The matriarchy described in the previous chapter is perceived by feminists as a lost Golden Age--and also as the bright wave of the future. Women living in surviving Stone Age societies, such as exist on Indian reservations, are held up as exemplars for the liberated women of our own society. "There are parts of the world," writes feminist Elise Boulding,

where women already feel the autonomy I am imagining for Western women in the future. For Americans, North and South, there is an alternative model for women close at hand, in the Native American communities....It doesn't take many encounters with women tribal leaders who have the quiet confidence of centuries of traditional knowledge behind them to realize that here are a set of teachers for European-stock American women right in our midst. Where does their serenity and self- confidence come from? What do they "know"?...This is a time for the rest of us, especially middle-class Western women, to "go to school" to those of our sisters who have the unacknowledged skills, the confidence, the serenity, and the knowledge required for creative social change.

These Stone Age women, despite their squalor, ignorance and poverty, are contented. They fill the biological role of the mammalian female, heading the reproductive unit, enjoying the liberty of the first law of matriarchy. And today's feminists are coming to share their tranquility and placidity. They are, as Helen Fisher says, "moving towards the kind of roles they had on the grasslands of Africa millions of years ago....Human society is now discovering its ancient roots." As Betty Friedan puts it,

For my generation and the generation that followed, the battle for women's rights came in the middle of life--after we'd started our families and were already living the feminine mystique. For us, the feminist movement meant the marvelous midlife discovery of a whole new identity, a new sense of self. The most notable result of this newfound identity was a dramatic improvement in the mental health of older women....Two decades ago mental hospitals were full of women suffering from involutional melancholia, a severe depression that afflicted women at the time of menopause when, according to the old feminine mystique, their life was over. But a few years ago the American Psychiatric Association stopped using the term because such acute depression was no longer considered age related.

Today the mental health of women in their 40s, 50s and 60s is as good as that of women in their 20s and 30s. No such improvement has occurred in men, so it really is related to the women's movement toward equality.

No such improvement has occurred in men because men have had to pay the costs. Men in the larger society are being ground down to the status of the men on Indian reservations--roleless, unmotivated, alcoholic and suicidal, because the first law of matriarchy deprives them of a stable family role.

It was the discovery a few thousand years ago of this connection between the regulation of female sexuality on the one hand and family and social stability, male productivity and social progress on the other which ended the Stone Age and began the era of patriarchal civilization. "Patriarchy's age," says lesbian- feminist Susan Cavin, "is approximately 3,000-5,000 years old. Compared to the millions of years human ancestors have populated the earth, patriarchy represents only a dot of human time." True. The fact shows that the creation of patriarchy is the greatest of human achievements, since each and every one of the other achievements of civilization came into existence during that dot of time, whereas the preceding millions of years created none of them. Patriarchy, says Adrienne Rich, "is the one system which recorded civilization has never actively challenged." That is because without patriarchy there can be no recorded (or unrecorded) civilization. The central fact about patriarchal civilization, besides its recency and the magnitude of its accomplishments, is its artificiality and fragility, its dependence on women's willingness to submit to sexual regulation. Women's de-regulation of themselves by achieving economic and sexual independence can wreck the system. The ghettos show how easily this can happen. The wrecking of the system is rapidly spreading from the ghettos to the larger society, where the legal system has become patriarchy's chief enemy, expelling half of society's fathers from their homes.

Dr. Gerda Lerner describes how sexual regulation was imposed on women in ancient Mesopotamia, during the era in which the patriarchal system was being developed: "While the wife enjoyed considerable and specified rights in marriage, she was sexually the man's property." Her rights and her status depended upon her acceptance of the patriarchal system--and vice versa, the system depended upon her acceptance of regulation. "In Mesopotamian law, and even more strongly in Hebrew law," continues Dr. Lerner, "all women are increasingly under sexual dominance and regulation....The strict obligations by husbands and sons toward mothers and wives in Hammurabic and Hebrew law can thus be seen as strengthening the patriarchal family, which depends on the willing cooperation of wives in a system which offers them class advantages in exchange for their subordination in sexual matters."

Providing for a woman and placing her "under coverture" in the honorable state of marriage is perceived by today's feminists in wholly negative terms as dominance, regulation and oppression. Feminist Dr. Alice Rossi speaks of "an exchange" between a husband and a wife in which the husband confers social status on the wife and "in exchange...she assumes economic dependence on him"--permits him to pay her bills. It doesn't occur to feminists that "their subordination in sexual matters" benefits women as much as it benefits men. It means law-and-order in the sexual realm and the creation of wealth in the economic realm. It means stable families which provide women with security and status and in which children can be decently reared and socialized.

As will be explained in detail in Chapter VII, Dr. Lerner's and Dr. Rossi's view of sexual law-and-order as something imposed by males is the opposite of George Gilder's. Gilder imagines that women have a primal yearning to impose sexual law-and-order on men and that civilization depends on men submitting themselves to women's higher ethic:

She is the vessel of the ultimate values of the nation. The community is largely what she is and what she demands in men.

He describes this imposition of female values on males as "creating civilization." But if civilization is a female creation, imposed by women upon men, why did not civilization precede patriarchy? "The appropriation by men of women's sexual and reproductive capacity," says Dr. Lerner, "occurred prior to the formation of private property and class society." It was the precondition for the creation of the wealth upon which civilization depends. Without sexual law-and-order men cannot be motivated to create wealth or do anything else worth doing.

While Dr. Lerner is oblivious to the advantages for women of this patriarchal law-and-order, she is correct in insisting that the law-and-order is a male idea. In discussing the Garden of Eden story she writes:

[T]he consequences of Adam and Eve's transgression fall with uneven weight upon the woman. The consequence of sexual knowledge is to sever female sexuality from procreation. God puts enmity between the snake and the woman (Gen. 3:15). In the historical context of the times of the writing of Genesis, the snake was clearly associated with the fertility goddess and symbolically represented her. Thus, by God's command, the free and open sexuality of the fertility-goddess was to be forbidden to fallen woman. The way her sexuality was to find expression was in motherhood.

It is significant that a feminist like Dr. Lerner perceives "female sexuality" as female promiscuity. On page 198, she has this:

To the question "Who brought sin and death into the world?" Genesis answers, "Woman, in her alliance with the snake, which stands for free female sexuality." [Emphasis added]

The Biblical view is not that "female sexuality" is severed from procreation but that it is joined to it, in other words that it must be regulated in accordance with the patriarchal Sexual Constitution which Gilder imagines as something which women try to impose on men, but which Genesis and Dr. Lerner more plausibly see as something men impose on women.

