Bruce Hafen Motherhood and The Moral Influence of Women

"Motherhood and The Moral Influence of Women"
World Congress of Families II, Geneva, Plenary Session IV, November 16,
1999
Elder Bruce C. Hafen, Member of the Seventy and Australia/New Zealand
Area President, The Church of Jeus Christ of Latter-day Saints

My topic is motherhood and the moral influence of women. I
begin with a personal perspective that lets me put my gratitude for this
World Congress into the frarnework of my own experience with the
United Nations' recent involvement in family law.
As the traditional home of UN treatymaking about human rights,
Geneva has become the modem headwaters of thought about I-N family
policy. This week's grassroots World Congress of Families will add to
those headwaters a crucial new stream—the mainstream. This group is
sending to the UN, and to people everywhere, a family message of the
heart from people representing the international heartland of democracy.
Farnily policymaking in the I-m and elsewhere now emphasizes
dysfunctional and alternative family types, while the traditional family
withers as an endangered species. Exceptions have become the rule, as
self-appointed lobbyists have replaced the UN policy agenda with their
personal agenda, like a rebellious child seizing the steering wheel of the
farnily car while at full freeway speed. I find it incredibly ironic that
now, when democracy is more widespread than ever before, the United
Nations — a very undemocratic forum that is far from the world's homes
and families — would have allowed this adolescent style rebellion.
Here's how I came to this view. I have long believed that the UN
has value. I applaud the original declarations on Human Rights and
Children's Rights adopted here in Geneva many years ago. But I
discovered that today's UN had lost the plot about family life when,
during my days as a law professor, a Japanese legal scholar asked my
opinion of the UN's new 1989 Convention on the Rights of the

Child—the "CRC." He prompted my study of the CRC that led to my
1996 article in the Harvard International Law Journal entitled,
"Abandoning Children to Their Autonomy."
In doing that work, I found in a UN Publication this description of
the CRC: "A new concept of separate rights for children with the
Government accepting [the] responsibility of protecting the child from
the power of parents." Hello? Did anyone notice that this "new concept"
uproots one of the most ftndamental natural rights about family life--
that parents may rear their children as the parents see fit, as long as the
parents are fit?
The 1989 CRC was written primarily by American lawyers whose
trendy arguments about child autonomy were ultimately rejected by the
U.S. legal mainstrearn in the 1970's and 80's. The U.S. still hasn't
adopted the CRC, and probably won't—even though most other countries
have. This odd outcome reflects the herd mentality of naive
govemments who fear being criticized for not embracing an international
treaty that has the word "rights" in its title.
The CRC shows how political activists who have lost their
arguments in such democratic forums as parliaments and courtrooms
have leamed to use the UN to exploit the naivete of local governments.
Ifthe activists can clothe their extremist visions of personal relationships
(note that this term is different from the word "farnily") in the vague but
lofty language of intemational law, they've built a trojan horse that lets
them slip like an undetected virus into a country's legal system and,
hence, its culture.
The IN's current approach to motherhood and women reflects this
very problem, because recent UN documents have accepted the extremist
claim of radical feminism that motherhood is an oppressive concept
designed to perpetuate male domination. For example, many countries
still want to protect motherhood as intended by the original UN
Declaration of Human Rights in 1948: "motherhood [is] entitled to
special protection." But today's Committee on the Elimination of
Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) criticizes these protections as

