Feminist propaganda has always pushed the idea that patriarchy is inherently dangerous for women and children. If you question the merits of the women’s lib movement, you are sure to be met with cries of “why don’t you want to protect women and, by extension, children?!” Propagandists use platitudes about children’s welfare as a way to tug on the heart strings of the public consciousness. Whether it's for the purpose of garnering support for a war, a new law, or to raise money, children are used as propaganda pieces. Feminist activists have been very sneaky about baking children’s welfare into the women’s lib cake, but 100 years later the data seems to suggest that children have not been protected by feminism. In fact, they have clearly been harmed by it. This seems like a rational and predictable consequence to me. It makes perfect sense that fathers are naturally the people with the most interest in the welfare of their own offspring. Historically and biologically, the main driver of finding a wife or accumulating resources would be for the production and preservation of a man’s offspring. A man’s main biological imperative is to see his genetic lineage prevail long into the future after he is gone. Yet, the social engineers and revolutionaries who pushed women’s liberation into the culture convinced the public that the family patriarch is the main threat to the welfare of his own wife and children.
This piece will get into the reasons why this idea was propagated and how it was done, but first I want to present the data on how the last 100 years of feminism have affected children. It is worth noting first that the modern idea of mothers being the default primary custodian of children in the event of any divorce or marital separation is relatively new. This change came with the first Industrial Revolution, which saw a transition from families homesteading, farming, or running family businesses from home to the modern model of men leaving home to work wage jobs in cities. Prior to this, children were considered the property of the father because he was the one who was able to protect and provide material support to his children. Divorce was incredibly rare then, so this wasn’t a pressing issue until the economic changes of the Industrial Revolution produced the view of fathers as wage earners more than patriarchs of their families. Things began to shift in 1839 when England passed the Custody of Infants Act. This allowed women to ask courts for primary child custody up until age 7. This was later extended to age 16 in 1873 with something called “The Tender Years Doctrine,” which held that mothers are the best caretakers for children up to that age. This doctrine came about mostly due to the efforts of English reformer Caroline Norton, a beautiful socialite and writer who went through a public and scandalous divorce from her husband and fought a bitter custody battle over their three sons. Caroline petitioned British Parliament and even Queen Victoria to reform the laws and was successful in convincing them. Since then, courts in the UK and the U.S. have given default custody to mothers unless they can be proven unfit.
The passage of woman suffrage in the early 20th century, and later, the sexual revolution and simultaneous advent of Women’s Studies as an academic discipline completed the process of transforming the west into a gynocentric culture rather than a patriarchal one. No fault divorce proliferated in the U.S. beginning in 1989. What have been the results of these massive changes? As I note in my book Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women's Liberation, no other social revolution in history rivals the impact of feminism. I take some time in the book to examine the effects of the last 100 years, but here I want to focus specifically on how it has affected childhood. Has the feminist argument that emancipation of women from marriage and the home would improve conditions for them and their children held up?
The Kids Are Not Alright
The changes of the last century, and the last 50 years especially, have provided us with a body of data to analyze. Although left-wing radicals do their best to cherry pick and convolute it, the data is clear about several things. The first is that raising children with both married biological parents produces the best outcomes and poses the least risk to children.
The U.S. Dept. Of Health and Human Services has been tracking data on child abuse and neglect since 1978 with something called the National Incidence Study (NIS). The National Incidence Study is a congressionally mandated, periodic effort of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. There have been 4 such reports, the latest being the NIS-4 which came out in 2010. This includes a breakdown of data collected nationwide on child abuse and neglect by living situation (section 5.3.2 here). This section of the study opens as follows:
“Figure 5–9 shows the incidence rates of Endangerment Standard maltreatment for the different family structure and living arrangement subgroups. The rate of overall Endangerment Standard maltreatment for children living with two married biological parents (15.8 children per 1,000) is significantly lower than the rates for children in all other circumstances (51.5 or more children per 1,000). Children living with one parent whose unmarried partner was in the household had the highest incidence of Endangerment Standard maltreatment (136.1 children per 1,000). This is equivalent to more than 13 per 100 children, or more than 1 child in 8 whose single parent has a cohabiting partner in the general child population. Their risk of Endangerment Standard maltreatment is more than 8 times higher than that of children living with two married biological parents.”
