Fascinating Womanhood , by Helen Andelin, was published in 1963, but was based on some pamphlets written in the 1920s and 1930s. Even in its time (which was a little before the “sexual revolution” but when feminism was still thick in the air nevertheless), it was a traditionalist expression, with a Christian theme. It has since sold millions of copies, and has been the subject of numerous books that are commentaries on the original. The book has its own page at Wikipedia.

Mostly, it is a practical guide of specific do-this and do-thats. But, within it lies a more abstract principle of what makes a good wife, in any era. Implicit within this is also: what makes a good husband. Andelin’s own husband, Aubrey Andelin, also wrote a book about this, Man of Steel and Velvet, which takes up this topic in more detail. This is also a worthwhile book, although it is not so timeless or important as Fascinating Womanhood, and also, to read the first implies the second to some degree.

At first, I considered the title to mean “how to be fascinating (to men, and thus manipulate him to get what you want),” and the contents do address this, but now I take the title to mean that “being a (traditional, stay-at-home) woman is fascinating” — that marriage, home and family is a complex and rewarding milieu, and does not involve only changing diapers, or cooking without shoes. When we consider how many “smart, educated” women fail at this miserably, even as they dismiss it as too menial for their oh-so-specialness, it would seem that it is a task today that would strain even the ablest women.

I consider both books to be required reading for both men and women today.

Even the idea that anyone might have an opinion about “how to be a good wife and mother” will probably drive some women to apoplexy. And yet, if one is to be a wife and mother, shouldn’t you do a good job in that role? Does anyone suggest that you should be an employee of a company, and not be a good employee, but rather, a bad one? Does anyone suggest that you be a student, and not be a good student, but a bad one? Or that it doesn’t matter? Any woman who rejects, in principle, the idea that she should be a good wife and mother, rather than a bad wife and mother, is unfit for marriage and motherhood. Unfortunately, these women often get married and have children.

At the same time, there are millions of men who lament that the women in their lives are not good wives and mothers, or lament that it is hard to find a single woman with some promise of becoming a good wife and mother, but these men rarely ever express what it is that they seek, except that it might involve making sandwiches. Probably, they don’t know themselves, in a rational way, and just assume that these women’s mothers will tell them. It is “woman’s stuff” that we just expect women to know how to do, like apply eyeliner. But do these young women’s mothers even know themselves? I think they do not.

Thus, one of our goals around here is to express, in a fashion that a fourteen year old girl can understand and apply, what it means to be a good wife and mother — how to excel in that role.

If women don’t want to be wives and mothers, that is OK. Then they don’t have to be good ones. If 20% of all women were unmarried and childless, by their own choice and design, it wouldn’t be that big a deal. But, it seems that women almost universally want to become wives and mothers.

Today, about 56% of college students are women. This might sound like it is almost 50:50, but actually 56:44 means that there are 27.3% more women than men. In 2018, 36% of women born in 1980-1984 had earned a bachelor’s degree, compared to 28% of men. Not surprisingly, men are losing interest in institutions that are militantly anti-male. The figures for students today are likely to be more skewed toward women.

At the same time, these women have a lot more college debt than men — 66% of all college debt is held by women. No wonder these women are focused on career instead of family — they have debts to pay. Nor are men very interested in marrying women buried in debt, many of whom will struggle to pay it off by age 40. After all, the men themselves are hardly able to pay the debts of these girls. While going to college in the 1950s and 1960s often meant an improved ability to marry higher value men (in part because of access, and also, because an educated housewife was more valued), today, going to college often creates even more barriers to marriage, not that there weren’t enough already. If a woman goes to graduate school, including law and medicine, she spends more years as a student (accumulating more debt), and then has more debt to pay afterwards, thus chewing up still more time out of her limited window of prime fertility between ages 16 and 32.

These women might like to get married and have children “eventually,” but for now, they can barely afford to pay their rent, after making their loan payments. How would they be able to raise a child as well? Who would want to marry in to such a load of problems? Where are the men that are making much more money, and therefore could pay her debts and also pay for children? There are such men, but only a few. Women know this, which also tends to make their relationships transient.

