Whew! After watching ABC-TV’s marathon documentary last week, I’m gladder than ever that I’m not part of the Sexual Revolution. ABC-TV showed us three dreadfully dreary hours of unhappy women, working harder but enjoying life less because their personal relationships with men and children are so unsatisfactory.
One after another, they cried their complaints into the camera. We saw successful career women who made business their first priority, and now have discovered that their biological clock has ticked on and they have passed up the chance to have a family.
We saw the woman in her late thirties, fighting back tears, saying “the women’s revolution was wonderful — but I want someone to love and be loved.” We heard about the “fear of being alone” and the 5,000 dating services that have profited from the problems of loneliness and isolation.
One woman coped with her dilemma by deliberately bearing a child whose father is married to another woman. Another was bearing a fatherless child via artificial insemination. A third chose a twice-divorced husband with his ready-made family.
We saw what is supposed to be the prototype of the post-feminist blue-collar couple: a woman who is a subway maintenance worker and a man who is her house-husband. Sorry, ABC, your provincialism is showing; that lifestyle will never play in Peoria.
Even the woman who has a successful business plus a husband and one child (whom she admitted came second in her life) was griping because she had to fight for what she had achieved and had to keep her emotions under control. It hadn’t occurred to her that successful men do those things, too. And then there was the woman who didn’t want a promotion because it would mean working longer hours and no lunch break.
We saw the victims of the easy divorce laws so eagerly promoted by the feminist movement in the 1970s. In truth, those easy divorce laws liberated husbands to trade in a faithful wife of 20 years and enjoy a younger woman.
We saw the middle-aged woman who has returned to the labor force and was trying to cajole or shame her husband into sharing the housework because she is so tired at the end of the day. Poor guy; he tried to bake the frozen dinner in its paper box, and the dials on the automatic washer are beyond his grasp.
We heard the Stanford professor say that women are no better off than in 1959 because women are now working longer and harder. “The more women achieve in their career,” we were told, “the higher their chance of divorce.”
ABC couldn’t resist the opportunity to sermonize. Peter Jennings started off with the false feminist dogma that, prior to the women’s lib movement, the American society was “predicated on women’s inferior status.”
Betsy Aaron’s preaching for the Sexual Revolution was obnoxious. She proclaimed that “the age-old idea of virginity” is out, that “divorce is no longer a dirty word,” and that “the stay-at-home housewife is becoming part of our history.” She announced that, “instead of one lifelong marriage, now it’s often a merry-go-round of marriage and divorce.” In case you didn’t know, that’s called “serial marriages.”
Richard Threlkeld proclaimed that we are “a nation at risk” (that’s not very original; it was the title of the Reagan Administration’s report on the failure of the schools to teach the basics), and that “child care is a national scandal.”
Richard has it all mixed up; it’s not our “nation” but the participants in the Sexual Revolution who are “at risk,” as the soap-opera program clearly showed. Indeed, it is a national scandal the way those who joined the Sexual Revolution have treated their children — all the way from abortion to latch-key children to the trauma forced on children by parents who divorce.
ABC’s solution for these emotionally confused women is for our government to imitate the policies of other countries which have socialized and warehoused children into tax-funded institutions in order to keep their mothers employed in the labor force. ABC scrolled the list of countries whose policies we are advised to copy: the Soviet Union, East Germany, Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria, China, Nicaragua, etc.
ABC’s documentary reminded us again and again that the Sexual Revolution is “here to stay.” But if enough women see the program, the Revolution’s days are numbered. The personal testimonies of so many unhappy women cry out that the price they paid to join the Sexual Revolution was too high.
