Shamelessly trading on my status as a one-time, very distant "Friend of Bill’s,"* I was one of only two non-socialists who managed to gain an invitation to then-First Lady Hillary Clinton’s October 1997 "White House Conference on Child Care." As I entered The Presidential Palace, it was like walking into a carnival house-of-mirrors, a place where all was not as it seems, where reality grows distorted in grotesque ways.

For example, the star panelist at this event actually wore two on each shoulder. Major General John G. Meyer, until recently Commanding General of the U.S. Army’s Community and Family Support Center, captivated an audience of institutional child care enthusiasts with tales of military triumph in the nursery. Under his leadership, he proudly reported, 85 percent of the child care centers run under the Army’s Child Development command had received accreditation from the National Association for the Education of Young Children. This compared to the national average of only five percent. "Commitment, Standards, and Funding," the General declared, were the lessons to be learned.

Basking in the glow of the First Lady’s personal praise, he expanded on the new military gospel of social parenting. "Child care is critical to the Department of Defense’s bottom line," General Meyer said, and added: "Supporting the care and development of children is a responsibility the military readily assumes in exchange for the loyalty of their parents in uniform."

Meyer emphasized the "new reality" of America’s fighting forces: the 1.4 million active duty personnel have 1.3 million dependent children under age 18, 345,000 of whom are under age three. Sixty percent of this force is married (compared to only 30 percent during the supposedly family-friendly 1950’s); and 68 percent of spouses are employed outside the home. Indeed, nearly 10 percent of this force were "service couples," with both husband and wife in uniform.

Accordingly, in the words of the 1987 Army Family Action Plan, "quality child developmental care" has become "a crucial [military] program." While the number of combat divisions has been slashed by half over the last decade, direct and indirect military expenditures for child care have tripled. Among the three services, 800 child care centers, some offering 24-hours-a-day service, embrace 200,000 little Americans, making the U.S. Department of Defense the nation’s largest child-care provider.

Indeed, in an extraordinary display of the welfare-warfare state in action, the First Couple ordered the military in 1997 to proselytize the civilian world on behalf of safe, affordable, and accessible substitute child care, using propaganda videos, booklets, and DOD seminars for corporate employers lagging behind in the child care race. "The Department of Defense’s dedication to adequate funding, strict oversight, improved training and wage packages, strong family child care networks, and...national accreditation standards is laudatory," the President explained in his April 1997 Directive. "I believe that the military has important lessons to share with the rest of the nation on how to improve the quality of child care for all of our Nation’s children." Or, as The First Lady subsequently told reporters at Quantico Marine Corps Base, "I think, as in many areas, the military provides a good example [for substitute child care]. What we’re hoping is that this model will be applicable in the civilian sector."

The sentimental, collectivist tone heard here is no accident. Since the first Army Family Action Plan, issued ominously in 1984 (known in DOD circles as "The Year of the Army Family"), the focus has been on dissolving real, autonomous families in the DOD’s employ and blending the human parts into "The Total Army Family." This is a vaguely totalitarian notion that actually assumes the primacy of post-family or non-family bonds. As one Army document explains: "We want soldiers, of all ranks, feeling they belong to a ‘family’....Building the ‘family’ requires a professional sensitivity toward and caring for one another."

Obviously, such use of the word, "family," masks the inversion or deconstruction of the term, much like former New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s frequent use of the phrase, "The Family of America," by which he meant not real families but the welfare state. Unfortunately, these maudlin expressions of military socialism have borne concrete results. As Army Chief of Staff Dennis J. Reimer concluded in late 1996: "Since the content of the [1984] white paper defined family to mean our global Army family, the impact of the Total Family concept has permeated to all levels of military planning." In a Rose Garden conversation over punch and cookies at the White House Conference on Child Care, I pointedly asked the Army’s new "Child Development" commander if his "warm, fuzzy" assignment in some way might hurt his career. The tall, lean, highly decorated Airborne Ranger–a Brigadier General–assured me with a wink that a focus on "the Army family" and child care was, in fact, now the preferred path for promotion and career success. Forget the phrase, "fix bayonets." Instead, "pass the diaper pins!" Sensitivity and concern for "all our children" pervade the New Model American Army.

