U Not Gonna Like This

This group of anti-family statments made by variuos feminists was listed at David R Throop's Men's Issues Page. [Orginally located at: .]

Unfortunately, the site is no longer online. However, thanks to the Internet Archives this particular page is being reposted for all to see.

Selected quotes on abolishing the traditional family

Gerry Harbison harbison@unlinfo.unl.edu writes:

Some feminists object to the nuclear family.

Some examples:

Judith Stacey - The belief that married-couple families are superior is probably the most pervasive prejudice in the Western world.

Toni Morrison: The little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work

Barbara Ehrenreich, as quoted by Stephen Chapman, from Time:
"Only with the occasional celebrity crime do we allow ourselves to think the nearly unthinkable: that the family may not be the ideal and perfect living arrangement after all -- that it can be a nest of pathology and a cradle of gruesome violence," she writes. "Even in the ostensibly 'functional,' nonviolent family, where no one is killed or maimed, feelings are routinely bruised and often twisted out of shape. There is the slap or the put-down that violates a child's shaky sense of self, the cold, distracted stare that drives a spouse to tears, the little digs and rivalries."

Ms. Ehrenreich extols the "long and honorable tradition of 'anti-family' thought," waxing nostalgic for those early feminists who regarded marriage as just another version of prostitution. This deeply defective institution "can hardly be the moral foundation of everything else," she argues, pining for the day when "someone invents a sustainable alternative."

And of course our own Gordon Fitch....

"The nuclear family is a hotbed of violence and depravity."
[Gordon Fitch clarifies his statement. -DRT]

Note that none of the authors above said 'traditional male-dominated family'. It is evidently not the religious right model they object to, but any nuclear family.

This is an intellectually legitimate viewpoint, although I claim I am entitled to object to suggestions that the family is intrinsically some sort of concentration camp, in the same way *anyone* is entitled to object to a blanket condemnation of the way they live. The dishonesty is in feminists pretending that there is not a significant anti-family movement in feminism. It suggests a stealth campaign, in which the real agenda is concealed.


And by way of sheaffer@netcom.com (Robert Sheaffer):

From Female Liberation by Roxanne Dunbar.

"How will the family unit be destroyed? ... the demand alone will throw the whole ideology of the family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and we can fight collectively. Women will feel freer to leave their husbands and become economically independent, either through a job or welfare."

From article, "Is Marriage the Answer?" by Barbara Findlen, Ms magazine, May-June, 1995:
"Feminists have long criticized marriage as a place of oppression, danger, and drudgery for women."

From Sisterhood Is Powerful, Morgan (ed), 1970 p. 537.

"The Feminists -v- The Marriage License Bureau of the State of New York...All the discriminatory practices against women are patterned and rationalized by this slavery-like practice. We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage."

From Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness, p. 294

"most mother-women give up whatever ghost of a unique and human self they may have when they 'marry' and raise children."

Alice Walker in "Embracing the Dark and the Light," Essence, July 1982. As cited in Andrea Dworkin's "Right-Wing Women"

"...I submit that any sexual intercourse between a free man and a human being he owns or controls is rape."

The context of the quote in RWW makes it clear that marriage is such a form of control.
Lenore Walker, speaking at a Laguna Beach conference, as reported in the SF Chronicle:

"Our research and most other studies show that wife-battering occurs in 50 percent of families throughout the nation."

The SF Chronicle comments, "Only the most crazed man-hater could believe that." [I suspect it has more to do with hating marriage than hating men - DRT]

Lenore Walker, after visiting one of the early shelters for battered women, wrote "I was struck by what a beneficial alternative to the nuclear family this arrangement [communal housing and child raising] was for these women and children." (p.195) The Battered Woman

Andrea Dworkin: "Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership."

Contributed by rodvan@nwlink.com (Rod Van Mechelen):

Functions of the Family, Linda Gordon, WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation, Fall, 1969.
"The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together. ... Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process. ... "Families have supported oppression by separating people into small, isolated units, unable to join together to fight for common interests. ...

"Families make possible the super-exploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as peripheral to their 'true' role. ... No woman should have to deny herself any opportunities because of her speical responsibilities to her children. ... Families will be finally destroyed only when a revolutionary social and economic organization permits people's needs for love and security to be met in ways that do not impose divisions of labor, or any external roles, at all."

Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone; E. P. Dutton
In fucking, as in reproduction, sex and economics are inextricably joined. In male-supremacist cultures, women are believed to embody carnality; women are sex. A man wants what a woman has--sex. He can steal it [prostitution], lease it over the long term marriage [marriage in the United States], or own it outright [marriage in most societies]. A man can do some or all of the above, over and over again.