THE WOMAN QUESTION & THE DEATH OF THE FAMILY

...The women's liberation movement, as a movement, has not had nearly enough to say about this state of affairs, I suppose largely because it has perceived the situation in very different terms...

...I hardly think so, for in the counter culture, and more and more in the culture at large, these are largely forbidden observations...

...What a disappointment it must be, then, for so many people in the counter culture to be told, by a friend like Slater no less, that to do your own thing is too often to do it at someone else's expense, and frequently at the expense of one's entire culture...

...To these more or less familiar points I should add others, to the effect that fathers who cultivate distance and dignity at the expense of paternal warmth rarely turn out to be acceptable figures for their children, who conceive ultimate authority as kept from them by a series of dexterous mystifications...

...Some will be unable to see themselves even as parttime homemakers, and will spend much time decrying the rampant proliferation of women who would castrate men...

...What is this man out to prove...

...I say this not merely on the basis of the many family studies I have read and pondered, but on the basis of my experience as a member of families, first as a child, more recently as a husband and father—and it is with nothing approaching retrospective horror that I look to my participation in these families...

...Clearly, these concerns have much to do with the rigid insistence upon doing one's thing that Slater so derides, and they are all complexly involved in the woman question as well...

...We shall have to see, as such a reconception becomes a reality for greater numbers of people...

...I expect Cooper would be little moved by an outright appeal for compassion among human beings...

...Slater's answer is, essentially...

...What we men ought to say, as the women themselves should have been urging us to do these several years, is more like: life is involved, at least for most human beings, in generation, generation implies nurturance and the real pleasure that children give and our commitment to them gives us...

...Most parents know about these realities, perhaps even try to address them where their own children are concerned...

...Or, at best, with rare exceptions, men have gone on to find in their new relationships more compliant and motherly wives than they could find the first time around, women badly burned in early marital wars, perhaps, and therefore more willing to settle for simple stability and to occupy the protective, largely symbolic role of mature nurturant both to children and husband...

...Still, there must be a limit to speculation, as to generalizing observations, and we should keep in mind Keats's remark that "the truth is, there is something real in the world...

...Can human beings who have become almost as free as gods, free to participate in or to reject relation, free to behave responsibly or not according to need or desire rather than conscience, can such men and women seek to be controlled...

...Charges of mechanicism and abstraction will be on the tips of the tongues both of participants and bemused spectators...

...What the child is not permitted to do is to take his own personality for granted...

...Where does this leave us...

...What I am suggesting is that if people like Marcuse and Slater are right in saying that families tend to prepare children for replication of the basic authoritarian and alienating structure in a variety of other institutions, then the children should be more malleable than they seem to be in so many instances...

...For what will we hope...

...But is it wishful thinking to assert that our sexual lives need not THE WOMAN OUESTION & THE DEATH OF THE FAMILY 65 be severely diminished by reconceiving masculine and feminine roles as more or less indivisible insofar as such things as childrearing and professional experience are concerned...

...What upsets one in reading Cooper's book, though, is that he proves wholly incapable of examining one of the basic assumptions upon which its premise rests: the notion that all men who would experience themselves authentically must necessarily first undergo what he describes as "divorce proceedings...

...To the voices that tell us that the women and the men must reconceive their roles as not distinct but indivisible except to the extent that normal human circumstances and temperaments prevent perfect sharing...

...That is why revolution and theater have grown so close in the last few years, why performers like Abbie Hoffman have taken so much of our collective attention, why gesture and act are almost indistinguishable for many of us...

...Spock, asserts that such intense maternal nurturance as Spock recommends inevitably produces an abundance of such guilt in the child that it may require a lifetime to be overcome...

...Clearly, some of us will be better equipped than others to realize the new potential— we may feel we have less at stake in maintaining the old order than in insisting that our families try something new...

...Is this child some sort of inferior reality the inspired individual cannot find the time to confront...

...This is a responsibility and a pleasure that we should not want to give up, not to make a thing of mere random possibility like the pleasure of making a great deal of money, or the responsibility of keeping accurate records or quoting one's scholarly sources carefully...

...Without the death of the family, he feels, we shall continue to produce human beings alienated from their true needs, their bodies, and the possibility of community...

...Cooper, a British psychoanalyst and close associate of R. D. Laing, comes across in his book as a very compelling and troubling man, in the way that severely disturbed people may be both engaging and repulsive...