Other important takeaways from this report include the following:
Children living with a single parent with an unmarried partner had the highest incidence of physical abuse by far, more than 10 times the lowest rate
Only 0.7 per 1,000 children living with two married biological parents were sexually abused, compared to 12.1 per 1,000 children living with a single parent who had an unmarried partner.
When it comes to emotional abuse, the rate of 15.0 per 1,000 children living with a single parent with an unmarried partner is more than 8 times higher than the rate for children with two married biological parents.
The lowest incidence of Endangerment Standard physical neglect occurred for children living with two married biological parents (6.5 children per 1,000), which is significantly lower than the rates for children in all other living arrangements.
The highest rate of Physical Neglect occurred for children living with a single parent with a cohabiting partner (47.4 children 1,000), which is over 7 times greater than the lowest rate.
Children whose single parent had an unmarried partner again had the highest rate of emotional neglect, at 68.2 per 1,000 children, which is a factor of more than 10 times higher than the lowest rate.
The incidence of children who suffered serious harm from Endangerment Standard maltreatment was significantly lower among those living with their married biological parents (2.8 children per 1,000), compared to the incidence rates for children living under any other conditions (9.5 children or more per 1,000).
Severity of harm from physical abuse varied by the perpetrator’s relationship to the child. A physically abused child was more likely to sustain a serious injury when the abuser was not a parent.
Perhaps one of the most relevant and more surprising findings was this: 68% of the maltreated children were maltreated by a female, whereas 48% were maltreated by a male. (Some children were maltreated by both.) Of children maltreated by biological parents, mothers maltreated the majority (75%) whereas fathers maltreated a sizable minority (43%). In contrast, male perpetrators were more common for children maltreated by nonbiological parents or parents’ partners (64%) or by other persons (75%).
This statistic is the single most illustratory piece of data proving that removing children’s biological fathers from the home is the single biggest factor in risk of abuse. This supports my assertion that fathers, the family patriarchs, have the most interest and the biggest protective effect on the lives of children. They are less likely to abuse than biological mothers and, once removed, make single mother homes an easy target for predators who are not related to the child.
The second point people need to understand is that mothers are the most likely to abuse or neglect children, not fathers. In 2021, about 210,746 children in the United States were abused by their mother, whereas 132,363 children were abused by their father in that year. (Source: US Department of Health and Human Services; Administration for Children & Families https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/cm2021.pdf) This is consistent with findings across all NIS data.
Defenders of feminism object primarily to these data by pointing out that mothers are more likely the primary caregivers and spend the most time with children, which they say explains why we see higher rates of abuse from mothers than fathers. However, there is a trend that tests this hypothesis. The number of children living with their fathers only more than quadrupled from 0.8 million (1%) to 3.3 million (4.5%) between 1968 and 2020. Given this, we would expect to see a rise in abuse among fathers over this same period that would correlate with fathers’ increased primary custody and parenting time. The fact is that the data is very consistent in this metric over the last 45 years of NIS studies, meaning we have not seen a rise in abuse as fathers become a larger share of primary custodians and caregivers.
A more likely explanation of why we see a larger share of mothers abusing children might be that women are much more prone to mental problems. In fact, we are seeing increases in women struggling with mental health problems over recent decades. The UK’s leading mental health charity, the Mental Health Foundation, says that today, women are three times more likely than men to experience common mental health problems. In 1993, they were twice as likely. McLean Hospital, a leading provider of health care services in the U.S., references a study published at the end of 2020 which found that women were reporting more frequent and more severe symptoms of anxiety and depression. Also, women’s symptoms got worse over time when compared to men. You can find that report here. According to an analysis of prescription drug data by Medco Health Solutions, more than a quarter of American women (26%) take prescription psychiatric drugs- including antidepressants, anti-anxiolytics, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) drugs, and atypical antipsychotics. That compares with 15% of men.
