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The Myth of Marriage
« on: 2005-07-24 12:00:50 » |
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The Myth of Marriage
By Monica Mehta, AlterNet
Posted on July 21, 2005, Printed on July 24, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/23400/
The institution of traditional marriage is in a state of crisis.
There's a misstatement in that sentence. But it's not that marriage is in crisis. It's that the institution of marriage is, or was at any time, traditional. As Stephanie Coontz reveals in her new book, Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, human unions have gone through a number of evolutions. We would be remiss to think that it was ever a stable institution. Instead, it has always been in flux. It has only been based on the concept of love for 200 years; before that, it was a way of ensuring economic and political stability. Through painstakingly-detailed descriptions and anecdotes from hunter-gatherer days to the modern era, Coontz points out that "almost every marital and sexual arrangement we have seen in recent years, however startling it may appear, has been tried somewhere before." So when we think of cohabitation, gay marriage, or stepfamilies as deviating from the "norm," we are wrong, because there has never really been a "norm."
For a country obsessed with the perfect image of the nuclear family -- mother, father and two kids -- this is eye-opening. We are trying to force ourselves to be something we never really were, or were for a very brief period of time. Instead, Coontz argues, we need to be more tolerant of and open to different forms of union. People with traditional "family values" lack the skills to adapt to social realities that have changed marriage, such as the increased independence of women.
Coontz argues that many of our familial woes come from an unrealistic, idealized version of marriage, and advocates a more liberal interpretation of marriage. Many have had this idea before, but Coontz's centuries-long historical survey confirms it. Below, she answers our questions about gay marriage, the government's support (or lack thereof) of the institution, and what really makes a marriage work.
What is the central thesis of your book?
The basic argument for this book is that what we think of as the traditional marriage -- the marriage based on love, and for the purpose of making peoples' individual lives better -- this was not the purpose of marriage for thousands of years. Instead, marriage was about acquiring in-laws, jockeying for political and economic advantage, and building the family labor force. It was only 200 years ago that people began to believe that young people could choose their own mates, and should choose their own mates on the basis of something like love, which had formerly been considered a tremendous threat to marriage. As soon as people began to do that, all of the demands that we now think of as radical new demands -- from the demand for divorce, to the right to refuse a shotgun marriage, to even recognition of same-sex relations -- were immediately raised.
But it was not until the last 30 years that people began to actually act on the new ideals for beloved marriage. Social conservatives say that there has been a crisis in the last 30 years, and I agree with them, that marriage has been tremendously weakened as an institution. It's lost its former monopoly over organizing sexuality, male-female relations, political social and economic rights, and personal legitimacy. Where I disagree with them, is in how to evaluate that change and its consequences. I agree that it poses tremendous challenges to us, the breakdown of this monopoly of marriage, but I disagree with the idea that one could make marriage better by trying to shoehorn everyone back into the older forms of marriage. Because the main things that have weakened marriage as an institution are the same things that have strengthened marriage as a relationship. Because marriage is now more optional, because for the first time ever, men and women have equal rights in marriage and outside it. Because women have economic independence. This means that you can negotiate a marriage, and make it more flexible and individualized than ever before. So a marriage when it works is better for people, it's fairer, it's more satisfying, it's more loving and fulfilling than ever before in history.
But the same things that make it so are the things that allow people not to marry, or to leave a marriage that they find unsatisfying. My argument then is that you can't have one with out the other. And so we'd better learn to deal with the alternatives to marriage. Alternatives to marriage being singlehood, cohabitation, divorce and stepfamilies, all of these kinds of alternatives to marriage that have arisen.
So it's not about necessarily strengthening the union of marriage as it's been known for years, but adapting better to new forms of marriage?
I think of the revolution in marriage very much like the industrial revolution. It opened up some new opportunities for many people. It also created havoc in some peoples' lives. But the point is that it was not reversible, there was no way to go back to turn everyone into self-sufficient farmers. So we had to reform the factories, and we had to deal with the reality we faced. I would say that the revolution in marriage is the same. There is no way to force men and women to get married and stay married. There is no way to force women to make the kinds of accommodations they used to make, to enter a shotgun marriage or to stay in a marriage they find unsatisfying. So we have to learn with both the opportunities and the problems that raises for us.
You mention that evangelical Christians are just as likely to remain single or divorce as atheists.
Yes. One of the signs that this is in fact a huge, irreversible revolution in personal life on the same order as the industrial revolution, is that it doesn't matter what your values are. Everyone is affected by this. Even people who want or think they are in a traditional marriage are not exempt from these changes. So that the divorce rates of evangelical Christians are the same as those of agnostics and atheists. And in fact, the highest divorce rates in the country are found in the Bible Belt. First of all, the Bible Belt is a more poor area of the country, and poverty is a huge stress on marriage and other relationships. But I also think that there's something in the values of the Bible Belt. People who are extremely traditional, people who believe that sex outside of marriage is immoral, tend to get married early. And in today's world, that is a risk factor for divorce. So that's one of the reasons that they tend to divorce more. We are experiencing a revolutionary change in the way that marriage operates, and the dynamics of marriage. It's so much more important now to meet as equals, to be good friends as well as lovers, to have values that allow you to change through your life and negotiate. And a lot of people with so-called traditional values in fact don't have those skills.
Would you say that Republicans with "family values" have better marriages?
No, and I wouldn't say that Democrats have better marriages either. I think that you really cannot predict how well a marriage is going to go by the values that people have entering it. And in fact, one thing we do know for sure is that women with higher egalitarian ideas about gender are still slightly more likely to divorce than women with more traditional ideas. The opposite is true for men. Men with more traditional ideas about male bread-winning and female roles are more likely to divorce today than men with more egalitarian liberal views.
What is the analysis of that? Do you think it's that both parties have to come halfway to meet each other?
I think it's because for thousands of years marriage was set up to benefit men more than women. Most of the emotional expectations and the kinds of tasks that people brought to marriage involved women shouldering the physical work and emotional work that makes life goes on. So it is women that have an interest in changing the traditional terms of marriage. They are the ones most likely to ask for change. And people who actually study marital dynamics report that it is one of the best predictors that a marriage will last and be happy is when a women asks for change and the man responds positively. So I think that the difference in divorce rates is that if the woman is more egalitarian than the man, she's more likely to not get the changes she wants. But if the man is equally or more egalitarian, she is likely to get the change she wants and that marriage is going to work better, for the man as well as the woman.