...Never mind that individualism hasn't been a vitally operant principle for middle-class Americans in the last 50 years...

...True or not, it is something not readily to be dismissed, and as we look about us at the great rush to reduce these intimate ties to mere options, we realize how persuasive the adage has been, how completely it has been taken to heart by a generation of therapeutics hell-bent on a pleasure that is to be the exclusive function of libertarian play...

...Too subtle...

...We could go on and on with this, and I agree that such speculative probes seem as good a way as any in which to apprehend human reality in all its uncertainty...

...Intimate communities founded along such lines will rapidly break down, I fear, or they will tend to develop hierarchies in which numbers of people will be selected to run the operation, to organize, plan, and support its activities while a great many others run about playing games and enjoying a perpetual childhood...

...The death of the family will be complete, so that no roles may be taught or prepared for, no specific values imparted...

...I don't mean anything as simple as hairbrained prophesy or charismatic hysteria...

...In reinterpreting and extending mutuality as a principle upon which the nuclear family can be rebuilt we do not want to encourage the notion that human experience can be reduced to domestic detail, or professional exertions to the status of part-time entertainment...

...An infant's cramps don't do much for the mother's selfhood, I suppose, and so the counter culture shifts the ground to frustration, and informs us that in the worst of circumstances anyone may be taught to administer an enema, while the parent continues on his or her way to an ideal selfhood...

...The imagination runs amok with the sheer limitless possibilities...

...These have been described most persuasively by Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man and by Philip Slater in The Pursuit of Loneliness...

...The women who will interest me when they speak of their condition will address a situation we share, which has rather little to do with restrictions on freedom...

...What so many of that generation are raging about is the technological and political manipulation, and also about their own appalling susceptibility to this manipulation...

...For our purposes, though, the level of familial intimacy is more crucial than any other, for it is a level at which we can individually engage ourselves, and it is a level upon which all others surely depend...

...The result is a great deal of frustration in which young people clamor for the resurrection of human values they cannot themselves begin to understand...

...Yes, it's a bad thing because looking around at ourselves and our friends, we don't like what we see...

...but hold we must...

...What the young have been doing, as they've so often reminded us, is recalling their elders and their alienated peers to a vital tradition badly in need of renovation...

...The words frequently remind the reader of Cooper, but Slater's utterances have a quiet modesty that one appreciates...

...Is the women's movement essentially theatriTHE WOMAN QUESTION & THE DEATH OF THE FAMILY cal in nature...

...Ought we to hope for better...

...In all this the women have taken the major role, even those who have not identified themselves with the radical feminists, and for this, too, I am grateful...

...And what we will say to her is not that life is...

...If American culture today finds itself at the breaking point, as the subtitle of Slater's book contends, can the situation be attributed to a totalitarian control, exerted on emergent generations, a control facilitated by Spockian maternal nurturance...

...One must be sympathetic toward a fellow who is intent on finding out what he has to do for himself...

...He is a careful observer of American mores, and few of our customary deceptions evade his notice...

...What women have been asking for of late is a comparable freedom with men to be on the move, to vary life patterns and switch allegiances in accordance with the dictates of an independent spirit...

...What Slater describes as love-oriented techniques for controlling Spockian children Marcuse describes as the promise of a wide distribution of unending plentiude to control entire populations...

...ROBERT BOYERS...

...These are pleasures and responsibilities not commensurate, and we must not let polemic deal with them as if they were...

...What will the death of the family look like...

...While we are far from realizing a culture of flower children, we have liberated ourselves to a sort of magnificent randomness according to which each person goes his own way freely screwing every object in sight without ever experiencing the temptation to stop and reflect pleasurably upon his experience...

...What is so distressing about Cooper, though, is that he finds it necessary to cultivate Basho as some sort of symbolic personage who can show us the way...

...Not in its most serious manifestations, but in part certainly...

...but the universe of high discourse must be left uncontaminated by such mundane concerns...

...In fact, the movement's most outspoken advocates have simply accepted what has been developing in American culture for some time, and merely demanded a larger share of the action for women in general...

...According to Slater, we are left with a terrible conflict among the generations, in which the children move to actualize, at least in terms of symbolic gesture, the values they have been taught by their parents, and in which the parents insist upon being loved and respected for what they are, though their everyday behavior via THE WOMAN QUESTION & THE DEATH OF THE FAMILY lates whatever values they have tried to communicate to their children...