Dr. Lerner affects to believe (perhaps does believe) that sexual promiscuity signifies high status for women:

Further, women [in the Ancient Near East] seemed to have greatly different status in different aspects of their lives, so that, for example, in Babylon in the second millennium B.C. women's sexuality was totally controlled by men, while some women enjoyed great economic independence, many legal rights and privileges and held many important high status positions in society. I was puzzled to find that the historical evidence pertaining to women made little sense, when judged by traditional criteria. After a while I began to see that I needed to focus more on the control of women's sexuality and procreativity than on the usual economic questions, so I began to look for the causes and effects of such sexual control.

Her views, paralleling those of promiscuity chic movie actresses and other anti-patriarchal groupies, are antithetical to those of Gilder. Much of the feminist struggle is one to displace the feminine mystique "image" of the weakly virtuous patriarchy-accepting doll-wife abominated by Betty Friedan (and lauded by George Gilder) by the image of a defiantly promiscuous hell-raiser who will destroy the patriarchy by re-instituting the first law of matriarchy.

"The sexual control of women," says Dr. Lerner, "has been an essential feature of patriarchal power. The sexual regulation of women underlies the formation of classes and is one of the foundations upon which the state rests." Quite so. If you doubt it, ask yourself what kind of a state we will have when it is populated, as it is coming to be, by the fatherless offspring of today's promiscuous females--when the feminists on the campuses of our schools and colleges have convinced young women that the traditional patriarchal attempts to regulate their reproduction by imposing chastity and modesty upon them are a sexist plot to contravene the first law of matriarchy. The kind of state we will have is indicated by the evidence given in Chapter I, showing the high correlation between female-headed families and social pathology. "The state," continues Dr. Lerner,

during the process of the establishment of written law codes, increased the property rights of upper-class women, while it circumscribed their sexual rights and finally totally eroded them.

By their "sexual rights" she means not their right to be loved, honored and protected under coverture, not their right to enter into a stable and binding--and highly advantageous--contract to share their reproductive life with a man, but their right to be promiscuous, and therefore of no value to a man interested in having a family rather than a one-night stand. She does not even consider (what Gilder supposes to be self-evident) that many women covet the right to have a stable monogamous marriage, and thereby acquire the economic and emotional security and the status which the patriarchy offers women in exchange for allowing men a meaningful reproductive role--the right to be decently socialized in childhood, the right to the high status patriarchy confers upon "good" women.

"Their sexual and reproductive capacities," continues Dr. Lerner, "were commodified, traded, leased, or sold in the interest of male family members." What is the alternative? To have men not interested in stable family arrangements--to leave these arrangements instead to female improvisation of the sort found in the ghettos and on Indian reservations?

The Code of Hammurabi [continues Dr. Lerner] marks the beginning of the institutionalization of the patriarchal family as an aspect of state power. It reflects a class society in which women's status depended on the male family head's social status and property. The wife of an impoverished burgher could by a change of his status, without her volition or action, be turned from a respectable woman into a debt slave or a prostitute. On the other hand, a married woman's sexual behavior, such as adultery or an unmarried woman's loss of chastity, could declass her in a way in which no man could be declassed by his sexual activity.

Her status depended upon his status. Therefore she was motivated to make him achieve high status. And the success of the system in generating male overachievers who create wealth, social stability and progress--all beneficial to women--proves the arrangement to be desirable. Women would not have accepted it unless its benefits were greater than those offered by matriarchy. The wife of an impoverished burgher could have been de-classed by her husband's behavior, but she chose to be his wife because through marriage her status and income were more likely to be raised than lowered. This is the way the patriarchal system works, and it benefits everyone. It gives men motivation, makes them productive and thus helps their wives and children. It puts sex to work as a motivator, focusing on long-term (family) arrangements rather than on short term sexuality--promiscuity, the first law of matriarchy. "Society asks so little of women," says Betty Friedan. But that little must include the chastity and loyalty which makes patriarchal fatherhood and legitimate children possible.

"When Nigerian Muslim communities get richer through development," writes feminist sociologist Caroline Knowles, "women are increasingly confined in the home." Is it not the other way round--that when women are increasingly confined to the home, the communities get richer because more stable families are better motivators of male achievement?

There exists a woman's organization called Single Mothers by Choice but there exists no comparable men's organization called Single Fathers by Choice. A man must choose to marry if he wants children. Only a woman can choose to be a single parent--but for every woman who makes that choice there exists a man who is denied the choice of marriage and family, and therefore patriarchal society must deter single women from choosing parenthood. If women were to become economically independent (as feminism wishes them to be) and if the feminist principle becomes accepted that "there is no such thing as an illegitimate child," then men have no bargaining power, no way of inducing women to enter a stable marriage (though they may be willing to enter an unstable one as long as, following divorce, they have assurance of custody of the children accompanied by economic advantages). Under such conditions society becomes a matriarchal ghetto. "Woman, in precivilized society," writes Dr. Lerner, "must have been man's equal and may well have felt herself to be his superior." Her superiority (which made males idle drones) is why it was "precivilized"--and why precivilization lasted a million years. Her superiority is why Elise Boulding holds up the squaws on Indian reservations as models for American middle-class women. Her superiority is why women would not be altogether reluctant to return to precivilization, why feminists like Mary Daly declare that "society is a male creation and serves male interests" and that "sisterhood means revolution," why Freud thought that woman was the enemy of civilization, why feminists like Adrienne Rich insist that patriarchal civilization has been imposed upon women over "an enormous potential counterforce."

"In some places like Dahomey and among the Tlinkits of Alaska," writes feminist Marilyn French, "wealthy classes are patrilineal while poorer classes are matrilineal." Let's put this the other way round: the patrilineal classes are wealthy-- because their males are motivated to provide for stable families; the matrilineal classes are poor because their males are not. As she adds on the following page, "In matrilineal societies there are more sexually integrated activities and more sexual freedom for women." That is why they are poorer. Savage women and feminists want marriage to be unstable in order that they may point to its instability not only as justification for the first law of matriarchy but as proving the necessity for women to be subsidized by non-family arrangements which do not impose sexual law-and-order upon them. That the subsidization they demand must be paid for by taxing the shrinking numbers of patriarchal families who do submit to sexual law-and-order is no concern of theirs--except as it further undermines the patriarchy, which (they think) is good. Men stabilize marriage by creating wealth. According to Emily Hahn, "Necessity, as well as instinct, sends the ladies pell-mell to the altar; it is only the secondary things, social pressure of conscience, that send the men." (What sends the men is the desire to have families--which is not secondary, but never mind that.) What Ms. Hahn is acknowledging is that with women the economic motive is primary. Feminist Barbara Ehrenreich agrees:

Women were, and to a large extent still are, economically dependent on men....So what was at stake for women in the battle of the sexes was, crudely put, a claim on some man's wage.

The fact that, in a purely economic sense, women need men more than the other way round, gives marriage an inherent instability that predates the sexual revolution, the revival of feminism, the "me generation" or other well-worn explanations for what has come to be known as the "breakdown of the family."