So what about gay marriage? You mention that states in favor of gay marriage don't have higher divorce rates.
Massachusetts is one of the states with the two lowest divorce rates, and even though it's the poster-state for non-traditional values. It seems to me tremendously perverse to say that the institution of marriage is threatened by the one group that is clamoring to enter it, when so many heterosexuals are refusing to enter it. But I think that there's a lot of magical thinking going on in people who believe that we should campaign against gay and lesbian marriage. They are I think arguing that if we could just draw this one line in the sand we might be able to reverse all the other changes that have occurred in marriage. But in fact, I would argue that gay and lesbian marriage is not at all a cause of the changes in married life. It's a result of the revolution that heterosexuals have made in how marriage is organized.
I think we have to deal with reality. People have different moral values and I certainly would not say that any church that opposed gay marriage would have to conduct a ceremony in the church. But I think that we have to deal with the fact that marriage has always been evolving and that particularly right now we have to have some sort of recognition and rules for people who are taking on caregiving outside of traditional marriage.
Gay and lesbian relationships are not going to go away. There are millions of gays and lesbians who live together and many of them have children. So the best argument for gay and lesbian marriage, in my opinion, is the fact that gays and lesbians are no better at keeping their relationships going than heterosexuals are. So there are going to be divorces, de facto or real, and you need exit rules. If people are taking on responsibilities for children or for dependent care and one person is sacrificing, they should get the benefits of that, but they should also be subject to the same rules for dissolving their relationships so that it's not terribly unfair and a free-for-all battle when they do.
How do you think that the current government is faring in terms of supporting marriage?
I think almost all of its support is at the totally abstract level of values, family values and family rhetoric that doesn't really help either married people or unmarried people. So much of the government campaign to promote marriage has been about telling people how good marriage is for them, coaxing them to get married, sometimes offering incentives to get married, but never really investing in long-term ways to build healthy relationships, married or unmarried. There's a sort of attitude, again, magical thinking, that if we get you married, then you'll be fine and we don't have to worry about anti-poverty programs, we don't have to worry about job training for men and women, we don't have to worry about child-care. And if we can't get you married, well then we don't want to bother with you either, for a different reason. If we get you married we say you're fine, you don't need anything else. And if you don't get married, it's like you're not fine and you don't deserve anything else. So I find the rhetoric and the millions of dollars that are being spent to promote marriage very frustrating because it seems to me that we would make a better effort to do two other approaches. 1. If you're going to fight poverty, the best way to fight that is to get good child-care, affordable child-care, and decent jobs. And 2. If you want to help people do their relationships better, I'm all for that. And if we help people with healthy relationships many of those people will marry. But those counseling skills ought to be available to people who have no plans to marry or who are divorcing.
What do you think of the current emphasis on marriage counseling and therapy?
Well, we're still in the early stages of figuring out what interventions work and what ones don't. I think that it is important to allow people better access to counseling, but as I said, I think that we would do better to not confine that to people who marry or have intentions to marry, but to any couple who wants that kind of counseling. So that's the first thing I would say that is a problem with this new emphasis on marriage preparation, that it excludes so many couples. The second is that a lot of people are getting themselves certified as marriage counselors in two or three days, and then they go into communities with which they're not familiar. And we don't know exactly what some of them will be teaching. Some of these people are sincere people but people whose values about how a marriage should operate may be quite different than the on-the-ground reality for the impoverished couple who they're trying to help. So I'm concerned about that too. What I'm trying to say is that tested interventions to help people strengthen their relationships, married or unmarried, are a very good thing. But I worry about untested ones.
So from all of your research, if you were to sum up what does make marriage work, what would you say?
Well, first of all, there are two different things: one is interpersonal relations, and one is social context. You cannot produce one success without support from the other. Married couples in their interpersonal way certainly have to be deeper friends and more respectful of each other than at any time in the past. It used to be that people basically fell in love with the gender role. "This is a manly man, he'll take care of me." "This is a womanly woman, she'll take care of my kids." Nowadays, people need to like each other as much as they love each other, and they need to respect each other. That's one important thing. They need to learn how to negotiate and how to handle conflict more than they had to in the past when the rules of marriage just said that women had to obey.
But in addition to that, people need support systems. We live in a very unfriendly environment for families. Married couples, if they're going to keep their marriages going, need things like parental leave, subsidized parental leave so it's not a class privilege to take some time with your kids. They need family-friendly work policies. They need high quality, affordable child-care. So that they don't have to call in sick or quit a job or spend hours agonizing about their kids. The lack of these social supports for families really stresses families. So it's very ironic that many of the people who claim to be most in favor of marriage do not spend any time building these support systems.
Monica Mehta is an associate editor at AlterNet.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/23400/
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Re:The Myth of Marriage
« Reply #1 on: 2005-07-28 11:55:45 » |
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source: http://www.theweekmagazine.com/briefing.asp?a_id=567
How old is the institution?
The best available evidence suggests that it’s about 4,350 years old. For thousands of years before that, most anthropologists believe, families consisted of loosely organized groups of as many as 30 people, with several male leaders, multiple women shared by them, and children. As hunter-gatherers settled down into agrarian civilizations, society had a need for more stable arrangements. The first recorded evidence of marriage ceremonies uniting one woman and one man dates from about 2350 B.C., in Mesopotamia. Over the next several hundred years, marriage evolved into a widespread institution embraced by the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. But back then, marriage had little to do with love or with religion.
What was it about, then?
Marriage’s primary purpose was to bind women to men, and thus guarantee that a man’s children were truly his biological heirs. Through marriage, a woman became a man’s property. In the betrothal ceremony of ancient Greece, a father would hand over his daughter with these words: “I pledge my daughter for the purpose of producing legitimate offspring.” Among the ancient Hebrews, men were free to take several wives; married Greeks and Romans were free to satisfy their sexual urges with concubines, prostitutes, and even teenage male lovers, while their wives were required to stay home and tend to the household. If wives failed to produce offspring, their husbands could give them back and marry someone else.
When did religion become involved?
As the Roman Catholic Church became a powerful institution in Europe, the blessings of a priest became a necessary step for a marriage to be legally recognized. By the eighth century, marriage was widely accepted in the Catholic church as a sacrament, or a ceremony to bestow God’s grace. At the Council of Trent in 1563, the sacramental nature of marriage was written into canon law.