"patemalistic," promoting a supposedly outdated concept of motherhood
that discourages women "from seeking greater fulfillment in paid
work."l This bias misses the fundamental point that, as Harvard's Mary
Ann Glendon has said, "There can be no authentic progress for women
without respect for women's roles in the family."2
Let's place this issue into its historical context. We are now living
through the biggest change in attitudes and laws about the family in five
centuries. Writing recently in the Atlantic Monthly, Frances Fukyama
regards today's farnily disintegration as a central part of what he calls
"the Great Disruption," a wave of history as significant as the shift from
the age of agriculture to the industrial revolution.3 Essentially, people
have become skeptical about the very idea of "belonging" to a family.
After centuries of seeing family bonds as valuable ties that bind, people
now see those ties as sheer bondage.
What is happening to us? Broad scale forces are eroding our
foundations of personal peace, love, and human attachments. Whatever
held mother-father and child-parent relationships together suddenly feels
weaker now. This strange disruption feels like an ecological disaster, as
if a vital organism in the environment is disappearing.
Patricia Holland has said, "If I wanted to destroy society, I would
launch an all-out blitz on women." What did she mean? Men and
women share all of the common traits of human nature and often
perform the same tasks. But some of their strengths are gender-specific.
And we are losing what women have traditionally contributed to cultural
cohesiveness. Like the mortar that keeps a brick wall from toppling
over, women have held together our most precious relationships—our
marriages and child-parent ties. But now we're seeing cracks in that
mortar, which reveals some things we have too long taken for granted.
A salesman walked down a street past a group of boys playing
baseball. No one answered the door at the house where he was to call.
Through a side door, he saw a boy the age of those playing in the street,
dutifully practicing the piano. Baseball gear leaned against the wall. He

called, "Excuse me, sonny, is your mother home?" The boy glanced at
his baseball gear and said glumly from the keyboard, "What do you
On a broader scale, studies of third world development show that
of all the variables that affect social, economic, and political
development, perhaps the most significant factor is the literacy of
women. Women have always impacted entire cultures. Their influence
begins in each society's very core--the home, where women have always
taught and modeled what Tocqueville called "the habits of the heart"--
the mores, or civilizing habits, that create a sense of personal and civic
virtue, without which free and open societies can't exist.
Shakespeare's MacBeth teaches us powerfully about the moral
influence of women. He first uses his phrase, "the milk of human
kindness" when Lady MacBeth is persuading her husband to murder the
king and take his throne. As MacBeth hesitates, his wife sneers, "Thy
nature [is] too full o' th' milk of human kindness. " Then in a haunting
passage, Lady MacBeth pleads with the evil forces of the universe to
take away her own milk of human kindness, her life-giving, nurturing
female nature: "Come, you spirits/ that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex
me here,/ And fill me from the crown to the toe topful/ of direst cruelty!
Come to my woman's breasts,/ And take my milk for gall, you
murth'ring ministers / Come, thick night."
Take my woman's milk for gall, she cries; unsex me here.
Shakespeare's mastery of human nature shows us that Lady MacBeth's
womanly heart made her incapable of taking a life unless she renounced
her nature. A woman naturally gives and nurtures life. To take life, she
had to reject the distinctive essence of her female being. Later, after she
and MacBeth have killed the King, Lady MacBeth goes insane, then
dies--notjust from guilt, but from her symbolic renunciation of nature.
"The milk of human kindness" is a symbol of female nurturing
with many shades of meaning, but especially it means the moral
influence of women. Consider now four ways in which modem society

has begun to devalue female nurturing. Seeing more clearly what we're
losing will help us regain it. Let us talk first about the devaluation of
motherhood.
For most of Western history, the very word "motherhood" meant
honor, endearment, and sacrifice. Victor Hugo wrote, "She broke the
bread into two fragrnents and gave them to her children, who ate with
eagerness. 'She hath kept none for herself,' grumbled the sergeant.
'Because she is not hungry,' said a soldier. 'No,' said the sergeant,
'because she is a mother. '4 Yet this spirit of self-sacrifice has become a
contentious issue in recent years, thus making contentious the very idea
of motherhood.
For exarnple, a recent feminist essay entitled "the problem of
mothering" tells us that, "Explorations of women's oppression [look at]
the social assignment of mothering to women [because] women's
oppression is in some way connected to mothering."5 Others have
attacked the sacrificing mother whose selflessness has allowed and even
encouraged male domination. They argue that stereotyping the
motherly role forces women to accept a sexist "division of labor in every
area of existence, most especially in family relationships."6
These critics do have a point, but they have swung the pendulum
too far. As Newsweek magazine reported a few years ago, the radical
feminist critique has "sometimes crossed the line into outright contempt
for motherhood. "7
Still, at its best, feminist criticism is justified against
those who have exploited women's willingness to accept the relentless
demands of motherhood. And some women in the past did feel undue
social pressure to conform to overly rigid roles that denied women's
sense of self.
If being "selfless" means a woman must give up her own inner
identity and personal growth, that understanding ofselflessness is
wrong. That was a weakness in some versions of the Victorian model of
motherhood, which viewed women as excessively dependent on their

