School administrators have recognized for some time that students are particularly likely to drop out of high school if they move from one school to another. However, a study recently completed at Johns Hopkins University indicates that the likelihood that students will drop out of high school depends less on whether they have moved to […]
Read MoreNothing reveals the hellish consequences of the Sexual Revolution more than the emergence on American campuses of a new “hook-up” culture involving all kinds of polymorphous sex and no kind of moral or even emotional commitment. Because their own radical ideologies helped incubate this world of subhuman coupling, the university scholars who study such behaviors […]
Read More
The Birth of the Pill – How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched A Revolution Jonathan Eig W.W. Norton and Company, 2014; 400 pages, $27.95 One winter night in 1950, Margaret Sanger and the scientist Gregory Goodwin (“Goody”) Pincus met in a Park Avenue apartment to discuss the taboo topic of birth control. For years, […]
Read More
Generation Unbound – Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage Isabel V. Sawhill Brookings Institution Press, 2014; 212 pages, $32.00 For those concerned about family policy, the stark facts that Generation Unbound describes will be familiar. While teen parenting is down, for instance, “parenting by young unwed women has not declined. It has just moved […]
Read MoreThe Ground of Freedom The role of private property is a necessary component of home economics. To begin, I would like to consider briefly what some writers from our Founding Era had to say about private property and then quickly trace the idea into the twentieth century. We will see that the idea of private […]
Read MoreThomas Jefferson wrote to John Jay that “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.”[1] At America’s founding, we were a nation of farmers—over […]
Read MoreMarch is a busy month for us. The sap is running, and the first batch of chicks arrives. But most significantly, it is my youngest daughter’s birthday month. Ula turned eight this month, and she likes to make the most of her birthday. She usually starts outlining her plans at Christmas. She is particularly fond […]
Read MoreFamilies, Self-Sufficiency, and Limits I’ll Take My Stand, by “Twelve Southerners,” appeared in 1930 as a new statement of agrarian fundamentalism. In the American experience, Thomas Jefferson had framed the classic case for this outlook in his 1782 book, Notes on the State of Virginia. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people […]
Read MoreMarriage, the Economy of Membership, and Ordered Diversity in the Fiction of Wendell Berry For as long as men have told stories, they have been primarily concerned with stories of a certain kind—those of love, of fidelity, of loyalty to kith and kin and country. The purposes of these stories have been as varied as […]
Read MoreChanges in Domestic Population Policy and American Reproductive Behavior in the 1960s The sexual revolution of the 1960s did more than endogenously change the costs of sexual activity through the advent of normalized contraceptive use; it initiated the shift in how Americans think about reproduction. The new calculus of reproduction precipitated modernity’s unique demographic phenomenon: […]
Read More