Now, it is true that some aspects of the Total Army Family still appear traditional. For example, a range of family entitlements–including housing subsidies, health care, dependent travel, and "high quality" child care–actually encourage early marriage and child bearing, with measurable results. Twenty-one-year-olds on active military duty are nearly twice as likely to be married as their civilian peers and significantly more likely to have a child. Perhaps social conservatives should celebrate these tokens of family renewal.

These surface signs of family commitment are deceptive, however. To begin with, the high rate of early marriage is matched by abnormally high rates of family turmoil and divorce. Indeed, these young service couples are 64 percent more likely to be divorced by age 24 than comparable civilian couples. Put another way, the military incentives create dysfunctional families. As one University of Colorado study recently concluded: "These early military marriages might never have happened without the [special] incentives and they are fundamentally bad marriages."

Second, the early appearance of children does not apparently translate into increased completed family size, which we would expect to see if these were healthy families. Just as the Communists discovered in East Germany during the 1970’s, state "birth bonuses" can affect the timing of when children appear, but not the total number.

Moreover, the birth of military children increasingly occurs outside the bonds of matrimony, with The Total Army Family assuming the roles of both "breadwinner" and "caregiver" for the unmarried service mother and her children. While sexual statistics are closely guarded military secrets, it appears that about 40 percent of military pregnancies occur among unmarried soldiers, sailors, and airmen [sic]. Indeed, since uniformed personnel with children receive preferred access to military entitlements such as housing and medical care, and since unwed military mothers are not required to identify their mates, the Total Army Family actively encourages illegitimacy in the ranks.

In sum, contemporary military families are neither autonomous nor strong, the true measures of family health. All are heavily dependent on special subsidy. While our military women, whether unmarried or in fragile formal liaisons, do reproduce, they do so increasingly to give their children over to a system of collectivized child rearing.

Now, it is true that our military social engineers have not stumbled into the grand sweep of the Lebensborn program of Nazi Germany, where state child care workers tenderly raised the illegitimate offspring of SS troopers. Our military planners nevertheless have achieved something very close to the family policy goals of Swedish Socialism.

Back in the 1930’s, the Swedish theorist Alva Myrdal showed how radical feminism might be reconciled with a collectivist vision of "the family": women must be employed alongside men in the same jobs; marriage must be transformed from a social expectation into a mere "choice"; the costs of children should be subsidized by the state; and the very young should be raised collectively. Some commentators argue that American military family programs are mere parallels to civilian benefit plans. In fact, their whole logic rests on this model of Scandinavian socialism.

Indeed, in a 1978 article, "Arms and the Woman," for the journal Armed Forces and Society, Harvard University’s M.D. Feld described changes sweeping through the American armed forces. The services were less-and-less "a power-laden patriotic symbol" and instrument of war undergirded by concepts of valor and duty, and more-and-more technocratic institutions guided by intellectual elites in the pursuit of egalitarian sexual ends:

One consequence of the contemporary fusion of the notions of national security and national welfare has been the sensible eradication of the conceptual distinction between the nation-in-arms and the nation at peace. The notion of total mobilization as...[a] wartime measure is being replaced by the model of the permanently mobilized state: a state mobilized not for reasons of war but in order to allocate its resources in the fullest and most rational manner possible.

In imitation of Third World militarism, according to Feld, the American armed forces were becoming agents of social change, "conscious instruments of social policy," the "vanguard of modernization," a social-engineering tool committed–among other purposes–to the "ambitious" goals of eradicating belief in differences between the sexes and building new family forms.

