For most of the human record here on earth, to say that “the natural family is the fundamental social unit,” would be to say something unexceptional, or obvious: the equivalent of saying “the sky is blue” or “waves crash on the seashore.”

It has only been in relatively recent times, and only among certain educated elites in Northwest Europe and America, that we have heard statements such as:

• The family is “simply an institution for the more complete subjugation and enslavement of women and children”;¹ or

• Marriage is “an institution which robs a woman of her individuality and reduces her to the level of a prostitute”;² or

• Motherhood “is a calamity to be avoided”;³ or

• “The family goes back to the age of savagery while the state belongs to the age of civilization.”⁴

These quotations all came from Anglo-American sources, early in the 20^th Century, during the unsettling years when the Europeans also gave the world The Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution, 1914 to 1919. Such ideas receded in most places during the 1920’s, but returned again during the tumultuous 1960’s and 1970’s, when the family once more became a target of social and sexual revolutionaries. As the writer Stephanie Dowrick explained this view in her book, Why Children?: the family is the basic institution of oppression, “with father at the head and mother and children in a lump together dependent on father’s goodwill.”⁵  Or, as the radical writer Andrea Dworkin explained in her book,  Our Blood: “Marriage laws [sanctify] rape by reiterating the right of the rapist to ownership of the raped.”⁶  Or as another analyst explained in a 1983 article, the family is neither fundamental nor natural. Indeed, the word “natural,” like the term “normal” is “a word a feminist should use with extreme caution.”⁷

THE TRUTHS OF HUMAN NATURE

Yet, despite these ideological assaults, the truths of human nature could not be long suppressed. When honestly conducted, free from ideological bias, both the social sciences and the natural sciences force us to see the “natural” and “fundamental” meaning of the family.

In the study of social history, for example, even the new historiography of figures such as Peter Laslett, sometimes said to challenge the traditional family, has in fact confirmed certain old truths. For example, Laslett reports that in Anglo-American society, monogamy is still, and has always been, the social rule,⁸ while the family unit built on marriage, and supplemented by varying extended family ties, has always been and remains still the only significant family form. Importantly, Laslett adds: “Departure from the monogamous ideal of behavior, amongst English people nowadays, and perhaps among their ancestors, has been particularly conspicuous within the elite, and rejection of the beliefs associated with monogamy especially common with the intellectuals.”⁹  This is a problem to which I will later return. 

Some 20^th Century American historians have also claimed that the American people, early on, had moved away from “the ancient structure of family life” and toward an extreme individualism, where the family did not count. According to this interpretation, Americans were “a population raised on an economic tradition of land speculation and individualistic venturing,” people who refused to make sacrifices for any cause other than themselves; that the morals of Hollywood and Madison Avenue were implicit to the American founding.¹⁰

Yet again, more recent and complete historical investigations have discredited this view. The new interpretation sees American society, before mass industrialization in the late 19^th Century, as strongly familial in nature. The economy was home-centered, and most productive activities—from furniture-making to the raising and preparation of food—were family based. This ‘family’ or ‘home economy’ rested on a complex web of obligations: parents saw the ownership of land and other productive property as a kind of trust, held for the perpetuation of the family line through the children. Great attention focused on the terms and timing of the transfer of economic resources to future generations. In return, the elderly would enjoy care and support from their grown children. At the community level, kinship, ethnic, and religious bonds held America together. These Americans, in historian Barry Levy’s words, were committed to the creation of families and to the rearing of children as “tender plants growing in the truth.”¹¹  American families during the Colonial, Revolutionary, and early National periods were large—an average of seven children per married couple—and they were respectful of age, deferring on most important matters to the wisdom of elders. As historian James Henretta has put it: these American parents raised children “to succeed them,” not just to succeed.¹²

Even after industrialization and the rise of large cities, the new historians have shown how Americans sought to preserve the family-centeredness of their society. For example, labor leaders worked to craft a “family wage” system, which would limit the intrusion of industry into the home economy, preserve some level of independence or autonomy for the family, and create conditions where the child-rich or larger family might survive.¹³

In short, historians have denied the claims of the social radicals, and have restored attention to the natural and proper place of the family as the fundamental unit of society.

THE SOCIAL SCIENCES CHIME IN

The same “rediscovery” of the family has come in the fields of sociology and psychology. A quarter-century ago, some Western scholars in these disciplines were busy “debunking” the family, claiming that it was oppressive to the human personality, arguing that children did not need an active father to grow up normally, and urging full recognition and public support for what they called “new family forms.” 