Did this change the nature of marriage?
Church blessings did improve the lot of wives. Men were taught to show greater respect for their wives, and forbidden from divorcing them. Christian doctrine declared that “the twain shall be one flesh,” giving husband and wife exclusive access to each other’s body. This put new pressure on men to remain sexually faithful. But the church still held that men were the head of families, with their wives deferring to their wishes.
When did love enter the picture?
Later than you might think. For much of human history, couples were brought together for practical reasons, not because they fell in love. In time, of course, many marriage partners came to feel deep mutual love and devotion. But the idea of romantic love, as a motivating force for marriage, only goes as far back as the Middle Ages. Naturally, many scholars believe the concept was “invented” by the French. Its model was the knight who felt intense love for someone else’s wife, as in the case of Sir Lancelot and King Arthur’s wife, Queen Guinevere. Twelfth-century advice literature told men to woo the object of their desire by praising her eyes, hair, and lips. In the 13th century, Richard de Fournival, physician to the king of France, wrote “Advice on Love,” in which he suggested that a woman cast her love flirtatious glances—“anything but a frank and open entreaty.”
Did love change marriage?
It sure did. Marilyn Yalom, a Stanford historian and author of A History of the Wife, credits the concept of romantic love with giving women greater leverage in what had been a largely pragmatic transaction. Wives no longer existed solely to serve men. The romantic prince, in fact, sought to serve the woman he loved. Still, the notion that the husband “owned” the wife continued to hold sway for centuries. When colonists first came to America—at a time when polygamy was still accepted in most parts of the world—the husband’s dominance was officially recognized under a legal doctrine called “coverture,” under which the new bride’s identity was absorbed into his. The bride gave up her name to symbolize the surrendering of her identity, and the husband suddenly became more important, as the official public representative of two people, not one. The rules were so strict that any American woman who married a foreigner immediately lost her citizenship.
How did this tradition change?
Women won the right to vote. When that happened, in 1920, the institution of marriage began a dramatic transformation. Suddenly, each union consisted of two full citizens, although tradition dictated that the husband still ruled the home. By the late 1960s, state laws forbidding interracial marriage had been thrown out, and the last states had dropped laws against the use of birth control. By the 1970s, the law finally recognized the concept of marital rape, which up to that point was inconceivable, as the husband “owned” his wife’s sexuality. “The idea that marriage is a private relationship for the fulfillment of two individuals is really very new,” said historian Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. “Within the past 40 years, marriage has changed more than in the last 5,000.”
Men who married men
Gay marriage is rare in history—but not unknown. The Roman emperor Nero, who ruled from A.D. 54 to 68, twice married men in formal wedding ceremonies, and forced the Imperial Court to treat them as his wives. In second- and third-century Rome, homosexual weddings became common enough that it worried the social commentator Juvenal, says Marilyn Yalom in A History of the Wife. “Look—a man of family and fortune—being wed to a man!” Juvenal wrote. “Such things, before we’re very much older, will be done in public.” He mocked such unions, saying that male “brides” would never be able to “hold their husbands by having a baby.” The Romans outlawed formal homosexual unions in the year 342. But Yale history professor John Boswell says he’s found scattered evidence of homosexual unions after that time, including some that were recognized by Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches. In one 13th-century Greek Orthodox ceremony, the “Order for Solemnisation of Same Sex Union,” the celebrant asked God to grant the participants “grace to love one another and to abide unhated and not a cause of scandal all the days of their lives, with the help of the Holy Mother of God and all thy saints.” How old is the institution?
The best available evidence suggests that it’s about 4,350 years old. For thousands of years before that, most anthropologists believe, families consisted of loosely organized groups of as many as 30 people, with several male leaders, multiple women shared by them, and children. As hunter-gatherers settled down into agrarian civilizations, society had a need for more stable arrangements. The first recorded evidence of marriage ceremonies uniting one woman and one man dates from about 2350 B.C., in Mesopotamia. Over the next several hundred years, marriage evolved into a widespread institution embraced by the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. But back then, marriage had little to do with love or with religion.
What was it about, then?
Marriage’s primary purpose was to bind women to men, and thus guarantee that a man’s children were truly his biological heirs. Through marriage, a woman became a man’s property. In the betrothal ceremony of ancient Greece, a father would hand over his daughter with these words: “I pledge my daughter for the purpose of producing legitimate offspring.” Among the ancient Hebrews, men were free to take several wives; married Greeks and Romans were free to satisfy their sexual urges with concubines, prostitutes, and even teenage male lovers, while their wives were required to stay home and tend to the household. If wives failed to produce offspring, their husbands could give them back and marry someone else.
When did religion become involved?
As the Roman Catholic Church became a powerful institution in Europe, the blessings of a priest became a necessary step for a marriage to be legally recognized. By the eighth century, marriage was widely accepted in the Catholic church as a sacrament, or a ceremony to bestow God’s grace. At the Council of Trent in 1563, the sacramental nature of marriage was written into canon law.
Did this change the nature of marriage?
Church blessings did improve the lot of wives. Men were taught to show greater respect for their wives, and forbidden from divorcing them. Christian doctrine declared that “the twain shall be one flesh,” giving husband and wife exclusive access to each other’s body. This put new pressure on men to remain sexually faithful. But the church still held that men were the head of families, with their wives deferring to their wishes.
When did love enter the picture?
Later than you might think. For much of human history, couples were brought together for practical reasons, not because they fell in love. In time, of course, many marriage partners came to feel deep mutual love and devotion. But the idea of romantic love, as a motivating force for marriage, only goes as far back as the Middle Ages. Naturally, many scholars believe the concept was “invented” by the French. Its model was the knight who felt intense love for someone else’s wife, as in the case of Sir Lancelot and King Arthur’s wife, Queen Guinevere. Twelfth-century advice literature told men to woo the object of their desire by praising her eyes, hair, and lips. In the 13th century, Richard de Fournival, physician to the king of France, wrote “Advice on Love,” in which he suggested that a woman cast her love flirtatious glances—“anything but a frank and open entreaty.”
Did love change marriage?