If I propose that women focus on marriage and family first, and basically skip any college education, does that mean that women should be uneducated? Not at all: young women, whose ambitions went beyond a public high-school education, would be educated at their father’s house. Actually, not much education is happening in universities these days anyway (besides vocational training), so even today, the only decent general education (“liberal arts”) that a woman gets is likely to be on her own time. This is true whether she has only a high-school diploma, or is a graduate of Princeton.

The daughters of the wealthy typically had private tutors. But, any woman today can get a good education from readily-available materials. I am a fan of the Harvard Classics. This is a fifty-volume collection, produced in 1909, that represented an in-depth undergraduate liberal arts education of that time. It was compiled by Charles Eliot, president of Harvard University, with the help of some associates. If a woman today began to read the Harvard Classics at age 18, and finished at age 21, she would have a better general education than 99% of women today, including the graduates of Harvard. A young woman can do this living at her father’s house, or as a young housewife. You can buy a used print copy of the Harvard Classics for less than $300 today (that’s $6 per book). Or, as it is now in the public domain, you can get it online, in free .pdf format, here.

In the past — the 1920s through the 1960s — many women went to college. In 1960, 54% of young men and 38% of young women attended some sort of college. But, one of the main reasons that women attended college in those days was to meet a good husband; and also, to meet the expectations of a high-value wife, which was to have some higher education, which she would then pass on to her children. This was a time when the median age of first marriage was about 20. Commonly, if a woman was married before she finished her undergraduate degree, she would quit her formal studies.

If college once served as a way to get married to high-value husbands in the past, today I would say that women follow the general principle of studiously avoiding any commitment that might lead to marriage while they are at university. It is expected that any relationships during this time are transient. After graduation, a man and a woman’s path are expected to go separate ways, as they pursue different careers, in different cities, or attend a graduate school of some sort.

The same principle serves during the high school years. A woman who might go to a four-year residential college expects that any relationships formed during her high school years are transient.

In the past, a woman might begin her search for a husband at age 15. Laura Ingalls, the author of the Little House on the Prairie series of books, began “courting” Almanzo Wilder at age 15. (She also had a job as a schoolteacher at that time.) Almanzo was ten years older. They were married when she was 18. This is how women got married at age 18 — by starting at age 15. Today, that process is short-circuited by the expectation that all romances at this age will turn to dust; and then, all romances during the college years will also turn to dust. A woman does not even begin to search for a husband (if that happens at all) until age 22.

The women today who do manage to get married before age 30 often find their future husbands around this time, age 22-25. They begin monogamous long-term relationships, in effect junior marriages, often involving cohabitation, which they formalize into actual marriages around age 28 when they are “old enough.”

Instead of forming stable, long-term monogamous relationships, a woman has in effect been “training for divorce.” Her relationships during the age 15-21 period, a time when important habits and precedents are formed, have been transient by design. No surprise then that her first relationships after college, beginning around age 22, are also transient by design, as a long-term “boyfriend.” Often this works out and the couple gets married around age 28. But, sometimes it doesn’t work out (since they are transient by design), and a woman finds herself single at age 28.

To that we must of course add the incredibly harmful environment that universities have become today, of alcohol abuse and “hookup culture” combined with feminist/SJW brainwashing of the most toxic sort. If this weren’t bad enough, we also see that virtually no meaningful education takes place, except perhaps for some vocational training. A parent who is concerned about their daughter’s ability to form a successful family should recoil in horror at this spectacle; and certainly not send their children there, at great expense. But, this is apparently not a priority; instead, it is apparently all justified by what little vocational training their daughters receive. Because, with her ability to find a husband and form a family now seriously in doubt, she is going to have to make a living for herself.

Today, we have a conflict for women between “career” and “family.” We have already determined that the natural time for a woman to have a family is when she is young and at the peak of her fertility. A woman that marries at age 18 might have a full set of children by age 25. This means that her youngest children will likely be out of the house by age 45. This leaves a good twenty years of time when a woman can get any necessary vocational training and have a productive career, without any conflict with family. In practice, a lot of women today instead take this “empty nest” period to become women of leisure; and this has not been a bad solution. But, a more ambitious and energetic woman might be bored with that.