But here, too, the tide has clearly turned. For the last twelve years, the New Research supplement to this publication (Family in America) has summarized each month relevant new studies from the professional journals, which affirm the irreplaceable role of the family. We now have a database of over 1,200 such journal articles. Here is just a sample of what one finds there:

• The Summer 1998 issue of Journal of Marriage and Family reports on a 17-nation study of marital status and happiness, showing “perhaps the most sweeping and strongest evidence to date in support of the relationship between marital status and happiness.”  The strength of the bond between “being married and being happy” is “remarkably consistent in every country studied”; moreover, the Wayne State University researchers show that “marriage protects females just as much from unhappiness as it protects males.”¹⁴

• The Spring 1998 issue of The Journal of Health and Social Behavior shows that women who live in neighborhoods with a high level of fatherless, mother-led families “experience an 85 percent increased risk of dying of heart disease.”¹⁵

• The May 1998 issue of Demography shows that the presence of fathers in the home is vital to adolescent well being. Fathers have particular influence in the areas of children’s subsequent economic success and educational attainment, and in keeping children away from delinquent behavior.¹⁶

• The journal Violence and Victims reports that nearly half of lesbians report “being or having been the victim of relationship violence” from their same-sex partners,¹⁷ approximately four times the violence level reported by heterosexual couples.

• The Journal of Socio-Economics reports that the presence of church-attending persons in Swedish neighborhoods dramatically reduces rates of abortion, divorce, bankruptcy, and out-of-wedlock births: even among the non-believers who live beside Christians in these places.¹⁸

• And a 1998 issue of The Journal of Marriage and Family reports that while the percent of all white females, age 18, who were virgins fell from 51% in 1982 to 42% by 1988, the percent of female teens who were fundamentalist Protestants and who were virgins rose from 45 to 61% over these same six years.¹⁹  Strong-faith translated into public virtue.

Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming today that “fathers matter,” that single-parent families suffer from numerous innate disabilities, that the intentional out-of-wedlock child is a selfish, anti-social act that puts the child at great risk, that cohabitation is a violence-prone way of life, that marriage—compared to all the alternatives—produces more happiness and better health among adults and happier, healthier, smarter, and socially more well-adjusted children, and that religious belief and activity deliver a host of positive social gifts, even to non-believers. 

THE BIOLOGY OF COMPLEMENTARITY

The natural sciences chime in as well. In the fields of human biology and bio-chemistry, for example, dramatic new findings highlight the important effects of hormonal and psychological differences between women and men: in everything from the functioning of the nervous system and the brain, to emotional drives. The lessons, of course, are not that one sex is “better” than or “superior” to the other; such claims are at once wrong and irrelevant. The true lesson is the remarkable complementarity of woman and man: in the creation of families and in the rearing of children, men and women are designed to work together, each bringing special gifts and aptitudes which make the combination greater or stronger than the sum of its parts.

This is why research by social biologists shows: 

• That children raised outside intact, two-natural-parent families are 40 times more likely to be physically or sexually abused than are children raised within intact families.²⁰

• Or that “maternal care” of young children provides “a protective factor” in psychological wellbeing that neither fathers nor non-parental caregivers can provide.²¹

• Or that the level of the male hormone, testosterone, goes down among married men, who by marrying become less aggressive and more cooperative in socially constructive ways: that is, they became gentle men.²²

The great anthropologists have long told us that marriage and family living are universal to the human species. G.P. Murdoch, in his 1949 classic work, Social Structure, defined marriage as existing only when the economic and the sexual are united into one relationship, yet still found it “in every known human society.”  Also universal, he said, was “a division of labor by sex,” rooted in the natural and indisputable differences in reproductive function.²³  Another of the great 20^th Century anthropologists, Bronislaw Malinowski, has also testified to this universality of marriage, concluding that there is “something bigger in human marriage,” rooted in “the deepest needs of human nature and society.”²⁴

Indeed, even the theorists of evolution testify to family living as a defining trait of humanity. In his seminal article for Science magazine, paleo-anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy marshalls the gathering evidence showing that both human survival as a species and evolutionary progress have depended on what he calls “the unique sexual reproductive behavior” of humankind. Lovejoy shows that the human family system, rooted in complementary pair-bonding, reaches back hundreds of thousands of years; he even implies that the very definition of “human” rests on this family behavior. As Lovejoy writes: “[B]oth advanced material culture and the Pleistocene acceleration in brain development are sequelae to an already established hominid character system, which included intensified parenting and social relationships, monogamous pair-bonding, specialized sexual-reproductive behavior [by male and female], and bipedality. It implies that the nuclear family and human sexual behavior may have their ultimate origin long before the dawn of the Pleistocene.”²⁵  That is, even as the paleo-anthropologists’ early man began to walk on two legs, he was living in a recognizably human family system.

