Note: Unless stated otherwise, all quotes from this post are taken from this article.

In the second extract of her book, Louise Perry writes about how marriage has changed over the last 50 years. Following the 1969 Divorce Reform Act, the number of children born to unmarried parents increased from 8% in 1968 to almost 50% in 2019. Last year, there were in fact more children born to unmarried parents than married ones for the first time since records began in the 19th Century. Louise Perry concludes from this that the institution of marriage is “more or less dead.”

The purpose of the divorce reforms was not to attack the institution of marriage, but to allow unhappy couples to end their marriages and lift some of the stigma surrounding divorce. However, as with many social reforms, there were unintended consequences. According to Perry, divorces trebled over the next decade before peaking in the 1980s due to marriage itself decreasing.

There was also a shift in people’s attitudes towards marriages:

“Self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth became the key markers of a marriage’s success. Before then, couples who were not ‘irreparably unhappy’ tended to remain married. Now they usually don’t.”

Perry also notes:

“the mood that it’s better to cut and run is catching, and in a culture of high divorce rates even marriages that last will run the risk of being undermined. With wedding vows no longer truly binding, and marriage accepted as impermanent, couples become less confident in their relationships and the institution as a whole changes in ways that no one could have imagined.”

Louise Perry claims that, according to surveys, half of couples who get divorces later regret it.

Divorce reform was only one of several cultural changes during this period, following on from the introduction of the contraceptive pill and the decriminalisation of abortion. All of these changes led to the idea of premarital sex no longer being a taboo which meant women were more likely to have sex before marriage.

Perry quotes the journalist Virginia Ironside:

“It often seemed more polite to sleep with a man than to chuck him out of your flat…

Armed with the Pill, and with every man knowing that, pregnancy was no longer a reason to say no to sex. And men exploited this mercilessly. Now, for them, no always meant yes.”

Notice how this puts the blame entirely on men as if women had no power to refuse to have sex if they didn’t want to. The ‘no always meant yes’ attitude may have been the case for the brief ‘free love’ period during the 1960s, but I don’t think it lasted very long. Perhaps Virginia Ironside has never heard this remark by the comedian Steve Martin: “You know that look that women give you when they want sex? Me neither.”

The American writer Paul Craig Roberts also observed during this time that men were more ambivalent about the situation than is often claimed. This is likely because while men may like the idea of sexually available women, they also know that almost every other men does as well which makes having exclusive access to a lot of women difficult. This is also why women who are (or have been) promiscuous are a turn off for a lot of men. This ambivalence is probably one component of the so-called ‘double standard’ of promiscuous men being seen as ‘studs’ whereas promiscuous women are seen as ‘sluts’.

Perry writes:

“Thus motherhood became a biological choice for women – but that also meant fatherhood became a social choice for men”

Rob Henderson, of Luxury Beliefs fame, has made a similar argument which suggests that fatherless families are largely the fault of men absconding rather than taking responsibility for their children. This argument conveniently ignores the changes in family courts which are often imbalanced in favour of mothers. This development was influenced to some degree by the destigmatisation of single mothers along with the idea that fathers are optional. Fatherhood being ‘a social choice’ also implies that fatherhood is something that is forced upon men by women rather than something men may desire for themselves.

She continues:

“Before then, only the most flagrant cad would refuse to acknowledge and provide material support to his children if he was in a recognised relationship with their mother at the time of conception.”

“Now, deadbeat dads are commonplace. In the UK less than two-thirds of non-resident parents, nearly all of them fathers, are paying child support in full. Not only are record numbers of children growing up without a father at home, but many of them don’t even get any money out of these absent men.”

The conservative writer Stephen Baskerville has criticised this perception of ‘deadbeat dads’ in his books such as Taken into Custody where he outlines institutional bias against men in the US family courts. You can watch this interview here for more information.

While many people on the right are critical of feminism, there is a tendency to view the situation we find ourselves in to be the fault of ‘feckless fathers’ taking advantage of poor naïve women. This is undoubtedly why Louise Perry has been embraced by some mainstream conservative figures online. Baskerville himself points out in the video I linked to that many conservative commentators don’t seem willing to address the problems of identity politics as it is more complicated that the old Cold War divisions of the past.

