Life Without Father

Another distinguished sociologist in America is David Popenoe. He is writing revisionist history also saying we have not seen the greatness of the Victorians. In his book Life Without Father he explains that Victorian patriarchy was not as bad as everyone thinks. He says, "The lambasting of the Victorian family by scholars has been relentless. It has been charged with patriarchy and gross female oppression and seen as a domestic tyranny -- a place which men abandoned for the greater glory of the workplace; a family system where people were so repressed sexually that they became emotionally damaged for life; a hierarchy that suppressed children's natural instincts and stifled emotional expression, leading to lifelong psychological difficulties. In short, it has been seen as a historical family form whose departure should be a cause for little short of celebration."

He says they were not perfect, but "the seemingly intractable social problems of the late twentieth century throw into bold relief the strengths of the Victorian family -- not only in contributing to personal security and well-being but also in creating a viable and remarkably successful institution for raising future citizens and for promoting principles that buttressed the social fabric and the national good."

"Examinations of our past in an attempt to draw reasonable lessons for today are often dismissed as mere 'exercises in nostalgia.' The underlying assumption of this invocation seems to be that every aspect of our life has improved, and life in the past is something either negative or better left forgotten."

"The most remarkable thing about the nineteenth-century Victorian family was its great stability -- the rate of voluntary family breakup was extraordinarily low. The stability was especially remarkable because the Victorian family was based heavily on love and affection. Lawrence Stone has suggested that this was 'the first family type in history which was both long-lasting and intimate.'"

He asks, "How was the durability of the Victorian family achieved?" Some would argue that jobs were hard to get for women and divorce laws were more restrictive, but Popenoe says, "But it is also the case that male commitment to family life in the Victorian era remained enormous .... Men took their breadwinner role with utmost seriousness and strongly identified their success in the workplace with the happiness and security of their wives and families. To be a man was to be an economically successful family provider. 'In fact,' as Karen Lystra has pointed out, 'nineteenth century men claimed they worked for women and children in a way analogous to an earlier generation of Americans who claimed they worked for God.' Within the home many men sought to live up to their vows to 'love, honor and cherish,' just as women sought to respect their vows to 'love, honor, and obey.' And just as wives had an economic dependency on their husbands, so did husbands develop a strong emotional dependency on their wives."

"Although Victorian marriages were initiated on the bases of love and parental choice, older religiously based value systems of commitment and obligation were still largely in place. Marriages were held together less by the thin reeds of intimacy and affection, as in the case today, than by a deep sense of social responsibility and spousal obligation. In the words of historian Elaine Tyler May, 'Husbands were to provide the necessities of life, treat their wives with courtesy and protection, and exercise sexual restraint .... A wife's duty was to maintain a comfortable home, take care of household chores, bear and tend to the children, and set the moral tone for domestic life.' With children parents had a built-in attitude of self-sacrifice, renouncing many of their own personal satisfactions for the good of the family unit. As writer Henry Seidel Canby recollected about his Victorian upbringing in the 1890s, 'We knew ... from our own impulsive desires that the father and mother denied themselves every day, if not every hour, something for the sake of the family.'"

"The Victorian era was one dominated by a culture of 'character,' a belief that it was each person's supreme duty to live a life governed by a high moral code and to suppress any natural inclinations to the contrary. 'By the middle of the nineteenth century,' notes historian William L. O'Neill, 'Anglo-American society had formulated a moral code based on three related principles -- the permanency of marriage, the sacredness of the home, and the dependence of civilized life upon the family.' This moral code and the belief in the importance of character provided the interpersonal glue in marriage that love alone is incapable of providing. Once this moral code evaporated -- in the twentieth century -- the fragility of love as the sole basis for marriage became all too apparent."

He writes that this period was "a time of great social well-being .... an extraordinarily high measure of peace and social order, civility, optimism, and sense of social progress and achievement .... By the end of the nineteenth century, for example, rates of crime and deviance reached lows that have never before or since been seen. As social analyst James Lincoln Collier has summarized, 'Pre-marital pregnancy rates dropped sharply; alcoholic intake was down two-thirds from the dizzying heights of the previous era; church attendance rose dramatically; homes, farms, and streets became cleaner, casual violence was curbed.'"

