The Anti-Feminists Are Wrong
Posted on 22 October 2008 by cory
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It has become increasingly popular among divorced men to blame the failure of marriage and the dissolution of their families on the teachings of feminism, be it modern, post-modern, or neo-feminism. Men fault women’s liberation and family law changes over the past 30 years for giving women the incentive to divorce their husbands.
An essay recently released by the National Marriage Project, a research group based out of Rutgers University, seems to indicate that feminism may actually be helping marriage.
The essay, titled The Future of Marriage in America, talks about how there is a growing “marriage gap” between college educated women and those women who never went to college. Since most women learn about the roots of feminism and gain their indoctrination during their college years, it would stand to reason that going to college and being exposed to feminism has somehow helped marriage’s cause.
Of women marriage in the 1990’s, only 16 percent of college educated women had been divorced within a ten year period. Compare that with a 46 percent divorce rate for those with less than a full high school diploma. What’s more, the data shows that the divorce rate is continuing to decline among the highly educated, and continuing to increase among the poorly educated.
Even accounting for later marriage age and a better income among those who are educated, it would seem that exposure to the intellectual ideas of feminism are almost a certainty, and almost certainly help improve their attitudes toward marriage.
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October 22nd, 2008 at 7:50 pm
I would say that was a poor essay. Just because feminism is taught in college and women who go to college have a more successful marriage proves nothing. There are probably thousands if not millions of variables involved. For example higher education would most likely mean higher paying jobs which would lead to less financial stress at home. Finances are usually a huge problem in marriages.
Not saying the National Marriage Project is wrong just that their reasoning for their statement is extremely miss leading and incorrect. I never read the essay so I hope they would have done a little better research than that.
October 27th, 2008 at 1:55 am
I would not blame feminism for marriage problems. I think it’s more to do with the individual. I’m a Filipino and I see a lot of white men coming to the Philippines to marry Filipinas. These men are very conservative and want a wife that they can dominate over. I think that their attitude is the reason why they have marriage breakups and not because of feminism. I really feel sorry for the Filipino women that get tricked into marrying a man who turns out to be a bad candidate for marriage. Many Filipinos are unaware that these men are seeking Filipino wives because the women from their own countries don’t like them. But in reality, most Filipinas are more educated these days and would reject such men.
November 29th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Feminist groups such as NOW have lobbied again and again against such children (and father) unfriendly laws such as those proposed to prevent custodial parent move-aways, for presumptive joint custody in the event of divorce and laws to curtail paternity fraud.
Your failure to address these very real issues is a symptom of your brief, poorly researched essay, which does nothing whatsoever to prove your point.
December 26th, 2008 at 4:16 am
There could be some statistical manipulation. “Only 16% of educated women had been divorced in 10 years”, many may not have ever been married as educated women more often wait. This statistic compared to “46% of marriages fail” with no apparent time limit. hmmm
January 22nd, 2009 at 7:56 pm
I’ve seen and heard studies indicating both men and women who wait longer to marry have a diminished risk of divorce. I think this speaks more about maturity in decision making skills and character values than the very loose connection to higher education and feminist teachings.
Also, studies indicate that the part of the brain responsible for emotional maturity doesn’t develop fully until ages 23-24. Id like a do-over on most of the decisions I made prior to that age! It’s my contention that length and quality of a marriage directly coorelates to men and women having the ability to base decisions on well-grounded values like “Im not the center of the universe” rather than “Let’s get married as long as it’s fun!” or NEEDING someone and NEEDING to be needed or wanted.
Other marriage and family studies which interviewed old-age married couples who never divorced reveal that those couples realized life has its ups and downs. They made hard choices to continue loving their spouse regardless. None seemed to have regrets in that.
January 28th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
A load of crap.
July 17th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
I don’t understand the link being made here. How can one assume that just because a women graduated from college, she must have been indoctrined into feminism. I am a women who spent 7 years in college and I never took one feminist or women’s studies course. As a matter of fact, if I had taken some feminist courses in college and believed them, I would probably not be happily married today (after 19 years0. The reason why women who are college educated are more likely to have a successful marriage has a lot more to do with the demographics and family backgrounds of the type of women who attend college (usually white, middle and upper class, educated, dual parent families) as opposed to women who do not attend college (usually minorities, lower social class, more likely to be the product of a single mother or broken home, low parental education.) That is a scientific fact.