...Like the trained scientist, the woman will find it easier and easier to entertain a variety of perspectives upon herself and upon others, even her children if she should have any, and her one overriding desire in life will be to attain clarity about herself and her needs...

...Surely communal structures, as Slater well knows, will require both a good deal of planning and meticulous governance, and I don't see how this will be possible in a culture largely divorced from instrumental values and committed to play as an end in itself...

...What I urge, then, is only in part what Slater describes as the deintensification of the mother-child relationship...

...And still I argue that the family is not a unit that inevitably nurtures mad children and creates a bind in which all members lose track of who they are and what they feel...

...Probably not, though we have hoped unreasonably before, and will again, no doubt...

...What a disaster if we should find ourselves in Kierkegaard's evocation of his own time: "The taedium vitae so constant in antiquity was due to the fact that the outstanding individual was what others could not be...

...If it has not become sufficiently obvious by now, I should say that I do not like what has happened to us, what we have brought upon ourselves, and that to the degree that the women have embraced a therapeutic ethic, or nonethic, I despair...

...The women's movement has forced many of us not only to rethink our lives as men and women, especially the relations between the sexes, but also to examine the nature and value of the family...

...Perhaps this next point may be nearer the mark: fathers accustomed to relating to their children through the mediation of a comforting and more regularly available mother will tend to sacrifice too much of their own emotional expressiveness to the mother and further reenforce the children's impression that authority is not only distant but also not obliged to deal intimately with the tedious details of ordinary living...

...Clearly, I think it neither idiotic nor perverse, in part at least because I deny we are as deeply controlled as Marcuse, Slater, and others contend...

...To point out to Cooper the altogether abstract nature of Basho's commitment as compared with the concrete dilemma of the weeping child would constitute a hideous appeal easy to reject as bourgeois sentimentality...

...Basho's compassion was fully expressed in verse, but his voyage had to come first—he knew he could do nothing for the child until he knew what he had to do for himself...

...For "divorce proceedings" many men have been ready, to be sure, 64 but they have not usually been of the sort that might promise better eventualities in some distant future...

...at which point they risk losing sight andunderstanding of the interconnectedness itself— a process well advanced in our culture today...

...that this generation's discontent has to do not only with the desire for more and better goods, such as a scarcity economics must always promise, but with the fact that these promises should be made and these desires be generated among us...

...But there is no way for large numbers of people to coexist without governing and being governed by each other, unless they establish machines to do it...

...But in neither case does the individual feel compelled, on behalf of any value, to make his life choices as if his very soul were at stake...

...They will speak, and I will respond, with respect to what we have made of our freedom, how we have damaged each other and incapacitated one another for a truly comprehensive experience...

...And when a psychiatrist informs us that handling these routines easily just about disqualifies us from the company of the authentic, that we shall be exalted only to the degree that we fail in conducting our lives smoothly, we become not only dispirited but perhaps even a little defensive...

...The terms of the argument are not new in this country, but the implications are bound to make a great many people feel uneasy...

...Also, I propose a series of adjustments in the usual conception of career, so that achievement orientation comes to be decidedly less single-minded than it has been...

...Slater is calling into question the entire ethic described by the phrase "do your own thing," a counter-culture expression that exROBERT BOYERS tends native American individualism without in any way considering what in fact entails doing one's own thing...

...The later group want their children to be more cultured, less moneygrubbing, more spontaneous and creative, yet still somehow willing to remain on the same treadmill with the parents...

...Not only will they withdraw from men who deny them 62 their rights, but they will move perpetually to disencumber themselves from anyone or anything that would type them as women and place obstacles in the path of their selfhood...

...I have studied the literature on schizophrenogenic families, and have discussed them at length with therapists...

...It is to this woman, perhaps more than to any other, that the women's lib people ought to speak—but the radical feminists will continue, I expect, to frighten and disappoint her...

...In his journal, The Narrow Road To The Deep North, Basho describes how, shortly after setting out, he saw on the other side of a river an abandoned child, small, desolate, and weeping...

...While he seems to have located very nicely what has driven his patients out of their wretched minds, he is terribly confused about what can be done about their troubles...

...For the urgency of their involvement is not a thing most men could have approximated—preoccupied with our careers as we have been...

...What we want is to respond not so much to the specific distortions of fact in Kate Milieu's argument, but with what we know is good and compelling in human experience and is not sufficiently cherished in the perspective of radical feminists...