It sure did. Marilyn Yalom, a Stanford historian and author of A History of the Wife, credits the concept of romantic love with giving women greater leverage in what had been a largely pragmatic transaction. Wives no longer existed solely to serve men. The romantic prince, in fact, sought to serve the woman he loved. Still, the notion that the husband “owned” the wife continued to hold sway for centuries. When colonists first came to America—at a time when polygamy was still accepted in most parts of the world—the husband’s dominance was officially recognized under a legal doctrine called “coverture,” under which the new bride’s identity was absorbed into his. The bride gave up her name to symbolize the surrendering of her identity, and the husband suddenly became more important, as the official public representative of two people, not one. The rules were so strict that any American woman who married a foreigner immediately lost her citizenship.
How did this tradition change?
Women won the right to vote. When that happened, in 1920, the institution of marriage began a dramatic transformation. Suddenly, each union consisted of two full citizens, although tradition dictated that the husband still ruled the home. By the late 1960s, state laws forbidding interracial marriage had been thrown out, and the last states had dropped laws against the use of birth control. By the 1970s, the law finally recognized the concept of marital rape, which up to that point was inconceivable, as the husband “owned” his wife’s sexuality. “The idea that marriage is a private relationship for the fulfillment of two individuals is really very new,” said historian Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. “Within the past 40 years, marriage has changed more than in the last 5,000.”
Men who married men
Gay marriage is rare in history—but not unknown. The Roman emperor Nero, who ruled from A.D. 54 to 68, twice married men in formal wedding ceremonies, and forced the Imperial Court to treat them as his wives. In second- and third-century Rome, homosexual weddings became common enough that it worried the social commentator Juvenal, says Marilyn Yalom in A History of the Wife. “Look—a man of family and fortune—being wed to a man!” Juvenal wrote. “Such things, before we’re very much older, will be done in public.” He mocked such unions, saying that male “brides” would never be able to “hold their husbands by having a baby.” The Romans outlawed formal homosexual unions in the year 342. But Yale history professor John Boswell says he’s found scattered evidence of homosexual unions after that time, including some that were recognized by Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches. In one 13th-century Greek Orthodox ceremony, the “Order for Solemnisation of Same Sex Union,” the celebrant asked God to grant the participants “grace to love one another and to abide unhated and not a cause of scandal all the days of their lives, with the help of the Holy Mother of God and all thy saints.”
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Re:The Myth of Marriage
« Reply #2 on: 2005-07-28 13:39:42 » |
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source: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3863/is_200410/ai_n9452412/print
Two Becoming One Flesh: Marriage as a Sexual and Economic Union
Carlson, Allan
"As time marches inexorably on, human society...evolves." So philosophized Judge William L. Downing in striking down the state of Washington's Defense of Marriage Act in August, ruling that same-sex couples have a right to marry. Indeed, evolutionary language seems tightly bound to the "gay marriage" agenda. "There is an evolution of society," cooed Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien last year when announcing a new national policy opening marriage to homosexual couples.1 Jacqueline Murray, columnist for The Toronto Globe and Mail, agreed that evolution is at work here: "Extending marriage to people of the same sex may be the final frontier and the logical conclusion of this evolution."2 Writing in The Boston Globe, Virginia Postrel argued that social institutions such as marriage are themselves "the result of an evolutionary process"; gay marriage, as such, represents another promising "experiment in living" contributing to forward evolution.3 Ellen Goodman concluded that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's ruling that homosexuals have a right to marry "may be as evolutionary as it is historic," adding, "The evolution of gay rights and marriage laws now merge into the definition of marriage written by the Massachusetts court."4
This focus on social evolution is revealing. It points toward the ideology that drives the same-sex marriage campaign, and the deeper conflict of ideas in which we are now engaged. On the one hand, there is the view put forth by prominent early anthropologists that marriage is, in essence, an unchanging, universal institution, coextensive with humanity. As Edward Westermarck explained over a century ago: "Among the lowest savages, as well as the most civilized races of men, we find the family consisting of parents and children, and the father as its protector." Holding this family system together was marriage, combining "a regulated sexual relation" with "economic obligations." In Westermarck's view, distinct maternal, paternal and marital instincts all existed, each rooted in human nature. Indeed, he argued that "the institution of marriage...has developed out of a primeval habit." While variations in the details could be found in different human cultures, the fundamental marriage bond was unchanging.5 Or, as George Murdock wrote in his great 1949 anthropological survey: "The nuclear family is a universal human social grouping." Moreover, "[a]ll known human societies have developed specialization and cooperation between the sexes roughly along this biologically determined line of cleavage." Murdock concluded:
[M]arriage exists only when the economic and the sexual are united into one relationship, and this combination only occurs in marriage. Marriage, thus defined, is found in every known human society.6
The conservative defense of marriage implicitly appeals to this vision of a necessary and unchanging institution, rooted in human nature.
"The Evolution of Marriage"
On the other hand, a different theory of marriage has exerted a profound influence, from the 1880s to our day. As one prominent sociologist has explained, "Social science developed only one comprehensive theory of family change, one based on nineteenth century evolutionary ideas."7 Applying Darwin's concept of "natural selection" to human behavior, these theorists have argued that human marriage is an evolving institution. As we have already seen, this very notion-and the theory behind it-today drives one major argument for same-sex marriage. Where did this theory come from? What does this theory of social evolution say? How has it affected American beliefs? Is the theory true?
The classic formulation of "the evolution of marriage" idea is found in Lewis Morgan's 1877 book Ancient Society. In fact, this book was the result of a U.S. government investigation of the social lives of American Indians. Morgan focused particular attention on the Iroquois, but drew broader conclusions. In his view, the family was a fluid agent, never stationary, moving in evolutionary fashion from lower to higher forms. The three main stages in this process, he claimed, were:
* Among pre-historic savages, group marriage, where unrestricted sexual intercourse existed within a tribe, such that every woman belonged to every man, and every man to every woman. Sexual orgies were routine practices. In this perfectly promiscuous social order, Morgan argued, children were common to all and descent or lineage was traced through the mother's family, the maternal "gens," since paternity could not be established. This, in turn, gave power and authority to women.
* Among barbarians, the pairing family. This construct rested on the nuclear pairing off of one man with one woman, and a limitation on inbreeding through creation of the incest taboo. And yet, the pairing family still held on to remnants of the old ways, as where sisters would be the mutual wives of their mutual husbands, and where maternal lineage would remain primary. Still, enforcement of the incest taboo led to an evolutionary advance, Morgan contended, including the expansion of human skulls and brains.