As Americans, we cannot claim that we were never warned about this. The Patriots of the late 18th Century fretted continually over the dangers posed to moral order by a large, peacetime standing army. As Sam Adams explained to another Son of Liberty: "I always look’d upon a Standing Army especially in time of peace not only [as] a Disturbance but in every respect dangerous to Civil Community." The early 19th Century patriot and historian Mercy Otis Warren wrote in her popular book, The American Revolution: "Whenever [a standing] army is established, it introduces a revolution in manners, corrupts the morals, propagates every species of vice, and degrades the human character."

What are our alternatives in a dangerous world? The one I favor is decidedly American. Operative from 1775 through 1947–that is, for 175 years–this model of defense assumed that America’s standing military force would be a small, professional, elite corps, largely bachelor in composition and backed in times of major crisis by a War Army, built on a "well regulated" militia or National Guard composed of "a citizenry trained and accustomed to arms": that is, citizen-soldiers in families.

This model could still work today as a viable method of national defense. It would also rescue our armed forces, and our nation, from a socially dangerous course.

The economic-political goal of the American Agrarians during the 1920’s and 1930’s was creation of what they called "the property state": one built on the widest possible diffusion of ownership of productive property, starting with land. Their rural vision was of a robust countryside composed of small subsistence farms, with "happy farmers" [that’s John Crowe Ransom’s phrase],1 jovial and fertile wives, and plenty of rosy-cheeked children. One distributist writer, Ralph Borsodi, described the agrarian ideal in this manner: "A comfortable home in which to labor and play, with trees and grass and flowers and skies and stars; a [vegetable] garden; fruit trees; some fowl; some kine [goats and a cow]; some bees; and three big dogs to keep the salesmen out–and I, at least, have time for love, for children, for a few friends, and for the work I like to do."2 Villages and small towns would dot the countryside as well, where local shops would craft the necessary machine-made goods for local consumption, and local merchants would provide those relatively few things that the farms could not supply themselves. Modest cities would be centers of regional identity, where the poets and writers and musicians growing out of folk culture would gather to celebrate their special place on earth, to publish, and to perform.

The enemy of the Agrarian vision in the 1930’s–the Leviathan that they most feared–was not the Centralizing State, per se; broadly, the enemy was Industrialism, the spread of industrial organization and its premises–the pursuit of efficiency, a highly refined division of labor, the steady substitution of capital for labor–into every corner of life. More specifically, the Agrarians’ enemy was "Finance Capital," which Herbert Agar defined as "the barbarism based on monopoly," a system of "commercial buccaneers" who built their wealth by buying control of the state and "plundering the people."3 These were hard words.

Notably, the Agrarians argued that this economic result was not the consequence of natural historic change. Rather, they saw the giant joint-stock corporations of the early 20th century as the consequence of a grant by the State of legal privileges, ones denied to families and individuals. These privileges included: limited liability; perpetual life, protecting the corporation from the hazards of death and inheritance taxes, to which family households were subject; and the ability to issue stocks, bonds, and debt instruments, giving the corporations huge advantages in raising capital. They saw large corporations as tools of economic centralization, which levelled small shops, family businesses, local producers, and regional diversity. In turn, this served the process of political centralization. The Northern agrarian Ralph Borsodi called Articles of Incorporation "veritable letters of marque," grant- ing corporate leaders immunity from their criminal acts: "the charter which the state grants to the organizer of a corporation is a commission to embark upon the adventure of doing the investing public with impunity."4

Again, hard words. But, of course, such charges carried a certain force in the early 1930’s. The abandoned hulks of many great factories, ruined investors, and the unemployed millions standing in relief lines seemed to testify to the false promises of Finance Capital, which was in turn the consequence of the incestuous relationship between "big money" and the state.

This left the Agrarians facing a problem, however. The work of Finance Capital had already been done. The 48 states had issued thousands of corporate charters over the prior hundred years. Vast numbers of farmers had lost their land to banks, insurance companies, and large corporations. Many people were still on the land–the farm population of 1935 was still larger than it had been in 1900, about 30 million–but tenants now outnumbered owners. How could the regime of small property be restored?