husbands. But today's liberationist model goes too far the other way,
stereotyping women as excessively independent of their families.
A more sensible view is that husbands and wives are
interdependent with each other. For example, the Proclamation on the
Family issued recently by the First Presidency and the Twelve Apostles
in our Church states that spouses are "equal parmers" who "help one
another" in fulfilling their individual roles. And a good marriage surely
enhances each partner's opportunity for personal development.
For instance, I once said in frustration to my wife about one of our
children, "The Lord put Adarn and Eve on the earth as full grown
people. Why couldn't he have done that with this boy of ours?" Marie
wisely replied, "God gave us that child to make Christians out of us."
That is an equal opportunity blessing for the personal growth of both
parents.
The critics who moved mothers from dependence to independence
skipped the fertile middle ground of interdependence. Those who
moved mothers from selflessness to selfishness skipped the fertile
middle ground of self-chosen service that conüibutes toward a woman's
personal growth. Because of these excesses, debates about the value of
motherhood have, ironically, caused the general society to discount not
only mothers but women in general.
In an essay called, "Despising Our Mothers, Despising Ourselves,"
one writer found that, despite many victories for women in the last thirty
years, the self-respect of American women is at an all time low. Why?
Because we've experienced not just a revolt against men's oppression,
but a revolt against women: "Heroic women who dedicated their lives to
the welfare and education of children, as mothers, teachers, nurses,
social workers, have been marginalized and devalued, made to feel
stupid and second rate because they [took] seriously the Judeo-Christian
precept that it was better to do for others than for oneself." Devaluing
motherhood devalues "everything else women do." When society

devalues "the primary work of most women throughout history," we tell
women "that it is really women who" aren't worth serious
consideration.8
Then what happens? Society's bricks begin to collapse. Consider
the unprecedented appearance of child brutality. American schools have
recently witnessed several cases of children shooting other children,
something the world has never seen before. The forerunner to these
events was the world-shocking 1993 British case of James Bulger, where
two ten year old boys murdered a two year old child.
Some British researchers were so stunned by the Bulger case that
they probed how children learn the difference between right and wrong.
They found that a child's ethical sense emerges emotionally long before
it emerges rationally. Thus the orientation ofa child's conscience begins
with its earliest relationship with its mother.
A child is an echo charnber. If he hears the sounds of love from his
mother, he will later speak those same sounds of love to others. But if
the mother's signals are confusing and hateful, the child will later feel
confused and hateful.9 Whether a mother feels support from her
husband, her family, and her society profoundly influences whether she
feels like a mother of hope—who values herself enough to nurture a child
of hope with the milk of human kindness. And children of hope create a
society of hope.
A second area in which social devaluation is endangering the
species gift of women is that of sexual behavior. The keystone of the
archway to sexual fidelity was historically the intuitive sexual self-
control of wonien. Most women's sexuality reflects an inner moral
compass that can point true north, like a natural magnet. Of course, just
as a natural magnet can lose its power through damage or
women can also lose their natural moral magnetism. And many men
have demonstrated the capacity for moral self-direction. But throughout
history, women have tended to be society's primary teachers of sexual

