Going back 250 years, the enemies of America thought long and hard about how to destroy the fledgling experiment of a Democratic Republic that our Founding Fathers envisioned.
It was and continues to be clear to them that America’s strength is a function of three phenomena:
- A fervent belief in the God Who makes miracles happen, for just one example the crushing defeat of the thunderously powerful English Empire’s armies by blazing patriots like General George Washington and his ragtag army of American heroes.
- An equally ardent belief in and passion for the concept of Freedom. Men who knew they were going to die, and their wives who believed their deaths were for the noble cause of freedom, all sacrificed to bring about our victory over the monarchy that wanted to continue to rule us.
- The most passionate was the embrace, belief in, and allegiance to family, its sanctity, its strength, its ability to weather all storms and overcome all obstacles.
Judaism and Jewish history, the source of the American Judaeo-Christian values on which the USA's ethos is based, evinces a strong belief in all three. In addition, the Jewish People's continuity unquestionably depends on the family unit (responsibility for which is chiefly, but not solely, put in the hands of women) and the study of Torah (responsibility for which is chiefly, but not solely, put in the hands of men).
If we destroy all three, our enemies reasoned, the masses they considered essentially stupid would be forced to rely exclusively on Big Government. And so, to this day, the socialists-cum-communists-cum-progressives among us are employing--as their predecessors did-- every malevolent tactic they can muster to actualize that goal.
ASTOUNDING PROGRESS
The America haters among us have already:
- Infiltrated our public schools and contaminated generations of students with anti-American propaganda, as well as explicit pornography and grooming, even in kindergarten!
- Lured both Christians and Jews to abandon their faiths and to worship the new God of Social Justice (there is evidence that this anti-faith movement's hold is beginning to weaken)
- Succeeded in the leftist--and to my mind traitorous--infiltration of our military and Intelligence services like the FBI and CIA until, that is, the redemptive entrance of President Trump and his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth.
- On and on and on.
Still, the family remains their most desired--yet maddeningly elusive--target.
HELP ALONG THE WAY
That effort was generously helped--perhaps, at first, innocently--by the theories of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the Austrian neurologist-cum-psychiatrist who was wildly successful in convincing the relatively new and free-thinking American public that the genesis of neuroses, phobias, anxieties, obsessions, depression, psychosis, and general psychological malfunction not only took place in the first few years of life, but that the mothers who raised these suffering children were primarily to blame. Later therapists blamed “cold” mothers for their children’s autism.
Mission #1 Accomplished: Mothers are not good for children.
These psychological theories prevailed throughout the 20th century and up to today, embraced by generations of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists until 1998 when they were thoroughly debunked by Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption, where the Harvard-educated psychologist and editor of most of the psychology texts used in colleges and medical schools in America argued persuasively that a person’s peer group is the major influence of thought, feelings, and behavior throughout life.
THE NEXT STEP
In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the most world-changing medication in history, developed by Dr. John Rock, a Harvard professor and obstetrician-gynecologist with five children--along with Drs. Gregory Pincus, C.M. Phang, and Selzo Garcia. Their creation was the birth-control pill, aka The Pill! For the first time in world history, women had control over their reproduction.
For millions of women, it was their own Declaration of Independence, and a huge relief not to have to worry about getting pregnant.
Mission #2 Accomplished: Now we can be just like men, some women reasoned. Thus was the Free Sex movement born and a complete redefinition of traditional morality.
GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!
Three years after The Pill, in 1963, a book by Betty Friedan, a housewife with three children from Queens, NY, shot to the top of every bestseller list. In essence, The Feminine Mystique told women that they were simply too smart, too creative, too intrinsically or at least potentially powerful to be spending their time, actually wasting their time, changing diapers, folding laundry, and-what was described as the most colossal waste of time of all--raising children.
Nevertheless, Friedan’s book resonated!
Mission #3 Accomplished: Multimillions of young women abandoned the once-desired goal of early marriage and motherhood and instead enrolled in colleges and universities where they pursued professional careers ranging from medicine and law and architecture to jobs like telephone linewomen to military combatants to firefighters to hedge fund managers to business executives, et al.
Friedan was right about women's abilities, just not about the need to use them out of the home. Coincidentally, an economy that once allowed men to work outside of the home and support a wife and put children through college became an economy that only two working parents could afford. Kind of like an economy that was completely energy independent in 2020 under President Trump but quite magically became one in which President Biden had to beg foreign countries to sell him oil in 2021.
REALITY SETS IN
The ‘60s also ushered in the historically unprecedented rash of violent assassinations--live on TV--of:
- U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963 (age 46),
- Firebrand Black activist Malcolm X in 1965 (age 39),
- Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 (age 39),
- Former Attorney General and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 (age 42).
All of a sudden, the idealized world of the newly emancipated women was shattered. The world is out of control, they felt. Is it any wonder that so many of them enthusiastically embraced (or attended) the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival, with its attendant drugs and free sex?
Mission #4 Accomplished: Many of these college-educated women congratulated themselves on avoiding marriage and especially motherhood, asking themselves: “Who wants to bring a child into this world and limit our freedom while adding responsibilities ?”
