Deeper feminist regret

There is a genre of confessional writing that might be called "feminist regret". I have chronicled many examples of this genre over the years, but I came across the most thoughtful one just this week. It is called "A Requiem for the Patriarchy" and is written by Darlene Lev. 

Darlene Lev has also discussed her thoughts in a long interview with Leslie Boyce (see here) and I will be using this as well to draw out some of her ideas.

It's helpful to begin with some biography. Darlene Lev was born in 1961 and grew up in Brooklyn. Her father was Christian and her mother Jewish (though she seems to have been raised Christian). Her mother discouraged her from being a homemaker and she was influenced by the changes in popular culture in the 1970s to think that she could do whatever a man did (she says that TV series like Charlie's Angels had this effect). When the pill became available, she and her friends took this as a freedom to be sexually promiscuous. She did eventually marry but chose to divorce her husband. She supported herself through her work as an academic. She is now in her mid-60s and childless.

Darlene Lev

She describes herself as someone who experienced two different worlds. The world she grew up in before the influence of second wave feminism and then the feminist one that followed. Surveying her life experiences she has come to a principled, and deep, rejection of feminism. 

What made her change her mind about feminism? Well, in comparing culture as it was in her youth to what followed she sees an emerging wasteland. Both family and local community have disintegrated during the course of her lifetime. This has left herself and many of her peers single, unsupported, childless and socially isolated. 

To her credit she does not take the option of blaming men. She has a more interesting analysis which I will break down into three parts.

1. Patriarchy

Darlene Lev draws a distinction between the patriarchy she grew up in and the present day matriarchy. By patriarchy she means something like a family structure in which men are present within the family, are respected for what they bring to family life, and who create stability and security for all those within the family. By matriarchy, she is referring to a social system in which this role of men has been dispensed with.

She does not have a naive view of the older family culture. She acknowledges that a small number of women were abandoned, and that some marriages were unhappy. Nonetheless, she has a sense that the masculine principle is necessary to uphold social life. Without it, communities lose a connection to both order and meaning. And, absent the masculine presence, women are less able to create local community as they once did.

She does not pull her punches in introducing this argument:

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 one of 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. 

She develops the argument by listing the people she knows with chaotic family lives or who disavow having children as a matter of principle. I understand her completely in this. My parents' generation had stable marriages and many children. My own did not. To experience this decline can be bewildering. I think, for instance, of my best friend at school who had four sisters. None of them married. None of them had children. This has always seemed tragic to me - and unsettling, suggesting some deeper social malaise.

Darlene Lev seems to be reaching toward an argument I have made myself before, namely that men bring into social life the vertical structure of reality. This is how Lawrence Auster describes it:

Symbolically, the father is the structuring source of our existence, whether we are speaking of male authority, of the law, of right and wrong, of our nation, of our heritage, of our civilization, of our biological nature, of our God. All these structuring principles of human life, in their different ways, are symbolically the father. The rebellion we've discussed is...a rebellion against the father. The belief that the universe is structured, intelligible, and fundamentally good, and that one can participate in this universe - this is the experience of having a father, which is the opposite of the experience of alienation that drives contemporary culture.

Without this, there is not the same conviction of participating in a reality that is, as Auster puts it, fundamentally good. And therefore there is not the same openness to creating new life. 

2. Choice

I recently read an essay by Ted Sadler in the Observer & Review (Volume 2 Issue 2, Number 3) titled "Suicide of the West: Towards a Universal Homogeneous Superstate".  Sadler views contemporary liberalism as a continuation of a longer project that had taken definite shape by the Enlightenment:

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century looked to a new cosmopolitan super-culture that would replace Christianity: individuals would be uprooted not only from their national or ethnic or local traditions - which could only be the source of prejudices - but also from the similarly cosmopolitan super-culture of Christianity. The new mature enlightened individual would stand naked and proud 'above' all tradition, needing only his 'freedom' and prosperity. (p.236)

By modern times this project was expressed in terms of building a social order upon material prosperity and individual choice:

The homogenization process of the universal homogeneous state means that society is defined as an indiscriminate aggregate of individuals stripped of any other cultural identity: ethnicity, nation, tradition and religion...All individuals, it is assumed, are capable of taking their place in the economy as workers, consumers, tax-payers and benefit-recipients....The assumption is that the social and cultural identity of the universal homogeneous state is nothing in particular: this absence of identity is called 'multi-culturalism', a euphemism for the cultural vacuum that is liberalism....

Liberals themselves, of course, do not say they are affirming a vacuous negativity, but insist that their supreme virtue is freedom. The ideal liberal state is supposed to provide not just economic well-being for everybody, but the freedom of individuals to do what they like, say what they like, think what they like, live however they like, providing it does not infringe on the freedom of others. (pp. 232-33)

Sadler goes on to describe the drift of liberalism toward intolerance. Darlene Levy approaches things from a different angle. She has already identified the disintegrating effect of this project on social bodies like the family and local community. But she also questions whether the project really delivers meaningful choice the way it claims to do.

In her interview, she says (at 22:05) that:

From the moment I hit puberty all that I could think about was having babies. That was my instinct. That's what I wanted to do.

Despite this being what she most wanted to choose, it never happened. She had to contend with her mother pushing her toward careerism. But more than this, there was by this time a dating culture based around casual hookups rather than a culture of courtship as had existed in previous generations. People socialised in bars and at concerts and she found it a difficult environment to assert her desire for a more committed relationship (it had become "shameful and humiliating" to have to admit to the man she was with that she wanted more than something casual). On the occasions she did give voice to this "they would say that that's not what they wanted". 

