Re: but we have ruined our generations......
DEATH....
The feminists were successful in bringing about significant public policy change in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. In many Western societies, the idea of no-fault divorce gained currency, and pensions for sole-parents became available. Tax concessions to families are gradually being eroded.
Whilst, the feminists were never able to completely destroy the institution of marriage in the West, their ideas did and continue to have a profound influence of the psyche of many people. The view of marriage and family as a restrictive institution, if not a prison, has led many women to put off marriage and delay having children.
The Brady Bunch became Sex and the City, and Alley McBeal.
Those people that do decide to have children are increasingly seeing marriage as being an irrelevant prerequisite. According to the US Census Data the percentage of women having their first child outside of wedlock in 1932 was 8.2%, with 53.6% of pre-marital conceptions ending in marriage. In 1994, it has jumped to 40.3% of women giving birth outside of wedlock, with only 23.7% pre-marital conceptions resulting in marriage.
The effect of the feminist struggle has been the undermining of the nuclear family. For the first time in American history, the census of 2000 reported that nuclear families accounted for less than one in four American families, whereas childless, single Americans accounted for some 26 percent of the population.
The reversal of this trend will be difficult. Financial incentives alone have proven, in Europe, to not be effective in encouraging parents to have children.
Just as the statistics alert us to the problem, they may also alert us to the solution. It is interesting and important to note that the conservative, deeply religious state of Utah has a much higher birth rate (2.76 per woman in 2000) than the ultra-liberal state of Vermont (1.57 per woman). In other words, women in Utah produce 73% more children per woman than Vermont. Similar trends can be observed in studies comparing birth rates amongst Orthodox Jews versus secular Jews.
On a global scale, the disparity is no more vivid than when comparing birth rates in Muslim countries versus non-Muslim countries. As Pat Buchanan noted in Death of the West, it is as difficult to find a Western society where populations are not shrinking, as it is to find a Muslim society where populations are not exploding.
What is taking place today in the West is not unique in history, but has been a characteristic of empires before it. Will Durant, the noted historian, wrote about the fall of the Roman Empire:
Biological factors were most fundamental. A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian.
The reasons, he adds, were:
the holocausts of war and revolution, and perhaps the operation of contraception, abortion and infanticide had a dysgenic as well as a numerical effect: the ablest men married latest, bred least and died soonest. The dole weakened the poor, luxury weakened the rich, and a long peace deprived all classes in the peninsula of the martial qualities and arts...Moral and aesthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed.
He could just as easily have been taking about today.