursue her goals is contingent on his willingness to change diapers, do dishes, and take over child-rearing responsibilities.  Some couples may be quite happy with a very traditional arrangement, with husband as "breadwinner" and wife as "domestic engineer".  Others, motivated by desire or necessity, may find it essential to have two incomes even while their children are small.  The man’s job, as far as I am concerned, is to do more than provide materially for his wife.  It is to make it possible for her to decide just how committed to her career she would like to be after motherhood.

Some musings on the motherhood dilemma

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 19, 2005
in Feminism and Having children
. 26 Comments

I have mixed feelings about this past week’s David Brooks op-ed piece in the Times: Empty Nests and Hearts (a tip of the hat to Lynn and Mary for bringing it to my attention for bringing it to my attention).  It starts thus:

Over
the past 30 years, the fraction of women over 40 who have no children
has nearly doubled, to about a fifth. According to the Gallup
Organization, 70 percent of these women regret that they have no kids.


It’s possible that some of these women regret not having children in
the way they regret not taking more time off after college. But for
others, this longing for the kids they did not have is a profound,
soul-encompassing sadness.

The first question this raises is an obvious one:  assuming the Gallup poll is right, to what do we attribute that regret?  Is it because, as traditionalists would have it, these childless women ignored their own natural instinct to bear and raise offspring?  Have they missed out on the defining experience of a woman’s life?  Or, as progressives might have it, is that regret at least partially socially imposed, the consequence of living in a society that still defines women’s worth in reproductive terms?  I’m leaning towards the latter explanation myself.

Anyhow, Brooks manages a nice line here:

Women now have more choices over what kind of lives they want to
lead, but they do not have more choices over how they want to sequence
their lives.

For example, consider a common life sequence for
an educated woman. She grows up and goes to college. Perhaps she goes
to graduate school. Then, during her most fertile years, when she has
the most energy for child-rearing, she gets a job. Then, sometime after
age 30, she marries. Then, in her mid-30’s, when she has acquired the
maturity and character to make intelligent career choices, she takes
time off to raise her kids.

Quite a bit there to unpack.  First off, Brooks’ "educated woman" is an economically elitist image indeed! (Mary Garth makes this point as well).  My classes are filled with young and not-so-young women pursuing educations, many already with children.  Brooks’ woman "gets a job" after college.  Heck, I don’t have many students of either sex who don’t already have at least one job, perhaps two.  Close to a third of my students work full-time hours.  I’m not sure that they would recognize themselves in the Brooks piece.

But I’ll admit he’s dead on about the "sequencing problem".   Our contemporary work culture is ill-matched to biology!  Many of my female students do long to lead the life of Brooks’ "educated woman", even though they haven’t thought through the problem of timing very well.  I often ask my students in my women’s studies classes when they think the "ideal" age to get married is.  I note that in the last couple of years, the median age they give as a response seems to have gone up (it’s now about 27, if my unscientific sampling can be trusted).   Many do expect to finish college, get a graduate degree, have children in their early 30s, and somehow balance that with a career. While I applaud their ambition, I want them to be clear about two things — the real potential of infertility if they wait "too long", and the reality that contemporary corporate culture is not particularly compatible with their aspirations.   

My goal is to make these young women better prepared for blending their future career and reproductive decisions.  But I also want to make them mad.  I want to turn them into activists who will begin to agitate for changes in workplace culture.  A feminist response must be more than merely asking young women to decide early on  what they intend to give up in order to try and have both motherhood and career!  We’ve got to ask critical questions about corporate culture,and where possible, seek legislative remedies (increased paid maternity leave with job security, etcetera).   At the same time, we’ve also got to ask whether we need to do more to dispel the "only a mom" stigma that leaves many women convinced that motherhood is not, in and of itself, a real "career."

And as a man, I’m interested in challenging other men to become part of the solution.  Men have been far more willing, on the whole, to invite women into the workplace than to take over the domestic duties that make it feasible for a woman to fulfill her potential.  It’s not enough for us to say to our wives and gal friends, "you go, girl!"  We have to place our encouragement into tangible action, which may mean cooking and cleaning and shopping and taking care of our children.  It may mean rethinking the real meaning of success and career in our lives.   I’m happy to say that I do see many men of my generation willing to become visible and committed allies with their partners.  But we still need many more men to step up to the plate. 