(The instability does not predate the feminist/sexual revolution but is a principal consequence of this revolution.)

It is, in retrospect [continues Ms. Ehrenreich], frightening to think how much of our sense of social order and continuity has depended on the willingness of men to succumb in the battle of the sexes: to marry, to become wage-earners and to reliably share their wages with their dependents.

(A man formerly--in the days of stable marriage contracts--did not "succumb"; he entered into what he believed to be a binding agreement which promised him the satisfactions of marriage and the right of procreating legitimate and inalienable offspring. It is the invalidating of these expectations which has turned men off from marriage or made them enter into it with the shallow commitment of which Ms. Ehrenreich complains.)

She continues:

In fact, most of us require more comforting alternative descriptions of the bond between men and women. We romanticize it, as in the popular song lyrics of the fifties where love was an adventure culminating either in matrimony or premature death. Or we convince ourselves that there is really a fair and equal exchange at work so that the wages men offer to women are more than compensated for by the services women offer to men. Any other conclusion would be a grave embarrassment to both sexes. Women do not like to admit to a disproportionate dependence, just as men do not like to admit that they may have been conned into undertaking what one cynical male called "the lifelong support of the female unemployed."

She shows that it is the man's paycheck which holds marriage together, and then she, most illogically, describes this paycheck as something causing instability. The least stable marriages are those in which the husband fails to earn the paycheck and those in which the wife earns a large enough paycheck to make her economically independent of the husband. "In the overwhelming majority of households today," says Lynne Segal, "men are no longer the sole breadwinners, and as their economic power has declined, domestic conflict and strain have increased...." Segal regards it as self-evidently good that women should shake off male controls and that the relative decline in men's economic power facilitates this shaking-off. She speaks for most women. Besides economic emancipation, there is an emancipation from traditional mores. The increase in illegitimate births among white teenagers from 6.6 percent in 1955 to 40 percent today follows from the removal of the controls (shame, guilt, etc.) which feminists have been working to remove, and their replacement by "a woman's right to control her own sexuality."

Popular songs such as "Papa, Don't Preach" and "Thanks for My Child" illustrate the failure to comprehend the Legitimacy Principle as essential to the working of the patriarchal system. Mrs. E. M. Anderson of Compton's Teen Mothers Program comments thus concerning the message of "Thanks for My Child," dealing with the woes (but also the noble inner strength) of a poor female who meets the father of her child four years after it is born:

These guys [i.e., the unwed fathers] are dumb--dumb. All they think about is themselves. Responsibility? Forget it. They cause a lot of pain and are too dumb to care.

"The song," says Mrs. Anderson, "does a service if it exposes the problem of these young kids getting pregnant out of wedlock by these guys who don't want any part of being fathers." A better service would be to explain to the dumb guys how they might claim the responsibilities of fatherhood if they wished to do so. What inducement would she have society offer the guys who want to be fathers and have families? The larger society offers white males a fifty percent chance of having and keeping children and a fifty percent chance of losing them to their ex-wives. In the ghettos, society offers virtually nothing to males who accept the responsibilities of fatherhood--and it attempts to compensate for its failure to provide the props needed by responsible fathers by showering rewards upon single mothers (non-ghetto and ghetto) in the form of AFDC, food stamps, subsidized housing, free medical care and the rest.

Besides these material rewards, there are status rewards. According to Jeff Wyatt, program director of a radio station which plays "Thanks for my Child" every day on the demand of enthusiastic female listeners,

The message really touches them--the mother-child aspect of it. Women identify with the woman in the song. Maybe some of them know young ladies who have been in that situation. Maybe some of them have been in that situation themselves.

According to Mike Archie, music director of WHUR-FM in Washington, D. C., women, especially black women, are responding strongly to the record, which has been the most requested single at his station:

The single focuses on the inner strength of black women, which makes it appeal strongly to black women. I find that it really touches single female parents--or women with children in general. In the song this woman is saying how much she really loves her child and that love can carry her through anything.

This is the old "feminine mystique" again--which feminism was created to get rid of. Women were told by Ms. Friedan to make less of a fuss about their maternal functions ("Don't you want to be more than an animal?" ) and participate instead in the arena of male achievement. "Thanks for My Child" reverts to Mom's maternal functions as the true source of woman's glory. The miserable consequences of female unchastity are celebrated as proving "the inner strength of black women." And the same wonderful inner strength is illustrated by comparison with the irresponsibility of the dumb male. The Los Angeles Times article describing the popularity of the song quotes Wes Hall, dean of students at Compton High School, in the Los Angeles ghetto:

The guys who father these kids have all the excuses for ignoring their responsibilities. If no one makes the young man see his responsibility, he'll go scot-free and father more kids. The burden falls on the teen-age girls who are too young to handle it. Maybe this song will get a message to some of these young men--that what they're doing is very wrong.

The girls are too young to handle it--and therefore they need to be taught what nobody teaches them, the necessity of chastity and conformity to the Sexual Constitution, the necessity of rejecting the Promiscuity Principle which tells them they alone have the right to control their sexuality--without interference from the irresponsible males whom Wes Hall would like to make responsible but who are discouraged--or prevented--from responsibility by the Promiscuity Principle which allows females to be mothers while preventing males from being fathers. Instead of teaching these girls chastity, the song teaches them about their wonderful inner strength (which nobody would have known about if they hadn't been promiscuous), about the moral inferiority of the dumb male, equally responsible but lacking their inner strength--as though unchaste females might protect their virtue by surrounding themselves with chaste Parsifal-like males. They are taught that there is no such thing as an illegitimate child, that society must not be judgmental of them, meaning that it must not use shame and guilt to regulate their anti-social behavior. And so forth. Wes Hall simply refuses to see the fact that males cannot be responsible heads of families unless society insists upon female chastity and loyalty and implements its insistence by guaranteeing to males the rewards of family life which justify imposing upon them the obligations of paternal responsibility. For males to accept the responsibility which Wes Hall wishes them to accept there must exist some reasonably dependable way for them to assume responsibility--and there is no way, because promiscuous Moms and society want no part of them except their paychecks. Here's Edward McNamara, who wants to do what Wes Hall is urging the young black teenagers to do--accept the responsibilities of fatherhood. The law won't let him. He has had six court appearances to gain custody of an illegitimate daughter, and, after giving up on custody, more court appearances to gain visitation rights. According to the Los Angeles Times,

McNamara, 41, maintains that his constitutional rights were violated when San Diego County social workers--acting at the behest of the baby's mother--placed the girl with an adoptive family four weeks after her birth.

But in sharp questioning in a high court [U.S. Supreme Court] hearing on the case, the justices disputed the notion that the U. S. Constitution gives an unwed father rights that outweigh those of the child.

