Mrs. America Lays Out Our Terrifying Predicament

I’ve been following these issues for a while now, but even with all I’ve learned over the years, seeing all the obstacles to marriage and family, and all the difficulties that men face, laid out end to end is a daunting prospect.

Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative commentator and advocate, gained the nickname “Mrs. America.” After raising a family of six children in the 1950s, as a stay-at-home Mom, she took up political affairs (mostly still at home), and played an especially important role in blocking the horrible Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and early 1980s. She had a Master’s in Government from Harvard, and a JD from the Washington University School of Law.

A little before her death in 2016, she summed up all that she had seen happen during her lifetime, in Who Killed the American Family? (2014).

The fact of the matter is, someone is going to have to fix all this stuff, and it is obviously not going to be women, although there may be a few, the younger Schlaflys (although I can’t name one with her level of expertise), that take a role in the process. Basically it is going to be men. So, we need to know, at very least, what it is we are going to fix. This includes things like No Fault Divorce of course, but it goes way beyond that, even to such things as the United Nations Treaty on the Rights of the Child, or everything related to the family courts, or Child Protective Services, or Child Support in general, the welfare state that rewards single motherhood, or even the student debt scam that has rendered both women and men of prime childbearing age burdened by debt that not only prevents young couples from even considering a chid; but also, marriage to a heavily-indebted partner. In short, everything since 1960 which has gradually made marriage and family a bleak and risky prospect.

The Black family actually survived both slavery and the Great Depression; but welfare killed it.

Men need to stop complaining on YouTube, and basically do what Schlafly did in her time, which was to figure out what the problem is, figure out what the solution is, and then make it happen, mostly at the level of State government. This means political organization. You can start on the weekends and evenings; in time, you can get good enough at it to start asking others to help support you with a few donations.

By the way, I always associated this sort of hairstyle with elderly women in the 1980s. It turns out that women commonly settle on a hairstyle during their youth, and keep it through their lives. It is not an “old women’s hairstyle,” it is a young women’s hairstyle from the 1950s, often paired with a tweedy jacket and pearls.

For example, here’s Barbara Billingsley as June Cleaver, a young stay-at-home mother, from the 1950s TV series Leave It To Beaver.