...in Philip Rieff's terms, "the important thing is to keep going...

...Just as sure as it is possible to be a grown-up, to look one's parent in the face and tell him or her what one likes and does not like, just so is it possible for families to provide a model and training ground, a central experience of relation and intimacy that may well enrich all other relations...

...All these twisted aspiring businessmen and these angry desperate foulmouthed young people hardly give us cause to believe we have been heading in a fruitful direction...

...But here is an image that profoundly exercises Cooper: How do we learn to mind our own business —as did the Japanese Haiku poet Basho...

...Because we have tended more and more to measure our strength by the numbers of beliefs we have abjured, we find it difficult at best to hold the line where the family is concerned...

...Older children frequently cry because they have nightmares and need to be comforted...

...In Slater's view, this is what has happened: The parents under the old method [before the time of Dr...

...The family at its best addresses what is best in most men and women...

...The death of the family, then, as it is developed by Cooper and others, involves first a deintensification of the parent-child relationship and a consequent breaking down of family-related structures of hierarchy and authority in other cultural institutions...

...Atomic culture promises everything, so that its citizens are incapacitated to select any one thing as if ultimately it mattered very much...

...One would expect just the opposite of our present situation: in place of a tendency to drop out of things, we'd anticipate a gravitation to the sources of power and wealth...

...I take seriously the view of John Stuart Mill that arguments with which we disagree are useful for sharpening our own sense of what it is we believe...

...As a result, their children have grown up to feel that human needs have some validity of their own, and that social occasions are less sacred than they appeared to earlier generations...

...Where he is least persuasive, though, is in his predictions of the future— sociology and prophesy do not, perhaps, get along very well...

...Ought we to listen to him...

...I also do not understand the uncritical adoption of Marcuse's notion of a triumphant pleasure principle wholly divorced from instrumental values, the notion that play indulged in and for itself can become a dominant mode of behavior in a future communal society, or that such a circumstance is devoutly to be wished...

...The family and the special intimacies it enables seem to me an ineradicable value, despite what we have lately been told about the awful things it does...

...Contrary to those who lament our inability to play, I worry that we play all too consistently without getting much from our play, that we lead fundamentally experimental lives without holding clearly in our minds what we might hope to learn...

...Individual health will consist of the individual's conviction that he knows about and can act in accordance with his true wishes, while the health of the culture will ROBERT BOYERS reside in its continuing capacity to promote this conviction in its citizens...

...Cooper will not see Basho as a man troubled in the extreme who, at a relatively advanced age, discovers that he must pursue an image of himself he has long sought to avoid...

...The artist working on his masterpiece does not let guests use it to wipe their feet on...

...If we take seriously what the radical feminists have in mind, we ought to consider it in the context of a whole series of arguments that have split this culture in two or more parts...

...If we are dissatisfied with merely doing our own thing, each man and woman his or her own creator, the culture unambivalent only about our right to pursue self-generated goals with the very least interference possible, can we then turn suddenly to some more structured situation as a viable goal...

...In a culture that generates all sorts of spurious needs while thriving upon fantasied impressions of scarcity, to look to one's true needs amounts almost to a heroic enterprise...

...The argument ranges from the intimately familial to the political, with politics here conceived on a global scale...

...If the family is not quite a necessary adjurant of man's biological nature, as the psychiatrist Theodore Lidz feels it may well be, it is at least something without which, if we do survive as a culture at all, we shall do even more poorly than we have to this point in time...

...What as a culture we badly need, though, is some clear conception of an all-important truth to which we may feel compelled...

...For what virtually all contemporary radical movements in this country have in common is a refusal to assign themselves specific goals that have anything to do with the enduring and communal needs of participants...

...life, the conventional woman's role hard but...

...What, then, have we to attend to in the women's movement...

...For Cooper, the death of the family, taken in its very broadest sense, is a process that will enable the growth of an entirely joyous individual free to participate in and reject relations according to his own needs...

...I consider it a fact that the great majority of us have been incapacitated for a truly wide experience—Marcuse's notion of one-dimensionality seems to me in its essence irrefutable, though the prospects for change I interpret as less distant than he will concede...

...This will be the most difficult problem new-culture adherents will face, for we are long accustomed to an illusory freedom based on subtle compulsion by technology and bureaucratic mechanisms...

