IMAGINE if instead of lame “Family Day” proclamations, a single prominent politician stood up and said words similar to those of Theodore Roosevelt when he spoke before the National Congress of Mothers in 1905:

In our modern industrial civilization there are many and grave dangers to counterbalance the splendors and the triumphs. It is not a good thing to see cities grow at disproportionate speed relatively to the country; for the small land owners, the men who own their little homes, and therefore to a very large extent the men who till farms, the men of the soil, have hitherto made the foundation of lasting national life in every State; and, if the foundation becomes either too weak or too narrow, the superstructure, no matter how attractive, is in imminent danger of falling. Read More »

YOU KNOW family has become a marginal institution when we have national “Family Day.” Stouffers, the maker of frozen dinners, is one of the sponsors of the event, which encourages families to do something radical – sit down and eat dinner. Columbia University, also a sponsor, says that families that eat dinner together are less likely to have teens who use drugs. Above is one of the photographs on the Family Day website. Two moms and their child. [Or, perhaps as noted below, it is a mother with two daughters?] Wouldn’t it be nice if eating dinner together were all it took to rescue families? 

Do any of the corporate, government or academic sponsors of this event say anything important? Family Day sounds, at best, trite and meaningless and, at worst, outright dangerous. Do these sponsors have any idea why families don’t eat dinner together? Read More »

REPUBLICANS continue to do a fine job of normalizing family breakdown and sexual freedom. This breezy New York Times profile of Carl P. Paladino includes information about his dog, his favorite vodka and his favorite nighttime ritual. He “travels to the home of Sarah, his daughter from an extramarital relationship, and puts her to bed.”  Read More »

Read More »

GAIL AGGEN writes:

When I read the reasons Theodore Dalrymple gives for the increase in domestic violence in the U.K., I felt that more needs to be said about specific causative behaviors, and the dehumanizing influences that spawn and maintain them. For example, if you visit Britain, you cannot help but notice that excessive alcohol consumption is rampant, as is here illustrated. When I was there, I saw this myself. Read More »

IN HIS 2007 book In Praise of Prejudice, Theodore Dalrymple, who formerly worked as a clinical psychiatrist in Britain, offers a compelling theory for an increase in domestic violence. He attributes the rise to two factors: sexual freedom and the cult of non-judgmentalism. The first makes men insecure about the fidelity of their companions: 

How does a man who lives in a sexual free-for-all, in which any casual encounter between a man and a woman may lead to a sexual liaison, bind a woman to him with hoops of steel, to ensure her fidelity?  This is his problem, because he knows that his intrinsic charms, merits, and attractions are minimal, or at any rate, no greater than those of a thousand other men around him. 

In these circumstances, it is best to fill his beloved’s waking hours with thoughts of himself and with nothing but thoughts of himself. 

The second prevents women from judging the obvious and discriminating accordingly:

They have accepted, perhaps without knowing it, the modern prejudice against prejudice, a prejudice that in their case might have preserved them from beatings and sometimes from death itself.  The argument they have accepted goes something like this: the observation that men who dress and present themselves in a certain fashion and tattoo themselves heavily are bad men is at best a rough generalization, which is itself probably the result of class or ethical bias in the observer.

Dalrymple’s insights, based on encounters with “thousands” of men and women, are excellent and plausible. I highly recommend the book. Here are extensive quotes from Chapter 26, The Dire Social Effects of Abandoning Certain Prejudices. Read More »

FRED WRITES:

I really appreciate your work at The Thinking Housewife. It has made a difference in my life. As a life-long liberal I have had the gravest doubts about things, and I find that you have opened new doors of thought for me. It may have been that I was wrong about many things.

Wrong, but I don’t feel guilty and I don’t count it as a sin, to be wrong about things and to make great efforts in service of those wrongs.

