“A Radical Feminist Idea?”: Stopping Domestic Violence
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, accompanied by fellow House Democrats, discusses the reintroduction of the Violence Against Women Act.
Of all the strange choices made by the GOP in recent years, the sudden opposition to the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is among the most confusing. The act had long counted on bipartisan support for its reauthorization—George W. Bush signed it without incident in 2005—but now Republicans in the House seem intent on killing it. Republicans haven’t suddenly morphed into evil comic-book villains who openly support rape and wife-beating, so what gives?
Obviously, Republicans don’t want voters to think they have it in for victims of gender-based violence. But the objections being offered by VAWA opponents are inconsistent or nonsensical. Some say the law represents an unconstitutional overreach and takes away state and local jurisdiction over domestic violence; in fact, the act provides federal support to local law enforcement, but leaves prosecuting these crimes to local authorities. Others take issue with small provisions in the new bill extending coverage to LGBT victims, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has been holding the bill up in the House because he objects to a provision that would allow Native American tribal authorities to use their own justice system to prosecute non-Native men who rape or beat Native women on tribal lands.
To get at what’s really going on, one has to look past the empty rhetoric of politicians to the various groups lobbying Republicans to kill the bill. These groups don’t care about jurisdiction or even the issue of LGBT victims. Rather, the right-wing Christian groups leading the charge against VAWA believe it is a piece of radical feminist legislation aimed at undermining patriarchal authority in the home.
As she did in the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly, an activist of the Christian right who rose to prominence as an anti-feminist leader in the 1970s, is leading the charge to kill VAWA. She claims the law is not about stopping violence so much as “promoting divorce, breakup of marriage and hatred of men.” She employs the same strategy as she did in the fight against the ERA—lying—to support her arguments, claiming that under VAWA, men can be jailed without trial. She also said that men can be jailed merely for yelling at a woman and that the bill doesn’t offer help to male victims of violence—both outright lies. She also objects to laws that make it easier for prosecutors to proceed in cases where victims retract, even though research shows that guilty men persuade victims to retract in a substantial number of domestic-violence claims.
Other conservative lobbying groups have picked up the charge. As reported at Talking Points Memo, FreedomWorks, the super PAC led by Republican and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey until recently, echoed Schlafly’s claims adding that “supporters of the VAWA portray women as helpless victims—this is the kind of attitude that is setting women back.” The implication: Simply refusing to call raped or battered people “victims” makes the whole problem go away.
Meanwhile, the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) denies that abusers’ desire to control and dominate their partners is the cause of domestic violence, instead blaming “substance abuse, emotional and psychological disorders and marital instability.” Concerned Women for America (CWA) concurs, claiming domestic violence is caused by “problems in relationships, psychological or social maladjustment, anger, alcoholism, and substance abuse.” The group claims, defensively, that only Islam’s teachings of male dominance contribute to violence, while Christianity’s similar teachings do not.
The IWF and CWA’s comments hint at the thinking among these groups about domestic violence. VAWA focuses almost exclusively on a specific strategy of preventing domestic violence: separating the victim from her abuser. Improving arrest and prosecution rates, establishing shelters and abuse hotlines, pushing for state provisions against stalking, and creating protections for immigrants all have the goal of getting victims out of abusive relationships and into safe situations. Separation-based policy is based on decades of law-enforcement and victim experience about what it takes to prevent future violent incidents.
But many conservative Christians believe that the priority should be reconciling couples in abusive relationships. The Christian right privileges keeping marriages together—even above protecting the women in them. Because of this, the belief that victims should try to reconcile with their abusers is common among conservative Christians. While they do not approve of domestic violence, many do believe that if women embrace wifely submission, they will “win” their husbands over and make them the kind of men who don’t hit women. Rick Warren’s teaching pastor Tom Holladay recently articulated this by characterizing divorce due to battering as “a short-term solution that’s going to involve long-term pain.”