For some, the reluctant answer was to turn to Leviathan itself, to the Central State, and use it now to undo the damage done earlier. Phrased another way, the necessary task was to employ the Central State to rebuild a traditional order already corrupted by the earlier corporate project of the various states.

Indeed, this is how we might view some parts of the New Deal of the 1930’s: as an attempt at traditionalist reconstruction through Federal agency. Most modern conservatives, of course, scoff at the very idea: the Federal government can never get things right (except, it seems, in national security affairs); the New Deal was radical, socialist, a failure: opinions backed by a fair amount of evidence.

A more charitable reading of the New Deal experience, however, suggests that the Agrarians may have made some progress during the 1930’s in their admittedly difficult task. For example, the Subsistence Homestead program, initially part of the National Industrial Recovery Act, was a remarkable experiment in rural renewal, and one partly inspired by the Southeran Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand.5 Between 1934 and 1940, about 200 federal homestead projects took form, in all corners of the country. New homes set on 4 to 10 acre plots, large family gardens, chicken coops, and family cows were the common features of these places. Photos of smiling, rosy-cheeked children resettled from urban or rural slums in these lovely garden homes and fields filled the government reports. Beyond this propaganda, it appears that some of the projects really did work, such as the Granger Homesteads in Iowa, informally guided by the Agrarian Catholic Priest, Luigi Ligutti.6

Or consider the Tobacco Allotment program, also instituted in the New Deal years. To this day, the contemporary Agrarian writer Wendell Berry insists that this strategy of production control "has worked well. In my part of the country, it has ensured the survival of thousands of small farmers for more than half a century."7

But the Agrarian project rested on another, usually implicit requirement. Rebuilding a decentralist order in America, one resting on a healthy regionalism and one requiring time to proceed, meant that America must turn inward. Foreign adventures and foreign wars must be avoided, for they would fuel and guide Leviathan in the wrong ways, and threaten those gains that had already been achieved. Herbert Agar caught the spirit of this Agrarian need in his 1935 book, Land of the Free: "It is our job to save a corner of the world from the despotisms that encroach on Europe." The best traits in American life were not those copied from the old continent, "but the traits we have freely adapted, or else originated–the traits which are our own." Where regional cultures in America–the South, the Middle West, the Far West–were signs of "a new affirmation of life," world cities such as New York and Chicago were corrupted by "cosmopolitanism" and "stricken with sterility."8

Indeed, as war spread over Europe in 1939, many of the Agrarians logically sympathized with the America First campaign, holding that the U.S.A. should stay out of the conflict. As Father Ligutti, newly appointed Executive Secretary of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, explained in early 1941: "If we are to maintain [the American way] we must continue and develop the works for social and economic reconstruction within our beloved land and we must not go out in battle array to save periodically our democracy."9

But global war was unpredictable: the Leviathans of Central Europe and the Asian coast had their own intentions; and America wound up in their way.

It was the Fall of France and the Battle of Britain in 1940 that led Herbert Agar to abandon his earlier arguments, and to favor American entry into the war. At first, he tried to cast Britain’s struggle as a kind of agrarian conflict: the British were fighting "for a chance for decent men and women to live their lives without cruelty.... They [want] to be left alone to tend their gardens." Where England was deindustrializing, Germany represented "total industrialism on the march."10

Other Agrarians still remained deeply distrustful of Leviathan at War. The poet and historian Donald Davidson warned in early 1941 that American entry into the war could only result in a "highly industrialized, centralized, and socialistic order." Responding to Agar’s call for intervention, Davidson continued: "I should have thought agrarians and decentralists would oppose our entry into the conflict when such, no matter what results might be achieved in Europe, would probably be ruinous to their hopes for a healthy reconstruction in America."11

But later in the year came Pearl Harbor, which, in the space of an hour, closed off the debate. Agrarian reconstruction would be shelved; Leviathan must be unleashed, for total war.

