The cost of women’s liberation

While human nature has an astonishing capacity to adapt to an unalterable situation, when presented with choices, human nature tends to manage them irrationally.

My mother’s contentment co-existed with an absence of choice. The new world of the liberated woman is a world of choices - and that means a wider world where there are new dangers. A laboratory rat forced to run a different maze each day ends up with both a sharpened intelligence and a neurosis.

Women leave their partners for one of two reasons; one is that he is intolerably negative towards her and the other is that (even if he is positive towards her) she feels she is wasting her life with him. The later reason hardly figured until 1975 when the Family Law Act allowed one spouse to walk out on another, wait 12 months, and then obtain a divorce. In the great majority of cases, it was the wife who left.

A marriage today has less than two in three chance of surviving. But, that figure relates only to formal marriage. Unlike the old days, many partnerships are now formed outside of marriage with every hope of being permanent. Now the failure rate jumps to five in six.

The more common breakups are, the more the culture accepts the situation as normal - and the more it encourages a low tolerance for any incompatibility. This is another nasty feedback mechanism. Relationships have become an emotional rollercoaster for a high proportion of the population. In my mum’s time the vast majority of the female population had only ever experienced one “permanent” relationship. Today this only applies to an ever-decreasing minority.

Negativity given free rein rapidly nourishes itself - so even what is reasonable begins to look bad. When physical escape from marriage was far from easy, the bad patches had time to heal. The animal capacity to adapt to the environment was given every opportunity to manifest itself. Any thought of my parents leaving each other would have been as alien as planning a trip to the moon. Now the silent concern in more than half of all partnerships is who is likely to pull the plug first.

The collateral damage is the developing minds of the children. In this country the proportion of single parent households is rising rapidly towards the million mark. But it is not only dad or mum who is never there. Nobody at all may be there when the child comes home from school. It meant a lot to my sense of stability that when I came home from primary school that my mum was always there.

Unconditional love is easily established between provider and dependent - but it is not easy to establish it with a competitor.

Distrust is becoming firmly entrenched in the psyche of many unmarried men. With marriage breakups so common, most single men know at least one former bachelor mate who has gone thorough hell in a dispute over his children.

Young women are frustrated by their failure to find a man willing to commit to what many men are now feeling to be looking increasingly like a game of roulette with very high stakes. As a consequence, many single women in their 30s have a growing fear that they are going to remain childless.

Conclusion

It is assumed by almost everybody that the average Western woman of 2009 is more fulfilled than the average Western woman of 1909 was. Nobody knows if she is. But we will continue to make that assumption for as long as it is politically incorrect to talk about the price paid for women’s liberation.