Chartres Cathedral, Nativity

JUDITH SHARPE of “In the Spirit of Chartres” (ISOC) interviewed me last week. Mrs. Sharpe, whom I have long admired for her common sense, talked with me about the vocation of housewife and “The Feminist War on Marriage.” The interview can be downloaded and listened to for no charge for a few weeks here.

I am truly honored to be among the authors and speakers who have been featured at ISOC. They include E. Michael Jones, Cornelia Ferreira, Hugh Akins, John Sharpe, Dr. Robert Sungenis and many more. Check out the terrific talks there on a wide range of subjects, from the state of the Church to economics to various aspects of the culture war.

In the interview, I mentioned the paradox of feminist opposition to the institution of marriage. As I said, most women want marriage and highly value it. Why then have feminists for hundreds of years opposed marriage in various ways and sought to undermine it? Does that make sense? If women continued to devote their hopes and dreams to marriage they would not devote them to Revolution. Feminism has consistently sought a transfer of power. The family must give charge over its essential functions to government, business interests and social engineers. Only impersonal forces can be trusted to bring about the utopian society, so radically opposed to human nature, that revolutionaries seek.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the bossy, 19th-century leader of the women’s suffrage movement, so elevated to the status of secular sainthood that I can find a long list of children’s books about her in my local library system, called marriage “a rite of barbarism.” She wrote in 1871:

“All this talk about the indissoluble tie and sacredness of marriage, irrespective of the character and habits of the husband, is for its effect on women. She never could have been held the pliant tool she is today but for the subjugation of her religious nature to the idea that in whatever condition she found herself as man’s subject, that condition was ordained of Heaven … Women would not live as they now do in this enlightened age in violation of every law of their being, giving the very heydey for their existence to the exercise of one animal function, if subordination to man had not been made through the ages the cardinal point of their religious faith and daily life.” [emphasis added]

What can we say about a woman who believed marriage and motherhood involve “one animal function,” but that she has little respect for women? Speaking of “pliant tools,” is that not what women are in relation to feminist ideology?

Feminists have wrecked marriage. They have insisted marriage be nothing but a bed of roses and denied its tragic side. They have fanned resentment and rivalry between husband and wife and helped further institutionalize divorce. They have created oceans of tears — and political tyranny. The family is the only thing that can reliably stand between the individual and government absolutism.

I also failed to mention in the interview that the single most disastrous effect — disastrous in the spiritual and cultural senses — of the decline of the housewife vocation is the falling birthrate. The U.S. birthrate was the lowest last year in the country’s history.

Thank you to Judith Sharpe for the chance to discuss these important subjects.

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