Some writers gathered around the agrarian journal Free America, trying to find "decentralist straws" in the new gale of centralization. Lewis Mumford, for example, argued that wartime social planning "must...establish every new industry, every new highway, every new housing development" in new "decentralized" suburbs. Another writer wanted to "Decentralize the War Effort–Now!" by spreading Federal agencies around the country and writing war propaganda on a region-specific basis: as in, "Buy bonds, y’all." Stringfellow Barr wanted to create a world republic, arguing that "decentralists and agrarians ought most surely to be in the ranks of those who have discovered the TNT concealed in national sovereignty."12 Alas, these arguments actually testified to the frailty of the term, "decentralism," as a meaningful intellectual construct, and the shutting down of the real Agrarian project.

In a thoughtful book entitled Kinship With the Land: Regionalist Thought in Iowa, 1894-1942, E. Bradford Burns describes the end of regionalism, agrarianism, and a distinctive folk culture in one Midwestern state. "After December, 1941," he writes, "one national goal exacted the full attention of everyone: to defeat the Axis powers in Europe and Asia....The war scattered the sons and daughters of Iowa to faraway places...[All] Iowans lifted their sights to global horizons, and they, thus far, have found it difficult to focus internally again."13

The more thoughtful Agrarians simply retreated from the political stage. Their fear of the domestic consequences of war had no prospects for a hearing after December 7. In the great push for victory, American farms would be quickly mechanized and consolidated; talk of subsistence homesteads and horse-drawn plows suddenly seemed to be sentimental foolishness. Between 1941 and 1945, a full quarter of the American farm population would flow into military service or defense work in the cities, most never to return. The great emptying of the American countryside had begun. Finance Capitalists, the derided "Plutocrats" of the 1930’s, were transformed almost overnight into widely admired Captains of Industry, the efficient mobilizers of America’s productive might, the material architects of victory over Fascist and Nazi foes.

Some of the Agrarians–notably Agar and John Crowe Ransom–would soon repudiate their agrarian work. Others simply drifted away to other concerns in life. But a few–such as Andrew Lytle, Donald Davidson, Frank Owsley, and Father Ligutti–tended the small Agrarian flame, turning toward more literary or scholarly projects, or to a focus on life after the war. Sometimes, I suspect, the Agrarian flame became very private, residing only in their hearts.

Leviathan had been loosed, in all its power, to fight a global war, to eliminate the great evils of that time; it must have its Day. The remaining Agrarians would wait for a later day, after the Fury had passed, when some imaginations might once again be inspired by the vision of a well-settled countryside full of happy, rosy-cheeked children.

Endnotes

1 John Crowe Ransom, "Happy Farmers," American Review 1 (Oct. 1933): 514-35.

2 Ralph Borsodi, Prosperity and Security: A Study in Realistic Economics (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1938): 462.

3 Herbert Agar, "The Task for Conservatism," American Review 3 (April 1934): 5-8.

4 Borsodi, Prosperity and Security, pp. 27-30, 70, 97.

5 Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1977 [1930]).

6 See: Luigi G. Ligutti and John C. Rawe, Rural Roads to Security: America’s Third Struggle for Freedom (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing Co., 1940).

7 Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1990): 132.

8 Herbert Agar, Land of the Free (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935).

9 Letter, Fr. Luigi G. Ligutti to Senator Clyde Herring, Jan. 13, 1941; in Box D-2, L.G. Ligutti Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI.

10 Herbert Agar, "London Calling," Free America 5 (Sept. 1941): 11-12.

11 In "Decentralization: The Outlook for 1941. A Symposium of Opinion," Free America 5 (Jan. 1941): 11-12.

12 "Decentralization: The Outlook for 1941," p. 14; Richard Neuberger, "Decentralize the War Effort-Now!" Free America 6 (June 1942): 3-6; and Stringfellow Barr, "The Choice: World Republic or National Tyranny," Free America 10 (Spring 1946): 3-4, 15-16.

