A few days ago, Amanda wrote a comment on a thread at Pandagon that I thought was so smart that I wrote her and asked if I could make it a post on Alas.
The context: Amanda and other commenters were involved in an argument with anti-feminist Dana (male), during which Dana trotted out a lot of assumptions about how feminism is opposed to family values. Amanda went through each of Dana’s claims and debunked them — feminism is not breaking up marriages and causing teen pregnancy rates to skyrocket. Instead, as we see feminist values filter into society, we see that real family values are actually boosted.
Amanda:
The divorce rate has actually declined since the 70s, which means that your way—the stifling culture of the 50s—was the way that “broke homes”.
Dana assertion that “our way” has led “kids” to have children at younger and younger ages. Survey says:
In 1970, the average age of a new mother was 21 years old. By 2000, the average age was 28.
Dana claims that “our way” is what leads children to live in poverty. Survey says:
One dire consequence was that one in four Americans in the mid-1950s lived in poverty. By the end of the 1950s, one in three American children lived in poverty…..
Today, the rate of poverty is half what it was in the 1950s. In fact, now if a husband is the sole breadwinner the family is four times more likely to be poor than one in which the wife brings home an income too. Dual income homes earn nearly two-thirds more than that of families in which the husband alone works. Consequently, the percentage of children living in poverty has decreased 50 percent since 1959. Money may not be everything. But it’s something.
Dana says that our way leads to unhappy and broken marriages. Survey says:
Not surprisingly, researchers in the ’50s found that less than one in three married couples reported being happy or very happy with their relationship. Compare that to today, when 61 percent of married Americans report themselves to be “very happy” in their marriage. Part of the sour spouse problem of the ’50s was that many couples didn’t really want to be married to each other. Often, they were trapped into marriage by unintended pregnancy.
Dana claims that feminism and pro-sex philosophies have led to a surge in teenage pregnancy. Survey says:
With no sex-ed, no birth control, no legal abortion — the exact legislative agenda of today’s pro-life movement! — teen birth rates soared, reaching highs that have not been equaled since: there were twice as many teen mothers in the ’50s than today.
Conclusion: Dana is full of shit. And if you want happier, healthier families and situations where girls delay childbirth until they’re ready and the divorce rate to go down, there’s only one solution.
Embrace “our way”.
In our email conversation, Amanda also mentioned feminism’s positive effect on the economy, which in turn leads to positive effects for families:
It’s worth noting that the poverty issue has more to do with feminism than an improved economy—I’ve seen it noted by a lot of social scientists that women joining the workforce in large numbers has been the saving grace of the middle class. Without those women’s incomes, “free market” capitalism would have shrunk the middle class considerably and we’d probably be worse off than we were in the 50s.
Amanda’s facts lead to a couple of conclusions:
1) Feminism would be worthwhile even if it did cause divorce and teen pregnancy because women’s equality is a non-negotiable moral good. However, as we’ve known for a long time, increasing the wealth and happiness of women increases the wealth and happiness of families, so feminism is a win-win situation.
2) When “family values” are a code word for the religious right, they really have nothing to do with increasing the value and health of the family. They have to do with reinforcing the patriarchal model of family. If so-called “family values” proponents were actually concerned with the health of families (which include women as well as children and fathers), the conversation about family would look very different than it does now.
This is really quite awesome.
I love your two points at the end, because they emphasize something I’ve always believed . . . feminism (in addition to being something of a moral imperative) is good for everyone. It’s not a zero sum game, and women’s gains aren’t men’s losses or families’ losses or children’s losses.
A more equal society is better for all of us.
We all do better when we all do better.
—Myca
Not to mention, feminists have healthier, more romantic relationships and are more sexually satisfied.
“A few days ago, Amanda wrote a comment on a thread at Pandagon that I thought was so smart that I wrote her and asked if I could make it a post on Alas.”
Amanda’s comment wasn’t smart, it was incredibly stupid and didn’t debunk anything.
