A Requiem for the Patriarchy

You’re allowed to want this, and it doesn’t make you a bad person!

This was the retrofitted caption for a colorful 1950s illustration of a patriarch returning to his charming suburban home from an office in the distant skyline. Rushing out the door, his wife and children greet him with open arms. Even the dog appears to shout with glee: Daddy’s home!

This image fills me with nostalgia, typical for a person of advanced age observing scenes from a past that will never return. While this picture of 1950s family life is clearly a work of idealizing propaganda, I truly lived it as a child growing up in the 60s. Since then, this image has been denigrated, but if our culture is going to survive, we need to renew our reverence for the life-giving forces of the patriarchy.

Running to the door to greet daddy when he came home from work was an instinctual response to the family feeling whole again, the patriarch returned to the fold. Despite my father’s significant flaws, he brought a masculine energy to our home that tempered my mother’s neurotic fears and penchant for flying off the handle. When he died of cancer at forty-six, we survivors became estranged individuals; without our patriarch, we were no longer a ‘family.’ Somehow this tragedy has become a ‘choice’ for many.

I was twenty when my father passed away in 1982, when second wave feminism pushed the choice for women to put career ahead of marriage and children, preaching that following patriarchal tradition was a form of oppression. Hence the nihilistic, dead end matriarchal society was born.

The ‘patriarchy’ was a fertile time. Life seemed to spill out of every door. The lively suburban street I grew up on had a patriarch in every home, and enough children in most households to form a chorus, or those dad-trained acrobatic families who performed on the Ed Sullivan show. But death is the essence of the matriarchy in which we now live, a time when abortion is labeled “health care,” the Democrats’ primary promise of a conduit to an ideal existence. Meanwhile, we’re in a fertility crisis that could bring the country to its knees, yet the matriarchy, with its tyranny of “care,” scolds us as “right wing” for caring about the fact that we’re not generating enough new life. Reporting on the steep decline in births, in deference to matriarchal control, the BBC claims that the cause is difficult to define.

The cause is obvious, though.

Moved by this sentimental patriarchal image and its caption, I posted it on Facebook along with an anecdote on meeting a pretty millennial woman at a Free Press function who blurted, “Feminism ruined my life.” The post triggered so much resistance and mockery that I wound up locking it out of exhaustion. None of the commenters were willing to entertain the unintended consequences wrought by feminist ideology.

Anna, unmarried but “partnered” is a professor emeritus who scored a coveted tenure track position at a small liberal arts college. She’s a fierce transgender advocate and mother to an adopted boy from Guatemala. Anna commented: “I can’t believe feminism ruined anybody’s life. That’s like saying emancipation ruined the lives of enslaved people.”

This is a false analogy, unless one believes that homemaking and motherhood is analogous to slavery. That was the message that I imbibed when launched into adulthood, even though my mother spent much of her time reading books, sewing clothes, and socializing, which she enjoyed, while my father went out in all kinds of weather to work, even when he was sick with cancer.

My grandmothers were not treated like slaves. One even had a black maid. My mother reports that my maternal grandmother’s journal from the late 1930s is rife with evidence of a lively social life. My paternal grandfather’s mother suffered the most; she’d grown up a sea captain’s daughter who married a cad who didn’t stick around after siring nine children. The patriarch she worked for as a housekeeper paid for three of her sons’ boarding at military school.

In response to “feminism ruined my life,” Elizabeth disagreed with the millennial’s “lived experience.” She wrote: “Wanting to be taken care of is a valid want. I think my main issue with lack of feminism is that it puts all the eggs in one basket.” She goes on to describe how her father decided that his “true self” was not monogamous, so her parents took on the ‘no fault’ divorce that came on the 2nd wave of feminism in the early 70s. She claims that her mother couldn’t get her own checking account after the split, so thanks to feminism, Elizabeth won't “get stuck just because she has a vagina.” She and her husband agreed that she would be the breadwinner, and he would stay at home dad to raise their two sons. Because she has a corporate job, Elizabeth says she is “a functional and productive adult.” This implies that her husband’s work raising their kids is not “productive” nor is it “adult.” It’s also intriguing to note that her husband agreed to perform the homemaker role that her mother had been in, which puts Elizabeth in control by making him dependent on her. Regardless, the arrangement recognizes the value of being home for one’s children, as opposed to investing in someone else raising them while mom is at the office. Note that Elizabeth sees being a housewife and mother as being “taken care of,” without acknowledging that providing a loving, beautiful home for children to grow up in is taking care of people. Not only that, but it’s a vital role in the human project.

While I don’t directly blame feminism for “ruining my life,” it did make getting married much more challenging than it was during the patriarchy when that’s just what people did. Where my mother dated toward marriage, I engaged in the vaunted “zipless fuck” hook-ups with no clear direction, and no language to advocate for myself since I wasn’t supposed to “need” a man. Ironically, it was the promise of the “choice” that has left me, this millennial woman — and most of the women I know — dangling in a liminal space. We are endangered in our old age with no descendants to “care” for us. In other words, there’s no avoiding getting “stuck.” When single and fending for myself, I was just as “stuck” and imperiled as I would have been if left alone with children, perhaps even more so, since a lone woman isn’t as concerning as a mother with children.

