Posted by
William D. Dannenmaier on Sunday, April 17, 2011 7:11:30 PM
A second major problem has arisen from the false idea of freedom and equality in sexual behavior. My bride and I began to realize it when we were going house to house documenting how many and who lived there for the census department. Sheila was the first to draw my attention to it. We each encountered many houses where two unmarried people were living together. If a man answered the door, he would say, “My girlfriend lives here also.” If a young woman answered the door she would always say, “My finance′ lives here also.” As my wife pointed out, there is a great difference in those two answers – one implies future marriage, the other doesn’t.
I have always enjoyed being with my wife. Laughter and conversation – at home, while driving and while wandering through stores have defined our marriage. Four years ago, a series of heart attacks ended the wandering though stores. I had too much trouble maintaining my balance and carrying objects over five pounds. The result has been that I have spent many hours watching young women at checkout counters and in the hospital. They, aware of my situation, have become friendly, providing chairs when I needed them and chatting with me during slack minutes. Once, stepping outside of one store, I saw one of these young women sitting and crying during her break. I asked the problem and she said, “All I want in life is my own home, a loving husband and the right to care for my own family.” Attractive, intelligent and a hard worker she was single, with a child. She was paying for her own way, but living with grandparents who were raising her child.
I have met too many like her in the past four years. Now eighty, I am old enough to be “safe,” and they confide in me. I wish I could change their worlds, but all I can do is listen. Somehow, in the sixties and seventies, the idea of sex without cost came into being. There is no such thing for women. Human nature does not provide “equal opportunity” in sex. Men can sire children over a wide variety of ages, from early teens into their seventies and eighties, but men don’t HAVE the children, women do.
Women have babies. They also have a time limit on having babies. The ideal ages, physiologically, for a woman to have children are during the late teens and the early thirties. However, as they age, the process becomes more difficult both for them and the child. In his textbook “Developmental Psychopathology” Yale scholar, Dr Thomas M. Achenbach points out that the chances of having a developmentally disabled child increases dramatically as a woman ages, that the chance of having a deformed baby is one out of four if the woman has her first child after the age of thirty-five. That time limit is, interestingly, only true for women having their first child after thirty-five, if they have had other babies prior to that those statistics do not apply.
Thus the public acceptance of living together without marriage is wonderful – for men. It provides all of the benefits of marriage, with none of the responsibilities. But for women, it reduces the possibility of a happy marriage with children with every year in such a relationship. The men in such relationships, whether they realize it or not – or care or not, are stealing the possibility of a happy marriage with children from the women with whom they are living, but whom they have no intention of marrying.
Thus the ultimate irony of the feminist sexual revolution is that just as it freed women from the bounds of marriage, it has also freed men. Men no longer need to accept the responsibilities of marriage in order to achieve sexual relationships mixed in with such privileges as having someone cook, clean and wash their clothes for them. After all, if this young woman, after several years, tires of such a one-sided relationship, there is always another, probably younger, woman to occupy her place. It’s sexual freedom, but the price is high – for women.