Dependency and personal choices

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 27, 2004
in Age, Family, Having children, Politics and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 45 Comments

This post is a bit more dull than some, perhaps — but I’ve been thinking about interconnectedness and dependence lately.

Secretly lurking in my liberal heart is a feisty social conservative. He only comes out once in a while, and he is particularly stimulated by the monthly Catholic journal First Things. Last month’s issue is finally on-line, and from within it, this terrific article by Mary Ann Glendon: Discovering Our Dependence. It’s a fine op-ed about personal choices, interdependency, and aging. Here’s a section:

Longer life spans have expanded the population of frail elderly persons, including victims of dementias characterized by lengthy periods of disability. Changes in women’s roles have greatly reduced the traditional pool of caregivers for the very young and the very old alike. Low birth rates are decreasing the ratio of active workers to pensioners and persons requiring social assistance. In combination, declining birth rates and improved longevity mean that the dependent population now includes a much smaller proportion of children and a much larger proportion of disabled and elderly persons than ever before. But with increased divorce and unwed parenthood, the impoverished population is now composed largely of women and children.

A serious problem indeed, especially in Western Europe but perhaps also in this country. She goes on:

Where children are concerned, changes in the sexual and marital behavior of large numbers of adults have altered the very experience of childhood. Moreover, as the proportion of childless households has grown and societies have become more adult-centered, the general level of concern for the well-being of children has declined. They are out of sight and increasingly out of mind. Cambridge economist Partha Dasgupta noted an interesting “free rider” problem: childless individuals (who as a group enjoy a higher standard of living than child-rearing persons as a group) expect to be cared for in old age through benefits financed by a labor force that they are not helping to replenish.

Well, how about replenishing by encouraging immigration? Oh, never mind. I’m childless and 37 — clearly, a “free rider” in training.

And here comes Mary Ann the social conservative:

With widespread acceptance of the notion that behavior in the highly personal areas of sex and marriage is of no concern to anyone other than the “consenting adults” involved, it has been easy to overlook what should have been obvious from the beginning: individual actions in the aggregate exert a profound influence on what kind of society we are bringing into being. Eventually, when large numbers of individuals act primarily with regard to self-fulfillment, the entire culture is transformed. The evidence is now overwhelming that affluent Western nations have been engaged in a massive social experiment—an experiment that brought new opportunities and liberties to adults but has put children and other dependents at considerable risk.

I like the way she puts that — balancing increased liberties with increased risk. To her credit, she doesn’t do what most social conservatives do: urge women to return to their traditional tasks of “sandwiching” (caring simultaneously for their children and their parents and grandparents.) The solution to the problem is obviously not one that can be born by women alone. But if we expect the state to provide crade-to-grave care while expecting to sharply limit our own fecundity, the numbers simply don’t add up long-term. I wish our politicians would talk about this.

The most compelling argument that social conservatives make about marriage and the family tends to be the one that Glendon made above: individual actions in the aggregate exert a profound influence on what kind of society we are bringing into being. This is true about many things. It is true of our reproductive behavior, of course. It’s also true about recycling aluminum cans and any other environmental action, though social conservatives are, without exception that I know of, more conserved with the preservation of the traditional family than with our fragile ecosystems!

When I grow old and feeble, I hope to be cared for by those I love — up to a point. I would want them to visit me, but I don’t want some future child of mine helping me on and off the toilet! Then again, I don’t know that it’s any more progressive to want what rich old folks have now, which is usually to have working-class immigrant women wiping their soiled bottoms instead. That doesn’t seem terribly feminist or socialist to me. I ‘m conflicted.

Here’s Glendon’s sobering conclusion:

To state the obvious: if the outlook for dependents is grim, the outlook for everyone is grim. Despite our attachment to the ideal of the free, self-determining individual, we humans are dependent social beings. We still begin our lives in the longest period of dependency of any mammal. Almost all of us spend much of our lives either as dependents, or caring for dependents, or financially responsible for dependents. To devise constructive approaches to the dependency-welfare crisis will require acceptance of this profound and unchangeable fact of life.

Amen.

Congrats all aroundl

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 11, 2004
in Blogging and Having children
. Closed

Two very different bloggers have become fathers in the past few days: XRLQ and Rudy. Send them your regards.

