“Why can’t the wife pursue a career and the husband take care of the house and babies?” That is one of the questions I am most frequently asked by women when I visit college campuses. My stock answer never pleases them.
“You don’t have to get my permission,” I reply. “All you need to do is to find a young man who wants that kind of marriage. But my observation of life is that very few men are willing to play that role.”
Those who seek the substantive answer to that question, or the answer to the question of why so many college women ask such a silly question, should read a new book called Men and Marriage by George Gilder, author of the best-selling defense of private enterprise called “Wealth and Poverty.”
Gilder’s book also provides answers to the question I am most often asked by college men. “Why, when young women seem totally bent on a career and independence from men, is ‘money … a good job … a promising career’ still the first quality they look for in a man they might want to marry?”
Young women say they want men to be “sensitive” and “compassionate” and share in the diapers and dishes, but most of all they want a husband to have a good income. All the Phil Donahue attributes he can muster will not compensate for failing to fill the role of provider.
Men and Marriage is unique; no other book in print addresses such fundamental questions as why men marry and why society depends on the natural and different roles of men and women — in marriage, in the family, and in society.
For the past two decades, the fad of feminism has taught the falsehood that men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, are fungibles, interchangeables. Gilder proves, with a wealth of sociological detail, that this is just so much nonsense.
Men and women have different natures, different purposes, and different functions.
Civilization depends on understanding, respecting, and fulfilling those differences.
Gilder’s book is enlivened with a couple of allegories. One explains why men marry — and what often happens to them, and to society, when they don’t. Another explains why the biggest profiteer of women’s liberation is the successful, middle-aged man who now can, without shame or penalty, put his faithful wife out to pasture, and enjoy the favors of a new wife in her youthful, fertile years.
The women’s liberation movement has had a profound effect on our society. It has produced a high divorce rate, 20 million abortions, much androgynous mischief, and a social acceptance of promiscuity and non-marital lifestyles for women as well as men.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported this month that 7,500,000 fathers have vanished. That’s a disaster far in excess of all the battle deaths in World War II (292,131), in the Korean War (33,629), and in the Vietnam War (47,318), combined.
One-fourth of American families with children are thus horribly disadvantaged because they have no father in the home. No amount of taxpayers’ money can ever compensate for this personal and societal tragedy.
Did a foreign enemy steal into our cities at night and slaughter the fathers? No, women’s liberation and sexual liberation stole into the minds and hearts of a generation and “liberated” millions of men and women from marriage and its responsibilities.
Women’s liberation taught young women to seek fulfillment in paid employment instead of as wives and mothers. Sexual liberation taught men and women to seek temporary pleasures instead of a monogamous, lifetime commitment. Liberation advocates forgot to warn what an awful price would be paid by the children.
Men and Marriage explains the successful relationship between a man and a woman, that wonderful nexus of mystery and intimacy, of romance and practicality. Men and Marriage shows why traditional marriage is essential to a stable society.
The next time people suggest that it is important for young people to be taught “the facts of life,” tell them to learn the facts of life as taught so powerfully in George Gilder’s book. It’s must reading especially for young women because it explains why men are the way they are. The fine print in the front of George Gilder’s new book suggests that librarians should catalogue it under sex customs, family, love, and sex roles. But those categories don’t begin to describe the rich content of this book or tell why it is so timely in an era when it is chic to talk glibly about the “changing roles of men and women.” (Pelican Publishing Co., Gretna, LA, $15.95.)