mores.
As Leon Kass put it, "A fine woman understood that giving her
body, even her kiss, meant giving her heart, which was too precious to
be bestowed on anyone who would not prove himself worthy, at the very
least, by pledging himself in marriage to be her defender and her lover
forever." Thus, "It is largely through the purity of her morals, self-
regulated, that woman wields her influence. Men will always do what is
pleasing to women, but only if women suitably control and channel their
own considerable sexual power.
This view of female sexuality abhors sexual abuse of women. It
also celebrates the spiritual and emotional fulfillment of marriage for
both women and men. At the same time, women have too long endured
the unfaimess of a cultural "double standard" that tolerated promiscuity
in men while condemning it in women. Sociologist David Popenoe
writes that "men the world over are more sexually driven and
'promiscuous, ' while women are more concerned with lasting
relationships." Moreover, he says, "men are universally expected to
initiate sex, while women are expected to set limits on the extent of
sexual intimacy." As another researcher put it, "Among all peoples,
everywhere in the world, it is understood that the male is more likely
than the female to desire sexual relations with a variety of parmers."ll
A double standard that winks at this male tendency enough to
excuse it is unequal and, hence, unfair. Society might have responded to
this inequality by demanding sexual fidelity of men. But instead, our
generation romped into history's most staggering sexual revolution,
seeking male/female equality by encouraging women to imitate the
habitual promiscuity of men. This unprecedented combination of sexual
liberation and women's liberation has, with incredible irony, now
liberated men--not only from a sexual conscience, but also from the
sense of family responsibility that women's higher sexual standards once
demanded of men. And the biggest losers in this process are, sadly,
children and women--the women who have lost their former power to
demand lasting commitments from their children's fathers.

Despite the apparent unfairness of the double standard, our concept
of marriage made serious demands of men. Men are simply not as
"biologically attuned to being committed fathers as women are to being
committed mothers."12 As Fukuyama put it, "It takes a great deal of
effort to separate a mother from her newbom infant; in contrast, it [takes
great] effort to involve a father with his "13 That is why George Gilder
defined "civilization" as the time when men began learning from their
women to care about their children.
Marriage was our culture's answer to this crucial need, because it
taught men to provide for and protect their families. But our current
culture of divorce shows us that Margaret Mead was right: Because male
commiünent tends to be a learned behavior, it "is fragile and can
disappear" when the culture no longer expects or teaches it.14 Thus, said
Mead, men won't stay married in any society unless they are culturally
required to do so. 15
By expecting men to marry, our culture sent men a message that
cormlled the damage of the double standard. But in the rush toward
women's sexual liberation, we seem no longer to expect men to marry.
Thus we've given up not only the double sexual standard, but the power
of marriage to tame the male wanderlust. And the losers in this hasty
bargaining were not men, but women--and even more so, children.
This brings us to the third area of devaluation: we have stopped
prizing women's innate yeaming for permanent marriage bonds. Ours is
becoming an anti-marriage culture that literally throws out our babies
with the bathwater of resentment toward the very idea of marital
commitment. The social wreckage produced by today's confusion about
sex, women, men, and marriage is well known. Rates of divorce and
illegitimacy have been raging out of control for years, with nearly a third
of all American children now bom out of wedlock, and over 50% of all
new marriages expected to end in divorce. Æ'1d many adults have
essentially abandoned their children by "liberating" them from parental
commitments.