"Why can't the state of California decide it wants to follow this polity" of acting in the best interest of the child? asked Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. State law directs social workers to consider the child's welfare foremost in custody cases, and the courts have agreed that McNamara's daughter would be better served in the care of the adopting family.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said she wondered why someone who engages "in a so-called one-night stand" would have a constitutional right to control the fate of the child who accidentally results from the affair.

The right of "someone" is unquestioned if "someone" is the female who engages in the one-night stand. And if McNamara were not a participant in a one-night stand but a husband or ex-husband he would stand little better with the law. According to the Los Angeles Daily News,

In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that a husband did not have the power to impose an "absolute veto" over his wife's decision to have an abortion....Women's groups reject out of hand the argument that men have a right to a legal say in the decision making process...and insist that the abortion decision should belong solely to the woman.

The point is equally relevant to McNamara and to the black youths scolded by Wes Hall: Women's [and girls'] refusal to grant men a significant role in reproduction means that they are denying to themselves the right to make a dependable commitment to bear a husband's children. The Promiscuity Principle (a woman's right to control her own sexuality) makes women moral minors who cannot enter into an enforceable contract to share reproduction with a man. A contract with a woman is worthless if she insists on her right to break it--and has the law on her side in doing so. No matter what a man does, a promiscuous woman excludes him from responsible reproduction. It is for this reason that the civilizations of antiquity found it necessary to divide women into "good" and "bad," those with whom a binding contract of marriage was possible and those with whom it was not. Only with society's enforcement of the man's rights under the contract is it possible for him to accept the kind of responsibility Wes Hall wants black teenage youths to accept. The entire fabric of patriarchal civilization rests upon female chastity. It would be ridiculous to refer to a man's chastity as his virtue because his unchastity does not destroy his family and his wife's reproductive role. But a woman's chastity is her virtue because her unchastity destroys her family and her husband's reproductive role--and civilized society along with them, because civilized society is built on the patriarchal, nuclear, two-parent family.

Feminist Hazel Henderson writes a piece titled "Thinking Globally, Acting Locally," in which she complains of "fathers who refuse to pay their child support payments ordered by courts." In the same column of the same page she rejoices thus over the success of the sexual/feminist revolution:

Yet the genie will not go back in the bottle--the cultural revolution has already occurred. Politics only ratifies social change after at least a ten year lag. Even more terrifying for the old patriarchs and their female dupes is the knowledge that the whole culture is "up for grabs." For example, it could shift fundamentally in less than a generation IF women simply took back their reproductive rights, endowed by biology and Nature. All that women would need to do to create a quiet revolution is to resume the old practice of keeping the paternity of their children a secret.

She cherishes the Promiscuity Principle--but also men's money. Men must teach women that the money will not be forthcoming unless they submit to the patriarchal Sexual Constitution and allow fathers to have legitimate and inalienable children. Society wants males to earn money. It is the labor of males which creates the prosperity of society, as the poverty of the surviving Stone Age societies, the ghettos, and the Indian reservations amply shows. There is one way, and only one, of motivating males to earn that money, and that is to make them heads of families. Wes Hall may condemn the young black males who procreate illegitimate children and go "scot-free" of the responsibility which ought to accompany fatherhood. These young black males ought to be taught in their sex education classes that they aren't so much getting something for nothing, as they are being deprived of the possibility of real fatherhood because of the unchastity of the females who consent to cohabit with them and because of society's unwillingness to supply the props (in addition to demanding the complementary responsibilities) which fatherhood must have because of its biological marginality.

The black matriarchs, who, like Mrs. E. M. Anderson, view "Thanks for My Child" as "a positive statement of a mother's love for her child" no doubt also perceive it as a reaffirmation of female moral superiority, paralleling the one-upmanship of their Latin American sisters who encourage their men in childish displays of machismo in order to cast themselves in the complementary role ("marianismo") of morally superior, spiritually strong, understanding but forbearing "Mamacitas." It is men who must put an end to this feminine mystique. The male reply to the condescension of "Thanks for My Child" ought to be an indignantly ironic "Thanks for reducing me to the status of a stud. Thanks for preventing me from being a real father, from having a real family."

The male is not equally responsible with the female for inflicting illegitimacy on a child. In the patriarchal system a man can only be held responsible to a "good" woman, one who accepts the Sexual Constitution. The bad women are an essential part of the system, but they must be de-classed and regarded as unfit for marriage, since husbands can have no assurance of their chastity and loyalty, no assurance of having legitimate children by them. The feminist campaign to do away with the double standard is an attempt to remove this class distinction and make all women "good." Instead, it is making all women "bad," creating the Garbage Generation in the process. The predicament lamented in "Thanks for My Child" has the consequence that women can no longer trust men and men can no longer trust women.

77 percent of the women readers of Glamour magazine responded "yes" to a survey (Nov., 1985) asking whether they approved of single women having children. 40 percent of girls in school today will be heads of households --signifying that 40 percent of boys will not be. These females will deem themselves to be leading meaningful and (now that their sexuality is de-regulated) socially acceptable lives. The displaced males will be leading roleless, often disruptive lives. If the fathers of illegitimate children can be coerced into supporting the mothers, the mothers will believe that a paternity suit (or a divorce decree) is as good as a marriage contract--or rather better, since it involves no reciprocal responsibilities, not even temporarily. Such sexual de-regulation of females means the destruction of the family and the ghettoizing of society.

The Prophet Mohammed emphasized the importance of regulating female sexuality. According to Dr. Fatima Mernissi, he

saw the establishment of the male-dominated Muslim family as crucial to the establishment of Islam. He bitterly fought existing sexual practices where marital unions for both men and women were numerous and lax.

In Saudi Arabia there exists a Committee for the Protection of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, whose executive arm is the Mutatawa or religious police. According to Kim Murphy,

Nearly every woman has an unpleasant encounter with the Mutatawa to report, an incident when she was observed talking to an unrelated man in public, or shopping without the proper headgear or abaya, and subjected to a public tongue-lashing, or worse.

"In the souq [market], they'll come up to you and say, 'Aren't you ashamed of yourself?' Or worse yet, they go up to your husband and say, 'Aren't you a man? Why are you dragging this hussy around with you?'" Raslan said. "You've embarrassed yourself, you've embarrassed your husband, and for what? For what reason?"

"Officially," she said, "they say, 'We don't want the ladies having to face the hazards [of being part of the working world], we want to protect them.' But unofficially, what the women see is they are apprehensive of women finding their own feet."

Apprehensive that women will sexually de-regulate themselves, restore the first law of matriarchy, replace the two-parent family with the "rotational" family, destroy the male role and ghettoize society. The Matatawa themselves may be ridiculous, but their apprehension is not. Take another look at the words of Hazel Henderson or those of Helen Fisher on page 5. What the Matatawa are afraid of has already happened in the ghettos and is happening before our eyes in the larger society. The ridiculousness of the religious police, like the ridiculousness of Victorian puritanism, proves not the silliness of the patriarchal system but its shakiness and the marginality of the male role within it--and its need for social props to sustain it. Female promiscuity can wreck it, as Hazel Henderson and Sjoo and Mor and other feminists clearly perceive.

