Radical Feminism and the End of the Family: Mission Accomplished?

The nuclear family must be destroyed … Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process,” says author and woman’s rights activist Linda Gordon.

She is joined in that view by author and feminist activist Robin Morgan: “We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.”

Radical feminists regard the family as a barrier to women’s success. They thus set out to free women by weakening or destroying the family. Their target was the traditional family. What some have called the natural family. By either name, we’re talking about the first human institution, engraved by God in human nature. The family is the basic building block of society. It is the voluntary, lifelong, covenantal union of a man and a woman and the offspring which are normally the fruit of that union. Marriage is patterned after the cosmic archetype: Christ and the church.

The World Congress on Families describes the benefits of the natural family:

Satisfying the longings of the human heart to give and receive love;
Welcoming and ensuring the full physical and emotional development of children;
Sharing a home that serves as the center for social, educational, economic, and spiritual life;
Building strong bonds among the generations to pass on a way of life that has transcendent meaning;
Extending a hand of compassion to individuals and households whose circumstances fall short of these ideals.

The family structure is weakening. In the eyes of society, the definition of family is changing. Today there are a variety of “family” models: blended, single parent, same-sex parented, childless-by-choice, et al. It’s politically correct to promote non-traditional families. But if the natural family model was what God designed for human beings, its destruction will bring profound consequences.

The recently published Schriever Report on women and poverty reveals the consequences of radical feminism’s deconstruction of the family (as reported by The American Thinker):

Nearly 70% of single mothers and their children are either living in poverty or teetering on the edge.
Women are two-thirds of the primary and co-breadwinners in American families.
Women are nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers.
40% of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income.
Out of a “groundbreaking bipartisan poll” of 3,500 adults only 37% of the women polled living on or over the brink of poverty were married.
Only a fifth of our families have a male breadwinner and a female homemaker.
More than half of babies born to women under 30 are born to unmarried women.
Women are three times more likely to be raising a family on their own, without a partner.

In her article “Feminists Shoot Themselves in the Foot,” M. Catharine Evans writes of the combined impact of fifty years of radical feminism (intended) and the war on poverty (unintended): “Spending over $20 trillion to date on government handouts to the poor in areas such as health, education, and job training have failed miserably with regard to lifting them out of poverty. Nevertheless, breaking down family structures has been successful.”

Many people deny that ideas matter. They are wrong. Richard Weaver captured the actual truth in his famous dictum, “Ideas have consequences!”

If we affirm that God created the universe with a certain order, and that this order includes the father-mother-child family, it follows that abandoning this order will trigger consequences for individuals, communities, and nations.

If a people or nation “suppress the truth” (Romans 1:18) and seek to redefine the family, unintended consequences will result. Radical feminism has largely achieved its goal: the destruction of the natural family. The consequences abound in the painful reality of broken families, shattered lives, and growing poverty.

– Darrow Miller