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The Heritage Foundation’s recent “Saving America by Saving the Family” report not only caused controversy on the Right, but it has also drawn more condemnation from the Left, particularly from feminists such as author Jessica Valenti.
In an often histrionic post titled “They’re Coming for Our Daughters,” Valenti claims the Heritage Foundation is part of a “well-funded campaign to reassert misogynist control by targeting women while they’re young and pliable.”
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The Heritage Foundation, according to Valenti, views “pretty much every major advancement for women’s rights and freedom” as a problem that can be addressed by “eradicating” contraception and “appointing family court judges hostile to divorce.”
In reality, Heritage has never called for banning contraception, and the only time judges are mentioned in the entire report is to call for more transparency of judicial records in jurisdictions where judges are elected by voters.
Valenti also claims the Heritage report is “a detailed plan to push [women] out of college,” which is odd because not only does the report never say women should not attend college, but thousands of women are currently attending conservative universities, including Baylor, Hillsdale, and Liberty, and at many of those universities, women outnumber men.
Now, the report does note that today’s current higher education system often leaves students in substantial debt, and that debt can be a major hindrance to family formation, but the solution they propose is less government-subsidized student loans, which only drive up prices, not kick women out of college.
The report also calls for rolling back college degree requirements for many jobs so that fewer men and women have to attend college at all. Other conservatives have even encouraged more universities to offer accelerated curricula that allow students — again, both men and women — to graduate faster, younger, and less in debt. These are all policies designed to make higher education more affordable for men and women so they can start their professional careers and families earlier in life.
The report also calls on universities to become more family-friendly themselves, such as Brigham Young University, which has special housing set aside for married couples who are both attending the university.
Marriage is the one actual priority Valenti gets right. “According to Heritage,” Valenti reports, “the future of the country relies on more straight married couples having more children.” It is true, the report does say that. But it is also an objectively true statement. The future of our country does rely on more people having children. And anyone who has ever taken an introductory biology course can tell you that straight couples are naturally better at producing children than their same-sex counterparts.
But instead of portraying marriage as the cornerstone institution of civil society, Valenti treats it as a trap, writing, “They want our daughters and granddaughters to have zero information about their bodies and sex, no ability to protect themselves from pregnancy, limited choices for an intellectual and professional life, and—once our girls have been corralled into early marriages—few opportunities to leave.”
All of this is false. In fact, The Heritage Foundation has argued for the opposite: more candid education about fertility so women aren’t blindsided by biological facts that feminists like Valenti like to suppress. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine began a “Protect Your Fertility” campaign in 2001, designed to give women clear, accurate information about the risks of delaying childbearing. For conservatives, the point of this kind of education is straightforward: empowerment through facts, so women can make informed choices about when is the best time to start looking for a husband, get married, and have children.
Conservatives have no desire to limit women’s intellectual or professional choices either. Again, the opposite is true. The report includes an entire section titled, “Encouraging Work and Flexibility Helps Families,” which notes that the most popular arrangement for both men and women is “to have both parents work flexible jobs and share childcare duties.” What exactly is misogynistic about that?
The report notes that “Work is one of the main ways that people create value” and that “It can also connect them and give them meaning and fulfillment.”
“Flexibility,” it continues, is especially valuable to women because “it makes it easier for parents to negotiate the competing demands of work and family.”
“Thus, any plan to encourage family formation should make it easier to balance work and family,” the report concludes, noting that gig work and broadband deployment make working at home easier for men and women. One would hope feminists would support an agenda that empowered women to balance work and family.
Unfortunately, today’s feminists have little interest in helping women balance work and family. Their goal is to sever women from the mutual dependence of marriage and motherhood. This was not always the case. The first generation of feminists who won the right to vote embraced marriage and motherhood. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the organizer of the Seneca Falls Convention, had seven children and called on “mothers and fathers” to dedicate their “soul and body” to marriage to achieve “sacredness and dignity.”
Starting with Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex, however, a work activist Betty Friedan cites as her foundational inspiration, feminists have turned against marriage and motherhood entirely. “The female organism is wholly adapted for and subservient to maternity,” Beauvoir writes, adding that at “times when she is free from maternal servitude she can now and then equal the male.” In this way, “maternity dooms woman to a sedentary existence, and so it is natural that she remain at the hearth while man hunts, goes fishing, and makes war.” Women will never achieve equality with men, Beauvoir argues, until the family is “abolished, with absolute measure.”
How exactly humanity is supposed to survive without families and mothers, Beauvoir does not say. If she were alive today, her answer would no doubt be the same as the Democratic Party’s: mass migration from the corners of the world where feminism hasn’t taken root.
The simple reality is that if we as Americans want to project our way of life into the future, we are going to need to get our birthrate back above replacement level. The simple math is that married women have almost double the number of children as unmarried women, and the younger a woman gets married, the more children she has. So, the Heritage Foundation’s goal of helping young men and women get married is correct. One might also hope that feminists would care about the physical health of those women who want to be mothers, because pregnancy is much safer for women in their 20s and early 30s than it is in their late 30s and 40s.
The good news is that America does not have to return to the marriage rates or the average age at first marriage of the 1800s or even the 1950s to get back to replacement fertility. All we have to do is get back to… 1995. The Clinton administration. Was 1995 really the Handmaid’s Tale dystopia that feminists claim?
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Valenti concludes her attack on conservative family policy by pointing to recent polling evidence showing that “young men are actually far more likely to name children as their top marker of personal success” than women. And it is true that male President Donald Trump voters did say they prioritize “having children” above “achieving financial independence” and “having a career you find fulfilling.”
But Valenti might also want to note recent Gallup polling showing that the average American woman wants 2.7 children, which is far below the 1.6 they are currently having. Maybe liberal women wouldn’t be so anxious and unhappy if feminists like Valenti spent less time stoking panic about conservative intentions and more time leveling with young women about the practical steps and timelines required to build the families they say they want.