* Finally, among civilized people, the monogamous family, resting on patriarchal controls and enforced chastity and fidelity among women, in order to ensure the fathers' lineages.8
Other ethnographers quickly exposed the fatal flaws in Morgan's analysis. Yet his theory took on an ideological life of its own. One writer who immediately drew out the political implications of Morgan's work was Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto. In his 1884 book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels underscored Morgan's importance:
The discovery [of] the original maternal "gens" has the same signification for primeval history that Darwin's theory of evolution had for biology and Marx's theory of surplus value [has had] for political economy.
From a Communist, high praise indeed. And yet, in an important break with Morgan, Engels refused to see modern monogamous marriage as superior or good:
Monogamy...does by no means enter history as a reconciliation of man and wife and still less as the highest form of marriage. On the contrary, it enters as the subjugation of one sex by the other, as the proclamation of an antagonism between the sexes unknown in all preceding history.
Specifically, Engels denied that romantic sexual love could survive in monogamous marriage. Moreover, he claimed that the human urge for primeval group marriage continued even in civilized nations through a turn to prostitutes by the men, and to adultery by the women.
Engels also described how the pending communist revolution would foster an evolutionary, or dialectical, return to group marriage. He outlined at least four steps to be taken by the revolutionary vanguard:
(1) Put all women into outside labor. "[T]he emancipation of women is primarily dependent on the reintroduction of the whole female sex into the public industries."
(2) Socialize property. "With the transformation of the means of production into collective property the monogamous family ceases to be the economic unit of society. The private household changes to a social industry. The care and education of children becomes a social matter."
(3) Institute free love. "Will not this be sufficient cause for...a more unconventional intercourse of the sexes and a more lenient public opinion regarding virgin honor and female shame?"
(4) And start with 'no fault' divorce: "If marriage founded on love is alone moral, then it follows that marriage is moral only as long as love lasts."9
Where the essentialist, conservative view of marriage saw changes in marriage over time as either a weakening or strengthening of the normative institution, Engels' evolutionist view held to a ideological end involving a visionary post-marriage, post-family social order.
Losing the Economic Function
I dwell on Engels here because a watered-down version of this Marxist evolutionary understanding spread far and deeply in the United States, working to undermine both the economic and the sexual aspects of marriage. To this day, no matter how carefully camouflaged, the cultural Left's arguments for societal "evolution" (including the "evolution" toward same-sex marriage) still derive from Engel's profound (mis) interpretation of Morgan's discredited work.
Regarding the economic function, for example, the first important Social History of the American Family appeared in 1917; it relied heavily on the evolutionary argument. "American history consummates the disappearance of the wider familism and the substitution of the parentalism of society," wrote historian Arthur Calhoun. Since natural parents were, by and large, unfit for parenthood in the new industrial order, society came "to accept as a duty" the upbringing of the young. Ever more children passed "into the custody of community experts who are qualified to perform the complexer [sic] functions of parenthood... which the parents have neither the time nor knowledge to perform." Calhoun concluded:
The new view is that the higher and more obligatory relation is to society rather than to the family; the family goes back to the age of savagery while the state belongs to the age of civilization. The modern individual is a world citizen, served by the world, and home interests can no longer be supreme.10
Another influential, sanitized version of marriage and family structures in evolution appeared in the work of sociologist William Ogburn of the University of Chicago. An analytical Marxist, Ogburn emphasized that the prime force in history was technology or "material culture," and that after a period of time, what he called "culture lag," social institutions would adjust to the new material realities. Commissioned by President Herbert Hoover's Research Committee on Social Trends to examine family life, Ogburn described in 1933 an American marriage and family system steadily diminishing-or rather, evolving. Once "the chief economic institution, the factory of the time, producing almost all that men needed," the family now stood stripped of all productive tasks, these having passed to the factories. At the same time, "the educational and protective functions" of the family had gone to government, because state institutions had "greater technical efficiency." Already by the 1930s, he reported, American homes "are merely 'parking places' for parents and children who spend their active hours elsewhere." Even so, "the evidence points to the further transfer of functions from the home," including the care of pre-school children.11
During the 1940s and 1950s, prominent sociologists called "functionalists" attempted to take this bad news about the evolutionary loss of family functions and turn it into a positive good. Talcott Parsons of Harvard University, the leader of this school of thought, acknowledged that among Americans "many of the 'auxiliary' functions [of the family], such as those of economic production which are common in kinship units, are here reduced to a minimum." But this was all to the good, he thought, for it made modern families sleek and efficient, able to focus on critical psychological tasks: "The relations are clarified because this modern family is 'stripped down' to what apparently approaches certain minimum structural and fundamental essentials," he wrote. Indeed, "the American family has been evolving into a new stability in which the emphasis is on the nuclear family."12 Critical to this evolution was what Parsons called "role differentiation," where wives/ mothers took on the emotional tasks of gratification, warmth, and stability, while husband/fathers focused on instrumental tasks in the outside world:
If the nuclear family consists in a defined "normal" complement of the male adult, female adult and their immediate children, the male adult will play the role of instrumental leader and the female adult will play the role of expressive leader.13
Parsons acknowledged that this "companionate" family exacted a high emotional price from husband and wife as they elaborated and refined their functional roles. Men served their families as Chairman-of-the-Board figures, looking outward. Women looked inward, focusing on "glamour patterns," "personal adornment," and the crafting of a pleasant home environment to ease psychological tensions.14 "Personality adjustment" toward these ends, Parsons insisted, became the core task of the companionate marriage of the 1950s.
