Anne Zook on the comforts of tradition

[Originally published on a weblog called “What Is Liberalism?”]

In the comments at Peevish, I wondered aloud why we still need to be talking about non-traditional roles for men, a conversation that should have ended 30 years ago. Anne Zook, in response, attempts to explain the comforts of tradition:

In ritual, in tradition, there is comfort. Security. Change is scary and confusing. It could be an improvement but as long as the “old way” works (and from the perspective of these men, and a few women, it did work…for them), they don’t see any reason to take a chance on change.

In a fashion, I do sympathize with them. Having grown up on the cusp of the Women’s Liberation movement myself, I know there came a point in my childhood when I no longer understood what was “expected” of me. (There’s something comforting, when you’re immature, in being able to see the well-defined path in front of you.) That caused not a little confusion to my young brain as I danced between a husband, a kitchen floor to mop, and 2.5 children, or, you know, not.

I grew up and learned that part of being an adult is coping with change and challenge. The country still awaits the Radical Right’s enlightenment on the subject of maturity.

More specifically, I think this conversation is coming back up now because this was significantly an intra-generational war. It’s easy to look at the 60s and 70s and see a “generation” determined to liberalize society, but there were as many youngsters in those decades opposed to the changes as there were in support of them.

All I can add to her thoughts is that the side fighting for an increase in women’s rights is certain to win over the long term. Unlike other minority groups, women are not actually a minority. They are the majority, they make up 51% of the population. The movement to suppress women’s rights is crippled by a number of glaring internal contradictions. One is the reality of women who travel the country giving speeches against women’s right: such women’s actions undercut their own arguments, the reality of them on a stage speaking about a political issue validates the idea of women taking part in the political process as full citizens. Two is the fact that many of the men who want to see women go home also want to see America remain a great military power, and the two goals are now incompatible: 38% of the American GNP is created by women, if they all went home tomorrow America’s economy would be smaller than that of Europe and only slightly larger than that of Japan’s, and our military would have to likewise shrink. Three is one recounted by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book, The Hearts Of Men, where she is at a party at which there are some well-known conservatives, and the woman next to her at the table remarks that it is obvious that the American family functioned better when women stayed home, and Ehrenreich replies that working class women have always had to work because their husbands have never earned enough to support a family, and the only way for all women to go home and not have their families starve would involve a radical shift of income from the capitalists to the workers, such as could only happen during revolutionary periods of peak working-class militancy. The woman she was talking to then looked at her as if she was from another planet.