The message in short?: To be human is to be familial. Any significant departure from the family rooted in stable marriage, the welcoming of children, and respect for ancestors and posterity—any deviation from this social structure makes us in a way less “human”: that is, I think it fair to say, the true message of modern science.

Revealingly, it is also the message of all the world’s great religions. While differing on many things, the great faiths—particularly those in the Abrahamic tradition—show that the deepest meanings and the greatest satisfactions for humankind are to be found in family living. It should be with a certain humility that science, after a century and a half of diligent investigation of human nature, comes to conclusions that in ways largely echo—albeit in less poetic style—the explanations given long ago in Genesis 1, chapters 1 and 2:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth…’

And as that first man met that first woman, the man said:

‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’  Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.

THE SCANDINAVIAN CONNECTION

Yet this analysis begs another question?  If the family is natural, fundamental, indeed irreplaceable, how do we account for the occasional success of anti-family ideas?  In particular, how can we explain the special success of the post-family ideology that has shown considerable influence at the United Nations over the last several decades?

Certainly, this was not inevitable. And certainly, it was not the intent of the founders of the U.N. Rather, I think we can explain this development through the influence of certain intellectuals in certain places and at certain times. People are policy. More specifically, the answer lies in the unusually strong influence at the U.N. of a socially radical form of Scandinavian democratic socialism during that organization’s formative years, 1945-1955; a story best told, I think , through the work of one early U.N. official: Alva Myrdal. She was not the only actor here; but she was surely one of the most influential.

During the U.N.’s first decade, let us remember, the Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark exerted an unusually strong influence on its administrative structure. As European peoples largely “untouched” by nazism, fascism, or colonialism, and with a common commitment to the “middle way” of democratic socialism, the Scandinavians were well placed to implement a new internationalist agenda in the years after World War II. The Norwegian Trygve Lie served as U.N. Secretary General from 1946 to 1953, followed by the Swede Dag Hammarskjold through 1961. Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal headed the powerful U.N. Economic Commission for Europe [E.C.E.] from 1947 to 1955, while Scandinavian functionaries were disproportionately represented in other agencies.

Starting in 1946, the U.N. structure included a 15-member Commission on the Status of Women, originally designed to be a forum on issues such as the extension of the vote to women and the suppression of international traffic in prostitution. Yet in the 1949 to 1955 period, the United Nations’ engagement on women’s issues underwent a decided shift, under the guiding influence of Alva Myrdal. 

Her background tells us a good deal.²⁶  Raised by her parents in a strong radical socialist ideological environment, Alva Reimers married economist Gunnar Myrdal in 1924, launching an extraordinary collaboration. In the late 1920’s, she travelled to the United States as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow, absorbing new social theories of family decline from sociologists such as William Ogburn, and picking up the progressive view of the state school “as a substitute for the family.”  In 1932, she planned construction of a “collective house” in Stockholm, where families would turn infant and child care, food preparation, and recreation over to professionals. 

In 1934, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal jointly authored Kris i Befolkningsfrågan (Crisis in the Population Question).²⁷  Under the pretext of a campaign to raise Sweden’s birthrate, the book advanced an agenda for a new form of social life. The existing family system, they argued, “is almost…pathological,” “rootless,” “isolated,” and doomed to “disintegration and sterility.”  It must be replaced by a new social model, where women would stand by men “as comrades” in productive wage labor, where children would become a social or state responsibility, and where antique notions surrounding “private life” and “home” would give way to state-guided social planning and cooperation. Other components of this vision were loosened anti-abortion laws, readily available contraception, sex education as part of the regular school curriculum, population targets and controls as a state responsibility, and elimination of the legal and social distinctions between married and unmarried adults. Alva Myrdal also argued that these goals required the conscious dismantling of remaining traditional homes, through law and policy, and even coercive efforts “to eliminate” women’s roles that were incompatible with her vision.

This book, Crisis in the Population Question, had a profound influence in reshaping Swedish attitudes and public policy. The Myrdals became important public figures at this time, and their own “companionate marriage” won wide praise as the model for the future. The Myrdals’ direct influence spread as well to Norway and Denmark, where they inspired “Population Commissions” that reordered those nations in line with their theories.

