Conservative columnist Mona Charen said Wednesday she is seeing a shift among the political Left with regard to traditional family values.
“It’s not hopeless. We can get it back,” Charen said. “There is a little bit of ice cracking that you can see on the left where they are beginning to not deny any longer that family structure is really important, and so we just need to recognize that we made a mistake in saying that families don’t matter.”
Charen, a syndicated columnist, New York Times bestselling author, senior fellow at the ethics and public policy center, and former speech writer for former first lady Nancy Reagan, said during an interview at the Heritage Foundation in D.C. that feminists are discouraging motherhood to focus instead on pursuing a career.
In her latest book, Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense, Charen credits feminism with “helping women get the vote, securing equal pay, and obtaining full civil and political rights,” but then asks, “did that full equality require the denigration of the nuclear family?”
During the talk, Charen discussed the “tremendous amount of breakups” in the U.S. She noted that in some European countries that have lower marriage rates than in some parts of the U.S. people tend to stay together more even if they aren’t married, while Americans are “quicker to form relationships and quicker to end them.”
“The United States has a dubious distinction now in leading the world in chaotic adult relationships,” she said.
Charen traced the decline of stable relationships back to the sexual revolution, saying that modern day feminism demands more than the social and political equality of women to men, but to live the same experience as well. Moreover, she stated children psychologically develop best in traditional families.
As a whole, she characterized the influence that conservative values have on society as what causes a nation to reach prosperity.
“We need to make sure that more people behave in our society the way the upper third who are the college-educated do, that they have the same expectations about what sociologists are now calling the success sequence,” Charen said.
“The success sequence is you finish high school, you get a job — any job — you get married before you have your first child and your chances of living in poverty are practically nil in America — very low,” she continued.
Charen said the Left, however, is consumed with eliminating all gender and class distinctions in “the sort of coercive, totalitarian style that they have of forcing an androgynous utopia on us and insisting that women’s lives have to look exactly like men’s lives.”
This, she claimed, is causing all sorts of behavior issues in the next generation, and that the only way to fix American society is to “admit our mistakes.”