"The women's libbers," says Samuel Blumenfeld,

object to the moral codes that the patriarchal system evolved as aids in the subjugation of women. But we must marvel at man's intellectual genius in creating such effective cultural and social devices to maintain the integrity of the family, as well as his control over women with a minimum of physical force.

Blumenfeld sees "the moral codes crumbling all around us," and says

Whoever sold teen-agers on the idea that there is such a thing as premarital "recreational sex" ought to be shot. Unless one understands that sexual pleasure was created by nature as bait for the more painful responsibilities of existence, one cannot understand sex, one cannot understand love, one cannot understand life. Unless sexual pleasure leads to human responsibility, it then becomes the shallowest and most depressing of pursuits.

It is not "nature" but the patriarchal system which puts sex to work as the great stabilizer and motivator of society, and the central feature of this system is society's guarantee to the father of the legitimacy and inalienability of his offspring. "Everywhere as society advances," says W. Robertson Smith, "a stage is reached when the child ceases to belong to the mother's kin and follows the father." "Everywhere" except in contemporary America, where society is reverting to the matriarchal pattern, with consequent social deterioration.

Freiherr F. von Reitzenstein, writing of early Roman antiquity, says

We cannot doubt the existence of matriarchy, which was constantly encouraged by the Etruscans...Marriage as a binding union was certainly unknown to the plebeians; accordingly their children belonged to the mother's family. This agamous or marriageless relationship still existed at Rome in later times, and was the basis of a widely developed system of free love, which soon changed into different kinds of prostitution.

Otto Kiefer's Sexual Life in Ancient Rome informs us that the celebrated Swiss jurist J. J. Bachofen

sought to prove that in ancient Italy the reign of strong paternal authority had been preceded by a state of exclusive matriarchy, chiefly represented by the Etruscans. He considered that the development of exclusive patriarchy, which we find to be the prevailing type of legitimate relation in historic times, was a universal reform, a vast and incomparable advance in civilization.

"We understand," writes lesbian-feminist Charlotte Bunch, "that the demand by some for control over our intimate lives-- denying each person's right to control and express her or his own sexuality and denying women the right to control over the reproductive process in our bodies--creates an atmosphere in which domination over others and militarism are seen as acceptable."

She makes no reference to the contract of marriage, which is intended to allow men to share in women's reproductive lives. She would have the marriage contract place no obligations on the woman, and allow her to exercise her reproductive freedom as though there were no contract.

She continues:

We know that priorities are amiss in the world when children are not protected from parents who abuse them sexually while a lesbian mother is denied custody of her child and labeled immoral simply because she loves women.

She is labeled immoral because she denies her child a father and wishes to transform society in order to make her lifestyle normative and thus make it unnecessary for any child to have a father. In other words, while she considers child abuse bad, she considers destruction of the patriarchal Sexual Constitution good, even though child abuse is commoner in the female-headed homes she wishes to create by destroying the Sexual Constitution.

Let's look as a concrete example. Charles Rothenberg was divorced by his wife and confronted with the loss of the one love object of his life, his 6 year old son David. He kidnapped the boy and then, realizing the futility of his one-man revolt against the legal system which was about to take the boy back, made the desperate resolve to kill the boy and himself. He doused David with kerosene and set him afire but lost his nerve when it came his own turn. He fled and was captured. The fire left David disfigured with burns over his face and most of his body. The righteously indignant judge, James R. Franks, who sentenced Charles to 13 years in prison wept in his chambers over the fact that this was the maximum allowed by the law.

A hideous crime. It might not have happened if Charles had not been goaded and crazed by the knowledge that he had no chance of getting a fair custody shake from the court.

Aside from this, is there anything to be learned from what Rothenberg did? This mixed-up man was, like Charles Manson, the offspring of an unmarried teen-age prostitute and a father he never saw. Presumably he got messed up because his socialization was messed-up. The sins of the father were visited upon the son, David. But also the sins of the grandmother, who brought Charles into the world in violation of the Legitimacy Principle. Grandma is unpunished because her sins are non-violent, merely sexual, merely sins against the Sexual Constitution which Ms. Bunch wants to do away with.

"There is no such thing as an illegitimate child"--no such thing as an unchaste woman, no need to regulate sexual behavior. But there are unchaste women and Charles's mother was one of them, and unchaste women do bring illegitimate children into the world, and Charles was one of them, and illegitimate children are responsible for a disproportionate amount of social pathology, a fact which will not be changed by passing as law (as has been done in Sweden) that there are no illegitimate children.

Harriet Taylor, friend, and later wife, of the 19th century feminist John Stuart Mill, expressed the feminist view about regulating women:

that if men are so sure that nature intended women for marriage, motherhood and servitude, why then do they find it necessary to erect so many barriers to other options, why are they required to force women to be restricted to this role? For if women's preference be natural there can be no necessity for enforcing it by law, and it has never been considered necessary in any other area to make laws compelling people to follow their inclination.

Women aren't drawn into marriage by their "nature." They accept it because it is advantageous and because its advantages cannot be obtained without submitting to the patriarchal constraints whose purpose is to channel procreation through families. The present disruption of sexual law-and-order is produced by women's trying to retain the advantages while rejecting the constraints.

We read in the book of Hosea in the Bible that Gomer, wife of the prophet, dressed herself in fine raiment and had sex with strangers at the Temple in Jerusalem. According to feminist Merlin Stone,

She took part in the sexual customs of her own free will and...viewed them not as an obligatory or compulsory duty but as pleasant occasions, rather like festive parties. This situation was clearly unacceptable to the men who espoused the patrilineal Hebrew system, as Hosea did, but it does reveal that for those who belonged to other religious systems it was quite typical behavior.

For thousands of years these sexual customs had been accepted as natural among the people of the Near and Middle East. They may have permitted and even encouraged matrilineal descent patterns to continue and a female-kinship system to survive. Inherent within the very practice of the sexual customs was the lack of concern for the paternity of children -- and it is only with a certain knowledge of paternity that a patrilineal system can be maintained.