Two experts describe all this as a "remarkable collapse of
marriage, leading to growing family instability and decreasing parental
investment in children."16 After surveying the gale-force damage to
children in this messy scene, Popenoe has concluded that our only hope
today is what he calls "the female predisposition toward permanent pair
bonding." That phrase sounds like a sociologist, doesn't it. What is he
talking about?
One short answer to that question is in a terse phrase that most
young women once uttered with forceful moral authority when first
propositioned by a young man: "Not until you marry me." A more
complete answer may be found in new evidence that women have innate
qualities that differ from men's. One of these attitudes is women's
stronger preference for permanent pairbonding. "Women, who can bear
only a limited number of children," and who must nurture them through
lengthy gestation and dependency, "have a great [biologically ingrained]
incentive to invest their energy in rearing [their] children, while men,
who can father innumerable offspring, do not."17 And especially because
of the demands of childrearing during a child's early years, women
traditionally managed to find ways to keep their children's father nearby
for long term protection and support.
Because women invest themselves so completely in their
offspring, they also exhibit "greater selectivity in their choice of
mates, meaning they want a mate who is committed enough to their
children that he will stay with them for the long term. This sarne female
instinct, with the social benefits that flow from raising secure and
healthy children, has led women and civilized cultures to find ways of
enticing fathers to share the yoke of family responsibility with mothers,
primarily through the bonds of marriage.
The chain of being that moves from a mother of hope to a child of
hope to a society of hope gives society an enormous interest in
permanent pairbonding. Thus the woman's greater desire for marital
permanence really is the mortar holding together the bricks of social

stability. Wendell Berry wrote, "Marriage [is] not just a bond between
two people but a bond between those two people and ... their children,
and their neighbors." When this bond weakens, we face "an epidemic
of divorce, neglect, community ruin, and loneliness." That is why
"lovers must not ...
live for themselves alone. They must tum from their
gaze at one another back toward the community.... The marriage of
lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to descendants, to the
community, to Heaven and earth. It is the fundamental connection
without which nothing holds, and trust is its necessity.
The core of this connection is the female predisposition toward
permanent pairbonding. When that core is secure, a wife stands at the
center of moral gravity for her family's universe, holding her husband
close with the gravitational pull ofa natural magnet. When he moves to
the perimeter of the home and community to guard and to sustain his
family, he is like a falcon and she is his falconer. If he strays too far, he
will no longer hear her voice, ever calling him home. William Butler
Yeates has told us what happens then: "Tuming and tuming in the
widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/ Things fall apart;
the center cannot hold,/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." Sadly,
society's recent devaluation of the female center of moral gravity has
created just such anarchy.
The image of the falcon and the falconer suggests an important
distinction between the roles of fathers and mothers in pairbonding and
childrearing. The distinguished psychiatrist David Gutmann has found
that in all successful human societies, fathers have been "creatures of the
perimeter" who provide for and protect their families (I note that
"providing for" and "protecting" their families describe the male role in
the LDS Proclamation on the Family) while mothers nurture young
children ("nurturing" describes the mother's role in the Proclamation).
"Strong mothers build secure homes; fathers and father's sons maintain
secure neighborhoods "20
Ideally, mothers first nurture children 's
feelings about right and wrong, then fathers teach them the law of the
family and community. This places fathers and other men into

disciplinary roles that teach sons with loving firmness to separate
psychologically from their mothers until they internalize community
norms within their own conscience. By this process, young men
transform their aggression and resentment of authority into a conscience-
based sense of duty to protect and provide for their family and
community. Then they can form their own homes as mature husbands,
rather than childishly needing wives who behave like mothers.
Gutmann is distressed about radical feminist criticism of male
authority in this longstanding pattern. That criticism has undermined the
masculine role, relegating fathers to being "second fiddle mothers." This
demeaning of men has driven them from marriage into the "masculine
default habitats" of "the bar and the adulterous bed," where they "feel
like men, rather than failed mothers." When this happens, men tragically
turn their aggression againstwomen and community, becoming the
enemy of their families instead of the protector and provider.
It is beyond the scope of my remarks to explore more fully the
distinctive influence of men, but we must at least note that sound,
permanent pairbonding requires us to value the complementary
contributions and roles of equal partners to the pairbond.
We have now considered the past generation's devaluating of
motherhood, women's instinct for sexual fidelity, and women's desire
for perrnanent marriage bonds. There is a fourth category of women's
contributions — women have a gift for nurturing all human
relationships. Recent research shows that women will often sacrifice an
achievement for the sake of a relationship, but men will more likely
sacrifice a relationship for the sake of an achievement.21 And
relationships are the stuff of social and interpersonal mortar.
Other studies tell us that the much cliched "feminine intuition" that
values human relationships is clearly of genetic origin, showing up in
females more than males. And women's capacity to develop and nurture
personal relationships is needed in all intersections of community

