Title: Marriage and Family in Western Civilization by William H. Young | NAS
Headings: Marriage and Family in Western Civilization
Marriage and Family in Western Civilization
Content: From members and followers of the Frankfurt School (and despite widespread criticism that its research had been fitted to conclusions reached in advance and that it lacked evidence), The Authoritarian Personality (1950) changed academic attitudes towards the family within psychology and sociology. Herbert Marcuse argued that monogamous marriage enforced submission to social rules and the compulsion to work. Cultural Marxism and psychoanalysis converged on the theory that the patriarchal, authoritarian family and its repressive morality served the interests of class society. Sexual liberation and obsession, relativism, and self-centered expressive individualism (choice over commitment) spread from the academy to society. Stemming from The Second Sex (1953) by Simone de Beauvoir, the French Marxist, gender feminism posited social construction of a new gender identity and a gender-neutral society, in which women were independent of morality and nature. Gender feminism seeks to abolish traditional marriage and deigns childcare worthy only of servants, like the role of Roman slaves near the end of that republic. It substitutes social science and the state for the family as developers of the faculties of children, emasculating the ethic of parental responsibility. These academically inspired beliefs, along with the welfare state, instigated a massive disintegration of marriage and the family—and a widespread betrayal of children—from which many of our most threatening social problems and individual distress originate The consequences are severe: drastically higher rates of divorce, out-of-wedlock births, and single-parent and cohabiting families. Since the 1960s: