Father Knows Best
Father Knows Best was one of the most widely-viewed and long-running TV shows of the 1950s. True, the program played to a romanticized image of middle-class Americana. But that beats the modern-day alternative of a raging epidemic of sexually-transmitted diseases, safe havens for abandoned infants, and 11-year-old girls wearing thong underwear.
Father Knows Best was yanked from the air in 1960. Before long the popular discourse was filled with the now-familiar litany of feminist grievance.
The women’s libbers were especially troubled with the notion of the traditional family. Arch-feminist Simone de Beauvoir argued, “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children … precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.â€
Robin Morgan, former editor of Ms. Magazine, chillingly predicted, “We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.†And Andrea Dworkin compared marriage to legalized prostitution.
Most laughed at the hyperbole. But the hairy-legged hags were dead serious.
Exactly how do you go about destroying the family which is, after all, the primordial unit of society? The best tactic, they decided, would be to go after the provider and protector image of Dear Old Dad.
Homer Simpson became emblematic of the well-intentioned but inept father. “Patriarchal†was inverted into an epithet synonymous with the mistreatment of women. “Paternalistic†was nearly as bad.
Media accounts began to tar men as wife-beaters, deadbeats, child abusers, clods, and all-around dufuses. Every one of those stereotypes was false or highly exaggerated, but no matter. As author Warren Farrell quipped, “father knows best†turned into “fathers molest.â€
Since men weren’t up to the task, the government would need to step in, the Lefties argued. A series of legal opinions, laws, and government programs came along, all claiming to “empower†women: Roe v. Wade, Violence Against Women Act, welfare programs, maternal custody preference, draconian child support programs, and more.
If removing flocks of children from their fathers is your yardstick, these programs were successful beyond belief. From 1960 to 1990, says the Census Bureau, the number of American children living with their biological fathers plunged from 82% to 62%. As columnist Dennis Prager recently wrote, “The contemporary absence of men in boys’ lives is not only unprecedented in American history; it is probably unprecedented in recorded history.â€
These fatherless children are far more likely to be poor, to use drugs, to experience a range of educational and behavioral problems, to be victims of child abuse, and to engage in criminal behavior.
But at least they’re liberated from the baleful influence of their fathers!
Fortunately, family advocates saw where this was all headed and began to question the fem-think. Several groups are now coming to the rescue of daddy-hood (I’m including the web address if you want more information):
- This week the National Partnership for Community Leadership is holding a major conference in Washington DC to honor African-American dads: www.npclstrongfamilies.com
- Next week the National Fatherhood Initiative will release a landmark report, “The One Hundred Billion Dollar Man: The Public Costs of Father Absence:†www.fatherhood.org
- Fathers and Families has been working with the media to promote positive images of dads: www.fathersandfamilies.org
And several groups are working to increase father involvement after divorce:
- Marriage Savers has just come out in support of shared parenting, revealing that “of the six states that passed the strongest Joint Custody laws, five experienced the largest drops in the divorce rate.†www.marriagesavers.org
- The American Coalition for Fathers and Children is urging citizens to sign a petition that reminds us, “Children thrive with the active involvement of both parentsâ€: www.acfc.org
- And the Children’s Rights Council has succeeded in introducing a Congressional resolution in favor of joint custody: www.crckids.org
True, frazzled fathers don’t always measure up to the iconic images of Father Knows Best. But on one point, these groups have hit the nail right on the head: a government program is a lousy substitute for a dad.
| More from Carey Roberts
Stumble It!
June 10th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
“”"”Since men weren’t up to the task, the government would need to step in, the Lefties argued. A series of legal opinions, laws, and government programs came along, all claiming to “empower†women: Roe v. Wade, Violence Against Women Act, welfare programs, maternal custody preference, draconian child support programs, and more.”"”"
Western men have to go down in history as the only social class that was enslaved by the state even though they had the vote, economic resources at their disposal and a justifiable moral obligation to fight the grotesque tyranny that is being put upon them. It will be one for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!
June 10th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Casting fathers as “providers” is a core of the problem. Someone defined as a “provider” (paycheck) can easily be replaced by:
1. The woman earning all that is needed on her own
2. The government stepping in and providing money, like with welfare
3. The government forcing the transfer of money from a man divested of rights to a super-governmentally-empowered woman, as in the cases of alimony, joint property settlements, and child support
It is detrimental to define fathers as providers. Feminists do it daily.
June 10th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
By the way, prior to the Civil War (for the most part), fathers got custody of all of their kids by default: sons, daughters, infants, toddlers, all ages. There was no “tender years” preference or maternal preference.
Feminists, when compelled to acknowledge this, derisively say it sprang from a view that fathers “owned” their children. They are wrong. It sprang from the understanding that fathers are the #1 natural guides for their children, and that this guidance is necessary for the children to go the right way in life.