Read More »

JOSH F. writes:

I’ve come to reject the “homeschooling” label. When people ask where my kids go to school, I simply tell them that they don’t go to “school.” They are educated, I say in a matter of fact manner, by myself and their mother. The idea behind rejecting this label is self-evident.  First, it’s entirely normal to be miffed by those that believe they are making a great sacrifice by “schooling” their kids with teacher experts. The time/money benefit alone provided by “school” is enough to put the “sacrifice” of “schooling” one’s children into serious perspective. I also have no desire to bring the isolated nature of  “school” into the home nor am I seeking to be part of a collective of  “homeschoolers.” Read More »

THE PIZZA industrial complex is spreading its tentacles day by day. Notice the fine print on this coupon.

Read More »

IMAGINE GIVING $100 million to a soulless, ineffective and corrupt bureaucracy to further its soulless, ineffective and corrupt projects. You might as well take tractor trailers full of cash, drive them to a major port, dump the cash in barges, haul the money out to sea and then dump it in a watery grave.

Read More »

A HOMESCHOOLING MOTHER writes:

Would that Oprah and Bill Gates would concern themselves with their own families and people in their local neighborhoods. Of course, they are historically common, the plutocrats who seek to incline the hearts and minds of our children toward their universal schemes (which is generally away from the traditions of their parents). 
 
The classicist Thomas Fleming discusses this and how to deal with it in his 2004 book, The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition.  I give but a fragment. Read More »

Jill Johnston and Dick Cavett

SCOTT M. writes:

The passing of Jill Johnston has conjured up some bitter memories of my melancholy college years. As an idly curious 19-year-old, I attended one of Johnston’s “lectures” at the student union at the University of Kansas not long after her book, Lesbian Nation, was making a splash in the fetid wading pool of what was known in those days as the “counter-culture.” Her very presence on a university campus was an admission by those in power that the “long march through the institutions” would be allowed to proceed apace, and that gratuitous freakishness could now be marketed as a stimulant. As Lady Gaga and many others have since learned, this is an irresistible enticement to those who are already convinced that they are freaks, and, that there will never be a home for them in the world until the norms are dismantled for everyone.  Read More »

I WAS SITTING in the front row of Sister Frances Michael’s second grade class when I had my first public attack of … internal chaos. It came without forewarning. I didn’t know I had a virus until it was too late. I felt the same uneasiness yesterday when I viewed this clip of Oprah and Bill Gates mulling over the education of millions of children. Whatever Bill and Oprah have in mind you can rest assured it does not involve freedom of choice for the ordinary citizen. We are the playthings of educational masterminds. It is not a question of whether they will control us, but how. They take delight not in the outcome of education, but in the process. The opportunities for managerial adventure are almost limitless. Public education is an extreme sport for the bored and wealthy. It is like Mount Everest: something to be scaled so that one can say one did it, a summit on which to stand and look down upon the rest of the world. Read More »

JOHN E. writes:

I’m looking forward to showing my daughter The Princess and the Pea as you have shown here. My wife or I at one time conveyed to our two-year-old daughter that there is such a story called The Princess and the Pea. A few months ago she wanted to hear this story every night before going to bed. Since I didn’t have the story available in print, I tried to indulge her by telling it from memory. I am a terrible story-teller, but apparently I got the basic idea across. A couple of nights ago, after I bid her hop into her bed for the night, she grabbed a baseball lying on the floor, lifted her little toddler mattress, and stuffed the ball underneath, exclaiming “It’s a pea!” Considering the relative size of the baseball, and the thickness of her single mattress, I guess she was leaving no room for doubt as to her princess-ly sensitivies!

Read More »

Enigma, Gustav Dore

THE WEBSITE Art Passions is a trove of works by some of the best 19th and 20th century illustrators of fairy tales and myths. You may have noticed the images I occasionally post from there. The site is the work of an anonymous woman artist devoted to these old story books. The artists featured include N.C. Wyeth, Gustav Doré, Adrienne Segur, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen and others. If you read fairy tales and myths to your children, I highly recommend this site, which is a labor of love. It is strange and wonderful that this form of technology can convey the pleasures of these antique illustrations. See Doré’s dark and foreboding illustrations of Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy and Wyeth’s images of the immortal Crusoe. Thank you, Art Passions!

The Princess and the Pea, Edmund Dulac