There was, in other words, a movement upwards towards God's ideal. God was working to create a society at the top of the growth period to meet the messiah and have him take them to a perfect world. Satan worked to end this and had by 1920 set mankind on a downward spiral by tricking everyone to believe that the basic values of the Victorian home were bad. Father has come to bring God's values back -- many of the values that the Victorians cherished.

Popenoe writes, "The social well-being of the time stemmed in large part from the high levels of self-discipline and sense of obligation, as well as personal achievement, that the late Victorians espoused. Using todays terminology, this era was highly communtarian in character, marked by a strong sense of shared values and reciprocal responsibilities. 'The main thing that Victorians can teach us,' writes historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, 'is the importance of values -- or, as they would have said, 'virtues' -- in our public as well as private lives.' Indeed, the values that today we desperately clamor to regain -- honesty, trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, and citizenship-- are the very values which characterized the Victorian period."

1848

 Marx and Engels were writing against the Victorian home. They wanted to abolish it, and they did. It is no coincidence that they wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848 in Europe and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the "Seneca Falls Declaration" in Seneca Falls, New York also in 1848. Satan unleashed his terrible ideology that year. Mrs. Stanton mocked the language of the Declaration of Independence urging women to become independent of men. She pushed for the vote, too. She had a good marriage, lots of kids, a big house and maids. Her husband was so upset he didn't attend her meeting and left town that day. She presented her document alone. The seeds for division between men and women were planted. The households of Marx and Engels were even worse. Engels didn't believe in marriage and had a live-in lover. No children wanted here. The seeds of fornication, cohabitation, barren women and fewer children were planted. Marx had an illegitimate child with a simple maid who he treated like a slave. Marx never loved or even acknowledged his son from her. Marx lived in poverty, constantly being thrown out of rented homes. He didn't provide for his family but spent endless hours at the library, the British Museum, obsessed with his satanic hatred of the traditional family and capitalism. He had a daughter who rejected moral behavior and then committed suicide. The seeds for adultery, illegitimacy, immorality, poverty, anti-capitalism and suicide were planted. Aren't these the problems we are harvesting today? But no one knows where it comes from, not even the so-called anti-communist UC which in reality teaches Marxist hatred for patriarchy and capitalism and advocates some glorious new alternative lifestyle without patriarchy that Marx and Engels wanted. Marx had to destroy the Bible because it taught patriarchy.

Tim LaHaye

Tim LaHaye in Six Keys to a Happy Marriage says, "No organization can function if it has two heads. That is particularly true of the home. One of the great hindrances to a happy home today is the false notion that a woman does not have to subject herself to her husband. Modern psychology and education seem to give women the idea that subjection is an old-fashioned notion that went out with the nineteenth century. But when subjection goes out of the home, so does happiness."

"Today we have more frustrated women, men, and children than ever before. With the downgrading of the father image and the rising dominance of the mother role, we have witnessed an increase in juvenile delinquency, rebellion, homosexuality, and divorce. God intended man to be the head of his home. If he is not, he will not have a sense of responsibility but will subconsciously feel he is married to a second mother. His children will soon detect who is boss, and as teenagers they will lose the natural respect for their father that is necessary for their adjustment to life."

"Usually a wife-dominated home is a quarrelsome home until the husband finally 'gives up.' He then crawls into his shell of introversion and degenerates into a sub-par human being. The sadder result is, a wife will eventually grow to despise the husband she dominates .... The Christian woman must be in subjection to her husband! Whether she likes it or not, subjection is a command of God and her refusal to comply with this command is an act of disobedience. All disobedience is sin; therefore, she cannot expect the blessing of God on her life unless she is willing to obey God."