The ‘dissident right’ scholar F. Roger Devlin reviewed Taken into Custody in his essay Rotating Polyandry – and its Enforcers where he cites this claim from the book:

Another survey, conducted in the north of England, found that “the most common reason given by the fathers for not having more contact with their children was the mothers’ reluctance to let them.” Here we see one of the reasons for marriage: not to prevent men from absconding, but to prevent women from interfering with the father-child bond.

F. Roger Devlin ‘Rotating Polyandry – and its Enforcers’

A likely feminist response to this claim would be that women may have legitimate reasons for preventing fathers from seeing their children such as the fathers being unreliable, uncooperative or even dangerous. Thus, such men are being disingenuous by claiming that mothers are preventing them from seeing their children. We could call this the “he would say that, wouldn’t he?” argument.

However, we can just as well flip this around and argue that it is equally possible that a woman would make claims about fathers as a means to prevent fathers from seeing their children and maintain control over access. We might call this the “she would say, “he would say that, wouldn’t he” wouldn’t she?” argument. While there will be individual cases where either argument is valid, the important point here is that the situation is often more complicated than the simplistic narrative of ‘deadbeat dads’ often presents.

In contrast to the common perception of ‘deadbeat dads’, Devlin argues:

“fatherhood is natural. If shotgun marriages and child support collection agencies were necessary to force men to provide for their offspring (as so many sanctimonious male commentators imply), civilization could never have arisen in the first place. The human male simply cannot be as bad as now routinely portrayed, whether by hate-filled feminists or pharisaical conservatives.”

F. Roger Devlin ‘Rotating Polyandry – and its Enforcers’

This quote definitely relates to Louise Perry’s description of fathers in her article. Compare her description of absent/non-custodial fathers with how she describes single mothers:

“research shows that, despite the often valiant efforts of single mothers, children without fathers at home do not do as well as other children on average. Fatherlessness is associated with higher youth offending and incarceration rates for boys, higher rates of teenage pregnancy for girls, and a greater likelihood of emotional and behavioural problems for both sexes.”

While her point about the disadvantages of fatherless families is true, she presents single mothers as essentially heroic, tragic or both at the same time. This continues here:

“This is not only because children are denied the material support their fathers might have given them, but also because single mothers are obliged to take on the almost impossible task of doing everything themselves: all of the earning, plus all of the caring, socialising and disciplining of their children. There is also the sometimes malign influence of step-parents to consider. A step-parent is 40 to 100 times more likely than a biological parent to kill a child, and stepfathers are also far more likely than genetic fathers to sexually abuse children.”

Although Louise Perry makes a legitimate point about the difference in homicide rates for children raised by a step-parent or a natural parent – otherwise known as the ‘Cinderella effect’ – single mothers are presented here as unfortunate victims of circumstance simply doing the best they can.

The reality however may be different. It’s not hard to imagine a situation in which a man and woman who barely know each other have sex, go their separate ways and then the woman discovers she’s pregnant with the man’s child. It’s also not difficult to imagine this happening in many poor and deprived areas of our towns and cities. Although both parties bear some responsibility in this scenario, did the man ‘abandon’ the woman? And is the woman being responsible for keeping the child rather than having the child adopted or (the more taboo and complicated choice admittedly) having an abortion? Given how generous our welfare state is, is it also taboo to suggest that some women keep children to claim benefits from them? Such questions are impossible to ask in our current discourse which displays what Theodore Dalrymple has called ‘the rush from judgement’.

Obviously, single mothers, like everyone else, can differ in their circumstance and personality and many may well deserve our respect and sympathy. I’m not naïve to assume that there are no situations where a man abandons a woman he got pregnant and she manages to successfully raise the child alone. The issue here though is that ‘feckless fathers’ are assumed to be the cause for all other cases of single motherhood whereas the more accurate explanation could be ‘feckless parents’.

There may also be a problem with using the term ‘single mothers’ since the circumstances in which such mothers find themselves in may be widely different. Class, family background and whether or not the father is around are just some of the factors that will affect outcomes of children in single mother families. Most of the social problems associated with single mother/fatherless families might be more related to the one-night stand scenario I described above.