Hosea was a spokesman for the newer patriarchal religion of Jahweh, Gomer a representative of the older worship of the Great Goddess. "The male and female religions existed side by side for thousands of years," reads a publisher's flyer advertising Merlin Stone's book:

Goddess worship continued throughout the periods of Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon and as late as St. Paul. It appears that the worship of the Goddess did not naturally give way to the new masculine religions, but was the victim of centuries of continual persecution and suppression by the more aggressive, war-like invaders....Merlin Stone believes that the persecution of Goddess worshippers had a political and economic basis. The invaders had a patrilineal system whereby men controlled paternity, property and the right to rule. If Goddess worship was destroyed, the indigenous, matrilineal system would also be destroyed. It was only by denying women the sexual freedom they had under the Goddess that men could control paternity. Therefore, moral imperatives, such as premarital virginity and marriage fidelity for women reflected and reinforced politically inspired religion. Stone's research has shown her that this integral Biblical story [the Garden of Eden story] which is used theologically to explain male dominance in all things, has been used through the ages to justify the continual oppression and subjugation of women. Ms. Stone believes that the story symbolically describes the eradication of Goddess worship and the damning of its religious trappings and institutions, i.e., wise, prophetic serpents as adjuncts of the Goddess, holy fruit trees, sexually active and free women. [Emphasis added.]

The male and female religions existed side by side for thousands of years. In other words, it required thousands of years of struggle to establish the patriarchal system and to do away with forms of religious worship which W. Robertson Smith describes as "horrible orgies of unrestrained sensuality, of which we no longer dare to speak in unveiled words."

The single generation following the publishing of The Feminine Mystique has produced a catastrophic subversion of the fragile and artificial patriarchal system and a more-than-partial return to the older matriarchal system, including even some tentative attempts in books like Stone's When God Was a Woman and Sjoo and Mor's The Great Cosmic Mother to provide it with a theological superstructure. The central issue, however, is not theological but familial: whether or not males shall participate equally with females in human reproduction. Equal male participation is possible only on the basis of stable families--on assurance of father custody in cases of divorce.

"Women by nature," writes Hendrik DeLeeuw,

are no more monogamous than men and no less polygamous. Women's sexual tendencies, biologically, are no less variational than those of the male gender. Best historical proof lies in the case of some of the primitive communities where conditions of life did not hamper sex expression of women any more than of men. Among the natives of Victoria, for example, the women have so many lovers that it becomes almost impossible to guess the paternity of children. Brazilian historians relate that among the Guyacurus and the Guyanas Indians of South America, the women, and especially the nobler ones, have one or more lovers who remain at their side day and night to attend to their sexual requirements. And so it becomes obvious that wherever conditions permitted, women have rejected the monogamous relationships as often as men. What it also implies is that, if granted equal freedom, women tend to be equally variational and multiple in their sex expression.

This promiscuity is why these societies are "primitive." It is to prevent civilized society from relapsing into this primitivism that the Legitimacy Principle--every child must have a father--must be enforced.

Here, from Dear Abby, 27 December, 1985, is an illustration of how easily the Legitimacy Principle is undermined:

DEAR ABBY: I'll bet you never heard anything like this before. Our son, "Mike," has been living with his girlfriend, "Libby," for three years. They have a 2-year-old son whom we love like a grandson.

Last year, money got tight, so to help out with the expenses, Libby and Mike rented their spare room to a friend of Mike's. (I'll call him Gary.)

As it turned out, Libby carried on a secret affair with Gary, and now she has a child by him, too.

Our son wants to forgive Libby, marry her and adopt her new baby. We, his parents, cannot forgive her for what she did to Mike.

We love our son and the grandson he and Libby gave us, but we do not want to accept Libby as our daughter-in-law knowing she had an illegitimate child by a guy who rented a room in their house.

How should we handle this?

--GRAMAW

Abby's reply:

DEAR GRAMAW: Regardless of how you feel about Libby, if you don't accept her as your daughter-in-law along with her children, you can say goodby to your son and the grandson you love. It's a package deal. Take it or leave it; the choice is yours.

It's a good example of the contrasting ways in which matriarchy and patriarchy handle the regulation of sexuality. Libby accepts the first law of matriarchy--whatever she decides is final--and Mike and the legal system go along. In consequence, seven people are at risk, the two babies, the three parents and the two grandparents. The son must either subsidize an adulteress and a bastard or lose his own child. The mother is at risk of being a single parent caught in the Custody Trap--as sole provider and sole custodian, with reduced resources and doubled responsibilities, de-classed in the eyes of conservative people, perhaps driven onto welfare. The two babies are at risk of being fatherless and therefore more likely to be impoverished and delinquent. The two grandparents will either lose their grandchild or be compelled to accept the adulteress's value system, accept an illegitimate child they don't want as their grandchild and pretend not to care about traditional family values.

Suppose that the legal system didn't go along. Suppose it behaved in accordance with the principles of the patriarchy which created it. Suppose it provided props for the father's role rather than for the mother's.

Then (1) there would probably be no shacking-up to begin with, no illegitimate child. Libby would be far less likely to have shacked up with Mike or to have had her secret affair with Gary, knowing that Mike, not she, was the legal custodian of the grandson and knowing that Mike had the authority to toss her out and keep his grandson for himself--and find himself a wife who would not introduce confusion of progeny into his household. Then (2) if there had been an affair between Gary and Libby anyway, it would have been up to Mike to decide whether to legitimize Libby's illegitimate child and by doing so guarantee it a place within the patriarchal system, or to expel Libby and her illegitimate child and by so doing safeguard the proper rearing and socializing of his son and his relationships with the grandparents--while at the same time giving Libby, Gary and their child their best opportunity of forming a patriarchal family of their own. And of course giving himself his best opportunity of marrying another woman and creating a patriarchal family of his own and providing his son with a stepmother who shared his patriarchal values.

Here's another letter to Abby, illustrating the sexual confusion of the times:

DEAR ABBY: Our parents' anniversary is coming up soon. Some of us would like to make them a gift of a family portrait including their children, their children's spouses and their grandchildren.

We want to limit this portrait to legitimate family members only, which would exclude the mother of one of the grandchildren and her son from a previous relationship.

We would like to include our brother and his legitimate child without including the woman he lives with and her illegitimate son. Is it possible to do this without causing hard feelings?

--PROBLEMS

DEAR PROBLEMS: No. Abandon the idea. There are no illegitimate children; just illegitimate parents.

The writer and his or her siblings believe in the Legitimacy Principle. No matter, says Abby. There are new proprieties to which everyone must conform on pain of being disliked by feminists and believers in the first law of matriarchy. Since the feminist/sexual revolution the Promiscuity Principle has replaced the Legitimacy Principle and one sexual arrangement is as good as another. Nobody's feelings must ever be hurt--unless they happen to believe in the Legitimacy Principle.

Field direction (thinking the way everyone else thinks), shame and guilt have hitherto been means of maintaining sexual law-and- order, especially among females, who used to glory in their role as the guardians of morality and who formerly had no greater pleasure than in gossiping about the sexual transgressions of their less virtuous sisters.