The ‘choice’ that Elizabeth promotes marks a vast improvement in her mind, but chaos has been the result: broken families, stressed-out single mothers, kids shunted between households, and even more acute for our cultural longevity: more childless people than ever. While it’s one thing to sympathize with alternate family structures, it’s quite another to promote a moribund future.

Take Family A as an example: A brother and sister in their 50s whose father passed away when they were toddlers, and their mother, recently deceased, never remarried. The brother has never married, is childless, and doesn’t work. The sister has one child by a man who pays the child support that she lives on; they aren’t married, and haven’t slept together since she was impregnated. She and their 13-year-old son sleep on mattresses on the floor in the otherwise unfurnished living room of the father’s apartment, while he sleeps alone in the bedroom.

Their male childhood neighbor arrived with his thirteen-year-old son, whom he sees only for summer and winter vacations, a privilege that cost him massive legal fees after his ex-wife falsely accused him of sexually abusing their son in order to gain sole custody. The mother’s second husband just died of a brain tumor, so male role modeling in the home is relegated to those winter and summer vacations with his biological father.

Family B of Allentown, PA: A 60-year old gay childless son who lives in the basement of his childhood home with his widowed mother; his 57-year-old sister is single and childless; her male friend and neighbor is also unmarried and childless; they met on a blind date in 1987, which paradoxically went nowhere while enduring. Family B described how Allentown was mostly white when they were growing up, but it’s now almost entirely Hispanic, which seemed to surprise them, even though they haven’t produced any humans to live there.

Family C is two sisters in their 50s whose elderly father is in hospice care. The younger sister had a son around the age of 18, and never married the father. The elder sister cohabitates with a man, but they don’t have children because of climate change, yet they are two persons occupying a large family-sized house. Their mother just passed away, and they described taking care of her as “a lot of work,” though who’ll do the same for them is anyone’s guess. The childless sister told how years ago she’d been married, got pregnant, and aborted the baby when her husband was killed in an accident, which she presented as a good reason for an abortion. In what had seemed to be a civil discussion on political disagreements, her climate-zealot partner went into a rant on how humans are “parasites” who are actively destroying the planet, and that he’s a “good person” for not having children. “Do you have children?” he asked in a combative tone. When I told him I don’t have children, he responded, “Good. At least you didn’t do that!” He emphasized his point that humans caused climate change with an analogy to do with the human who removes coal from under the ground and places it in the snow. If there were no humans to dig the coal out of the ground, the snow would remain pure, therefore, humans are bad for the earth. In other words, the human male whose sperm meets the egg to create a new human is as destructive to the earth as the human who digs the coal out of the ground.

If you’ve done the math on these three families, there are just three children born to nine Boomer and Gen X persons, an aging generation that will require the economic fuel of a younger generation that they have failed to engender.

Of my group of five female friends from high school, there are only three children from two of us; one had so many abortions that she could barely carry her one child to term. The father of the aborted babies is the love of her life, but she married someone else many abortions later. Our five mothers produced fourteen children. In my own family, my mother had four children. The two boys have fathered five children; the girls none. In their 20s and 30s, none of our nieces and nephews show any inclination to become parents. I’m “unintentionally childless” due to some Kool-Aid drinking combined with foolish “choices” that in hindsight, I wish I had not had.

Most of the women I work with are childless, and destined to remain so. Most are not married, nor are they in lasting relationships. The relationships that I’ve heard about were generally ended by the woman because he didn’t measure up in some way. Most co-workers who are married do not have children, or they are single mothers who have only one child, in many cases adopted from China or Central America. Another acquaintance got pregnant at thirty-seven from a hookup, and told the father that he did not have to be involved. He insisted that he should be involved, and they tried living together. I still don’t understand why he was so awful that she left, and subsequently took him to court when having a child proved to be more expensive than she’d anticipated. Since then, the father has been happily married to another woman, with whom he has no children, while the mother of his child has cycled through some ten relationships sourced online that her son has witnessed coming and going. The only woman in my world who’s created a large, patriarchal-style family is an orthodox Jew.

The cycle of life has been broken by the matriarchy. Never in the history of the world have there been so many childless people, and so many fractured families. It’s ultimately a counterintuitive solution to the patriarchal ‘problem.’

Recently I gave a presentation for a social justice group, all women, whose maternal instincts are projected onto prison inmates, their proxy children. My presentation concerned the exponential increase since 2009 of people dying alone and unclaimed in New York City. When no next of kin come to claim them, the decedents are buried in mass unmarked graves in the potter’s field. I presented the case of a childless career woman who died in her bathtub, and wasn’t found until neighbors complained of the odor. The public administrator’s search for next of kin turned up only a distant relative who didn’t even know of this woman’s existence, so the City buried the woman on Hart Island. Later, a persistent public administrator located a Jewish burial fund for those born in Jewish hospitals. This charity paid to disinter her body from Hart Island, and rebury her with a proper Jewish ceremony in a Staten Island cemetery. In other words, this childless woman was saved from obscurity by the patriarchy.

The social justice activists shrugged off this story, and my thesis that having children is vital. They have “chosen families,” they said. Children are overrated. What truly mattered to them were those non-white prisoners, dying alone in their cells.

“But this woman died completely alone in a cell,” I said. “And there was no one to care for her until after she was dead.”

What this matriarchy offers is the ‘choice’ to eradicate our legacy.