Back to Perry:

“Of course it is sometimes better for children not to live with their genetic fathers, or even have contact with them, particularly if those men are abusive or dangerously unstable. And of course there are plenty of devoted stepfathers and stepmothers who make exceptionally good parents. But there is no doubt the presence of a step-parent in a young child’s home increases the risk of bad outcomes.”

The reader might have detected a recurring theme here. Louise Perry is correct in stating that it may be better to prevent some fathers from being in contact with their children, but notice that she doesn’t acknowledge that some children may be better off not being raised by their mothers. Would a baby be better off being raised by their impulsive, mentally unstable, heroin-addicted mother or a stable, loving couple who can’t have children of their own but desire them? While this particular example is a little over the top, you get the point I’m trying to make. In my opinion, Louise Perry’s perception of single mothers is virtually identical to that of most feminists which makes her argument here a little weak.

Writing about feminist opposition to marriage, Perry argues:

“But it’s no coincidence that most of the feminists who opposed marriage never had children of their own. They have not put to the test the key question: how are women supposed to reconcile their search for freedom with a condition that necessarily curtails it?”

and

“Because having children changes the whole dynamic. If you value freedom above all else, you must reject motherhood, since this is a state of being that limits a woman’s freedom in almost every way.”

This point of view mirrors the claim made by some critics of feminism that the movement is anti-motherhood but I think the truth is more complicated.

Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young have noted the differing views expressed by second-wave feminists over motherhood in their book Replacing Misandry which can be seen in the following quotes:

“Early egalitarian feminists tended to downplay motherhood on the personal level, in short, for the purpose of attaining economic independence on both the personal and collective levels. By the 1980s, however, feminists such as Sylvia Hewlett were ready to challenge that approach.”

“Ideological feminists began to emphasize motherhood not for practical reasons but for personal ones. And these relied, explicitly or implicitly, on the notion that women, by virtue of their maternal instinct, are innately superior to men.”

“Juliette Zipper and Selma Sevenhuijsen noted that “in the women’s peace movement and in the eco-feminist movement, women speak in the name of motherhood, which is supposed to give a special wish and capacity for protecting life and nature, which is said to be threatened by patriarchal and/or male principles. In the wake of these activities, the connection between Woman-Mother and Nature is restored.”

Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young ‘Replacing Misandry’

I’ve observed this ‘motherhood makes women superior to men’ belief elsewhere: I once read an article in a newspaper about a device that apparently allowed men to experience the pain of childbirth which led to a rather self-satisfied comment from a woman in the following day’s newspaper. The woman commented that if men knew the pain that women go through to bring children into the world, they wouldn’t commit as much violence and war etc.

I imagined responding to this comment by asking what that woman thought about all of the medical breakthroughs and innovations, predominately made by men, that have made childbirth less dangerous for women and the world a better place in general! I wouldn’t be surprised if the woman who made that comment was a feminist, as feminists also like to speculate what it would be like if men got periods and tend to assume men would make things easier if they did.

It would be unfair to dismiss the complications and difficulties women can go through during pregnancy, but it’s hard to imagine an alternative simulation which allowed women to experience a difficult situation that almost exclusively involves men, such as working down a coal mine or fighting a battle in a war.

Nathanson and Young conclude in their book that second-wave feminists had conflicted views on motherhood as some devalued it while others glorified it. This contention appeared to stem from whether feminism should focus on ‘sameness’ or ‘femaleness’ which is reflected in the controversy over transgenderism we see today.

Louise Perry argues here that the supposed attack on motherhood is due to modern society’s preoccupation with individualism. Compare what Nathanson and Young say to what Louise Perry claims in these quotes:

“This clash of priorities has never really been addressed by feminists. They shut mothers out, with motherhood discussed in just a tiny percentage of research papers, academic journals and textbooks on modern gender theory. The whole topic has slipped out of sight. And no wonder, since the logic of individualism collapses upon contact with motherhood.”

“The pregnant woman’s frame contains two people, neither of them truly autonomous. The unborn baby depends on the mother for survival, and the mother cannot break this physical bond except through medical intervention that will result in the baby’s death. And then, after birth, mother and baby remain a unit, tied together both emotionally and physically. As one leading paediatrician puts it: ‘There is no such thing as a baby. There is only a baby and someone.’”

“Acting as that ‘someone’ means giving away some portion of your freedom, which runs counter to what we women are supposed to want.”