No more. What Charlotte Bunch said of lesbianism ("it threatens male supremacy at its core") is trebly true of the first law of matriarchy, now that field direction works for, rather than against it, now that shame and guilt no longer function to promote legitimacy, now that the courts (and Abby) are on the side of the Promiscuity Principle. Women now control their own sexuality without interference from men. The Legitimacy Principle, the patriarchal family and the male role as its head are obsolete. These changes, striking at the foundation of the patriarchal system, have been accomplished without any examination of their portentous consequences for society.

According to feminists Barbara Love and Elizabeth Shanklin:

The matriarchal mode of child-rearing, in which each individual is nurtured rather than dominated from birth provides the rational basis for a genuinely healthy society, a society of self-regulating, positive individuals.

Things are this way in the ghettos, where half of the young bear the surnames of their mothers, and where the proportion of such maternal surnames increases every year, along with crime and the other accompaniments of matriarchy.

"You Frenchmen," said an Iroquois Indian three hundred years ago to the Jesuit Father Le Jeune, "love only your own children; we love all the children of the tribe." In a promiscuous matriclan this is the best way to see that all children are cared for; but it will not create the deep family loyalties needed to usher a society out of the Stone Age. "At the core of patriarchy," says Adrienne Rich, "is the individual family unit which originated with the idea of property and the desire to see one's property transmitted to one's biological descendants." This creation of wealth cannot be motivated by a desire to transmit it to an ex-wife or to a welfare system which undermines the families whose resources it feeds upon.

The patriarchal family, whose linchpin is female chastity and loyalty, makes men work. That is why civilization must be patriarchal and why it slides into chaos, as ours is doing, where family arrangements become matrilineal. What feminist Marie Richmond-Abbott says of men in general is especially true of men in capitalist patriarchy:

A man's life is defined by his work, his occupation. The first question a man is usually asked is, "What do you do?" People shape their perception of him according to his answer.

A man's life may be defined by his work even under matriarchy, but it is only loosely defined. Here, described by the 19th century German explorer, G. W. Schweinfurth, is the way males perform when females regard them as inessential. The tribe described is the Monbuttu:

Whilst the women attend to the tillage of the soil and the gathering of the harvest, the men, except they are absent either for war or hunting, spend the entire day in idleness. In the early hours of the morning they may be found under the shade of the oil-palms, lounging at full length upon their carved benches and smoking tobacco. During the middle of the day they gossip with their friends in the cool halls.

Similarly, under communism, the state's guarantee of economic security weakens the male's commitment to work and undermines his productivity. "The other day," writes Eric Hoffer,

I happened to ask myself a routine question and stumbled on a surprising answer. The question was: What is the uppermost problem which confronts the leadership in a Communist regime? The answer: The chief preoccupation of every government between the Elbe and the China Sea is how to make people work--how to induce them to plow, sow, harvest, build, manufacture, work in the mines, and so forth. It is the most vital problem which confronts them day in day out, and it shapes not only their domestic policies but their relations with the outside world.

Who wants to plow, sow, harvest, build, manufacture, work in the mines--unless the work, unsatisfying and unfulfilling in itself, is made meaningful by a man's knowledge that it must be done if he is to provide for his family?

In the occident [continues Hoffer] the chief problem is not how to induce people to work but how to find enough jobs for people who want to work. We seem to take the readiness to work almost as much for granted as the readiness to breathe. Yet the goings on inside the Communist world serve to remind us that the Occident's attitude toward work so far from being natural and normal, is strange and unprecedented. It was the relatively recent emergence of this attitude which, as much as anything else, gave modern Western civilization its unique character and marked it off from all its predecessors.

George Gilder makes the same point, but with a different emphasis, indicating the significance of family arrangements:

The industrial revolution was perhaps the most cataclysmic event in history, changing every aspect of human society.

He points out that while multiple causes are at work,

it may well be that economic growth is most essentially a problem of interrelated motivation and demography--that is, a problem of familial and sexual organization.

Once again we may find that the success and durability of a society is less dependent on how it organizes its money and resources on a grand scale, or how it produces its goods, than on how it induces men to subordinate their sexual rhythms to extended female perspectives.

Patriarchy comes to its full flowering in capitalism:

"Pre-industrial men," as the British demographer E. A. Wrigley puts it, "lived their lives in a moving present; short-term prospects occupied much of their attention."

Wrigley believes that it was the presence of relatively isolated conjugal or nuclear families that made possible the emergence of the highly motivated industrial bourgeoisie and labor force.

There were major differences between the families of Eastern Europe and Asia ("economically stagnant") and those of England and precocious parts of Western Europe where the Industrial Revolution began and flourished, and where "a couple generally could not get married unless it was economically independent, with a separate household."

Thus sexual energies were directly tied to economic growth, and since strong sanctions were imposed on premarital sex, population growth was directly connected to economic productivity.

The italicized words signify that the Legitimacy Principle was enforced, the first law of matriarchy made inoperative. Chastity and monogamy became an essential part of capitalism. It was a stroke of genius: Work became sexy--but only for men, and only if women are chaste and loyal to their husbands.

Now dig this, from Harper's Index for March, 1987:

Average number of sperm per cubic millimeter of an American male's semen in 1929: 100 million.

Today: 60 million.

Work is no longer sexy. Alas, alas. What a universe of social disruption and suffering--demoralization, broken marriages, sexual confusion, female-headed families, underachievement, declining productivity, increased absenteeism, jobs travelling overseas, educational failure, crime, illegitimacy, drug addiction--is revealed by that cubic millimeter.

The Family in America: New Research, April, 1988 cites a study made by the William T. Grant Foundation Commission on Work, Family and Citizenship, titled The Forgotten Half: Non-College Youth in America:

Millions of young men are marking time in low-paying jobs that make them poor marriage prospects. This problem in male marriage and work patterns recently attracted the attention of the William T. Grant Foundation Commission on Work, Family and Citizenship, comprising some of the leading sociologists and policy analysts in America. In its interim report, the Commission notes that between 1973 and 1986, the average earnings of American males aged 20 to 24 fell from $11,939 to $8,859 (in 1985 dollars). This drop meant that while 59 percent of all males in 1973 could support a three-member family at or above the official poverty line, only 44 percent could in 1985. "No wonder, then," observes the Commission, "that marriage rates among young males (ages 20-24) declined almost in half, from 39.l percent in 1974 to 21.2 percent in 1985." Among black males, the drop has been an even sharper 60 percent, from 29.2 percent in 1974 to only 11.1 percent in 1985. Understandably, as marriage rates have fallen, the proportion of children born out of wedlock has risen, stranding millions of children in impoverished female-headed households.

"There is," writes Gilder,

considerable evidence of a sexual crisis among young men, marked by sexual fragility and retreat. Greater female availability and aggressiveness often seem to decrease male confidence and initiative. A large survey of college students indicated that while virginity among girls was rapidly diminishing, virginity among boys was actually increasing, and at an equal rate. Impotence has for some time been the leading complaint at most college psychiatric clinics. Citing evidence from "my patients, both male and female, articles in medical journals, and conversations with my colleagues," one psychiatrist called it "the least publicized epidemic of the 1970s."