She is describing a flaw in the liberal model. Some of our more profound life choices cannot be made through our own volition alone. They are more likely to be realised in certain cultural environments and they depend on the choices other people make. In her social milieu, there were no longer rituals of courtship leading to marriage and then to children. The expectation was that encounters were to be casual. Yes, it might still have been possible to find a way through this, but her choice was made much more difficult to realise than it once would have been.

Her solution to this is interesting. She says that,

In my generation we were fumbling around, not knowing how to get what we deep down really wanted...And the lack of community oversight also lends itself to that. You are alone in the middle of nowhere and no-one's really watching you...But if we have to decide what really is better for everyone, perhaps it would be more connection around community...that we are all families that live in this place and we collectively want to create a really nice place for us to thrive in. 

This too highlights an issue within liberalism. If there are no objective goods that contribute to human well-being, but only subjective preferences, then there will develop over time an "indifference to the good". But this then leads to the kind of abandonment that Darlene Lev complains about. There cannot be "community oversight" if there are no agreed upon outcomes to be achieved. If, for instance, you were to say to a liberal "is it not unusual for all four sisters to remain unmarried and childless?" the most common answer you will receive is "well, that is just what they chose to do". As if there were "nothing to see here" and therefore no real concern for what might have led to such an outcome.

Darlene Lev also seems to be reaching toward the idea of a common good - the idea that we might "collectively want to create a really nice place for us to thrive in". What is being recognised here is that our own individual good often depends on the health of the social bodies we are members of. So it does matter to us that others choose in ways that uphold the good of this larger body (an aspect of living in a high trust community - we can trust that others will do the right thing). 

Leslie Boyce, the interviewer, makes a similar point when the two women discuss one of Darlene Lev's female students who has chosen to be a prostitute. Leslie Boyce observes that (1:02:54),

There's a bit of a paradox here because on the individual level we tend to respect choices, let people do things and we're not going to look too hard at what they're doing. And then on the zoom out social level, it's the aggregate of these kinds of choices that end up creating exactly the trends that we're sitting here describing today.

The choices people make matter not only to themselves but to others, because the aggregate of these choices forms the culture we all inhabit. And none of us can claim to live entirely isolated from our own culture. 

3. Disposability

One of the problems identified by Darlene Lev is that marriage has become less durable, in part, because relationships with men are increasingly seen as being disposable. For instance, she writes that,

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.

She also recounts the story (at 33:58) of going for a walk in the park one day with a female friend and her baby. The husband of this friend had started a new restaurant and was working long hours to establish it. The wife felt aggrieved that he was not home more, but Darlene Lev pointed out that he was a faithful husband whose work was allowing her to spend time with her child. Years later the friend told Darlene that her words had helped save her marriage as her other friends had all advised her to leave. 

This shift to seeing relationships as disposable was noted by one of the first writers of the feminist regret genre, the Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger. In 2002 she wrote a newspaper article titled "The Sins of our Feminist Mothers" in which she confessed that,

For those of us that did marry, marriage was perhaps akin to an accessory. And in our high-disposable-income lives, accessories pass their use-by date, and are thoughtlessly tossed aside. Frankly, the dominant message was to not let our man, or any man for that matter, get in the way of career and our own personal progress.

We should not be at all surprised by this trend. It is not possible for loyalty to be a feature of a society like ours. If the primary and overriding good is a freedom to choose in any direction, then loyalty becomes a vice not a virtue. Loyalty means declining choice. It means renouncing options. When we are loyal there are choices we will not even consider, that are ruled out.

Worse yet if the loyalty is to a cultural identity or tradition that the homogenizing state is set against. This is then doubly an offence. Little wonder that our politicians do not feel the moral weight of betrayal. 

And little wonder that a modern day marriage therapist would argue with me as follows on the topic of what might be reasonable grounds for divorce:

She believes that the very foundation of marriage is the freedom to leave. This is our culture travelling to topsy turvy land, where the meaning of things is put upside down. Instead of a focus on fidelity, or religious commitment or even spousal love as foundations of marriage, it is the freedom to leave which takes centre stage. The notion of marriage vows would then seem to be redundant.

Depth

Some of the women who write feminist regret literature eventually lapse back into feminism. Their discontent relates to their failure to have children; once they reconcile themselves to this, they resume their former ideological commitments. Germaine Greer is something of an example of this. In 1991 she wrote "Most societies have arranged matters so that a family surrounds and protects mother and child," and complained of "our families having withered away" with relationships becoming "less durable every year." As well observed as this might be she nonetheless remained broadly within the feminist camp.

It doesn't seem likely that Darlene Lev will end up in this group of women. There is more than personal regret at her own feminist choices, there is also a recognition that something is deeply wrong at a wider social level, to the point that there is a closure to new life and to community. And she is reaching toward explanations that put her well outside of the Enlightenment project, with its limiting of values to material prosperity and individual choice. 

She clearly believes that a masculine principle is needed to provide a stabilising element within human relationships and even to provide the sense of meaningful order - the goodness - within which a commitment to future life is more likely to be made. 

And she has reached beyond the idea of a society made up of a mere agglomerate of individuals, toward something like a common good, in which communities intentionally set out to uphold the conditions for human flourishing and in which people are supported in realising the more important aspects of life, such as forming a family.