Another figure in this school, William J. Goode, saw the whole world essentially adopting this model. Characterized by few productive tasks, weak ties to kin, high mobility, relatively high divorce, and "intense emotional" interaction, this structure marked the next step in global family evolution: "Everywhere the ideology of the [companionate] family is spreading.... It appeals to the disadvantaged, to the young, to women, and to the educated." The companionate family succeeded, Goode said, because of the close fit between this family form and the modern industrial system. Revealingly, though, in 1963 Goode also argued that the strong role differences between husbands and wives were more-or-less permanent: "[W]e do not believe that any family system now in operation, or likely to emerge in the next generation, will grant full equality to women." Why? Because, "[t]he family base upon which all societies rest at present requires that much of the daily work of the house and children be handed over to women."15
While seeming to affirm the traditional family, the narrow conception of family tasks in "companionate marriage" actually left families vulnerable. For example, federal policy came to favor the functionless home. Government housing agencies pushed designs that eliminated workrooms, pantries, large kitchens, sewing rooms, and parlors-to be replaced by functionless "open spaces." As urban planner John Dean explained in 1953, suburban homes should focus on maintaining "family interaction without recourse to the traditional housekeeping dwelling unit." Instead of designs "inherited from the family farm," homes should be built more in harmony with modern life patterns focused on psychological intimacy and consumption.16 Architect Svend Reimer, writing in 1951, stressed that "housing attitudes must be related to long-term trends of social change in the family." They must evolve. In place of formal, single-purpose, and work rooms, suburban homes should have open, "flexible rooms that serve the every day life of the family and reduce household chores to the minimum." He concluded that "[t]he goal of home construction lies in...a frictionless family life."17 Similarly, federal education policy under the Smith-Lever and Smith-Hughes Acts, which had favored training in homemaking and homebuilding tasks from 1914 into the early 1950s, shifted curricula in favor of training girls in more ambiguous psychological tasks.
The Feminists Return
Alas, in 1963, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique appeared. The book lashed out at the "companionate marriage" celebrated and defended by Parsons, Goode, and the other functionalists. Indeed, a conservative reading of Friedan's book is possible, as she exposed the weaknesses of the suburban life model. Some aspects of her argument even implied a return to an older, more agrarian form of family life. But in the end, Friedan herself turned out to be an acolyte for social evolution. She simply argued that the functionalists wanted to have their evolutionary cake and to eat it too.
Friedan pointed to the fatal inconsistencies in the functionalists' argument. As she reported, Parsons himself had admitted
...that the "domestic" aspect of the housewife role "has declined in importance to the point where it scarcely approaches a full-time occupation for the vigorous person"; that the "glamour pattern" is "inevitably associated with a rather early age level"...[and] "that in the adult feminine role there is quite sufficient strain and insecurity... [manifested] in the form of neurotic behavior...."
And still, Friedan complained, Parsons had the gall to insist that women adjust themselves to these fragile, disordered, and unfulfilling roles.
The suburbs, which Parsons praised as fitting homes for companionate families, drew her scorn. Friedan called them "ugly and endless sprawls," where women did "the time-filling busy work of suburban house and community." She blasted "the open plan" of new suburban housing, "noisy" places without walls and doors, where the woman in her kitchen would never be without her children, and where the "one free-flowing room" created a continual mess.
However, rather than arguing for a return to an older model of family living, Friedan insisted on the elimination of the last remnants of economic cooperation in the home:
[F] or the suburban and city housewife, the fact remains that more and more of the jobs that used to be performed in the home have been taken away: canning, baking bread, weaving cloth and making clothes, educating the young, nursing the sick, taking care of the aged. It is possible [forwomen] to reverse history-or kid themselves that they can reverse it-by baking their own bread, but the law does not permit them to teach their own children at home....18
Instead, social evolution now pointed toward young mothers in the workplace, small children in day care, and a final end to the traditional home.
So energized and directed, Friedan's book had a powerful impact. The equity feminist movement quickly gained strength and won important political victories through Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which mandated sexual equality in employment practices, and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which did the same for schooling. Federal policy, which had already worked in the 1940s and 1950s to create economically functionless homes, now aimed at ending even the "division of labor" between husband and wife, as expressed through the recently favored "companionate" model.
Sexual Evolution
This evolutionary approach to the family also radically altered the understanding of the "sexual" aspect of marriage: specifically, by shifting its core meaning from "procreation" to "pleasure." Ogburn, again, was instrumental here. He emphasized the profound importance of the sharply falling American birthrate: "In 1930, for the first time there were fewer children under five years of age in one census year than in the one preceding." This presaged an emptying of the schools and depopulation. More important for him, it pointed to a different kind of marriage:
[T]here are many wives without children.... In other families with only one or two children the mother devotes only a fewyears to child rearing. Families without children may almost be classed as a different type of family.
Indeed, Ogburn called for a fundamental reappraisal of the meaning of marriage:
The relationship of husband and wife is dearly at the center of the problem of the modern family since most families have children with them for only a part of married life or not at all and since so many other functions of the family have declined. The stability of the future family is not clearly seen."
Ernest W. Burgess and Henry J. Locke, in their 1945 book The Family agreed that as families shed their formal legal and economic functions and shrank in size with fewer children, they reorganized around psychological tasks. This new step in social evolution rested on "mutual affection," "sympathetic understanding," and "comradeship," rather than procreation. The home now focused less on children and more on psychological intimacy and sexual love.20
Indeed, the "companionate marriage" elevated sex as a mode of self-definition. True, during the 1940s and 1950s, sexuality remained tied by popular mores and expert opinion to marriage. But as functional productive tasks and children diminished as the ends of marriage, these same experts urged men and women to reach for higher levels of sexual and emotional compatibility. Companionate marriage, the experts said, rested on passion, romantic affection, emotional intimacy, and "shared ecstasy"-not children.21
Unwittingly, but clearly, this analysis fed directly into the sexual revolution of the 1960s. First came the separation of sex from procreation, an advance bolstered by the introduction of the birth control pill in 1964. For a brief time, however, acceptable sex and marriage remained bound. The U.S. Supreme Court caught this spirit in its 1965 Griswoldv. Connecticut decision. While the Court declared that married couples had a constitutional right to buy and use birth control, it also reaffirmed that "marriage is a coming together for better or worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred."22 This was the last time that the nation's High Court would use such language. Within a fewyears, a new singles culture embracing sexual experimentation, a feminist movement affirming equality in pre-marital sex, and media attention to "swinging" and "wife-swapping" out in the suburbs combined to separate sex from marriage. The so-called "Population Bomb" scare during the late 1960s gave another radical imperative to change: children should be avoided in marriage altogether. "Motherhood: Who Needs It?" was the feature article in a September 1970 issue of Look magazine. Hope for the nation lay with those "younger-generation females" who recognized that "it can be more loving to children not to have them."23 The "childless marriage," once deemed a profound sadness, became the "child free" marriage, noble and forward-looking. According to historian Stephanie Coontz, the final step in the sexual revolution came in the 1970s, when "a gay movement questioned the exclusive definition of sexual freedom in terms of heterosexuality."24
In short, the evolutionary appearance of the diminished "companionate marriage"-one without economic function and one with the sexual function redefined from "procreative" to "pleasure seeking"-cleared the path for more claims to change, and eventually to demands for "gay marriage." Indeed, according to one scientist, due to their "playful, creative character ...[y]ou could say that homosexuals are at the pinnacle of human evolution."25 And who can deny such superior humans their due?