However, as industrialization took fathers out of the home for longer and longer each day in a shift from the home-based agrarian and cottage industry models, the newly-absent fathers were demonized and mothers were recast as saints by default. From that came the maternal preference in custody cases, which was the first step to establishing a societal matriarchy of fatherless homes.
So, to reverse all that, fathers need to return to the homes, with things like telecommuting, home offices, home shops, various business ventures based at home, and arrangements with an outside boss to do much of the day’s work from home. Doing so allows the fathers to be there in person for their kids during the day, which is necessary to really raise the kids.
It also throws a wrench in the claims of women to be the primary caregivers, because where the father is working from home, he becomes the primary caregiver. There, gentlemen, is the real revolution that needs to happen.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
FHNR -
You are so correct! And this is why I work from home!!
Furthermore – my kids see me all the time. Before school and after!
I believe it is the sanest model, ‘incase things go bad’.
June 11th, 2008 at 3:45 am
“These fatherless children are far more likely to be poor, to use drugs, to experience a range of educational and behavioral problems, to be victims of child abuse, and to engage in criminal behavior.”
Yes. I am going to emphasize here the “behavioral” problems. I noticed after my divorce in 2002 that nearly every woman that I dated had a child (or children) with some type of serious behavioral problem. Quite a few even had children who were institutionalized. Many had medicated children. Nearly all their children had problems. I was appalled years later (2007-2008) when one of my children went through a serious depression (he seems to be better now but he is on anti-depressant).
I feel extreme guilt that maybe this would not have happened if the marriage had survived but then again I am not the one who had the affair with the drug dealer, I am not the one who wanted the divorce, etc.
The main stream media doesn’t even come close to admitting the horrors caused by our divorce culture.
June 11th, 2008 at 5:44 am
Any Grubment program to advance the image of fathers will be half-arsed and designed to fail. There are too many guilty parties in the Grubments of the western world, all covering their arses and refusing to admit that THEY were the ones that have facilitated the Feminazi revolution. They are hardly going to put their hands up and say,”We were wrong”. The compensation claims would sink the Economies.
Like the horros of the French Revolution, the peasants (us) will turn upon the self-styled women’s advocates but far too late, and a foreign power will destroy all that was. The last words of General Ney at Waterloo will be ours, ‘Alors, nous ont buggered’
June 11th, 2008 at 8:05 am
Don’t be silly.
Children only have one parent.
That other… person just supplies money.
June 11th, 2008 at 10:02 am
We’ve gone from “Father Knows Best” in the 1950s, to “Father Knows Least” in the 2000s.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
HRC as President (or even as a VP) would do untold damage to males (that has not been done already). Unfortunately-Obama is a feminized male. He is not a real man.
And McCain?
Well, he thinks that making a profit-growing a business etc. are not noble efforts.
He thionks all men are cannon fodder.
That does not leave much hope that the government will be looking out for the rights and interests of men in the next4-8 years.
June 11th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Life Expectancy Reaches New Record
That’s what the CDC’s preliminary data show, based on some 2.4 million deaths in 2006.
White women: 81 years
African-American women: 76.9 years
White men: 76 years
African-American men: 70 years
http://www.webmd.com/news/20080611/life-expectancy-reaches-new-record?src=RSS_PUBLIC
June 12th, 2008 at 9:16 am
From Dennis Prager’s latest column:
When I Was a Boy, America Was a Better Place
“I said to my then-teenage son, “David, please forgive me. I am handing over to you a worse America than my father handed over to me.”"
and….
“When I was boy, I was surrounded by adult men. Today, most American boys (and girls, of course) come into contact with no adult man all day every school day. Their teachers and school principals are all likely to be women. And if, as is often the case, there is no father at home (not solely because of divorce but because “family” courts have allowed many divorced mothers to remove fathers from their children’s lives), boys almost never come into contact with the most important group of people in a boy’s life — adult men. The contemporary absence of men in boys’ lives is not only unprecedented in American history; it is probably unprecedented in recorded history.”
Many of these themes have been discussed here at MND over the years. Prior to 2001 such commentary was unheard of.
The word is getting out-albeit slowly.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2008/06/10/when_i_was_a_boy,_america_was_a_better_place
June 12th, 2008 at 9:22 am
Judge refuses to divorce gay marriage. Confused as to whom to discriminate against?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080612/ap_on_re_us/gay_divorce
June 15th, 2008 at 12:15 am
Gentlemen,
I have a favor to ask. Feministing.com is invading Urban Dictionary to change the definitions of feminism. They put a link to the definition page and have had thousands of their followers skew the vote against anti-feminist definitions.
The anti-feminist definitions were WAY ahead util a few days ago and now they are behind by the thousands.
I hope you can help by encouraging your friends to visit the Urban Dictionary definition of feminism (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=feminism) and helping to outvote feministing.com.
Also, notice the crazy man-hating comments left by feminists who visited the site. This is entertaining stuff . . .
Thanks again for your support!!
Peter O’Neill