This trend is also seen in Canada, where a study from The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health shows that nearly 25% of Canadian women indicated they were struggling with moderate to severe anxiety, compared to just under 18% of men, and more than 23% of women indicated severe feelings of loneliness when compared to just over 17% of men.
Differences in biology, including brain structure and hormones, may account for most of this difference according to Turnbridge treatment center: “For example, due to their brain’s wiring, women report higher levels of empathy and emotional understanding than men. These qualities, while generally positive, are closely tied to worsening depression, anxiety, and trauma.”
What about children’s mental health? A 2012 study investigated associations between family structure and rates of hospitalization as an indicator for behavior problems in children. In a chart review of 154 patients who were admitted to the preadolescent unit at Lincoln Prairie Behavioral Health Center between July and December 2012 found that only 11% of children came from intact families living with biological parents while 89% had some kind of disruption in their family structure. The authors of the study concluded that children from intact biological families were far less likely to experience mental health problems severe enough to require psych hospital admission.
Here are some quick stats from the Centers for Disease Control about risks to children who grow up without their dads. Children from fatherless homes represent:
90% of homeless kids
85% of kids with behavioral disorders
70% of kids in juvenile facilities
71% of kids in adolescent substance abuse treatment centers
What changed? Well, CDC statistics also show that in 1960, only 5% of U.S. babies were born out of wedlock. That number has now increased to 41% as of 2010. Census data also show that the number of children living with only their mother has doubled in the last 50 years. Again, if dads were the primary threat, wouldn’t we see child abuse rates plummet over this period? But we see rates average out to be stagnant over the last 45 years according to the NIS.
Are Women Happier?
So, it seems that by every metric, welfare of children has been harmed rather than helped by sexual liberation, no fault divorce, and an attitude that fathers are disposable. But what about women? Once again, it seems men and marriage were not the source of women’s woes. A landmark 2008 study from the Wharton School called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” opens with this:
“By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well‐being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relatively to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measure of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued, and a new gender gap is emerging- one with higher subjective well-being for men.”
This study made a lot of noise when it first came out. The authors state that they do not have answers to what is driving the decline in female happiness despite the huge gains in opportunities and choices women gained over the previous 35 years. Last year, in 2022, a follow up to this study amusingly states “We find that one part of the female happiness paradox is very robust: when answering questions about negative affect, women are always and everywhere more unhappy than men. This is true across time, country, and across different metrics of negative affect.” LOL.
We see more evidence that well-being for women has decreased as egalitarianism has increased. CDC statistics also show that disordered alcohol use among American women more than doubled between 2002 and 2013, which I found shocking. The NIH website also shows that the instance of fetal alcohol syndrome rose two and a half times between 1996 and 2018.
So, women traded long-term security and stability through marriage for crap jobs, booze, and psych drugs. But at least they aren’t trapped in abusive marriages, right?
As it turns out, cohabitating relationships are more violent than marriages. This Canadian study showed that women in cohabitating relationships experience more violence than their married counterparts. But what might surprise you even more is the fact that men are not more likely to be perpetrators of domestic violence. Women are.
Analyzing data gathered from 11,370 respondents, researchers found that “half of [violent relationships] were reciprocally violent. In non-reciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more that 70% of the cases.” In one study of 1,100 lesbian or bisexual women in abusive lesbian relationships, researchers found that the women were more likely to have experienced domestic violence in past relationships with women than in their relationships with men. Researcher Dr. Don Dutton cites a huge gender gap in reporting intimate partner violence. Men tend to drastically under-report domestic abuse perpetrated by women, while women are much more likely to report domestic violence. They are also much more likely to falsely accuse men of abuse, although estimates of the prevalence of this vary widely due to the nature of trying to measure this problem. Men very rarely falsely accuse women of abuse due to the social stigma of such a claim, as well as the odds of him being believed. I was shocked to learn that in juvenile corrections facilities, female staff are also a much more significant threat than male staff; more than nine in ten juveniles who reported staff sexual victimization were abused by a woman.