activity. For example, a British economist recently praised this female
strength as an asset in the economy of the future, with its emphasis on
personal neovorks. 22
Our Church has long involved women across the world in decision-
making processes and the personal ministering of local congregations.
We sponsor one of the world's largest women's organizations--the
"Relief Society," whose motto is, "Charity Never Faileth." This is a
sisterhood for all adult women through which mothers and other women
learn to strengthen not only family bonds, but an endless multitude of
other relationships that are nourished--sometimes kept literally alive by--
the milk of human kindness.. Our experience is that women's
perspectives can profoundly influence and enrich many fields of human
endeavor without compromising the primary value of home and family.
Consider now, in summary, a ü•ue story from Australian history
that illustrates the power of women's moral influence as mothers of
hope, women of fidelity, wives of commiünent, and nurturers of human
ties. In its early decades as a British colony, Australia was avast
wilderness designated as a jail for exiled convicts. Until 1850, six of
every seven people who went "down under" from Britain were men.
And the few women who went were often convicts or social outcasts
themselves. The men ruthlessly exploited them, sexually and in other
ways. With few exceptions, these women without hope were powerless
to change their conditions.
In about 1840, a reformer named Caroline Chisholm urged that
more women would stabilize the culture. She told the British
government the best way to establish a community of "great and good
people"in Australia: "For all the clergy you can despatch, all the
schoolmasters you can appoint, all the churches you can build, and all
the books you can export, will never do much good without ... 'God's
police'-- wives and little children--good and virtuous women."
Chisholm searched for women who would raise "the moral

standard of the people." She spent twenty years traveling to England,
recruiting young women and young couples who believed in the
common sense principles of family life. Over time, these women tamed
the men who were taming the wild land; and civil society in Australia
gradually emerged. Also, the colonial govemments enacted policies that
elevated women's status and reinforced family life.23 As one historian
said, "the initial reluctance of the wild colonial boys to marry was
eroded fairly quickly." Eventually, thousands of new immigrants who
shared the vision of these "good and virtuous women" established stable
families as the basic unit of Australian society more quickly than had
occurred "anywhere else in the Western world."24
This striking story of women's moral influence grew from a
conscious design to replace "the penal colony's rough and wild ways"
with "a more moral civilization." The reformers intentionally capitalized
on women's innate "civilizing" capacity. 25 These women made
Australia a promised land that flowed with a healthy ecosystem of milk
and honey. And the milk, literally and figuratively, was mother's milk--
the milk of human kindness. That milk nurtures those habits of the heart
vithout which no civil society can sustain itself.
Most radical feminists, which includes many of the people on the
UN's current CEDAW committee, would reject for today's society the
concept that women are civilizing agents. They resist this concept
because they believe that acknowledging any inherent differences
between men and women will lead to negative gender discrimination that
will somehow place women in subservient roles. However, the evidence
shows that, despite many similarities, men and women do differ innately
in some crucial ways. Hence the title of one popularized book, Men
Are From Mars. Women Are From Venus.
Psychologist Carol Gilligan's 1982 book shows how women and
men perceive the sarne things in different ways, and they speak In a
Different Voice from one another. Gilligan found that women possess
an ethic of care that is inherently stronger then men's. If society can