Dana says there are more broken homes; Amanda points to a slight decline in divorce – true, but because of the rise of cohabiation this tells us nothing about broken homes, only broken marriages. Dana says children are having kids younger and younger; Amanda points to statistics showing adults are having kids older and older – again perfectly true, but again totally irrelevant. Dana says teen pregnancy has soared; Amanda says teen motherhood has fallen – yes, factually correct, but it completely misses the point it supposedly addresses. Dana says there are more unhappy and broken marriages; Amanda says there are more happy marriages – perfectly correct, but not much of a shock considering all the broken ones are not in the sample. Dana says there are more single women trying to rear children in poverty; Amanda says there’s less poverty – yeah, I’m sure two income families help reduce poverty, but it doesn’t women who aren’t in those families.
It’s a completely bad faith response. Amanda has decided that Dana is wrong and then cherry picked irrelevant facts to ‘prove’ it. I agree with you that feminism is worthwhile regardless of it’s effect on divorce/teen pregnancy/child poverty. But you’re averting your eyes to reality with this panglossian nonsense. There’s a lot to what Dana’s said, and Amanda didn’t even bother to put together a decent respond.
How has teenage pregnancy falling missed the point? You want to argue that there’s more teenage pregnancies, I point out that they’ve been in a freefall, and your retort is, “Wah, that’s not the point!” Of course it’s not. You and I know that the real issue that concerns you is the decline in male control over women’s lives. But saying it outright will never fly, so you have to have all this fakey fake concern about how horrible it is for women with that boot off their neck.
I think James means to say that tons and tons of abortions would account for the difference. Now, this would not have occurred to me and seems absurdly unlikely given the evidence that abortion ‘bans’ do not significantly reduce the rate of abortion. But apparently this somehow proves “bad faith”. Note that a decrease in teen motherhood casts strong doubt on the other claim that “children are having kids younger and younger”, regardless of what that means and how you interpret the statistic.
I went to look at the original comment from Dana. If anything it seems worse than Amanda’ s summary, since she left out the crazed assertion that nothing we’ve tried (as feminists, I guess — no, Dana actually says “on the left”) has ever worked.
Don’t call other posters (or their comments) stupid.
Also, I’d like to see some hard evidence for Dana’s claims. It’s one thing to say that Amanda is offering weak evidence (and I don’t even agree that it’s weak in most of these cases) for her claims . . . but as opposed to nothing, it’s pretty good, isn’t it?
—Myca
I’ll assume (for the sake of argument) that both Dana/James and Amanda are factually correct. Teen pregnancy has gone up but thanks to legal abortion teen motherhood has gone down.
If those are my only two choices, teen abortion or teen motherhood, I’ll take teen abortion.
I don’t think teenage girls that don’t want to be mothers would be very good mothers. So I’d rather they wait until they’re ready and than have kids.
Was it freakonimics that pointed out most people who have abortion end up having kids later?
Also, from what I know. Feminism has helped white people first/more than racial minorities. Aren’t teen pregnancy and motherhood rates at an all time low for whites? If I’ve got this wrong please correct me.
Updated to add: If I am correct, i think this would mean we need more feminism for everyone not less for white people.
From 1973 to 1997 the pregnancy rate per thousand for mother’s under 20 has fallen (98.9 to 95.5) it seems to have peaked in 1990.
The birth rate has also fallen (60.3 to 53.4) it peeked in 1991.
The abortion rate has climbed (23.9 to 28.6) but has been falling since 1988.
The age at which teenage pregnancies occur also seems to have increased
in 1972 about 2.89% of teenage pregnancies were 14 years old or younger by 1997 it was 2.57%.
Myca/Amanda,
I do think Amanda’s response misses a couple of fairly important points.
