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 The Feminine Utopia
Walter Karp
"A movement that began by asking for a fair share of dignity and human achievement can today think of no other source of dignity, no other source of achievement, than toiling at a job."
...Females, in the view of the women's movement, remain subordinate, because they are still "economically dependent" on males, which is to say, husbands. Miss Millett views the entire "sexist" system as the means by which males prevent females from gaining "independence in economic life." As Mme de Beauvoir wrote twenty years earlier in Paris, the extent to which women are dominated is the extent to which they are kept "from assuming a place in productive labor." Only when all women are "raised and trained exactly like men ... to work under the same conditions and for the same wages," will females ever be liberated.
What looms up as the giant barrier to such liberation is, of course, the primal institution of the family. It is the family that directly secures the economic dependence of women, for within the family the female is supported while she herself labors without pay -- a point the women's movement finds particularly telling. It is by means of the family division of roles that females are assigned, in Miss Millett's words, to "menial tasks and compulsory child-care," and thus are prevented from taking their place in the work force. It is by virtue of her training for the family that a female is brought up to be feminine, passive, compliant, and unaggressive, and so rendered unfit for winning independence through work.
The conclusion of the movement's argument is not easily avoided, though more moderate elements flinch from the logic of the case. The liberation of females, all females, can only come when the family is abolished as the primary unit of human life, to be supplanted, in the words of Miss Millett, by "collective, professionalized care of the young." With the end of the durable family-centered world, females would no longer have to be trained from birth to exhibit and admire domestic and maternal virtues. Legal distinctions, like that between legitimate and illegitimate children, and moral distinctions, like that between fidelity and adultery, would cease to have any meaning. The bond of marriage would be quite unnecessary and would be replaced by "voluntary associations."
In this familyless world females would enjoy "complete sexual autonomy," and their decision to bear children would become a purely voluntary one. Trained alike, sharing alike in the world's labor, men and women would be equals. Except for their differing roles in procreation, they would for the first time in human history be interchangeable, one with the other, as fellow human beings.
Those women's movement spokespersons who propose this "sexual revolution," as it has been called, do not expect that it lies in the immediate offing. What they do maintain is that this must be the ultimate goal of women in their struggle for liberation. They do not promise, in general, that humankind would be happier under this new dispensation. What they do say is that this new dispensation would be just and that only such a dispensation can liberate females from the age-old injustice of male domination.
And yet, something seems wrong, and very seriously wrong. At the base of the long and complicated argument propounded by spokespersons for the women's liberation movement lie two seminal assumptions, which deserve more scrutiny than the movement, to date, has given them. The first is the assumption that the family can be replaced successfully by a modern organization of experts, professionals, and salaried employees. The second is the assumption that human dignity is to be found in the organized wage-earning work force.
G.K. Chesterton put his finger on the first assumption in a short essay he wrote some fifty years ago, called "Marriage and the Modern Mind." What, he asked, did the women's movement of his day think about children? The answer was that they did not think about them at all. They would "imitate Rousseau, who left his baby on the doorstep of the Foundling Hospital." They overlooked the problem of children, Chesterton implied, because they saw children not as a problem but merely as an obstacle. Yet every known human society has made the problem of children its primary concern, and has done so because the problem is primary.
The most important thing about children is that we must have them. We must reproduce our kind in sufficient numbers to replace those who die. This is so not because we are animals, who cannot recognize, and will not mourn, the possible extinction of their species. It is so because we are human and have made for ourselves a human world whose essential attribute is its permanence. We die, yet it abides. Without that assurance, human life would be unthinkable. But precisely because we inhabit a human world, not even the birth of children is assured: as the women's movement has emphasized, there is no maternal instinct and no natural fulfillment in bringing children into the world. Just so. However, humankind must find some secure and permanent means to ensure that females submit to motherhood, that they continue to sacrifice a large portion of their individuality, for the sake of the human world's survival.
To date, at least, this has been assured by the family. Because of the personal bonds it establishes, the female is not asked to carry out an abstract duty to the species and to the world. She bears children for the sake of her spouse, or for the sake of her father, or for the sake of her mother's clan, according to the form of the family system. By means of the family, duty to the species becomes duty to known persons, to persons united to females by abiding ties of loyalty and affection. But what of the familyless world outlined by the women's movement? In such a world the sexual training of females would be abolished and bearing children would cease, of necessity, to be a deeply felt personal virtue. Under such conditions reproduction would become a public duty, as it was in the garrison state of Sparta, where women, as well as men, were largely liberated from family ties. The personal voice of the family would be replaced by mass exhortation -- the voice of the megaphone -- urging females to bear children for the good of the State or the Nation or the People.
Such a prospect can be looked on as merely repugnant, but more is at stake than that. To make child rearing a public duty, and mothers into state charges, it is worth remarking, was seen by the Nazis as a perfect means to extend totalitarian control, which is why they exhorted females to bear children out of wedlock in sunny, luxurious nursing homes. The Nazi effort to "liberate" females from the thralldom of husbands was not done, however, for the sake of liberty. A society compelled to make childbearing a public duty is one that puts into the hands of its leaders a vast potential for tyranny and oppression. The "purely voluntary" choice of bearing children might one day have a very hollow ring...