So now that I have thrown mountains of data at you (congrats on making it this far!), I hope I have given you good cause to reconsider the claim that feminism protects women and children. Even those most opposed to my arguments can surely admit that the results are mixed at best and damning at worst. Taking a sledgehammer to the sacrament of marriage and the family didn’t protect anyone. It atomized people. It broke down not just families, but also extended family ties and communities. In doing so, feminism has created easy targets for the most predatory men and women. There is no better prey for a predator than a single mother who has just kicked her husband out of the house. Easy divorce discourages the male instinct to protect his own wife and children by making marriage and family a legal and financial risk. Women initiate 70-80% of divorce. The most common reasons given have nothing to do with husbands “cheating and beating,” yet this is the most common assumption I hear from people in discussions about the divorce epidemic. In surveys on why they initiate divorce, women’s answers vary, but common reasons include boredom, financial strain, feeling held back in career/life, or lack of communication. It seems logical that this is in line with women’s overall tendency to experience more negative emotion (aka be harder to please) than men. They also tend to act on that emotion. What women can’t seem to grasp is that they will often just end up with a whole new set of problems after the divorce but be at a bigger disadvantage to solve those problems.
How Did This Happen?
How did this happen? Who thought dismantling the family and removing fathers was a good idea? It is not a coincidence that the rise of socialism happened at the same time as feminism and egalitarianism in general. Marxists in the early 20th century wrote at length about how they could never fully achieve stateless communism without feminism. This is because they recognized that private property and cross-generational wealth was passed down through paternity. Furthermore, fathers as heads of household perpetuate hierarchy, which is antithetical to left-wing collectivism of all kinds. Removing fathers also makes women and children reliant on the state and wealth redistribution for survival and results in the total re-organization of the economy. Flooding the labor market with married women who historically did not work outside the home depressed men’s wages, doubled the income tax base, and also transformed the economy into one based on service and consumption. The emancipation of women could be seen as the first Great Reset, but I am not an economist, and this piece is already getting long. But I will point out that the expansion of the welfare state correlates directly to the rise in out of wedlock births. Welfare spending in 1950 was $50 billion, the non-marital birth rate was 4%. By 2010 welfare spending increased 14 times to a whopping $700 billion, and the non-marital birth rate rose to 41%. The government is your daddy now, America. This is great for trans-national corporations, the government, predators, and the predator class. These same groups are masters at propaganda and “public relations.” This is why almost everything people believe about the history of feminism is wrong. 100 years of propaganda throughout the culture and the institutions. If you want to know how we got here, there is your answer.
Thomas Sowell famously said “There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs; and you try to get the best trade-off you can get, that's all you can hope for.” Life will never be equal or fair, and it’s not obvious that pure equality would be best or even better. The feminist experiment of the last century proves this. Women were tempted with power and accepted a Faustian bargain to destroy the family and the men who built the modern industrial world that makes such a contradiction as feminism possible.
It’s time to admit that easy divorce, total lack of family cohesion, and dispensing with sex roles altogether has made women and children more vulnerable to abuse than they were before these changes. Fathers and husbands are protectors, not perpetrators. Men’s lives have been devastated by the total inversion of the social order. Women themselves report a paradoxical decrease in well-being. But the data about what this has done to people’s childhoods is heart breaking. I’m going to shamelessly appeal to your emotions and ask you to consider the hell that so many children grow up in. That’s what motivates me. No mother should take a wrecking ball to her children's home unless there is a very serious reason. Broken children grow up to be broken adults. We know without a doubt that intact families with married parents are what children need. 100 years of feminism is enough. I, for one, am not willing to sacrifice children on the altar of feminism.
This is probably Rachel's best essay on her Substack Newsletter!