To make her argument, Louise Perry focuses on the feminists that devalued motherhood without acknowledging the opposing side which emerged as the movement progressed. Similarly, popular culture is often far more sympathetic to mothers than it is to fathers and I’ve read quite a few articles from women talking about how hard motherhood is (as if this is somehow a recent discovery) and how society works against them.

It’s interesting that many wealthy women throughout human history had nannies and nursemaids to look after their infant children presumably because these women found some aspects of looking after babies unappealing – dealing with a baby’s various bodily fluids for example. It could be said that childcare is the modern equivalent of that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that women don’t have a maternal instinct; that stay-at-home mothers aren’t valuable or that it’s a good thing for very young children to be away from their parents (especially their mothers) for long hours day in day out, but it does suggest that some women prefer some components of motherhood over others.

Yet again, Louise Perry does not stray too far from typical feminist assumptions as seen in this quote:

“Many feminists described their goal as ‘women’s liberation’ – womankind was in chains, they said, and those chains had to be broken. And that goal was not without merit, given that women are still too often consigned permanently to the role of ‘someone’ – always caring, never cared for.”

This perception of women self-sacrificing for others and being taken advantage of is what I call ‘female martyrdom’ which is used to present women as perpetual victims. Rarely mentioned is the fact that societies often bend over backwards to accommodate women’s demands yet we are often told how women’s issues are ignored.

Louise Perry has issues with individualism because she believes it devalues dependency:

“But the solution cannot be individualism, because being ‘a someone’ or needing ‘a someone’ is our instinctive lot as human beings. We have to find a way of being dependent upon one another.”

Dependency, according to Perry, is instead being provided by the state:

“Some see the State as the answer, providing assistance from outside the family. And indeed the State as back-up husband is tasked with providing institutional childcare in day centres.”

Perry notes the problems with looking to the state for solutions to this need for dependency:

“Mothers can thus return to the workforce and put their tax revenue towards feeding the daycare engine. But such a model depends on physically prising apart women from their children, and that too goes against our natural instincts.”

It is possible that individualism can lead to more selfishness, but it could also be argued that individuals value families and tend to thrive in stable ones, so therefore families are also important. In other words, being individualist does not necessarily have to come at the expence of group dependency.

On the issue of mothers in the workplace, one reason for the expansion of childcare may be due to women desiring facilities where they can have respite from looking after children as I noted above although there certainly has been a big push in the past few decades to get more women working. This could be seen as two ideas converging on the same point – some feminists wanted to eradicate differences between the sexes whereas other feminists wanted to create more choices for women which has led to more women working.

Louise Perry also points out the evolutionary basis for women’s maternal instincts:

“We are animals, descended from individuals whose offspring survived to adulthood, and natural selection therefore favours attentive mothers. This means that when social structures fall away, the result is generally that the person left literally holding the baby is the person whose instincts make her most devoted to the child. And without the protection of a marriage, she faces a struggle.”

Comparing human behaviour to animals or our ancestors has its uses but it can also be tricky. Animal mothers are certainly attentive to their young, but may also display behaviour which would be considered unacceptable for human mothers to do. For instance, female animals may abandon or kill offspring they deem to be weak or deformed in some way. Of course, many animals’ lives are much more unpredictable and dangerous than humans so we can’t judge animal behaviour by our standards. This suggests however that natural selection may favour mothers who alter their behaviour towards their offspring depending on the situation.

Perry then notes that feminists see marriage as a way for men to control female sexuality, which she acknowledges as true, but also adds that stigmatising sex outside of marriage served women’s interests because it protected women from the outcomes of sex – i.e. pregnancy by giving them a man to provide for them. Perry however, doesn’t give any reason why men would want to control female sexuality, especially if marriage is meant to serve women’s interests anyway.

Here she writes:

“The stigma around single motherhood caused a great deal of misery for its many victims, but it also existed for a reason: to deter women from making an irreparable mistake for the sake of a worthless man, a cad who would desert them after casual sex rather than take on the commitment of being a dad.”

But was every woman who got pregnant by a man who deserted them whiter than white themselves? The situation suggests that at least some of theses women were poor judges of character, unless the man had promised marriage to the woman and then disappeared which is presumably what Louise Perry thinks.

