| What's wrong with welfare? Here's an answer you haven't heard: "The
key problem of the welfare culture is not unemployed women with illegitimate children. It
is the women's skewed and traumatic relationships with men and boys. In a reversal of the
usual pattern in civilized society, the women have the income and the ties to government
authority and support. The men are economically and socially subordinate.... This balance
of power virtually prohibits marriage which is everywhere based on the provider role of
men counterbalancing the sexual and domestic superiority of women."
I almost don't want to mention the source of this arresting notion - conservative
George Gilder writing in the conservative American Spectator (June 1995) - for
fear that the name and affiliation might lead some readers to suspend thought.
You see, of course, where Gilder is headed: Men, he believes, are the key to strong
families. And they are, the more successful welfare is - even if it leads women to
jobs, child care and improved earnings - the worse it will be for families, because it
will "render the men still more optional, desperate, feral, and single."
Does any of this make sense? How would I feel, hearing this indispensable-man argument,
if I were female - especially if I were a single mother?
Already there has been a stream of books and articles (several of the latter by me)
arguing the negative effects of absent fathers on children and on communities, or
contending that the breakdown of marriage is the leading indicator of social pathology, or
otherwise calling for reclamation of men and boys as the means of rescuing society. The
Million Man March only underscored the notion. Women must be wondering what makes us think
men are God's primary gift?
Well, Gilder isn't quite saying we are. What he is saying is that children need their
fathers, too - and so do their mothers - and that welfare almost calculatedly drives the
men away, perpetuating both the worst effects of welfare and the need for it. Listen: |
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"The entire welfare state - from Donna Shalala to Bob Dole's Senate offices - is
relentlessly feminist, mandating preferences for women on construction sites, in police
cruisers, in Air Force jets and in athletic scholarships. These programs necessarily
concentrate their job incentives, training benefits, and subsidies on women rather than on
men because, in general, it is only the mothers who are on welfare. The fathers use the
apartments and take the money of a series of welfare mothers, usually without joining the
dole. Thus the recipients of welfare-related work will mainly be women. "But we
know from reams of studies and centuries of experience that only fathers can
satisfactorily sustain families, reliably discipline teen-age boys, and lift a community
from poverty. The idea that welfare mothers can do it while the government raises their
children is incredibly naive.... The very idea that women with small children should work
outside the home is perverse. The welfare state has already deprived these children of
fathers. The workfare state proposes to take away the mothers as well."
Implicit in Gilder's analysis is his thesis of woman as civilizer of naturally
predatory man. How does she do it? By demanding commitment (which she needs) in exchange
for sex (his priority). Welfare eliminates the economic basis for the commitment.
"Unless they are tamed by marriage and the provider role," he says, "men
become enemies of civilization and revert to their primordial role as predators."
Is this blame-shifting drivel, as some surely will contend? Or has Gilder found the
virus that is killing our families and our communities?
He says it too harshly and too categorically, perhaps, but I think he is on to
something. The natural promiscuity of men combined with the increasing unnecessity of men
(except for sex) produces a breed frighteningly close to Gilder's description of
"optional, desperate, feral and single." We have to make men necessary again. |