The two prior posts give some sense of why it is fair to say that modern radical feminists are the new barbarians, for in seeking equivalence with males, instead of fighting to protect their natural complementarity, they have adopted the traditional male attitude toward children (let me go hunt, or work, while someone else looks after the kids).The earlier familism fought this internal threat aggressively from a grounding in spiritual and moral values that stressed the importance of character. For how could character be formed if both mothers and fathers - and even many children – went to work outside the home? To the contrary, the private home must be protected not only as a barrier to the tentacles of the state, but as a temple for the enjoyment of family relations and the inculcation of virtue, for the real job of the family, surely, is to develop the civilized men and women of tomorrow. No one then believed for a moment that any state could, or should do this, or should be allowed to do it, for governments can only shape us in their own image. So because men were of necessity sweating it out in factory and field to feed their families, women had to take control of the moral tenor of the family - if not of the entire nation. As feminists they took a prodigious stab at the latter job through the formation of anti-drug and anti-alcohol unions (we see it today in MADD: mothers against drunk drivers) through charity and job-training interventions in the homes of the poor and immigrant population (to "save" the children from ignorance and poverty), and extensively through their influence on the curriculum and development of the public schools.

Perhaps most important of all, these earlier feminists never felt the need to agitate for what they considered the false and damaging notion of "equal rights" - a concept roundly rejected even today by most European feminists (and more recently by millions of ordinary American women who rejected the Equal Rights Amendment in 1979 after a decade of aggressive, tax-funded lobbying by U.S. radicals). On the contrary, they argued: because women are special by nature they also have special home duties for which special laws and protections are needed. That was the motive behind their push for higher wages for working husbands. A single factory wage was obviously too little to support a wife and three children so there was, they argued, a pressing need for a "family wage" sufficient to support a family of five. In what was perhaps the single most important social achievement of the time they succeeded in structuring society so as to make this happen. They saw to it that laws were passed to protect and promote the five-member family by demanding higher pay for married men with children, and by actively discouraging the employment of single women or men who might take scarce jobs from working husbands and fathers (even today, about 95% of all men and women marry in their lifetimes and have families). This did not mean, then or now, that a woman who chose to do so couldn't go forth into the market and work. But it did mean that in a society that privileged the natural family over the autonomous individual a single man or woman might receive a lesser wage than a married man with children. And just as a young woman would have to cope with myriad social pressures pushing her toward a home-based life with children, so young males had to cope with myriad pressures pushing them to marry and become qualified for a job sufficient to support a wife and children. I think boys start worrying about their capacity to fulfill that male mission at about age 15 – I certainly did so - and it is a pressure that never fades in the manly. Others seem to get feminized early on, so to speak. They buy into the dogma of the welfare state and all the drivel about equality. Or they are lazy, or incapable of earning a family wage, and so they become overnight egalitarians and you soon hear them attacking their child-weary wives, trying to make them feel guilty and to drive them out of the home and into the work force where they can “do their share” to help with the family income.

Well, the horse is well out of the barn by now, but knowing our own history helps us see how far we have traveled from our former family-based social ideal. The long and short of it seems to boil down to the fact that in the recent past women recognized the ongoing struggle between the economic order, and the moral order, and that without adequate protections the first may well erode the second. But there is a crucial difference between the moral order they were trying to protect, and the one feminists value today. Then, the moral order rested on the family unit, whereas today it rests on the seemingly attractive but ultimately dangerous notion of the autonomous individual who yearns to be “free” even of all moral ties and obligations he or she has not personally chosen. It is important to understand how contemporary radical feminism became a major driving force toward the establishment of this crass and selfish form of individualism – one never before imagined in all of history - and hence how it has served as maidservant to the growing power of the anti-family welfare State. For the latter is only too happy to extract more tax dollars to grow more government to supply us with more social agencies and services to replace the affections and connections families proudly – even defiantly - used to create, nurture, and protect, by and for themselves.