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Missing From Action 

The truth has set my wife and I free of the deadly ideology that she and I interchange positions. Another excellent book that explains how America has gone off track is Weldon Hardenbrook's Missing From Action. He writes, "It is imperative that American men understand that Jesus attempted not to destroy or to replace the patriarchal function of men, but to explain its full meaning. His teachings on virginity, equality of the sexes, loving one's enemies, the value of human life, humility, good works, and the absolute sacredness of the marriage bond served to complete the proper patriarchal image of pre-Christian Israel. Jesus came not to abolish patriarchy, but to reveal it. In all honesty, apart from Christ, men will not be adequate fathers. It is only in Him that the fullness of the Father is disclosed."

"Being the kind of fathers men are supposed to be means that they must return to patriarchy. Therefore, men should reject the historically inaccurate assertion, so naively believed by Americans of both sexes, that patriarchal families were oppressive families in which women and children suffered at the cruel hands of despotic men. An objective look at the period in American history when patriarchal families were the norm tells just the opposite story. It plainly demonstrates that spouses and children felt far less oppressed and far more content than their modern counterparts."Hardenbrook Picture

"This antipatriarchal propaganda is part of the Victorian myth that disgraces not only the prerevolutionary colonial family, but the entire Judeo-Christian tradition, whose influence provided family order for the entire world. 'Alternative' families are not adequate replacements for traditional families. They are Band-Aids on cancer. Patriarchy is the only workable blueprint for the family. The American home has no chance of survival without it."

Feminists have been constantly brainwashing America about how bad the Victorian patriarch was and how they have a brave new world. The following is against Helen Andelin because she teaches Victorian values. Notice that you will hear the standard line of how men back then had mistresses and wives were so unhappy. Afterward I'll quote a scholar on the Victorians who will say this is not the way it really was. Most men were loyal and most families were happy and intact instead of the other way around since this century tried Marx's equality in marriage and work.

A book criticizing Helen Andelin and those who champion the traditional family is Patricia Gundry's The Complete Woman. She writes "Women are seeking. From where I sit I can see in my bookcase The Fulfilled Woman, The Total Woman, Fascinating Womanhood, and The Feminine Principle. All these books try to tell women how to find what they are seeking. They tell how to get what you want. Or how to want what you get, and convince yourself it is wonderful. And they all do it by telling women to be weak, submissive, even subservient."

"They insist that God is on their side. In fact, that is their proof that their way is best, guaranteed. God is in it. And that's exactly where they are wrong. God does not require that women stifle themselves to please him. The position reflected in these popular books is the result of a distorted view of God and of what the Bible says about women." She is the one with distorted views. These books do not "stifle" women.

She goes on to say that Andelin and others "limit," "demean," and make women into "slaves." She teaches that women need "a marketable skill .... We have too long believed that all we needed to do was to be good wives and mothers and leave the supporting to our husbands. It doesn't work out that way for too many women. Without warning, they suddenly find themselves displaced by younger women, or through the death or disablement of their husbands."

"For purely practical reasons, quite apart from any joy one gets from a skill that is also marketable, women need to be able to support themselves." This sounds good on the surface but there is a higher view. That is trinities. Women are to not only be provided for by one husband. They need two or more other men to take responsibility to care for them. God's life insurance is trinities and community, not impersonal companies. Women should focus on building a community, not on getting skills for the workplace.

She writes that the Victorian patriarch saw his wife as an "asexual, pure, idle and decorative creature protected and kept in this lofty state by a man who went out to prostitutes for sex in order not to brutalize and destroy his pure lily at home." This is a myth. She writes, "It is this attitude about women from the Victorian Era that led to the Total Woman and Fascinating Womanhood mystique. This mystique is the logical result of the new view of woman as decoration and lapdog begun way back there." Nothing could be further from the truth. She goes on to glorify work in the marketplace for women.Gertrude Himmelfarb

The world's authority on the Victorians is the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb who wrote The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. She teaches that we have a completely wrong view of the Victorians.

 Victorian Myths

 She refutes the common belief that Victorians had repressed sex lives:"In the absence of any Victorian equivalent to the Kinsey Report (which itself is notoriously unreliable), it is hard to speak confidently about Victorian sexualit -- even about ideas of sexuality, let alone practices. Yet there is enough evidence to suggest that the conventional view of sexual repression is much exaggerated; the many happy marriages, for example, surely testify to satisfactory sexual relations. It is also significant that whereas Evangelical writings in the early part of the century tended to be puritanical about sex, the later one stressed the importance of conjugal sex for a happy and healthy marriage." Himmelfarb discounts a book by Acton that is considered by many historians as the truth on Victorian sexuality. She writes,"According to one historian, he exposed the sexual repression that was at the heart of the Victorian age, a time when 'hypocritical prudery' combined with 'sexual asceticism' to produce a 'concept of women as sexless, domesticated, child-bearing machines.' For another, he confirmed the view of women as 'either sexless ministering angels or sensuously oversexed temptress of the devil."

"There are good reasons, however, to distrust Acton's book. Mistresses were not a commonplace of Victorian life -- certainly not among the middle or working classes -- so that most men need not have worried about overtaxing their sexual capacities. Nor were prostitutes as plentiful as some contemporaries thought. Nor were the concepts of the 'sexless' wife and the 'oversexed' mistress or prostitute nearly as pervasive as Acton made it appear. The memoirs and letters of some contemporary women, including eminently respectable ones, testify to a recognition of a strong sexual desire on their part; since this was not a subject that was readily discussed, even in private communications, one may assume that there were a larger number of such women than has been supposed. There were also other doctors who had a more modern conception of female sexuality. One of England's first woman doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell, who believed female sexuality to be as strong as that of males. Another was James Paget, a distinguished teacher and surgeon, the author of classic medical works who was far more influential than Acton (he was consulting surgeon to Queen Victoria) and who had much moderate views on the subject of sexuality. In addition to medical books, there were marital and sex manuals, which in themselves belie the image of a thoroughly repressed and inhibited society."

She also destroys the myth that men were basically brutal and insensitive patriarchs:"The stereotype of the tyrannical, abusive paterfamilias applied to a small minority...it was the exception, not the rule, and an exception much frowned upon by neighbors and relatives. That minority, to be sure, inflicted untold misery upon their families. The misery was usually suffered in silence, but when a wife brought an official complaint, the court generally found in her favor, granting her a judicial separation and a maintenance allowance and sentencing the husband to several months at hard labor." Men and women were basically happy living in their"separate spheres." Can we say that about marriages today?


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