ONLY A FEW YEARS LATER
In 1971, Gloria Steinem --“We are becoming the men we wanted to marry” -- and editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin, founded the first national feminist magazine, Ms.
Mission #5 Accomplished: The traditional nuclear family was being dismantled by a new generation of radical feminist women who bought into the notion that a career and making money was infinitely more satisfying, meaningful, and important than raising children.
MARRIAGE OUT--NOW BABIES OUT!
On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7-2 decision in Roe v. Wade that all women had a “right” to an abortion. To this day, that decision is the Holy Grail of millions of women who believe that “my body, my choice” starts after they’ve had unprotected sex and gotten pregnant with a baby they don’t want.
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and sent the decision for abortion back to each individual state. Today, every woman in the United States who wants an abortion can get one, although some may have to endure the inconvenience of traveling to another state…forget about the inconvenient death sentence their embryos face.
Mission #6 Accomplished: The once-most-cherished accomplishment of both men and women-to be the parent of a newborn baby--was often reduced to ending that baby’s life in utero. And today, in some states, abortion exists right up to the moment a full-term baby is delivered, and, believe it or not, in California, even up to the time a healthy thriving baby is 28 days old!
THE TICKING CLOCK
Uh-oh. After graduating from college and laboring in the workforce for over a decade, millions of women realized that this money-making thing wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. But looking for a good man--after stepping on their necks on the way up the ladder--was even more problematic.
Nevertheless, the new social phenomenon of women marrying in their mid-thirties and older took hold, and not coincidentally gave rise to a booming in-vitro-fertilization industry, as millions of these new brides learned that conceiving and carrying a child after the age of 35 was both a “high-risk” and extremely pricey enterprise.
Mission #7 Accomplished: Further erode both marriage and the family at the same time.
BUT WHAT ABOUT MY CAREER?
Modern women have been told by the influencers of the day that they could “have it all” -- marriage, children, and career. Since they wanted it all, they bought it!
Some women were lucky to have their mothers or mothers-in-law or even young grandmothers volunteer to raise their children, and a rare few could afford expensive nannies.
But most women had to rely on another industry that boomed like no other--the daycare business--where mothers dropped off their infants, babies, toddlers, and preschoolers to paid workers who tended up to 20 or more children at a time, making sure those children were safe and fed, but not necessarily held, loved, comforted, taught, or nurtured.
However, this still allowed the mothers to brag that the hour or so they spent with their child at the end of a day--in which both mother and child were exhausted--was, ahem, “quality time.”
Mission #8 Accomplished: Women out of the home, children being raised by strangers, the American family being dismantled piece by piece.
THE GENIUS STEVE FACTOR
Two geniuses…Steve Case, the founding CEO of America Online (AOL) in 1983 (which really took off in the ‘90s), and Steve Jobs, who invented, created, introduced the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010.
No need to elaborate on the degree to which these geniuses totally eliminated face-to-face communication and succeeded in riveting both parents and children to all the tantalizing distractions on these electronic devices that separate people and depersonalize intimate relationships, especially meaningful communication between parents and children.
Mission #9 Accomplished: Family concerns take a backseat to beeping texts, emojis, Facebook invitations, Instagram images, Hollywood gossip, and horrifically graphic porn sites, which even savvy eight-year-olds can access with ease.
Worse, this has given rise to an entire generation of sociopaths who, understandably, have little or no human empathy, given the largely robotic care they’ve received.
And now we have an ad--since removed and eliminated from every search engine--that shows a child laughing and sharing an experience with her clearly delighted mother. Both are on iPads communicating long distance. The ad ends with a voice telling the mother: “You Don’t Have to Be There.”
Right. The mother doesn’t have to be there to raise and love and comfort and teach and tuck her child in at night, and the father doesn’t have to be there, either. Others can do it for them.
Mission #10 Accomplished: Father never mentioned, mother out of the picture, the actual premeditated murder of the American family.
While first wave feminists fought for equal rights, and second wave feminists broadened that fight, third wave feminists focused on intersectionality and DEI.
The Feminist Movement may have succeeded in achieving its objectives, but those objectives failed both women and American society. And the results of the crashing failure of the Radicalized Feminist Movement are all around us.
THE TRADITIONAL JEWISH APPROACH
In contrast, many years ago, Rabbi Norman Lamm wrote a small paperback bestseller called Hedge of Roses, in which he cited the traditional Jewish marriage and family as being the basis of Jewish continuity with its candlelighting symbolizing a light-filled peaceful home, other observances of the Sabbath and holidays built around the family, et al.
Lamm characterized the Orthodox Jewish home as a sanctuary from an “environment where the breakdown of family life becomes more shocking with each year.” To this day, these values serve as both role model and inspiration to stop the family breakdown that Rabbi Lamm lamented.
And next week, on Cheshvan 11, is the yahrzeit of Matriarch Rachel, whose life is a symbol of love between husband and wife and the yearning for motherhood,
THE CHOICE IS YOURS.
Joan Swirsky is a New York-based journalist and author. Her website is www.joanswirsky.com, and she can be reached at [email protected].