The disaster with the tree has been cleared up. The downstairs window pane has been replaced. Matilde the chinchilla, who has had an exhausting day, is finally sleeping. I’ve missed my office hours, but will be back on campus for night class tonight.

Update on Rudy and Sam and fear

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 14, 2004
in Chinchillas, Having children and People
. 4 Comments

An update on yesterday’s post:

Rudy Carrasco’s son, Sam, does indeed have leukemia. He is beginning chemotherapy this morning at Children’s Hospital, Los Angeles. The splendid Jen Lemen is organizing a fundraiser at her blog; I have made a small donation and encourage others to consider the same. I am praying constantly for this man whom I’ve never met (we live a mile from each other at most) and his family.

I am not yet a father. By God’s grace, in God’s time, I pray that I will become one. I’ve spent years working with and loving on other people’s kids and teens; it may be time for one or two of my own! But I cannot imagine the fear and pain that must come when your child is diagnosed with leukemia!

I think about how I reacted when our little chinchilla was electrocuted in May. I think how I still worry about her today. Chinnies, you see, are in constant danger of overheating. They have those marvelously thick pelts (the sort that cretins of the most vile sort like to wear as coats); they don’t cool themselves well. Matilde loves to bounce off the walls of our bedroom and burrow in our closet each morning and evening. This morning, she got a bit overheated (something you can always tell by checking the temperature of a chin’s ears.) When we put her back in her cage, she was exhausted. We put a frozen water bottle in with her, and she sat on it for fifteen minutes, just trying to cool down. It was a bit scary. On a day like today, when we shall come close to hitting 100 degrees outside, I live in fear that our air conditioning at home will fail. It is very easy to get myself all tied up in knots of anxiety about an animal who weighs 600 grams! How on earth do parents of human children cope???

Reasons to Rejoice

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 28, 2004
in Blogging, Christianity, Fun, GLBTQ, Having children, Marriage and Sports
. 9 Comments

What are you grateful for tonight? I’m grateful that our chinchilla is well, that I have a new car coming, and that I am finally online with my cable modem from home. Oh yes, and I am running again, healed from that loathsome and tenacious respiratory infection.

There are other reasons to rejoice: XRLQ and wife are to have a baby boy; send your congrats to the erascible and erudite unpronounceable one.

The Cal Golden Bears softball team is in the semifinals of the College World Series; I caught a bit of the game today.

In my post on confirmands at All Saints, I mentioned that Bishop Jon Bruno of Los Angeles was planning to perform his first same-sex blessing since becoming bishop on May 16. It happened as planned; here is the account.

Bishop Bruno invited Malcolm and Mark to stand in full view of family and friends to declare their covenant to one another : promises to live together in love, to be faithful to one another, to support one another so that they might grow into maturity of faith in Jesus Christ and to do all in their power to make their life together a witness to the love of God in the world.

The bishop then instructed the couple to clasp each other’s hand so that he could wrap them with a beige silk scarf presented by Mark’s brother, John, and painted by Malcolm’s mother, Beatrice, half a century ago. The bishop pointed out the painted image on the scarf – a flock of cranes – and noted it symbolized good health, prosperity and the uniting of two families. After tying the scarf in a knot around their hands, Malcolm and Mark took turns pledging their love for one another.

The invited guests prayed for the couple and gave their promises to celebrate with them and stand by them in times of trouble and distress. Then, all, many with tears of joy in their eyes, raised their hands and joined the bishop in the blessing the union of these two loving and gracious men. How could they not?

Not all are rejoicing. Kendall Harmon is concerned as to definitions:

Sure sounds like a wedding to me. But it isn’t one we are told. No legal implications either. So we are clear on what it is not (or are we really?) What is it then? Can you do something this significant without even an agreed upon term for what it actually is? Without any meaningful development of a basically coherent theology for it?

Well, liberals are very clear on what we think it should be: a wedding. A wedding legally, spiritually, and theologically indistinguishable from a heterosexual wedding. The problem for me, as a liberal with deeply evangelical impulses, is that most of the best theology is on the other side. Liberal theologians end up using Enlightenment rhetoric about liberty and rights as often as they cite Scripture. The left has completely captured my heart. Unfortunately, the right has my head. Yet as a complete and utter ENFJ, I’m going to put my heart first. As my second-favorite poet, Auden said:

and always, though truth and love
can never really differ, when they seem to,
the subaltern should be truth.