Our culture bombards us with anti-patriarchal messages. Ellen Goodman is one of America's most popular syndicated columnists. She wrote against the Million Man March and the Promise Keepers because they teach men to be heads of their families. She quotes someone from Ms. magazine saying, "They are telling men, 'We've been bad masters, let's now become better masters.'" , "Today, Americans talk about families and communities in chaos. The absence of fathers is described as a national disease. The return of fathers as a cure. But in any chaos it's easy to give up on the democracy of relationships, the give and take of equality. It's easy to long for control, for authority figures, for old icons of manhood .... after all this time, all this change, the new man being molded by this movement doesn't sound much like a partner. He's just a kinder, gentler patriarch."

Movies and literature have attacked men relentlessly. In one book I was reading the writer is from England and, "More sophisticated couples took their ideas from Bernard Shaw's Candida and Man and Superman': from H.G. Wells' Ann Veronica and James Barrie's What Every Woman Knows. All of these mocked the authoritative, know-all husband and made it clear that British men simply make tedious fools of themselves when they try to dictate to their wives and daughters. In any case, all the popular humorists made a practice of caricaturing the pompous German husband, who strutted about in over-elaborate uniform and relegated his wife to Kuche, Kirche und Kinder, and no English husband wanted to be anything like him." It goes on and on. The examples are endless. Several of my kids saw the movie recently with Steve Martin playing the hapless father in "Father of the Bride part two". They know my ideas and told me that the daughter has a baby and announces she will go back to work shortly. Millions of people laugh and then go live this lifestyle. There is nothing funny about this brainwashing by Satan against the homemaker.

The Bible teaches that without vision, a people perish. Vision comes from men. They are the dreamers, the visionaries. God sent the Messiah as a man to give His dream of the future. We are called to help him build it. God doesn't send a woman first; He sends another Adam. The Messiah must be strong like a rock. That means the messiah must be a man. The Messiah must come from a virile, manly society, a patriarchal society. God could not send the Messiah as a white man from the West because they are too weak. Western men were weak and got tired after decades of women nagging and gave them their power of the vote and to become the most powerful influence in the family. Father says men have "striving" natures. They are "designed to reach out for things which they can only imagine. A man naturally seeks after his dream, his ideal, while women are more concerned with the here and now rather than the future, intangible realm. This is why we say that man is symbolized by heaven and women by earth." Father is desperate for leaders who can save lives. He never talks of men interchanging with women. He goes out of his way to explain how they are opposite.

He says constantly that "man is in the plus position and the woman is in the minus." They are never to "compete," but make unity. How can women make unity if they are competing in the marketplace? Mother said women should not compete with men. WFWP, she said, was not going to be feminist and struggle with men but instead be "complementary." Women are to "seek out tasks that men cannot perform." Where is that? It is to be men's supporters, mothers, homemakers, home school teachers, and care for the old, sick and poor and still find time to witness in her Titus 2 ministry. WFWP should have as its major goal to get women back into the home and to stop competing with men outside the home.

We found this great article on the internet. The author did not give his or her name. The website is http://www.panix.com/~jk/antifeminism.html. It was titled "Feminism and Antifeminism."

