What a strange thing the “women’s movement” is. Often it seems
to work against the interest of women. I heard the Independent
Women’s Forum was meeting, so perhaps they could shed some light.
(The IWF was launched when a group of ladies rallied to the defense
of then-beleaguered Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.) When I
asked someone what the Independent Women’s Forum is independent of,
she said: “the women’s movement.” That was good enough for me, and
I promised her anonymity.
The main speaker, Elizabeth Kantor, has just published
The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (Regnery
Publishing). The idea is that Jane Austen’s characters and stories
can illuminate the modern conflict between the sexes. Men and women
may well be unequally affected by today’s ongoing sexual
revolution, and Mrs. Kantor looked at it from the distaff side.
“When it comes to men, sex, and marriage, women are settling for
less than they want,” she said. It’s “relationships” that make for
happiness, not independence, equal pay, or high-powered jobs. I’m
sure she’s right about that. She warned against the error of
seeking out the drama and romantic “soul mates” that tempted some
of Jane Austen’s heroines, and she said many other good things.
I enjoyed the forum, but the problem is that when it comes to
Jane Austen, I find it hard to keep my Bennets, Bingleys, and
Dashwoods straight. I also agree with my fellow TAS
columnist Jim Bowman, who was on the panel and made some sensible
comments. The difficulty that college-educated or professional
women have in finding suitable husbands today, he said later, is
“rather different from anything the women of Jane Austen’s day had
to cope with.”
Jane Austen, who died at the age of 41 nearly 200 years ago,
would surely be horrified if she were to return and see the sexual
chaos that prevails among young people today. Contributing to the
problem is the strangely myopic condition of the modern feminist
movement, which seems to have made things worse.
At least three bad things have happened. First, the old
restraint against divorce was overridden. A vow before God was
reduced to a contract. Mrs. Kantor told me that before the Divorce
Act of 1857, divorce in England could be obtained only by an Act of
Parliament, and only the rich could afford that. Marriage therefore
was final, imposing on an Austen heroine a burden of prudent
inquiry into the character of a potential suitor. That inquiry
unfolds in the course of the novel.
Second came the technology of contraception. “The pill” arrived
50 years ago, working (as I believe) to the considerable
disadvantage of women. Not long after the pill, abortion was
legalized. It still comes as a shock to realize that today’s
feminists overwhelmingly support abortion.
The widespread acceptance of these three “social issues” has
accompanied, and at the same time has helped to accelerate, the
decline of Christianity in the Western world.
I have long wondered about the rage that infuses the women’s
movement, and maybe the reason is not hard to find. First, sex
involves a stark inequality: for the man it is brief and
pleasurable. For the woman (if it leads to pregnancy) the
consequences can be long-lasting, painful, and life-altering.
Before the pill, a woman could resist sexual advances by appealing
to their consequences (for her). Men understood that. After the
pill—and I’m old enough to remember when it came in—men could say,
“Well, can’t you go on the pill?”
Many a young woman accepted that proposition, perhaps after
seeking reassurance that the man would still love her “in the
morning.” So the pill effectively weakened a key argument against
men whose primary goal was to have sex. Further, a good many men
proceeded to betray the women they had inveigled into bed. They
didn’t love them in the morning. Instead, they moved on to the next
“conquest.” It was the Gloria Steinem generation that was affected,
and hurt. The “women’s liberation movement” arose in response,
beginning in about 1970. Not surprisingly, it was infused with a
good deal of rage—against men.
I have no statistics, but I have no doubt that over-whelmingly
it was men who, in this way, launched the pill-enabled sexual
revolution. Notice also that the men who seized this opportunity
for themselves rebelled against or ignored any Christian teaching
they may have received. For whether contraception was available or
not, pre-marital sex was contrary to their religion. It was
sinful.
Charles J. Chaput, now the Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia,
observed in 1998: “Contraception has released males—to a
historically unprece-dented degree—from responsibility for their
sexual aggression.”
The next development was that the contraceptives often failed
and women found themselves with child—and without husband.
Abortion, therefore, was not far behind—not just as something legal
but as a constitutional right. So in response to the initial male
revolt against traditional morality, both women and men compounded
the error and embraced the horror of abortion.
A hundred years ago, early feminists opposed abortion. Today?
NOW favors “reproductive rights,” to use the latest euphemism. But
what so many of us have forgotten is that the old Christian
prohibitions against divorce, contraception, and abortion worked to
protect women (just as the old injunction against women in combat
worked to their advantage, too).
THE CUMULATIVE EFFECT has been to plunge us ever deeper
into the sexual revolution. There’s a brave pretense that sexual
equality is an achievable goal, and not just equality in the
office. So we have same-sex college dorms and a culture of “hooking
up.” We have date-rape codes and an ever-increasing wariness
between the sexes of a marriageable age. The connection between
sexual intercourse and procreation has been rendered voluntary.
We are so immersed in this that we can hardly see how
revolutionary it is. A recent book that addresses the subject
persuasively is Mary Eberstadt’s
Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution
(Ignatius Press). She sees the gravity of the situation, for
both men and women. Among other things she points out that Pope
Paul VI’s unpopular encyclical, Humanae Vitae (1968),
opposing contraception, has been borne out in every particular.
There’s also a parallel with the Communist revolution.
“Incredible as it may seem in retrospect,” Eberstadt writes, the
moral facts of the Cold War “remained disputed at the highest
intellectual levels, especially on American campuses, until about
two seconds before the Berlin Wall came down.” Now we have another
world-changing force, the “destigmatization and demystification of
nonmarital sex and the reduction of sexual relations to a kind of
hygienic recreation in which anything goes so long as those
involved are consenting adults.” It’s defended in liberal circles
as fervently as Lenin defended Communism.
The Communist revolution was Russian, but the sexual revolution
(I regret to say) is authentically American—from divorce in Las
Vegas to Roe v. Wade in Washington. It will be defended to
the death by liberal organs like the New York Times.
Mrs. Eberstadt skirts one issue that is likely to provoke a
reappraisal—population decline in the developed world. It surely
has been a consequence, and a desired consequence, of the sexual
revolution. I believe its impact is already being felt in Europe.
Populations top-heavy with old people will not be able to sustain
income-transfer programs (from workers to retirees). Young people
beware. Anyway, we will be hearing a great deal about this in the
years ahead.
Well, I seem to have strayed far afield—from Jane Austen to Las
Vegas; from the premarital courting rituals in Regency England to
the disruptions of the sexual revolution today. If you want to
delve further into both, I heartily recommend both Elizabeth
Kantor’s Happily Ever After and Mary Eberstadt’s
Adam and Eve After the Pill.