Faith and Reason
So what shall we make out of all this? Traditionalists of a religious bent might suggest turning to Genesis 1 and 2, where they see marriage portrayed as an immutable aspect of God's creation, fixed from the beginning:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth".... Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh.26
These passages affirm marriage as both heterosexual ("Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth") and economic (the passage regarding "subdue" and "have dominion"). It might even be said that the author of Genesis seems to agree with Westermarck and Murdock.
What does evolutionary biology teach? Far from agreeing with contemporary "gay marriage" advocates, Darwin actually built his evolutionary theory on the idea of "reproductive success." Since homosexuality is, by definition, sterile, the behavior stands as an obvious biological dead-end: a "genetic aberration," Darwin labelled it.
Contemporary evolutionary scientists implicitly agree. Writing in Science, for example, paleo-anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy argues that "the unique sexual and reproductive behavior of man"-not growth of the cortex or brain-"maybe the sine qua non of human origin." The human "nuclear family" was not the product of, say, nineteenth-century bourgeois culture or twentieth-century Levittown. Rather, the paleo-anthropological record shows that the pairing-off of male and female "hominids" into something very much like traditional marriage reaches back over three million years, to the time when our purported ancestors left the trees on the African savannah and started walking on two legs. As Lovejoy concludes:
...both advances in material culture and the Pleistocene acceleration in brain development are sequelae to [i.e., follow after] an already established hominid character system, which included intensified parenting and social relationships, monogamous pair bonding, specialized sexual-reproductive behavior, and bipedality. [This model] implies that the nuclear family and human sexual behavior may have their ultimate origin long before the dawn of the Pleistocene.27
Other new evidence supports this conclusion. A 2003 paper featured in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science examines "skeletal size dimorphism" (that is, the difference in male and female size) in Australopithecus afarensis, a human ancestor said to have lived three to four million years ago. Among the apes and other mammals, sexual dimorphism is greatest when sexual coupling is random or where one male accumulates numerous females. Dimorphism is least when male and female pair off in monogamous bonds. Overturning earlier assessments, this new study finds that A ustmlopithecus males and females were nearly the same size, no different than men and women today. According to the Kent State research team, this means that this human ancestor was monogamous, with male and female in a permanent pair bond, "a social complex including male provisioning driven by female choice."28
Ronald Immerman of Case Western Reserve University reports in a 2003 issue of the journal Evolutionary Psychology that, from the very beginning, our distinctly human ancestors showed a unique reproductive strategy where a female exchanged sexual exclusivity for special provisioning by a male. "This sharing of resources from man-to-woman is a universal," Immerman reports. From the beginning of the human race, it appears that women chose men not on the basis of physical size, but because of male skills in provisioning and loyalty, that is, women have bonded to men who reliably returned to the cave, hut, or split level tract home, with fresh meat or a good pay check. In this monogamous order, promiscuity stands out as a disease, an evolutionary danger. At the same time, the ethnographic "data suggest an independent man (to) child affiliative bond which is part of [Homo sapiens] bio-cultural heritage," one found nowhere in the animal kingdom. Immerman explains this trait, as well, by evolutionary selection. Besides looking for reliable providers, women "were simultaneously selecting for traits which would forge a social father: a man who would form attachments-bond-with his young and who would be psychologically willing to share resources with those young."29
It would certainly be going too far to say that modern evolutionary theory and Genesis have converged; significant differences remain over key matters, such as timing. All the same, it would be fair to say that new research guided by evolutionary theory does agree with the author of Genesis that humankind, from our very origin as unique creatures on earth, has been defined by heterosexual monogamy involving longterm pair bonding (that is, marriage in a mother-father-child household) and resting on the special linkage of the reproductive and the economic: where two become one flesh. So the evolution of marriage did occur-but only once, three to four million years ago, when "to be human" came to mean "to be conjugal." All the other cultural variations surrounding marriage are mere details. "Change" must therefore be understood as the mark of cultural strengthening or weakening around a constant human model. And, rather than being the "pinnacle" of evolution, homosexuality and "gay marriage" emerge as obvious evolutionary and cultural dead-ends. Such practices are by definition sterile, and evolutionary theory-on its own terms-depends on reproductive success.
In the name of evolution, the campaign for same-sex marriage openly mocks the religious heritage of Western civilization. It ignores the hard-won lessons of human history. And it rejects the results of scientific inquiry, relying instead on sentiment to make its case. In all these ways, the campaign is radical indeed. Just as recklessly, this same campaign will, if successful, also subvert the one trait-permanent heterosexual pair-bonding focused on reproduction and child rearing-which science points to as unique to human nature and vitaho human success, even to human existence, on earth. Advocates for change in the nature of marriage are playing with elemental evolutionary fire.
A New Home Economics
What then about the functionless home? What shall we do with that place which the rise of industrial organization has stripped of economic activity?
Part of the answer is that the economic evolutionists, from Engels to Ogburn to Goode to Friedan, have simply been wrong about the status of the home economy. It is true that many functions once conducted in homes were torn away by industrial organization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with disorienting results. And yet, much of this trauma-from the rise of public schooling in the 1850s to the building of "companionship" suburban homes in the 1950s-was driven by government engineering. Other choices could have been made.