Unfortunately for the right, the facts simply aren’t on their side. Domestic-violence activists have instituted over 2,500 batterer intervention programs with hopes that batterers did have mental-health issues that could be fixed. Disappointingly, activists found very little reason to think these programs work, though some groups have continued the hunt for effective batterer interventions. Futures Without Violence reports that what success has been had in reforming abusers comes from taking an approach diametrically opposed to the one offered by conservative organizations: “[B]attering does not arise from mental illness, anger, dysfunctional upbringings, or substance abuse. Rather, battering is viewed as learned behavior that is primarily motivated by a desire, whether conscious or unconscious, by the abuser to control the victim.”
The question about the sudden opposition to VAWA is: Why now? It’s likely for the same reasons the Republicans have doubled down generally on the war on women, turning up the volume on attacks on abortion, contraception, and equal-pay legislation: A combination of the influx of hard right politicians in recents elections tipping the party further to the right and over-the-top outrage at the very existence of Obama that encourages mindless obstructionism of any Democratic legislation. The conservative base has grown more vocal in its demands that Republicans demonstrate fealty to the hard right cause, and voting against VAWA has, sadly, become an excellent way for politicians to demonstrate their conservative bona fides.
By: Amanda Marcotte, The American Prospect, February 19, 2013
The Golden Age Of Motherhood That Never Existed
One of the most enduring myths about feminism is that 50 years ago women who stayed home full time with their children enjoyed higher social status and more satisfying lives than they do today. All this changed, the story goes, when Betty Friedan published her 1963 best seller, “The Feminine Mystique,” which denigrated stay-at-home mothers. Ever since, their standing in society has steadily diminished.
That myth — repeated in Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly’s new book, “The Flipside of Feminism” — reflects a misreading of American history. There was indeed a time when full-time mothers were held in great esteem. But it was not the 1950s or early 1960s. It was 150 years ago. In the 19th century, women had even fewer rights than in the 1950s, but society at least put them on a pedestal, and popular culture was filled with paeans to their self-sacrifice and virtue.
When you compare the diaries and letters of 19th-century women with those of women in the 1950s and early 1960s, you can see the greater confidence of the earlier mothers about their value to society. Many felt they occupied a “nobler sphere” than men’s “bank-note” world.
The wife of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sophia, told her mother that she did not share her concerns about improving the rights of women, because wives already exerted “a power which no king or conqueror can cope with.” Americans of the era believed in “the empire of the mother,” and grown sons were not embarrassed about rhapsodizing over their “darling mama,” carrying her picture with them to work or war.
In the early 20th century, under the influence of Freudianism, Americans began to view public avowals of “Mother Love” as unmanly and redefine what used to be called “uplifting encouragement” as nagging. By the 1940s, educators, psychiatrists and popular opinion-makers were assailing the idealization of mothers; in their view, women should stop seeing themselves as guardians of societal and familial morality and content themselves with being, in the self-deprecating words of so many 1960s homemakers, “just a housewife.”
Stay-at-home mothers were often portrayed as an even bigger menace to society than career women. In 1942, in his best-selling “Generation of Vipers,” Philip Wylie coined the term “momism” to describe what he claimed was an epidemic of mothers who kept their sons tied to their apron strings, boasted incessantly of their worth and demanded that politicians heed their moralizing.
Momism became seen as a threat to the moral fiber of America on a par with communism. In 1945, the psychiatrist Edward Strecher argued that the 2.5 million men rejected or discharged from the Army as unfit during World War II were the product of overly protective mothers.
In the same year, an information education officer in the Army Air Forces conjectured that the insidious dependency of the American man on “ ‘Mom’ and her pies” had “killed as many men as a thousand German machine guns.” According to the 1947 best seller “Modern Woman: The Lost Sex,” two-thirds of Americans were neurotic, most of them made so by their mothers.