Bethany Torode and another kind of teenage pregnancy

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 16, 2004
in Christianity, Family, Feminism, Having children, Marriage and Youth
. 3 Comments

Whenever I am feeling counter-cultural (in a rightish sort of way) I assign three essays by Bethany Torode to my students.

The Largest Career of All (2000)
Confessions of a Teenage Mom (2001)
Finding the Center (2002)

They trace three years in this young woman’s life, from marriage to motherhood. An astonishingly mature and articulate young Christian woman, Torode (nee Patchin) sketches a very different vision of feminism, sexuality, and happiness than what we normally read and hear.

In her first article, she wrote this as she contemplated getting married and becoming pregnant while still in her teens:

There will always be women who scoff at me, who are disappointed because they think I let down our sex. There will always be the professors who sigh because I am not living up to their idea of potential. But I know what makes me happy, and I’m slowly learning not to feel guilty about sharing it with people.
I look forward to giving up my independence. The word “dependence” has come to mean something negative: “an unhealthy need for a person or substance, an addiction.” But I see it as a positive reliance on others for companionship and love.
A friend of mine once said his greatest desire is to create something beautiful and lasting. That stuck with me. I want to create a beautiful and lasting marriage with a man, and with that man I want to bear and rear children, which are the most exquisite and eternal creations we humans can take part in fashioning. Architects design buildings that will someday fall down, programmers construct computer software that will eventually be obsolete—but fathers and mothers create and cultivate souls that will never die. How wonderful to experience just an inkling of what God feels as our Father.

Good stuff. In her second piece, written while pregnant, Bethany wrote:

Yes, I am among those contributing to the teen pregnancy rate. I would encourage other responsible young Christians in their late teens and early twenties to do the same. Women, these are the best years of your life to have a baby (ages 18-to-27 are when your body is at its peak for childbearing, and having your first child during these years significantly reduces your risk of breast cancer). Men, why not channel your youth and energy into something with profound eternal value?

Is it “fun” becoming a mom? So far, I wouldn’t describe it that way. Pregnancy is a challenge, and frankly, not very enjoyable (at least in the early weeks). It’s also terribly frightening, much more so than I imagined it would be. I am opening myself up to inevitable hurt — whether it comes at the miscarriage of this child in a week’s time, or whether it is stretched out into 60 years of having pieces of my soul pulling at me from the separate beings of my children.

And in her third, written as the mother of baby Gideon, Bethany says:

To me, there is nothing greater than curling up between my husband and baby and knowing that both of them depend on me for their very happiness (as I also depend on them). All three of us want to be around each other constantly. My 16-year-old sister, too, complains about wanting to get married and have her own baby every time she holds Gideon. But I think that’s because we grew up in a household with a vibrant center, which formed an inner compass in each of us to help set a true course in our own pursuit of happiness.

Just as every wheel needs a hub and every cell a nucleus in order to work, every household needs a strong marriage at its center — and, over the last 50 years, an increasing number of households have been floundering without a visibly united (and physically present) team of husband and wife…

Though in the grind of the ordinary we sometimes forget it, human beings are the highest gifts of God in our lives. Without them, there would be no need to make sacrifices — but there would be no happiness either. Our families are where we must relinquish ourselves the most, and in return experience communion second only to that with God. That’s why the family has been hit the hardest by the selfishness pervading our culture. Because the sacrifices have not taken place, we have had very little vision of what the rewards could have been. Young and even older people today have only a vague sense of how to make a family.

What we need are more people willing to trust God with their fears and become models of self-sacrifice. The water may look unfathomably deep, and the mist and the waves may often obscure Him — but Christ is waiting for us, as he was for Peter, with outstretched hand. He will help us to regain a vision of what a happy household looks like; He will provide us opportunities to take those small steps towards a more anchored family and community. And we will discover Him in the oddest, quietest moments — like when we’re planting a seed or patching clothes.

It is the dazzling nature of her prose which captivates me, and enthralls — and enrages — my students. I’m going to drop all three articles on them in the coming weeks. Yes, they are firmly Christian, but the values that Bethany Torode articulates so beautifully are not exclusive to those who share our faith. As a childless man in his middle thirties whose life and whose world are utterly different from Bethany’s, I am bewildered but also charmed by her world view. And I think, as a gender studies prof, she’s got some crucially important things to say.