Therapists have coined a new term for this, Inhibited Sexual Desire, ISD. According to Newsweek,

psychiatrists and psychologists say they are seeing a growing proportion of patients with such complaints--people whose main response to the sexual revolution has been some equivalent of "not tonight, dear." Clinically, their problem is known as Inhibited Sexual Desire (ISD), a condition marked by the inability to muster any interest in the great obsession. "The person with low sexual desire will not feel 'horny'....He will not be moved to seek out sexual activity, nor will he fantasize about sex," wrote psychiatrist Helen Singer Kaplan in a 1979 book that first called wide attention to the problem.

Over the past decade ISD has emerged as the most common of all sexual complaints.

Here is Gilder's explanation of how the patriarchal system works and why chastity and monogamy are essential to it:

The virtues of this arrangement, which also prevailed in the United States, go beyond the effective harnessing of male sexual and economic energies to the creation of family units. By concentrating rewards and penalties, the conjugal household set a pattern of incentives that applied for a lifetime. Benefits of special effort or initiative were not diffused among a large number of relatives, as in the extended family; and the effects of sloth or failure would not be mitigated by the success of the larger unit. In general, the man stood alone as provider for his wife and children. He was fully responsible for the rest of his life. Such responsibility transformed large numbers of pre-industrial men, living in "a moving present," into relatively long-term planners, preparing for an extended future.

The alternative was shown in a 1986 T.V. film, Man Made Famine, which made the point that African women did most of the continent's agricultural work, a fact interpreted by the filmmakers as proving that "institutionalized male chauvinism is at the core of many of Africa's agricultural problems." These hard-working African women want independence from men and yet they complain of abandonment by men. Their problem is that their societies have failed to channel male energies into socially useful and economically productive directions. This is not institutionalized male chauvinism; it is the failure to impose patriarchy. The males will never be productive as long as women's sexual autonomy (the first law of matriarchy) cuts men off from families. They are in the same situation as millions of their American brothers, concerning whom Success magazine writes:

The alienated poor. Some see their very existence as an indictment of capitalism. These are not the striving, ambitious immigrants who battle hardship and discrimination in order to ascend the economic ladder. These are the cut-off poor, whether in Harlem or Appalachia, who lack the conviction that they can succeed by dint of their own efforts. They are without skills, motivation, self-esteem, and awareness of opportunity. They are nonfunctional in a free-enterprise society, where effective work requires, to use [George] Gilder's words, "alertness and emotional commitment"--in short, a positive mental attitude.

They hate capitalism, and capitalism does nothing for them because they have been deprived of the cornerstone of capitalism, a patriarchal family, without which most males remain unmotivated.

A famous 1965 study by Mattina Horner showed that women commonly feared success. The study was repeated in 1971 by Lois Hoffman, with surprising differences of result. According to Marie Richmond-Abbott,

The group that had changed in their perceptions since Horner's (1965) study were the men! Horner reported only 8 percent of the males tried to avoid success, and Hoffman's (1971) study showed 77 percent of the men tried to do so. They were equally likely to show fear of success in all-male settings as in settings where both sexes functioned professionally.

For both men and women, mean scores of "desire to achieve" had gone down significantly between 1965 and 1971. However, women's reasons for fear of success remained much as they had been earlier, whereas men's reasons seemed linked to a diminished desire to achieve at all. Hoffman points out that the content of the men's stories was different from that of the women's. The men seemed to question the value of success itself.

"By age 30," says medical writer Janny Scott, "only 3% of those born before 1910 had experienced depression--compared to nearly 60% of those born around 1950." The suicide rate of white males age 15-24 rose almost 50 percent between 1970 and 1983.

"Somewhere at the dawn of human history," says Margaret Mead, "some social invention was made under which males started nurturing females and their young." Aside from a few tramps, she thinks, most men will accept their responsibilities to provide for their families. But there exists a male responsibility only if there exists a complementary female need. The goal of feminism is to remove this need. Hear Betty Friedan:

I've suspected that the men who really feel threatened by the women's movement in general or by their own wives' moves toward some independent activity are the ones who are most unsure of their women's love. Such a man often worries that his wife has married him only for economic security or the status and vicarious power he provides. If she can get these things for herself, what does she need him for? Why will she continue to love him? In his anger is also the fear she will surely leave him.

Of course. If she can get these things for herself she doesn't need him and they both know it, even if they haven't read Nickles and Ashcraft's The Coming Matriarchy and found out about the divorce rates of economically independent women--women like Ms. Friedan herself, who put her husband's name on the dedication page of The Feminine Mystique, but later, after she discovered she could make it alone on her royalties and lecture fees, tossed him out, took his children from him and removed his name from the dedication page. (Not that she didn't complain about his failure to provide her with child support money for the children she took from him. )

A man who supposed his wife married him only out of love, the motive proposed by Ms. Friedan as sufficient to hold marriages together, would be a ruddy fool and--what is really bad from society's point of view--an unmotivated fool, for society needs the man's work and wealth, and if his family no longer expect him to be a provider he won't work too hard--which is why single men earn so much less than married men earn.

Ms. Friedan cites a family therapist from Philadelphia, who is worried about his stake in his family:

"I was working at one of the big family-training centers in the country," he said. "There was constant theoretical discussion about getting the father back into the family. But the way our own jobs were set up, you had to work fifty to sixty hours a week. To really get anywhere you had to put in seventy hours, work nights, weekends. You didn't have time for your own family. You were supposed to make the job Number One in your life, and I wouldn't do that. My life is Number One, and my family--my job is only to be a good therapist. To play the office politics and be one of the big guns you had to devote your whole life to it. I started my own practice where I keep my own hours. Most of the other family therapists at the center are now divorced.

They are divorced--and have lost their children and their homes. They were "unsure of their women's love" because they were economically superfluous. The man with whom Ms. Friedan spoke knows his wife may toss him out as his fellow-therapists were tossed out by their wives, and he is in a panic. A generation ago, a man's attachment to his family gave him the motivation to be a high achiever; today, the feminist/sexual revolution has made this attachment to his family the cause of his becoming a panicky underachiever.

Lesbian feminist Susan Cavin proposes using the first law of matriarchy as a means of destroying patriarchy and liberating women:

Collective refusal of women to tell men who is the "father" of their children; this could be accomplished by the simple method of hetero-females never sleeping with only one man for any length of time, but always having two or more male lovers. This method is based on the assumption that mass high rates of "illegitimacy" will destroy the patrilineal family, especially its monogamian form.

It would work if men refused to enforce the Legitimacy Principle. Which is why they must enforce it--and why they must regain control over their paychecks in order to do so.

Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Annex to chapter I
Additional note
References