Moreover, even in modern industrial nations, a vast amount of productive activity still occurs in households, albeit uncounted and unheralded. Australian economists now lead the way in documenting this truth. Duncan Ironmonger of the University of Melbourne offers a good summary of continuing home-centered activity, including meal preparation, laundry and cleaning, shopping, various forms of child care, elder care, gardening, pet care, repairs and maintenance, transportation, and volunteer community work. Moreover, he shows that the quality of these goods and services is often of higher value than that found in the marketplace (for example, compare the parental care of children to that found in a commercial daycare center). The problem is that all of these activities occur on a non-cash basis, so their "economic value"-so to speak-is unclear and easy for economists to ignore. In response, Ironmonger has carefully calculated the shadow value produced by "household industries," through both labor and capital. For Australia, in 1992, he reports this so-called Gross Household Product to be worth $341 billion, nearly equal to the economic value added by all market production in that country. Assuming rough socio-economic equivalence between the United States and Australia (which is reasonable in this case), the same figure for America would be a Gross Household Product of almost $10 Trillion in 2004.30
What then about marriage? The traditionalist case points to the needed recovery of a cultural understanding of marriage as the union of the sexual (meaning the reproductive) and the economic, with an insistence that law rest on this human universal. In the short run, this would be vital to the defense of marriage at a time when it faces profound legal and cultural challenges, rooted in misguided evolution theories. In the long run, it would be essential to the very health, and survival, of our nation.
A second imperative therefore would be more productive and more vital homes. There are several successful contemporary models; I focus here on one. The clue lies in a throwaway line from Betty Friedan, who said:
It is possible [for women] to reverse history-or kid themselves that they can reverse it-by baking their own bread, but the law does not permit them to teach their own children at home."
Well, that last item has changed-through the grassroots efforts and political action of homeschoolers since the early 1970s. From a mere handful then, homeschooling fami lies may now number 700,000, and homeschooled children over two million. In home education, we see the broadly productive home visibly reborn, and an important "lost family function" returned to its proper place. The educational effects are vast: homeschoolers are rein venting both American teaching and learning, and the children excel. By grade eight, according to a recent federal government study, these children are-on average-almost four years ahead of their public and private school counterparts. More importantly, however, these refunctionalized families also remake the very psychology of homes. They become beehives of activity: the evidence suggests that these families are more likely than nonhomeschooling households to live in semirural locations, tend a vegetable garden, engage in simple animal husbandry, create home businesses, and turn to home births.
And regarding that last item, homeschooling families are also rebuilding the bond of marriage by recovering procreative sexuality. One 1997 survey found 98 percent of homeschooling children to be living in married-couple households. The sexual division of labor in these homes was more pronounced: 52 percent of homeschoolers lived in two-parent families with only one parent in the workforce, compared to 19 percent of children nationwide. And these families were noticeably larger: with nearly twice as many children as the national average. Indeed, 62 percent of homeschooling families have three or more children, compared to 20 percent nationwide; a third of these homes have four or more children, compared with only 6 percent nationwide.32 "Functional" and "prolific," it appears, still go together, underscoring both the poetry and the power of that wonderful phrase, "They become one flesh."
In contemporary America, same-sex marriage has won a hearing in part because many see heterosexual marriage in the early twenty-first century as falling far short of the traditional standard binding the reproductive and the economic. Accordingly, any effort to rehabilitate the institution of marriage must not stop with legal bans on "gay marriage." It must also embrace true encouragements to the reconstruction of the function-rich and child-rich home.
1. "Canada OKs Gay Marriage," Seattle PostIntelligencer, June 18, 2003.
2. Jacqueline Murray, "Same-Sex Union: The Final Frontier of Marriage Evolution," Toronto Globe and Mail, June 27, 2003.
3. Virginia Postrel, "Hayek on Gay Marriage," Boston Globe, January 11, 2004.
4. Ellen Goodman, "Ruling Shows Evolution of Gay Marriage," The Detroit News, November 21, 2003.
5. Edward Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage, 5th Edition (London: Macmillan, 1925), 26-37, 69-72.
6. George Peter Murdock, Social Structure (NewYork: The Free Press, 1965 [1949]), 1-8.
7. William J. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns(New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 3.
8. See Lewis H. Morgan, Ancient Society (New York: Henry Holt, 1878).
9. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, trans. Ernest Untermann (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1902), 24, 27, 80-82, 90-92, 99.
10. Arthur W. Calhoun, A Social History of the American Family: From Colonial Times to thePresent, Vol. III (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1945 [1917]), 165-175.
11. Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of The President's Research Committeeon Social Trends, Vol. I (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), xlii, xlv, 661-692, 705-707.
12. Promotional text for Parsons and Bales, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, found in Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns, back cover.
13. Talcott Parsons and Robert F. Bales, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958), 315, 341.
14. Talcott Parsons, "An Analytical Approach to the Theory of Social Stratification," in Essays in Sociological Theory (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949), 174.
15. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns, 8-10, 368-369, 373.
16. John P. Dean, "Housing Design and Family Values," Land Economics 29 (May 1953), 128-141.
17. Svend Reimer, "Architecture for Family Living," Journal of Social Issues 7 (1951), 140-151.
18. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Newark: Dell Publishing, 1963), 122, 232-234.
19. Recent Social Trends, xliv, 688, 707.
20. Ernest W. Burgess and Henry J. Locke, The Family (New York: American Book Company, 1945), 651-672.
21. See: "Marriage...What's the Point?" at: http://www.iaguarwoman.com/mmartl27.html (3/4/04).
22. Eisenstadt v. Baird, 495 U.S. 438, 453 (1972).
23. Betty Rollin, "Motherhood: Who Needs It?" Look, September 22, 1970, 15-17.
24. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 197.
25. Talk by zoologist Clive Bromhall, Edinburgh Book Festival, 15 August 2003.
26. Genesis 1:27-28; 2:24 (Revised Standard Version).
27. C. Owen Lovejoy, "The Origin of Man," Science 211 (January 23, 1981), 348. Emphasis added.
28. Phillip L. Reno, Richard S. Meindl, Melanie A. McCollum, and C. Owen Lovejoy, "Sexual Dimorphism in Australopithecus afarensis was similar to modern humans," Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 100 (August 5, 2003), 9404-9409.
29. Ronald S. Immerman, "Perspectives on Human Attachment (Pair Bonding): Eve's Unique Legacy of a Canine Analogue," Evolutionary Psychology 1 (2003), 138-154.
30. Duncan Ironmonger, "Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs and Caring Labor: Estimating Gross Household Product," Feminist Studies 2 (1996), 37-64.
31. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 232.
32. "Homeschooling in the United States: 1999," National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education; at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/HomeSchool/chara.asp.
Allan Carlson is President of The Howard Center in Illinois and Distinguished Fellow in Family Policy Studies at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. He is the author of numerous books, including The "American Way": Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity (ISI Books, 2003). An earlier version of this essay was delivered as a lecture at the Family Research Council.
Copyright Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc. Fall 2004
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved
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