A decade later, however, husband Gunnar grew absorbed in his new tasks for the United Nations. Alva Myrdal saw her own new style marriage falling apart, complaining bitterly that the “ECE became everything for Gunnar, the family and I nothing.”  According to the testimony of her daughter, Sissela Myrdal Bok, their “full-fledged companionship” as spouses and as partners-in-work “had now been abandoned.”  Alva’s marital role “had become nothing but a mask,” and the Myrdal home grew “alien, empty, [and] devoid of love.”²⁸

This strain, and threatened rupture, of a marriage was and is a tragic tale, but not one terribly uncommon in the war-wracked 1940’s. The difference was that Alva Myrdal soon gained a unique opportunity to translate her new family ideology—conditioned by her recent personal experience—onto a global political canvas.

DISPLACING TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE      

In early 1948, she gave a lecture to U.N. officials based in Geneva on “the Surplus Energy of Married Women,” arguing that global social and economic woes could be countered by moving women outside the restraints of traditional marriage. Such work attracted the attention of Secretary General Lie, who offered her the directorship of the Secretariat’s Department of Social Affairs. In what she felt to be “a period of desperate [personal] powerlessness,” and traumatized by the Swiss women about her who—she said—held “cowlike” to traditional female tasks, Myrdal accepted the appointment. She left Geneva for New York, leaving behind her troubled marriage and her two daughters, ages 15 and 12. 

Alva Myrdal was now the highest ranking woman in any international organization, and she turned her considerable energies toward institutionalizing two issues at the United Nations: the reconstruction of sex roles and population control. These concerns rose steadily on the United Nations agenda. In summer, 1950, she accepted a new appointment as head of the Division of Social Science at the United Nations Economic and Social Council, a post that she held through 1955. The choice was curious, for Myrdal had no formal training as a social scientist (her university degree was in literature). Nonetheless, she proceeded to rebuild social science institutes and faculties in war-ravaged countries and to create new ones in the post-colonial states. Her control over program funds provided an unprecedented opportunity to pass over or eliminate those social scientists rooted in an historicist sociology, who had emphasized the central role of the family. They would be replaced by those committed to Myrdal’s vision of the family as a social institution needing radical change. In later years, many of these scholars would return to United Nations’ fora as national delegates, reinforcing the vision of their benefactor. Myrdal also built a Division staff compatible with her views, one that remained long after her departure. Myrdal battled regularly against “Catholic governments” and “Catholic scholars” who held that there was no over-population crisis, only a need for social and economic reforms. This conflict was particularly intense at the 1954 U.N. World Population Conference, in Rome.²⁹ 

In the late 1960’s, Alva Myrdal also chaired a committee of the Swedish Social Democratic Party on “equality,” producing a manifesto subtitled The Alva Myrdal Report. The document acknowledged that the pursuit of equality means a constant struggle by “society” to level those matters “where Nature has created great and fundamental differences.”  Note the point here: she argued that the natural complementarity between men and women must be subverted by state action. Equally radical in its implications, The Alva Myrdal Report dismissed the home, the informal economy, and other forms of traditional society, as dangerous to the future. Instead, she said, individuals should have a common dependence on the central state. Marriage as a distinctive legal, social, and economic construct need also be eliminated. As The Alva Myrdal Report explained:

• “No specific form of cohabitation should be rewarded through the tax system, which should be the same for everyone regardless of sex or civil status;”

• “Every adult is responsible for his/her own support. Benefits previously inherent in married status should be eliminated….”

• “At the same time it appears important to provide more protection to other forms of cohabitation [instead of marriage].”³⁰

As these quotations show, “equality” was not even the real issue; the ideological remaking of society was always the goal. Myrdal’s radical vision of a post-family society, formed in Sweden and institutionalized within the United Nations, has since borne significant fruit.

A NEXT STEP

So what should we now do?  It is time to bring to the United Nations and to other international settings the shared truth of history, of the social sciences, of the natural sciences, and of the great religious faiths: that the family is the natural and fundamental social unit, inscribed in our nature as human beings, rooted in marriage, rooted in the commitment to bring new life into the world, and rooted in a deep respect for both ancestors and posterity.  

It is time to move this view of the family as the fundamental social unit to the very heart of international deliberations, so that it might guide the creation of laws and public policies in our respective nations. The radical model of the “post-family” society does not work. It generates violence, disorder, unhappiness, ruined lives, and even premature death. We are all called to do better in and for the future. Given the story I have told here of the turn by European and North American "elites" against the natural family, perhaps it will be the Africans, the peoples of the Middle East, the Central Americans, and the Asians who will—even must—take the lead.

Endnotes