Consider if a woman gets married around age 32, and has her first child around age 33. She finishes having children around age 40, and these children are out of the house around age 60. She has no time left over for a meaningful career, including any necessary training. Since the woman presumably has been supporting herself somehow until age 32, and probably has been juggling “relationships” and work through her twenties as well, this leaves a conflict between work and family that persists through her whole life. This is a problem not only for women, but also for husbands and children as well.

There will always be individual situations where a woman is simply destined for a certain career, perhaps at a young age. Some women just want to be doctors, or actresses, and why not let them? But, it would be best if the majority of women followed a pattern such as this: family first, and then career. Because, you can’t really do it the other way — career first, and childbearing after age 40. It seems that a lot of women want to try anyway, with failure a certainty.

Since we are discussing wives and mothers, we should address the question of whether women should become wives and mothers at all, especially since it seems we are telling young women something like the opposite of this these days.

We have a couple options here:

Spinster/Corporate Workerbee: not a wife and not a mother.
Working Single Mom/Welfare Queen: not a wife, but a mother.
Barren DINK/Woman of Leisure: a wife but not a mother.

Obviously there are a lot of opinions about all of these, but what we find is that, despite all the feminist brainwashing, and argumentative horsepuckey, American women today seem to be unanimous on these points eventually. By age 45, 92% of American White non-Hispanic women have been married, and 85% have had children. When we consider all the women that are grossly fat and ugly, all the women that are grossly stupid, grossly ill-behaved, the degenerate sluts, the feminist nutjobs and purple hair girls with noserings, the lesbian experimenters, and the girls whacked out on prescription brain meds, or crystal meth — in short, all those women who are grossly ill-suited to being anyone’s wife and mother — this is a little amazing. If we consider those women that wanted to get married but didn’t, and those that wanted to have children but didn’t (we sure hear a lot about those even though they are a small number of women), we can see that virtually every woman in America today wants to get married and have children, at some point in their lives.

The main problem, it seems, is that these very same women don’t want to get married and have children, at the very best time to get married and have children, when they are at their peak of beauty and fertility. No, they want to get married and have children at the time when they should be caring for their brood of children around age 5-12 years old. This is pure dysfunction.

Let us form some basic assertions, and see what leads from them.

1. A woman should bear children during her peak childbearing years; this is basically 18-32.
2. A woman should be married before getting pregnant.
3. A woman should not have sex before getting married.
4. This is difficult, since a woman naturally has a high sex/coupling drive during her years of peak fertility.
5. A woman should be married when her attractiveness is at its peak, as this is the time when she would presumably get the highest-value husband. This also corresponds to her years of peak fertility, ages 18-25.
6. Having born children, the woman ideally becomes a dedicated housewife.

From this, we conclude that a woman should be married at a young age, ideally around 18-20 and practically between 16-25. By age 25, the woman would be both “on the market,” and also horny as all heck, for ten long years of celibacy, which is already more of a “season of singleness” than should be asked of anyone’s daughters.

A woman today might be expected to bear three children. In the past, it was more: Catherine of Aragon married Henry VIII of England at age 23. (Her first marriage, at age sixteen, ended five months later with her husband’s death.) She was pregnant seven times with Henry, but bore him no male heirs. One daughter lived. Six other children were either stillborn or died soon after birth. Her last birth was at age 32. Times were hard then: this was a woman given every possible advantage and comfort. If we say that a woman might bear three children before age 35, age 25 at marriage is not so early to get started, with the first child born at age 26. If a woman is married at age 18, she could have three children by age 25. Thus, marriage in the 18-25 window leads naturally to a full complement of children within the woman’s window of peak fertility, which is really up to about age 32 although you might get some children even to age 40.

There is another aspect to this: a woman’s peak childbearing years also correspond to a woman’s natural inclination toward infant care. It is often said that the care of young children is best done when the parent is themselves young. The manner of a typical four-year-old can be very trying to a person in their forties, who is naturally inclined, at that time of life, toward the education of adolescents in preparation for adulthood.

If we are marrying our girls at (ideally) age 18, they would likely be paired with men older than them, probably in the 23-35 range. A man must be both interested in and able to start a family. It is possible that an 18-year-old girl could marry an 18-year-old boy, but this is most sensible when the young man’s future is more-or-less assured: perhaps he is the heir of a wealthy family, and expects to inherit the family farm, business or estate. He is perhaps attending a prestigious university, or is able to get a secure and well-paid union job, or there is open land available from which a productive farmstead can be hewn.