Typical of the invective against homemakers in the 1950s and 1960s was a 1957 best seller, “The Crack in the Picture Window,” which described suburban America as a “matriarchal society,” with the average husband “a woman-bossed, inadequate, money-terrified neuter” and the average wife a “nagging slob.” Anti-mom rhetoric was so pervasive that even Friedan recycled some of this ideology in “The Feminine Mystique” — including the repellent and now-discredited notion that overly devoted mothers turned their sons into homosexuals.
For their part, stay-at-home mothers complained of constant exhaustion. According to the most reliable study of all data available in the 1960s, full-time homemakers spent 55 hours a week on domestic chores, much more than they do today. Women with young children averaged even longer workweeks than that, and almost every woman I’ve interviewed who raised children in that era recalled that she rarely got any help from her husband, even on weekends.
In the 1946 edition of his perennial best seller, “Baby and Child Care,” Dr. Benjamin Spock suggested that Dad might “occasionally” change a diaper, give the baby a bottle or even “make the formula on Sunday.” But a leading sociologist of the day warned that a helpful father might be suspected of “having a little too much fat on the inner thigh.”
Not surprisingly, these social norms led to widespread feelings of inadequacy and depression among stay-at-home mothers. “The female doesn’t really expect a lot from life,” a mother told pollsters from Gallup in a survey in 1962. “She’s here as someone’s keeper — her husband’s or her children’s.”
Study after study found that homemakers had lower self-esteem than women who took paid employment, even when it came to assessing their skills as parents. They experienced higher levels of stress and greater vulnerability to depression than women with paying jobs. And they had few legal rights: wives had little protection against abusive husbands, and only eight states in 1963 gave a homemaker any claim on her husband’s earnings.
Contrary to myth, “The Feminine Mystique” and feminism did not represent the beginning of the decline of the stay-at-home mother, but a turning point that led to much stronger legal rights and “working conditions” for her.
Domestic violence rates have fallen sharply for all wives, employed or not. As late as 1980, approximately 30 percent of wives said their husbands did no housework at all. By 2000, only 16 percent of wives made that statement and almost one-third said their husbands did half of all housework, child care or both.
Most researchers agree that these changes were spurred by the entry of wives and mothers into the work force. But full-time homemakers have especially benefited from them.
From 1975 to 1998 men married to full-time homemakers increased their contributions to housework as much, proportionally, as men whose wives were employed. And from 1965 to 1995, homemakers decreased their own housework hours more than did wives in dual-earner families. As a result, most stay-at-home mothers now have shorter total workweeks than their husbands.
There also seems to have been a significant shift in the relationship between depression and homemaking. Stay-at-home mothers still recount more feelings of loneliness than working mothers. But in a new Council on Contemporary Families briefing paper, the sociologists Margaret Usdansky and Rachel A. Gordon report that among mothers of young children, those who were not working and preferred not to have a job had a relatively low risk of depression — about as low as mothers who chose to work and were able to attain high-quality jobs.
Mothers who want to work outside the home but instead are full-time homemakers, however, have a higher risk of depression. This is a significant group: in 2000, 40 percent of full-time homemakers said they would prefer to be working at a paid job. So telling women who want to work that they or their children will be better off if they stay home is a mistake. Maternal depression is well known as being harmful to children’s development.
These findings suggest that it is time to stop arguing over who has things worse or who does things better, stay-at-home mothers or employed mothers. Instead, we should pay attention to women’s preferences and options.
Feminism has also fostered increased respect for men’s ability and desire to be involved parents. So we should also pay attention to expanding men’s ability to choose greater involvement in family life, just as we have expanded women’s ability to choose greater involvement in meaningful work.
While stay-at-home mothers may not have the aura of saintliness with which they were endowed in the 19th century, it’s indisputable that their status and lives have improved since their supposed heyday in the 1950s. On this Mother’s Day, it’s too bad that nostalgia for a golden age of motherhood that never existed still clouds our thinking about what’s best for mothers, fathers and their children.
By: Stephanie Coontz, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, May 7, 2011
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