Women Alone Fifty years ago Betty Friedan galvanized a movement by chronicling the angst of married women who felt trapped in middle-class suburban American motherhood and packaging it as The Feminine Mystique. Her genius was in conceptualizing that sense of ennui and alienation as “the problem without a name.” The “problem” actually had a name […]
Read MoreThe Ultimate Social Meaning of Friedan’s Sovereign-Self Feminism Radiant with the hopes kindled in The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan concludes her landmark feminist manifesto with an optimistic question about the beckoning future: “Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? . . . It has barely begun, the search […]
Read MoreAt a time when national marriage rates are astonishingly low and national divorce rates remain distressingly high, Americans might learn something from a new Finnish study about the personal characteristics of those young people most likely to make enduring marriages and about the contrasting personal characteristics of those most likely to divorce. Conducted by a […]
Read MoreParental divorce seriously hurts American children, some progressives have argued, only because the United States is politically backward compared to advanced social democracies, such as, say, Sweden. But that line of thinking loses plausibility when assessed against the results of a new study of parental divorce in that very land of the progressives’ hearts’ desires. […]
Read MoreWhat makes young people open to the idea of divorce? What makes them resistant to that idea? Psychologist Daniel R. Stalder of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater offers illuminating answers to these questions in a new study of how “cognitive dissonance” affects marital thinking. “Cognitive dissonance,” Stalder explains, “is a psychological discom-fort created by an inconsistency […]
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Sex and God at Yale Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad Nathan Harden Thomas Dunne Books, 2012; 320 pages, $25.99 Nathan Harden’sstoryof being admitted to Yale is an unconventional one. Harden grew up in various states across the South and began dreaming of Yale at ten years old. When he was in […]
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The End of Men: And the Rise of Women Hanna Rosin Riverhead Books, 2012; 320 pages, $27.95 Despite the title of Hanna Rosin’s book, The End of Men is clearly written from the standpoint of women. Men as a sex are languishing: they do not complete college, are not working full-time jobs, and, with the […]
Read MoreA Centenary Reflection This year marks the centennial of Hilaire Belloc’s curious book The Servile State. Recent commentators have been unsure where to place this volume on the ideological spectrum. In the Liberty Fund edition, Robert Nisbet labels Belloc a “libertarian Catholic,” a writer taking his inspiration from the nineteenth century’s Cardinal Newman and Lord […]
Read MoreHow the Erosion of American Family Life Fuels Illegal Immigration For the vast majority of ordinary Americans, particularly those who fall between the center and the right of the political spectrum, illegal immigration is a simple issue: The Law is the Law, and the Law should be enforced. As commentator George Rodriguez, himself of Mexican […]
Read MoreWhat Helps, and What Hinders, the American Dream What more sacred, what more strongly guarded by everyholy feeling, than a man’s own home? —Cicero America’s founding fathers inherited from English common law the doctrine that “a man’s house is his castle.”[1] Property ownership and political autonomy are two sides of the same coin. John Locke […]
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