We can also see that there is little need for a woman’s career here, as she is plenty busy caring for a household with (perhaps) three children. From this, there is little need for a woman to go to college, from where she is going to emerge, at age 22, already at the tail end of her peak 18-25 marriage years, something different than what a sensible man wants in a wife, which at a bare minimum may be described as: a debt-free virgin without tattoos.

This is not to say that a woman should not be educated. She can also wear shoes. There is not much “education” happening in universities these days anyway. The daughters of the wealthy were educated at their fathers’ house, where they lived until their marriage. This often involved private tutors — a major plot device in, for example, Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. Catherine of Aragon didn’t go to the University at Salamanca, but she was certainly educated. At age 21, she held the position of Ambassador of Spain to England, the first female ambassador in European history; a job she (naturally) quit after marrying Henry two years later. At age 27, while her husband was away at war, she served for six months as Regent (that is, temporary king) of England. During this time, she made an emotional speech about English courage, which is said to have served an important role in Henry’s victory at the Battle of Flodden.

Beginning in the 1990s, inspired by books such as I Kissed Dating Goodbye (2003) by Joshua Harris, there emerged among small Christian groups a “purity movement,” which basically attempted to revive Christian courtship as it existed before 1900.

This, apparently, did not go so well. All too often, girls remained “pure,” that is: unmarried. This did not come about, as you might think, because such girls would lose out to girls who would put out without a ring on their finger. Actually, there was a large cohort of similarly-minded young men as well, whose interests lay in Christian virgin brides, rather than the usual degenerate hoes. But, for various reasons, they weren’t able to pair off. An interesting response to this has come out, Courtship in Crisis: The Case for Traditional Dating (2015), by Thomas Umstattd Jr. Umstattd was an eager participant in the “purity” movement, and saw its failures firsthand.

Courtship had two contradictory elements — one was preventing premarital sex, and shooing away unsuitable men; the other was to get the girl married, as young as possible, which usually meant exciting the romantic interest and sexual desire of eligible bachelors. This contrast reached an extreme form in the practice of “bundling,” which apparently came to the American Colonies from the Netherlands and Britain, and which is still practiced among some Amish groups. Basically, a girl and boy were wrapped and tied up in blankets, and then placed in the same bed to sleep (and chat, which was encouraged) overnight. This would, presumably, inspire them to marry each other.

There is a funny passage in War and Peace (1869), where Tolstoy marvels that prim society girls, who would write a letter to the Pope asking permission to do needlepoint on the Sabbath, would also show up at the Opera in clothing so revealing that Tolstoy considered them half-naked. But prim society girls want to get married too, and it was competitive!

“Traditional Dating,” according to Thomas Umstattd, was basically traditional courtship, as applied to the “dating” customs of the 1950s. Some excitement and connection had to be developed among young people. Premarital sex was of course forbidden; but also, interestingly, “going steady” or any kind of monogamous commitment. A girl was not allowed some kind of “half-marriage,” except perhaps in formal engagement. If a girl committed herself to one man, as a “girlfriend,” it obviously excluded other potential suitors; and the courtship process, the process of finding a husband, would come to a halt. Also, once such a monogamous marriage-like commitment was made, as a “girlfriend” and “boyfriend,” the pull toward premarital sex was unstoppable, for any girl past her sixteenth birthday. In short, what Umstattd called “Traditional Dating” was not dating as most people practiced it, in the 1950s; but probably there was still a pretty large group that was following the general rules of Courtship.

Actually, Umstattd suggests a “going steady” (exclusivity) stage, basically as a precursor to engagement. But, this is rather chaste, and nothing much very sexy happens that wouldn’t have happened at a girl’s father’s house in Jane Austen’s time. Nevertheless, the potential couple spends a lot of time together.

The other factor contributing to the failure of the “purity” movement was, I think, a failure to formally abandon the common expectation today that a girl is not really serious about marriage until about age 28, and instead is focused on school and career. In courtship, women marry young, and it is the prime focus of their lives.