...In fact, it is not compassion Cooper lacks, nor spirit, nor even intellect, nor loyalty...

...And what is this balance but a sense of the appropriate emphasis we owe to the various realities with which we daily contend...

...Let us first try to see how his writing is symptomatic of something very general in our culture...

...In other words, while the counter culture has subverted all sorts of things in American life, it has subscribed to a traditional value Americans have always pointed to with pride...

...For this is the middleclass woman of our time, the woman who has not bought modernity as if it were the most precious item in a badly diminished inventory of valuables...

...Though he says the drift of a decent future will inevitably have to be communal in nature, Slater sees young people as peculiarly unsuited to realizing such a future: Any community worthy of the name [one in which the relationships between people are regulated by people, instead of by machines] would seem "totalitarian" to today'syouth, not in the sense of having an authoritarian leadership structure, but in the sense of permitting group intrusion into what is for most Americans the private sphere...

...Can they feel compelled once more, as religious men and women were compelled, by an authority they accepted because they knew it was right that they do so...

...Where we part company is the point at which he argues for the development of communal modes of relation to replace the tightly knit nuclear family...

...According to such a perspective, a career will be something one pursues in conjunction with what is at least equally one's real work: the nurturance of family and the perpetuation of enduring intimacies that grow and change throughout the course of a lifetime...

...But why, we must ask in turn, can we not first address the wailing of the abandoned child...

...There are those who say that this is a vicious and stupid idea, that specifically sexual relations, for instance, will be forever fouled up if we forget that sex has to do with power, that a man will have an impossible time "getting it up" for a perfect equal with whom he has worked out arrangements for sharing all aspects of nurturance and domestic detail...

...And from this journey we have gone on to look at our current family situations, not to draw the easy comparisons, but to better understand the way we lead our intimate lives...

...On the one hand, there is the prospect described by the Brahmanic adage, which reads: "Each time you create a new tie, you drive another pain, like a nail, into your heart...

...It leaves us with what Slater sees as a generation of ambitious, grasping, guilty, moralistic adolescents and young adults who are, at the same time, capable of conceiving that human needs have a real legitimacy that no structure can deny...

...Although such writers as Kate Millett and Susan Brownmiller have been less than illuminating, there has been occasion to think long and hard about a good many things—both because of the emergence of the women's liberation movement and because of such liberationists as R. D. Laing, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman Mailer...

...Now I'm not certain I know precisely what it is that's out of place in the analysis —surely, even if a fellow like David Cooper is careless of detail, of simple human reality, that is not the sort of thing one can say of a Slater...

...Just as it is not always possible for great poets to be moral geniuses, so it is hideous to suggest that most of us betray what we can do well so as to enjoy some perfect freedom most of us can neither appreciate nor do much with...

...Where once there was the woman as object there will come to be the woman as freefloating self, absorbed in the creation of a project to replace the spurious life goals previously designed for her by men...

...And what I shall here support and defend is precisely the family, not in all of its versions certainly, but as a necessary and still vital institution...

...The women's movement, then, has retrospectively returned us to the families in which we grew up, a journey many of us have been encouraged seriously to undertake in the course of intensive analysis and with the guidance of an experienced psychiatrist...

...Commonplace...

...Americans live collectively under the aegis of Fitzgerald's green light...

...Spockian parents feel that it is their responsibility to make their child into the most all-around perfect adult possible, which means paying a great deal of attention to his inner states and latent characteristics...

...The content of her project will matter very little next to the fact that it will be her own and that the men will never again dare to expect of her anything she has not already given them to understand they may legitimately expect...

...When Susan Brownmiller, for instance, tells us that a major theme of the women's movement must be its resistance to rape, that men in American society have ceaselessly and shamelessly raped its women, we have the sense that she is after applause rather than a more substantial response...

...And it is to this rather overly domesticated, unhappy, yet still proud and alert woman that we may address our thoughts, whether the woman be in her first, second, even third marriage...

...He lacks only balance, a most unfashionable property many in the counter culture would have us junk altogether...

...As a matter of fact, though I like to play as much as a great many people I know, I am not altogether sanguine about the prospects for a culture that has become so terribly self-conscious about its spontaneity and play habits as ours has...

...Nonetheless, we owe a lot to the radical feminists, for they have stirred us to consider what they say and to find suitable grounds on which to refute them, when refutation is called for...