...But ... what of the familyless world of women's liberation? In describing possible family substitutes, spokespersons for the movement have not gone much beyond their cursory remarks about collective and professional child care. The details, however, do not matter as much as the essence of the thing. The care of children would be paid employment; the primary relation of adults to children would be the cash nexus. Child rearing would be an administrative function. That is the heart of the matter.
Certain consequences seem inevitable. From that primary experience of life the young would learn -- could not help but learn -- that the basic relation of one being to another is the relation of a jobholder to his job. Seeing that the paid functionaries who tended them could be replaced by any other paid functionaries, they would also learn that adults must be looked upon as interchangeable units, individually unique in no important way. Nor is it difficult to imagine the chief virtue the young would acquire should their care be turned into an administrative function. All our experience of bureaucracy tells us what it would be: the virtue of being quick to submit to standardized rules and procedures.
How would the human world appear to a child brought up in such a way? It would appear as a world whose inhabitants are jobholders and nothing more, where there is nothing else for a grownup to be except gainfully employed. What is more, the child would be perfectly raised, by the most basic lessons of his young life, to become another jobholder...
...In a society where cash is too often the link between people, it would make cash the sole link between adults and children. In a society where people are being reduced more and more to mere jobholders and paid employees, it would make the child's primary experience of life the experience of being someone's job. In a society showing a remorseless capacity to standardize and depersonalize, it would standardize and depersonalize the world in which children are raised. The ideal world in which females would be liberated for productive labor is a world that would tyrannize the young, which means, in the end, it would tyrannize us all.
Paid labor is freedom and dignity: that is the axiom of the women's movement today. It is not theirs alone. We hear it every day in a hundred different guises. We are told that the dignity of the citizen consists, not in being a free citizen, but in working on a job, that the dignity of the factory worker consists in working in a factory, and that the dignity of the "hard-hat" comes from wearing a hard hat. When an oppressed minority in America demands a citizen's share in power, it is told that what it "really" needs are more and better jobs. That is the common ideology, and if the dream of the women's movement is monstrous, that ideology is its seedbed. The women's movement has simply driven that ideology to its logical conclusion, and the ideal "sexual revolution" is that conclusion.
We must turn, then, to the work world to see what it does offer in the way of human dignity, achievement, and freedom. The first and primary question is that of freedom and its relation to work. The relation is negative. To the Greeks it was axiomatic that those who must labor could not be free. To be free required leisure -- even Karl Marx, the philosopher of productive labor, admitted in the end that freedom began when the workday ended. Without leisure, men could not take part in public affairs, could not speak and act in the polis, could not share in power, and thus could not be called free, for those subject to commands are not free. There is nothing abstruse about this, for quite obviously, people work and are paid for their labor even under conditions of abject tyranny and totalitarian domination. In the Soviet Union women play a far more prominent part in the work force than they do in America -- most of the doctors in Russia, for example, are, women -- and thus, by the women's movement definition, are freer than women are here. Yet Russian women enjoy no freedom at all.
The liberationists' blindness to the nature of the work world may have been explained, inadvertently, by Mme de Beauvoir when she pointed out in The Second Sex that in comprehending men, women see little more than "the male." So, in looking at the realm of work, the women's movement sees that males, as such, are ascendant. But they have hardly begun to grasp the obvious: that some men are more ascendant than others. When movement spokesmen contrast the "male" role and "male" achievements with the monotonous tasks of the household, many men may well wonder which males they are talking about. According to a statement in The Sisterhood is Powerful, "a great many American men are not accustomed to doing monotonous, repetitive work which never ushers in any lasting, let alone important, achievement." It sounds like a typographical error. Most jobs are monotonous and do not usher in lasting or important achievements. The majority of jobs are narrow functions, dovetailing with other narrow functions, in large-scale organizations.
Because this is so, most jobs demand few of the moral qualities that mankind has found worthy of admiration. They demand our proficiency, patience, and punctuality, but rarely our courage, loyalty, generosity, and magnanimity, the virtues we mean when we speak of human dignity. The one honorable satisfaction that most men obtain from their labor is the satisfaction of providing for their families, and the women's liberation movement would sacrifice the family for the sake of performing such labors. A movement that began by asking for a fair share of dignity and human achievement can today think of no other source of dignity, no other source of achievement, than toiling at a job. It has looked on the modern mass society, a society in which more and more activities are in the hands of administrations and bureaucracies, a society in which more people are becoming, more and more, merely paid employees, and it has made this mass society its ideal for human life. That, in the end, is the failure of the women's movement...
"The conclusion of the movement's argument is not easily avoided, though more moderate elements flinch from the logic of the case. The liberation of females, all females, can only come when the family is abolished as the primary unit of human life, to be supplanted, in the words of Miss Millett, by 'collective, professionalized care of the young'."
Reprinted with permission from Horizon. Spring, 1971, Volume XIII, Number 2. Copyright © 1971, American Heritage Publishing Company Inc. |