value and encourage this gender gift without allowing it to cause
discrimination against women, we just might experience, as Australian
Anne Summers put it, "a genuine breakthrough in our thinking about the
qualities contemporary society now has the greatest need for."26
The women's rights movements of recent years opened many
valuable doors to women and pricked the conscience of many man who
had exploited women's willingness to give their bread to others and keep
none for themselves. But the gender equity pendulum of the past era has
moved our attitudes too far, devaluing and damaging the culture's
support for motherhood, sexual fidelity, marriage, and women's
distinctive voices.
It is now time to swing the pendulum of attitude back to magnetic
north, the point in the compass that will nurture our children and the
future society with the milk of human kindness. Surely society can
restore the confidence of today's women in their own instincts without
coercing them into being non-entities. Surely we can invite men to
emulate the ethic of care they see in their mothers, their wives, and their
daughters. We have already learned the hard way that women, children,
and the entire culture are worse off when we seek gender equality by
encouraging women to adopt permissive male lifestyles.
Therefore, as this World Congress sends a message from the
mainstream into Geneva's headwaters of thought about family policy
across the globe, let us call for a more responsible form of gender
equality that celebrates and preserves the natural moral influence of
women. It is time to equalize the sexes by asking men once more to
follow the moral leadership of women, by honoring the equal yoke and
lifelong commitnents of marriage. That kind of progress will make the
civilization ofthe 21st century not only more equal, but infinitely more
civilized.

l. Kathryn O. Balmforth, Human Rights and the Farnily, Remarks at
World Farnily Policy Forum, Brigham Young University, January 15,
1999, pp. 8-9.
2. Mary Ann Glendon, "The Pope's New Feminism," 1995/96 Crisis
magazine.
3. Francis Fukuyama, "The Great Disruption," The Atlantic Monthly,
May, 1999, p. 55.
4. Quoted in Jeffrey R. Holland, "Motherhood," Ensign, May, 1997.
5. Quoted in Kathleen S. And Howard M. Bahr, "Another Voice,
Another Lens: Making a Place for Sacrifice in Family Theory and
Family Process," Virginia F. Cutler Lecture, Brigharn Young University,
Nov. 13, 1997.
6. Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police (Penguin Books
Australia 1975, 1994), p. 70.
7. "Feminism's Identity Crisis," Newsweek, March 31, 1986, p. 58.
8. Orania Papazoglou, "Despising Our Mothers, Despising Ourselves,"
Eirsühings, January 1992, p. II.
9. Richard Whitfield, "Sensitive Directions for Children's Moral
Development," Presentation to World Congress of Farnilies, Prague,
Czech Republic, March 20, 1997.
10. Leon Kass, "The End of Courtship," The Public Interest Winter
1997, p. 39.
I l. David Popenoe, "The Essential Father," from Life Without Father
(The Free Press: 1996), p. 12 (manuscript version).
12. Popenoe, "The Case for Marriage and the Nuclear Family: A
Biosocial Perspective," unpublished manuscript, p. 6.
13. Fukuyama, at p. 72.
14. Quoted in Ibid. p. 72.
15. Cited in Popenoe, note II above, at p. 25.
16. Jean Bethke Elshtain and David Popenoe, "Marriage in America,"
the Institute for American Values (1995).
17. Popenoe, "The Case for Marriage and the Nuclear Family," at p. 6.
18. Wilson, quoted in "The Essential Father" at p. 13.
19. Wendell Berry, Sexa-E.CQ.nomy.a-E.redom-&-CQmmunity (1993),
125, 137-39.
20. David Gutmann, "The Paternal Imperative," The American Scholar,
Winter, 1998, p. 118, 124.
21. I first heard this phrasing from Jeannette Hales Beckham. It is
supported by studies reported in Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice
(1982).
22. Paul Gollan, "How Feminine Intuition Can Help the Profit Margin,"
Sydney Morning Herald, July 28, 1993, p. 13.
23. Summers, note 6 above, at 355.
24. Ibid. at pp. 337-53.
25. Ibid. at pp. 354-57.
26. Ibid. at p. 46

Tangents Greg Bear Omni Jan 1986