Why Are Some Women Negative About Marriage?

MN Staff
November 2002 Print Edition

The puzzle for many is why women are negative about an institution which was created to protect them and their children.

In Vermont, it was the women who pushed Civil Unions over the top. In their House of Representatives, only 41 men voted in favor of the measure and 60 voted against it. But the women voted for it by a four-to-one margin of 35 in favor and only 9 against. The final total was 76 in favor and 69 against, with the women making the difference.

This is startling in light of the fact that before marriage was created a few thousand years ago by the Jews, and then taken seriously by those Jews who followed Jesus Christ, women were mainly objects of enjoyment for men. We still see that today in the rest of the world with most young girls going into prostitution. That has been brought home vividly to America with a view of Afghanistan where women live in unbearable conditions, as is true in most of the world.

Even Europe has a promiscuous attitude toward early sex with girls. The age of consent in many countries there is now at twelve.

It has mainly been in the United States that women have been protected and cherished while the rest of the world has always laughed at our "Puritanical" society. As the so-called sexual "revolution" (which many see as a sexual regression) swept across the country, more and more women have found themselves unhappy and bitter about their lot in life. They have found that free love is a terrible trap. And more and more women are again saying no to sex without marriage.

Back in 1963, Betty Friedan wrote her famous book, The Feminine Mystique. It is credited with starting the feminist movement, but it also proclaimed that women in America were the envy of other women over the world.

She wrote that the suburban housewife in the 1950's was "the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife - freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected as a full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of."

Friedan said this dream world had been demanded by the women.

"In the last analysis," she wrote, "millions of able women in this free land chose, themselves, not to use the door education could have opened for them. The choice - and the responsibility - for the race back home was finally their own. The chains that bind her in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit."

But according to Friedan, these women who had everything were miserable. This did not make much sense to the young men of their age who were battling the Chinese Army in Korea to give the women at home that security.

Friedan wrote: "It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scout and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night - she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - 'Is this all?'"

These words from the future founder of NOW caused many men, who were either fighting the Chinese or working hard at home to provide all of this munificence, to ask in frustration, "What do women want, anyhow?"

Friedan would not say what she wanted, but it was clear that she was looking to change our society. She said: "Whether we will finally have to challenge the institutions, the concepts of marriage and the nuclear family - I don't know, I just don' know."

Although Friedan would not say whether she would attack the bulwark of our society, the family, and replace it with something else, the other leaders of NOW knew that they would be doing so. It was in 1970 that it was publicly acknowledged that lesbians had taken control of NOW, according to The Sisterhood by feminist Marcia Cohen. She says this was the "turning point" when feminism "moved beyond" Friedan and the point where lesbians, who dislike all men, were in charge.

It has been in America that the role of women has flourished but many women now seem intent on destroying the best society they have ever seen. Even the Jews of King David's time did not always take the command of their God seriously. David's son, King Solomon, had 1,000 wives.

The publisher of MassNews was prescient in his 1998 book which was three years before 9/11 when he wrote:

"There have always been and always will be intelligent, competent women. But the women of America in the late 20th century have allowed their good names to be used by a radical, hateful group of people.

"This will change. It is only a matter of time.

"But how the change will occur is not yet clear. Either it will be violent, with a total moral and spiritual collapse of our country, with the men from somewhere like China or Iran conquering the men of the United States and imposing total totalitarian control. This, of course, will mean a total loss of everything that women have gained over the centuries since the birth of Judaism and Christianity.

"Or we will return to a more reasoned discourse to solve the problem of how we can arrive at an intelligent answer to the tremendous possibilities that lie ahead. There is going to be 'change' in our society. It's necessary because the world is becoming more technological. But it can't be driven by 'hate,' or everyone will suffer."

Thankfully, the warning from abroad has alerted many more Massachusetts women to the dangers of the Archie Bunker mentality which taught an entire generation the falsehood that men and women are the same. Many of our citizens, both men and women, still believe the falsehood that only the culture makes us different. We believe that at our peril.

Those women who believe in marriage and families should make sure that their voices are heard in the coming debate about the future of women and families in Massachusetts.