First, “teen motherhood” has two components; they are worth disentangling in this analysis. The first is unprepared teens, having unexpected children, before the rest of their life is at a point where they can provide support and stability. (This is the one we worry about.) The second is teens having children when they are at least somewhat expected, and at a point where they can provide support and stability. A 19-year-old, married, with a high school diploma, in a community where most people finish high school and get jobs, is a teen mother; she is not unprepared in the way a 16-year-old who has not finished school, and has no stable partner, would be.
It’s my impression that older, married teen mothers are less common, and younger, unmarried teen mothers are more common, than they were in the 1950’s. Those trends are offsetting in statistics.
Also, saying that more marriages are happy, but more people are divorced and very unhappy, isn’t particularly reassuring that people are on average happier. (If marriage rates go down, marriage can get happier on average and people be unhappier on average.)
And I know plenty of women who would rather live in a world where they did not have to work at the jobs actually available to them. “Women can and must have jobs” is great for women who like their jobs; not so great for those who hate them.
SamChevre
And I know plenty of women who would rather live in a world where they did not have to work at the jobs actually available to them. “Women can and must have jobs” is great for women who like their jobs; not so great for those who hate them.
I would also like to not have to work at the jobs actually available to me. If I do say so myself, I’m quite a good cook, a decent handyman, and a loving father (allergies forbid me from dusting though). I could get a lot done as a stay-at-home Dad. Once breastfeeding is over, my wife and I may swap arrangements, but for now she’s at home.
Feminism doesn’t mean that both men and women MUST work. It means that the same options that are available to men should be available to women, and vice versa.
My sister-in-law works, and her husband stays home with their kids. What would the ’50s society say to them? He already has enough trouble dealing with role-fixated women and teachers who refuse to acknowledge him as the primary caregiver.
As for the sex thing, I think the problem wasn’t the liberalization of sex, but the secondary consequence of it’s liberalization was the way the sexual revolution into traditional gender roles – traditionally-minded women still just want to land a man who’ll take care of them, but now they have more power (and thus, obligation) to use sex as a means to do so (see SATC)… and that attitude seems to rub off on teen-aged girls a great deal, and boys will, of course, take advantage of it. Because of the mixing of traditional roles and the acceptance of sex, it’s now seen as a social tool instead of a expression and recreation.
Free love works fine if everyone’s a feminist (or “egalitarian” for the left-MRA types). But when you have a power-imbalance, it becomes a cheap poker-chip (where in the ’50s, it was an expensive poker-chip).
In 1970, the average age of a new mother was 21 years old. By 2000, the average age was 28.
What were the distributions? And while it’s not directly to the point of what was being asserted and responded to, what is the proportion in the various groups of those mothers who are married (especially to the child’s father)?
My guess is that if you do that, you’ll see that in all ages the proportion of new mothers who are married dropped. I bet you’ll also see that in 1970 the new mothers’ ages followed a relatively tight bell curve centered on the age of 21, whereas in 2000 you’ll see a two-peak distribution of ages, one around 17 and one around a higher number, with the lower peak mired in poverty.
I’m not offering this as an anti-feminist argument; I just want to play the game fair, here, and make sure we understand what’s actually happening and the consequences. There are a lot of factors that cause what I suspect is the actual result, not just feminism (if it’s even a factor at all in this).
I guess the point I was making is that arguments about what ‘could’ be true impress me a lot less than evidence of what ‘is’ true.
Sure, that’s plausible . . . but I think that a lot of things are possible, and to say that Amanda’s evidence is wrong or misguided or not taking abortion or age distribution or divorce or whatever into account without offering evidence of what an accurate analysis would look like seems unfair to me.
I’m totally not bashing RonF on this, by the way. There’s been a lot of it, and I understand the reason, but absent someone ponying up some facts, the best evidence we have is what Amanda’s offered.
—Myca
james: “disagrees with my conservatives values” is not what “bad-faith” means.
Dana posted a lot of factually untrue statements and you are angry that Amanda called him on them. Now, if you are saying that there are some points Dana didn’t make, that’s a different issue.