Back to Perry:

“The problem for women, in the past and now, is how to persuade men into sexual continence. Because the fact is that the cad mode of male sexuality is bad for women.”

Once again, Perry has a point, but is this ‘cad mode’ not attractive to women? And what about the ways in which societies had tried to discourage negative aspects of female sexuality? – what we might call ‘slag mode’. Perry seems to suggest here that no stigma against women in the past was necessary in order to promote marriage as it’s something that women naturally want.

If the sexual revolution allowed men to have sex outside of marriages, it also allowed women to have children outside of marriages, in essence, to become mothers without first becoming wives. A legitimate response to this claim would be to ask what woman would want to have children without a man around? It is true that most women desire a man to provide for them and help with raising children, but a lot of women appear to be perfectly content with being single parents as long as their ex-male partners or the state is providing for them. Perhaps this is due to the influence of feminism, but I think human nature also plays a part.

Any partnership like marriage and parenting involves some degree of conflict between the two parties in which one may, on occasion, have to acquiesce to the other to maintain stability. Women, for example, may have to accept that their husband, or their husband’s family, may want her child to be raised in a particular way – raised in ‘x’ religion, go to ‘x’ school, disciplined in ‘x’ way – which she may have issues with. (Men of course also have to be accommodating, but my focus here is on women).

Feminists have additionally encouraged the idea that any compromise by women with men is a loss to women in some way which makes single motherhood more appealing to feminism. Consider as well that a single mother may have support from other people such as their parents, other family members, friends as well as the state, all of which may be more lenient with how the mother brings up her offspring. This is because unlike a husband and father, these parties do not share the same relationship with the mother’s children.

With the possible exception of a woman’s parents, no other figure presents a bigger challenge to a mother’s influence on her children than the children’s father. This is very likely why feminists have tried, and in many ways succeeded, to undermine fatherhood. In an ideal world, mothers and fathers’ interests should always be aligned, and of course fathers are not always in the right, but feminists have encouraged us to adopt the mantra: what mothers want, mothers should get.

A single woman raising children with outside support does not have to worry about having to compromise with another person who may have their own views on the child’s upbringing. In short, a wife has to accommodate a husband as well as children whereas a single mother only has to do so for the latter.

Regardless of sex, it is human nature to want to reap the most benefits from a situation and avoid the drawbacks. In some situations, women may believe they are better off without a man, and society doesn’t judge them for having this assumption anymore. Of course, single mothers may regret thinking they are capable of raising children alone if they find that, particularly with their sons, they can’t control them like a father would.

One of the ironies of feminism for me is that many of its critics accuse it of being anti-motherhood despite a lot of its success being, in my opinion, our tendency to sympathise with mothers and children over fathers/men in general.

Perry advises young women to get married and try to stay married. While this certainly isn’t the worst advice you could give young women, they still may have to convince men it is worth the potential difficulties that marriage offers to them. She also advises women not to bring a stepfather into their home until their children are older, although a better suggestion would be to have good judgement over which man you choose to become a step-father; This suggestion might not have crossed Perry’s mind because it places too much responsibility on women.

Ultimately, Louise Perry is advocating for marriage on women’s terms, as if the point of marriage is simply to meet female needs. Even though it is assumed that marriage was primarily to benefit women and children, both sexes had to make sacrifices to make marriage work.

The benefits of marriage on society that Louise Perry describes are true, but she views marriage as simply a means to ‘tame’ men, pointing out that marriage and fatherhood appear to decline men’s testosterone levels. There may be biological reasons for this, but presumably women want men to be masculine enough to potentially protect them or father other children with them as well.

Bernard Chapin argued in his book Women: Theory and Practice that any man considering marriage should ask himself the question: “what’s in it for me?” He didn’t mean that marriage should be entirely for men’s benefit, but instead that men should weigh up the benefits and drawbacks of marriage and consider if they have more to gain than to lose from it.

Any man thinking of getting married should go into it with their eyes open about the present situation and ideally with a woman who doesn’t believe it’s wholly for her benefit. Although some men may go for the MGTOW option, it could be argued that men who are aware of these issues have an advantage over other men who are blissfully unaware of the dangers of modern marriages. I’ll leave it for the reader to make their own mind up.