"Feminism" means so many different things that it appears to mean very little. Its advocates constantly contradict each other and themselves. In casting off feminine reserve and modesty they seem to have learned intellectual shamelessness as well. It appears, however, that nothing can be called feminism that is not radically antitraditional and antinatural. What feminists call "gender" -- the system of attitudes, expectations and customs that distinguishes men from women -- has always and everywhere been basic to human life. The detailed content of that system has varied somewhat but general outlines have been stable. The ties among a man, a woman, and their children have always been fundamental, and dependent for reliable functioning on a generally settled division of responsibility among the parties and therefore between the sexes. More specifically, all societies have been patriarchal, with men mainly responsible for public concerns and women for the care of small children and domestic matters. Always and everywhere men have predominated in positions of formal authority, although exercising no general right of domination. The universality of these distinctions shows them to be rooted in biology and other permanent conditions of human life. Nonetheless, it is opposition to acceptance of gender as a principle of social order -- to what is called "sexism" -- that unifies the things called "feminism." Feminist goals are thus not in the least reformist. Feminism treats a fundamental principle of all human societies, sex-role differentiation, as essentially an arrangement by which some human beings oppress others. Its aim is thus to create a new kind of human being living in a new form of society based on new ties among men, women and children, reconstituted in accordance with abstract ideological demands. For existing sexual and family ties, based on what seems natural and customary, feminism would substitute contractual relations, reliance on the state bureaucracy, or some presently unknowable principle. Experience gives no guidance for how to carry out the substitution, or indeed any reason for supposing it can be done. Feminism is therefore ideological and radical to the core; there can be no commonsense feminism, because doing what comes naturally gets a feminist nowhere. Whatever harsh things can be said about anarchism and communism can be said with yet more force about feminism, since the latter seeks to eliminate something that touches us far more deeply than private property or the state. Like the other two ideologies, feminism can be presented as a lofty ideal set up in opposition to a long history of dreadful injustice, but its practical implementation, especially by force of law, can only lead to catastrophe. Like anarchism it calls for categorical opposition to authority and hierarchy, and like communism for the unending radical reconstruction of all aspects of life, and consequently the absolute bureaucratization of society. Both principles are thoroughly destructive; the fact they utterly contradict each other does not help matters. It is not surprising that feminists, who misconstrue so much, misconstrue the nature of the opposition to them. Since their position requires a comprehensive and minute system of ideological regimentation they assume antifeminists must also be aspiring tyrants. They thus recreate their opponents in their own image. In fact, to be antifeminist is simply to accept that men and women differ and rely on each other to be different, and to view the differences as among the things constituting human life that should be reflected where appropriate in social attitudes and institutions. By feminist standards all societies have been thoroughly sexist. It follows that to be antifeminist is only to abandon the bigotry of a present-day ideology that sees traditional relations between the sexes as simply a matter of "domination" and "submission," and to accept the validity of the ways in which human beings have actually dealt with sex, children, family life and so on. Antifeminism is thus nothing more than the rejection of one of the narrow and destructive fantasies of a century in which such fantasies have been responsible for destruction and murder on an unprecedented scale. It is opening oneself to the reality of things. The acceptance of the legitimacy and usefulness of sex roles is an exercise of ordinary good sense. What is in itself good sense may be quite radical from the point of view that is conventional in public at a particular time and place. Such is the state of antifeminism today; to reject feminist claims is to put oneself outside what is said to be the mainstream. The success of feminism has owed a great deal to the astonishing absence of open opposition to it. That absence has had a variety of causes, including masculine cowardice, the difficulty of communication between the sexes, the extreme centralization of public life and discussion today, the power of the interests served by the destruction of all social relationships other than market and bureaucracy, the absolute triumph of liberal ideology in our public and intellectual life, and the difficulty that ideology has dealing with issues relating to family life because of its tendency to base human relations on either arm's-length bargaining or force. The consequence of the victory of feminism has been disorder cascading from America throughout the world and from the most immediate personal relationships to high culture and international politics. Feminism has meant suspicion and hostility where mutual reliance is an absolute necessity. It has meant growing poverty and brutality in daily life, resulting in particular suffering for the weak. Its triumph has been part of the triumph of State and Market over all other social powers, the culmination of a trend that has been sweeping all before it for centuries and has long since become horrendously destructive. Feminism must therefore be opposed as a destructive fanaticism based on a gross and wilful misapprehension of human life. In the end feminism cannot win because it makes stable and productive ordering of private life impossible for most people. It has done a great deal of damage, however, and will do more before it disappears. The more explicit, articulate and successful its opponents the more damage can be prevented. The media, the educational system, and even organized scholarship are vehicles and beneficiaries of bureaucratization and are therefore dominated by feminism. The Internet retains its independence and holds out hope that free discussion and resistance may still be possible and fruitful. Hence this page.

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