13 E. Bradford Burns, Kinship With the Land: Regionalist Thought in Iowa, 1894-1942 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996).

By Allan Carlson

The 1950s were an unusual time, sociologically speaking, in the United States. There were startling social changes:

What caused this dramatic break in the 1950s? And just as important: Why did this new family-centered social order fail during the 1960s, barely a generation after it had began?

On the first question–why it happened–one might cite economic explanations, such as rising real wages or a family-friendly tax system, or psychological ones, such as the complex effects of World War II. But I am concerned today with an ideological explanation: specifically, the eclipse of feminism for a remarkable two decades.

Again, for a century prior, the feminist cause had been an accelerating intellectual-political current in America. As late as the 1930s, American public discourse still rang with statements such as:

Then came World War II: women moved onto assembly lines in defense plants; the little children were in government run day care; the men were shipped far away. It seemed the feminist version of Eden.

Suddenly, though, something went very wrong from the feminist perspective. Indeed, by the mid-1950s, feminism had been popularly transformed from trendy cause to a kind of mental illness. Part of the reason was the new intellectual hammerblows brought to bear on the feminist movement itself.

One of the most prominent of these was a 1947 book now consigned to the dusty corners of inadequately censored libraries, but once a best seller, and cause celebrae. Entitled Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, the volume was co-authored by historian Ferdinand Lundberg and psychiatrist Marynia Farnham, M.D., with Harper and Brothers as publisher. The themes of the book included: "that contemporary women in very large numbers are psychologically disordered"; that the feminist movement rested "on a bedrock foundation of hatred" every bit as nasty as that of the Nazis; that persons who voluntarily refused to bear children were mentally disordered; that feminist arguments about a long history of the male oppression of women were nonsense; that feminism was, at its core, "a deep illness," a bundle of neuroses driven by the impossible goal of "the achievement of maleness by the female"; and that the woman’s movement gave energy to "the slaughter of the innocents," seen in growing contraceptive use and rising levels of infanticide, abortion, and child abandonment.

Lundberg and Farnham pointed to the late 18th century writer Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Women, as the prototypical feminist. Diagnosed as "an extreme neurotic of the compulsive type, Mary [Wollstonecraft] was a masochist like her mother, as indeed all the leading feminists were in fact. Aggressively Mary flung herself at men, only to be repeatedly repulsed....The feminists were always doing this, thereby either driving men away from them or capturing psychologically impaired males." Feminism, the authors concluded, arose out of this very sickness.

Remarkably, this identification of feminism as neurosis spread widely. A kind of conservative pop-Freudianism became the accepted wisdom of the 1950’s, and "neurotic" a common label. In its 1957 special issue on women, for example, Life magazine–at the apogee of its popular influence–drew directly on the Lundberg-Farnham book, and consigned the remaining American feminists to the care of the mental health profession. With this hostile sickness-ideology suppressed, marriage and fertility did grow in popularity. America seemed reborn.

It did not last. In the early 1960’s, feminist tracts re-emerged, notably Betty Friedan’s volume, The Feminine Mystique, on "the problem that has no name," codewords for the boredom and restlessness of the suburban housewife. Within a very few years, the more radical feminist voices were again in full song; a chorus that has lasted to our day. The American social revival, seen in more and strengthened marriages and larger families, collapsed like a house of cards, and the old trends–a retreat from marriage and "the slaughter of the innocents"–came storming back, seemingly with a vengeance.

How, then, might we explain all this? Relative to the Lundberg-Farnham book, an explanation is relatively easy. Popular opinions about this widely discussed, but less widely read book–that feminism represented a bundle of neuroses and that women should return home–actually overlooked a second part of the book’s argument. Largely forgotten was the authors’ claim that modern housewives also suffered a psychological affliction similar to that of the feminists. They, too, were neurotically disturbed.