One of the things you find, is that the pattern of courtship has held in pretty much all major civilizations for the last two thousand years. It has been true of the Christian Era, but it was also true (I believe) of Rome in its prime, and Greece. It is true in Islamic countries (many do not know that Islam was originally founded as a sort of reform of Christianity), in India, China and Japan (in their traditional form, before becoming “Westernized). Probably, there have been societies that have not pursued this courtship pattern; and those societies have disappeared. There is little particularly “Christian” about this pattern.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead went in search of a society that practiced some kind of “free love.” This was in 1928 — as “dating” was becoming the norm, and a lot of premarital sex, replacing courtship. She could not find one in the civilized world, and had to venture to the primitive tribes of the Samoan Islands to find an example. People later argued that things were not really so free, even in Samoa, as Mead claimed.

In other words, we have had thousands of years of experimentation with other systems throughout the world, and no other system has risen to the top. You can make the argument that some system will, although today nobody even proposes a “system” at all, but rather seems content with a sort of sexual “Do As Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law.”

I said that this would be a blog about solutions, not analysis, which you can get in great abundance elsewhere. Having considered all the analysis for some time, I have come to some conclusions; or, solutions. Basically, I find that the solution, or at least my solution, is: courtship.

By “courtship” I do not mean the process by which a man and a woman may become married, whatever that may be. I mean something specific:

1. A young woman does not have sex before marriage; and also, does not commit herself to a man before marriage, except as a kind of engagement. There is no “going steady” or “boyfriends”; only “husbands” and “fiances.”
2. A young woman typically lives at her father’s house until marriage.
3. A woman moves from her father’s house to her husband’s house after marriage.

This is a stringent program. A young horny girl is not going to want to be locked up in her father’s house for all that long; nor would a father want such a thing for his daughter. A young woman would be “debuted to society” (officially declared marriageable; come and get her boys!) around age 16, or even 15. Ideally, women would be married around age 18. But, since reality intrudes, somewhere between age 18 and 24 is best, with a practical median around age 21. Age 16 is not too young (it was the age of Saint Mary when she wedded Saint Joseph; Jesus was born when Mary was 17.)

No “season of singleness” here. You pair those girls up and get them out of the house.

The median and average tends to be higher than the mode (the most common age), because women don’t get married much before age 16, but can be delayed until 35.

A median of age 21 may seem young today, but it is a full five years of husband-hunting after a girl’s debut. It is actually not so far from the norm today, where a girl finally decides to find a husband around age 28, and gets married around 33.

This was the basic pattern of marriage for about 1500 years, from the end of the Roman era and the rise of the Christian era, to about 1920. Obviously, it did not hold in all circumstances. But, it was broadly embraced, by kings and commoners alike. It was the “norm,” which one either followed or deviated from. Probably, in all times, there were a lot of marriages where a baby followed about six months later.

But, even then, those who had strayed from this pattern did what they could to get back on it; and the results usually worked pretty well. Before 1950, among White Americans, 2% or less of children were born out of wedlock. (It was common for illegitimate children to be transferred to the household of a married relative, thus giving the child an adequate household in which to grow up, and preserving the fallen woman’s future marriageability. But here too, in failure the norms were upheld.)

We know that this pattern works. It is sustainable. It was sustained for centuries. We have not developed anything else that is sustainable (everything since 1920 has been a long process of crumbling), or that produces better results, even in theory let alone practice.

“Dating” did not exist in the past. Read the novels of Jane Austen, for example, and you will find no “dating.” Young people did spend time together, but these were usually either at the woman’s father’s house, or at public events such as dances or picnics. “Dating,” and all that has followed from it, emerged in the 1920s. (One book about this is Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (2017), by Moira Weigel.) In the 1920s, as farming was mechanized, young men that grew up in the country moved to cities to find factory work. Young women, finding no young men in their neighborhood, also moved to the cities to find husbands. To support themselves, since they were no longer living at their father’s home or working at their father’s farm or business, they found jobs too. Thus “dating” arose from the single working girl, living alone without her father’s supervision, far from home in the big city. From this it is not too hard to extend forward to our present situation today.

It would take a lot of explication to describe why I think this is a functional solution to our difficulties today; and why other solutions won’t work, just as no other solution from the 1920s onward has worked, but has instead constituted a slow deterioration into chaos. That explication will be the subject of many more items to come.