I don’t teach her in a vacuum — other, radically different voices are incorporated into my women’s studies classes. I am not advocating early marriage and pregnancy for all. But I do think she is saying something important, and it is something utterly unheard in the secular academy.

Marriage, feminism, and the Pill

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 16, 2004
in Family, Feminism, GLBTQ, Having children, Marriage and Sexuality
. 10 Comments

My step-grandfather once shocked his relatively liberal new family by declaring (over a particularly fine rack of lamb, as I recall) that “the decline of civilization was because of the birth control Pill.” Many family members, led by my dear mother, took him on, but he refused to retreat. He was convinced that the coming of reliable contraception had doomed marriage and the culture itself, and nothing could convince him otherwise.

I thought of him as I read this Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Donald Sensing, whose fine (and thoughtfully conservative) blog I link to. His op-ed is entitled: Save Marriage? It’s too Late, and Sensing’s argument is remarkably similar to my late step-grandfather’s. Here’s an extended excerpt:

Since the invention of the Pill some 40 years ago, human beings have for the first time been able to control reproduction with a very high degree of assurance. That led to what our grandparents would have called rampant promiscuity. The causal relationships between sex, pregnancy and marriage were severed in a fundamental way. The impulse toward premarital chastity for women was always the fear of bearing a child alone. The Pill removed this fear. Along with it went the need of men to commit themselves exclusively to one woman in order to enjoy sexual relations at all. Over the past four decades, women have trained men that marriage is no longer necessary for sex. But women have also sadly discovered that they can’t reliably gain men’s sexual and emotional commitment to them by giving them sex before marriage.

Nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43% since 1960. Instead of getting married, men and women are just living together, cohabitation having increased tenfold in the same period. According to a University of Chicago study, cohabitation has become the norm. More than half the men and women who do get married have already lived together.

The widespread social acceptance of these changes is impelling the move toward homosexual marriage. Men and women living together and having sexual relations “without benefit of clergy,” as the old phrasing goes, became not merely an accepted lifestyle, but the dominant lifestyle in the under-30 demographic within the past few years. Because they are able to control their reproductive abilities–that is, have sex without sex’s results–the arguments against homosexual consanguinity began to wilt.

Sex, childbearing and marriage now have no necessary connection to one another, because the biological connection between sex and childbearing is controllable. The fundamental basis for marriage has thus been technologically obviated. Pair that development with rampant, easy divorce without social stigma, and talk in 2004 of “saving marriage” is pretty specious. There’s little there left to save. Men and women today who have successful, enduring marriages till death do them part do so in spite of society, not because of it.
If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?

There’s a lot there to unpack. (I like the fact that both “divorce” and “promiscuity” get modified with “rampant”, one of my favorite words. It calls to mind rampaging hordes of hormone-driven adolescents, a group with whom I am happily familiar!) But like my grandfather, Sensing makes a classic mistake about the Pill. The vast majority of women who have taken the Pill in the past forty years are not promiscuous. Most women who took the Pill in its early years were married women (see this short article in Salon on the subject). Sensing fails to see that most women who take the Pill do so not out of a desire to have multiple sexual partners, but out of a desire to regulate the number of children they have within their marriage. Married folks have more sex than single folks, and last time I checked, most married women weren’t interested in being baby machines. Even those women who find motherhood to be the transcendent experience of their lives seem to be highly uninterested in having a very great many children!

Historically speaking, the Pill has impacted the lives of married women more than of single women. Rather than encouraging the “rampant promiscuity” that Sensing bemoans, what the Pill did was allow women to experience intimacy and pleasure with the men whom they loved without fear of pregnancy. The ability to regulate reproduction gave women access to the marketplace, access to the ivory tower, and access to economic and political power that they would not otherwise have had. Sensing seems to wish for a world in which intercourse and reproduction were once again inextricably linked, a world in which there could be no pleasure without very serious consequences. In its own way, his is a compelling argument. But it isn’t grounded on the historical facts, and it fails utterly to acknowledge that the real legacy of the Pill was not promiscuity, but women’s ability to embrace what men have always been allowed to embrace: intimacy, pleasure, and simultaneous independence.