...even those of us with rather dreadful or boring marriages and spiteful, grasping children were not about to unsettle things by asking fundamental questions and rethinking our roles as fathers and husbands...

...While the one I grew up in and the one my young son knows are different sorts of families, they have both developed in such a way that all participant members would know the intensities of pain and of joy, and the routines that can afford to accommodate relatively little of either...

...Now it is dispiriting to see a gifted man fail to perform even the least demanding routines such as most of us handle every day...

...It is better by far, it seems, to speak of an infant's experiencing frusROBERT BOYERS tration and desperation so that he may know how to live in a grown-up world in which, presumably, these are the major experiences he will need to confront...

...What I see in the most visible expressions of the woman's movement in this country is a predictable extension of America's rampant individualism informed and driven by the psychological ideals of a therapeutic culture, to adopt for a moment the language of Philip Rieff...

...I don't imagine that this could appeal to Philip Slater, or to Herbert Marcuse, but we need to understand how a new culture can promise to deliver us of so many evils without giving rise to others at least as vicious...

...For things of this nature to happen, we shall need more than will, though will cannot be discounted, and we shall have to take care that we do not bring to pass what our culture has already invited all too feverishly...

...Genius makes its way inevitably toward what it must do for itself, even as the poet Basho in David Cooper's paradigm could leave the wailing child in its misery...

...Moreover, to the extent that we are controlled, the control is insidious and terrible precisely because we are controlled in the name and in behalf of nothing...

...Clearly, something is wrong with the analysis the counter culture has provided...

...One suspects that for Cooper and others in the counter culture, only the refusal to address the wailing of the abandoned child would be sufficient validation of their 58 personal sincerity and commitment to truth...

...Too obvious to be said...

...Alternatives become merely matters of perspective, in this view, so that the wise man learns quickly that between one choice and another, either will do, depending on his mood at a given moment...

...Spock's baby book] felt they had done their job well if the child was obedient, even if he turned out dull, unimaginative, surly, sadistic, and sexually in capacitated...

...Its promise is the reduction in strength and scope of all those internalized controls the family has made possible through a variety of love-oriented techniques...

...Spock-oriented parents, absorbed with the goal of molding the child's total character, were much less inclined to sacrifice the child to the etiquette concerns of strangers...

...We shall continue to deny our children the discovery of their selfhood and we shall promote guilt in the coming generations for their failures to redeem the shabbiness of our lives...

...At the same time, in trying to explain the widespread discontent of young people asked to support the ongoing political and cultural system, Slater concedes that...

...The Spockian parent brings up the child to fulfill himself, to discover his "natural" potential and to be true only to it, whatever that may entail...

...They have told us that, given their way, they will set about to discover modes of being-on-the-move that will satisfy them and that will put to rout all male pretensions to superior mobility, creativity, and adventurousness...

...They are prevented by guilt and by the simple urge to get along in a culture bent on manufacturing artificial needs just beyond the reach even of its most grasping constituents...

...The predictions amount to little more than a catalogue of wishes, with little definition of the means by which they might be actualized...

...He could have gone back to the child and found some sort of home for it in a nearby village, but he chose to continue his elected, solitary voyage...

...Obviously, male college professors with relatively light working schedules will be better able than many, many others to adapt to a situation that calls for their spending daylight hours in the home with their growing children...

...Yet, what everyone can achieve ought not to be frivolously dismissed in the interests of some illusory greatness or exalted creativity that will ever be the domain of a few...

...You mean doing your own thing is bad, even if it doesn't involve burning draft-card files or dropping acid or Iying down in front of troop trains...

...Like men in our culture, she will refuse to think of any mode of behavior as other than immediately self-serving...

...After all, Basho's behavior is very much in keeping with what Cooper suggests of actual family situations: There seem to be very few mothers indeed who can keep their hands off their child long enough to allow the capacity to be alone to develop...

...Nor will he see that the extremity of BashO's way need hardly be approved as a model for all men...

...Many will never break the pattern, even with computer revolutions and other technological advances...

...In Slater's terms, The earlier group of parents wanted their children to become rich and respectable and still remain somehow part of the workingclass milieu...

...I have in mind a corresponding reintensification of the father-child relationship, and the development of a more comprehensive mutuality in 66 the nuclear family...

...It may appear at first either idiotic or perverse to speak hopefully of authority when we have been told so strenuously that our culture controls us in ways thorough beyond the wildest imaginings of our ancestors...