For the real problem, Lundberg and Farnham insisted, was the prior destruction of the home, brought on by the excesses of the industrial revolution.

As they explained, the home of the human past had been more than a place of shared shelter and consumption. Before the rise of the new factories in the 19th century, the vast majority of homes in town and countryside had been centers of economic activity, with husband, wife and children all sharing in the work of the family. These were homes "rich in daily event," full of meaning and content to their inhabitants. Children were economic assets in these productive homes, each one welcomed warmly into the family circle. The home was the center of education in basic and advanced skills. Estimates suggest that well over half of all available goods were created and produced by the women. In this context, women found deep and real satisfaction: as the mistresses of function-rich, economically productive homes, their fertility and their creativity combined in an ego-fulfilling way. In contemporary parlance, "they had it all."

The Industrial Revolution, Lundberg and Farnham maintained, shattered the home. Starting with the weaving of cloth and spreading inexorably even into areas such as education and recreation, the industrial principle "destroyed [humankind’s] earthly home and a wealth of...know-how and savvy about daily living." The industrial principle pressed into process after process, and soon nothing was left.

Women paid the largest price; and the authors describe the consequent anguish of women, their desperate emotional efforts to recover some sense of the wellbeing and fulfillment that they had known. As the authors summarize in a brilliant sentence (p. 164): "The [world] historical role of feminism, then, was to deliver women by the millions as factory hands, subject to factory discipline and severe limitation of movement and action." The new order transformed children from assets into liabilities, and fertility plummeted. Moreover, marriage no longer provided meaningful economic gains to individuals now in practical competition with each other. Even new suburban homes, full of fireplaces and other symbolic shards of the past, were functionless places, fit only for the "tattered dreams" of neurotics and alcoholics. In this sense, the authors anticipated Betty Friedan’s argument by fifteen years.

Why did popular commentators of the 1950’s largely ignore this part of Lundberg’s and Farnham’s analyses? For the obvious reason that it raised too great a challenge to the prevailing order. For behind the authors’ surface denunciation of modern feminism was this deeper critique of the whole of consumer industrial society.

Feminism, in this sense then, was not the cause of family disorder; it was a symptom of a home life disordered by the industrial principle, allowed to run amok. If the feminist was neurotic, so was the suburban housewife, and for the same reason: both groups of women were refugees, driven away from their natural places in functional, productive, and fertile homes.

Lundberg and Farnham insisted that only the reconstruction of functional homes offered any way out of the modern social dilemma. But their imaginations failed in considering how that might be done. In restoring the education function to the home, for example, the best they could do was to recommend that married-women-with-children, working part-time, replace the "spinsters" currently teaching in the state schools. They also called–God help us–for massive state-funded psycho-therapy programs.

Fifty-five years later, perhaps we can see better and more germane possibilities for de-industrializing some aspects of our lives. Home education, most obviously, has proven to be a real and practical alternative. Not only is it good for children and society, producing as it does well-above-average educational results. It also restores purpose and meaning to homes, most particularly to women and mothers in homes, who have properly reclaimed this vital function as theirs. As a sign of its success, American families that home-school do show fertility levels nearly twice as high as their neighbors.

Perhaps the home computer will have similar effects in recreating those "cottage industries" that once defined the productive home. The recent growth in home businesses in the U.S. is statistically striking; and an estimated three-quarters of them are guided by women.

We might also see here an opportunity for Christian compassion. Lundberg and Farnham reported on a letter sent by Mary Wollstonecraft to her roguish and sometimes abusive lover, Imlay, where she expressed her deepest wish: that he take her to North America; that they marry and settle on a farm; and that she bear him six children.

So, the next time you confront an angry feminist–be it in court, in Congress, or in public debate–you might remember Mary Wollstonecraft and perhaps see that you actually face another woman looking desperately for her true and real home.