...Does this have all that much to do with the family and ultimately with the woman question...

...ROBERT BOYERS Beyond this, we want to concede that to be committed to our children and to the process of nurturance as a living and immediate enterprise may well turn out to be a hazardous business...

...We may hope, though, that even such men will make subtle accommodations, if only for the sake of their children, who must not learn still again that what is appropriately a woman's work can be handled by men only at the expense of their manhood, and that careers in the great world are exclusively the domain of men and exceptional women...

...as a culture we have trained ourselves to look always for the go sign that will encourage the continuance of activity no matter how random...

...Vulgar...

...There is always a need to try to arrest the wailing desperation of the others—for one's own sake, not for theirs .. the infant may need, in her or his time, to experience frustration, desperation, and finally a full-scale experience of depression...

...If we can learn once again its compelling urgency and the modest exaltations it promises, we shall do much better as a culture...

...That this entails in some basic way a defense of motherhood as well, I recognize, but the fact in no way strikes me as rendering the argu THE WOMAN QUESTION & THE DEATH OF THE FAMILY 63 ment untenable...

...I think so...

...the inspiration of modern times will be that any man who finds himself, religiously speaking, has only achieved what everyone can achieve...

...It will be easy to parody the kinds of arrangements toward which couples inexperienced in real sharing will grope their respective ways...

...Proper conduct will be altogether problematic, and will depend upon the disposition of the woman at a given moment in time...

...her role willy-nilly and come what may...

...Most men will not find it possible immediately to alter their work schedule, which has them returning to their homes during the week at a time when most children are about to go to bed...

...We may think of such speculations as naive, but we ought also to suggest to Mr...

...All too frequently the divorces have been pressed on idiotic grounds and have been succeeded by romantic and delusional liaisons and finally by newer and sourly degenerating marriages...

...It sounds a good deal like the sort of situation hippies may look toward—they will be perpetual flower children, while a variety of straights clean the streets, drive buses, sign peace treaties, and develop cures for cancer...

...A period so given to activity in behalf of every liberation could be counted upon to leave no convention undisturbed...

...Can any of this do us good...

...These arguments I should like to engage under the heading, "The Death of the Family," which I take from the title of a recent book by David Cooper...

...Up to this point I find what he says insightful and persuasive...

...The hardest lesson may well be, as Cooper says, to know what one has to do for oneself, even if the notion does go against the grain of Western thought as it has come to us throughout these millennia...

...Women will feel free to respond or not to their wailing children, and will satisfy themselves easily that to look to their own immediate wishes will work to the advantage of all concerned...

...Now, of course, we may make a number of smaller observations, decidedly less dramatic, less categorical, such as that children do not develop a sufficient sense of what they can do when everything is done for them for too long a time, or that mothers who become too exclusively involved in the nurturance of their children frequently resent them when they grow independent and generally capable...

...The hardest lesson of all is to know what one has to do for oneself...

...Worse yet, is it the sort of reality that can be so readily dismissed in its disturbing aspects as it is by Cooper: "The infant may need, in her or his time, to experience frustration, desperation, and finally a full-scale experience of depression...

...No more will a child witness his mother turning from her own needs, even momentarily, to cater to his, as though being his mother could somehow have an importance transcending her selfhood...

...Why, we are compelled to ask, should these Spockian children find it so easy to rebel, and why are they turned off by the very things they know they can obtain and achieve if only they press on...

...The consequence of this is what is superficially defined as greater "permissiveness," but from an internal perspective is actually more totalitarian—the child no longer has a private sphere, but has his entire being involved with parental aspirations...

...Slater, in a critique of the child-rearing practices associated with Dr...

...What confuses us about this is that a generation into whom the internal controls have been so soundly built should be so rebellious, so dissatisfied...

...in place of a massive equalization of priorities in which all options are viewed as equally desirable, possible, and healthy, we'd anticipate a rig 60 orous hierarchization in which value would be attached only to those things that validated an individual's energy, creativity, intellectual breadth, and so on...

...Cooper that infants frequently cry because they have cramps or are cold or hungry...

...We want to remember, too, that what is real is subject to change, but that change is something we will best consider in the context of enduring values to which we may feel committed, and which seem still worthy of honor...

...What I have said thus far may give the impression that I have something against play, against the free movement of the instincts...

...Dr...