Another triumph of the divorce generation

[fpb]

According to a recent piece of research that the BBC is heavily publicizing, one good third of British teen-agers do not consider their parents people they admire or want to imitate. Even disregarding the obvious notion of teen-age rebellion, this is rather a worrying number. However, the BBC does not draw one clear conclusion from it: if teen-agers have learned to despise or disregard their own parents, does that have nothing to do with the prevalence of divorce? Does it have nothing to do with Mother telling them all kinds of awful things about Fathers, and Father teaching them to hate Mother, and both of them instructing them to repeat the same stories in the divorce court? Stories the more damaging because they were often based on some truths - Father and Mother knew each other, after all, they knew how to defame each other in the most hurtful ways possible?

As I said elsewhere, the reasons for the prevalence of divorce are real and serious. But when you consider the damage it does, let alone the cost, is there no ground for a serious policy of reducing it?

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The link is right. The subject of the essay is the collapse of the relationship between men and women in the first half of the twentieth century. Read it, especially the closing paragraphs, with some care, and you will find that it has everything to do with divorce.

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

Apologies.

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

Having now read your article properly, I see where you are coming from.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It's like this: for most of history, and even in the most misogynous societies - such as ancient Greece - there was a specific female sphere of action, activity and even power, namely the house. Servants and maids made this into a small society by itself, and gave them interests in life, things to do, a respected and necessary role. Technology has destryed this whole social area - only the super-rich now have real servant staffs, and they are mercenaries drawn from distant countries such as the Philippines, not local girls and boys apt to marry each other and start local businesses - reducing even well-off housewives to the level of solitary and irrelevant social atoms. The role of housewife now has a lot less life in it than that of mistress of the house had a century or two ago, and as a result women want out of it.

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

There are other factors that, I would say, have also led to Women wanting out of the role of 'Mistress of the House", the availability of higher education and equal pay for equal work, for example.

Are you offering your theory as an explanation of something that has happened, or are you suggesting that we need to return to simpler times to reduce the divorce rate?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That' s unhistorical. First, the introduction of technology released millions of women for paid employment. Then - at least two generations later - the scandal of different pay rates for men and women became obvious, and the trades unions - which originally had not even welcomed female employment - finally set about setting it right. The presence of millions of women in the workplace, you ought to see, is the pre-condition for finding differential rates of pay unfair, as well as for having the ability to do something about it. I do not believe that equal pay became an issue until the late sixties, whereas mass female employment had been a feature of the landscape since the First World War.

And I would ask you to beware of cliches. I was not speaking about "mistress of the house"; most women never did reach that exalted position - they were not born to it, for one thing. However, both servants and mistresses and anyone in the intermediate area - governesses, poor relations, nurses, etc. - shared a common area of activity, of interest, of fulfilling social life, with friendships and hates, feuds and reconciliations, dramas and comedies, a real life. The rivalry between the parlourmaids, the bad character of the cook, the supposed affairs of the pretty between-maid with the mistress' younger son (love affairs between upstairs and downstairs were so frequent as to become a cliche'), the unfairness of the mistress and the bad influence of her spinster sisters, were enough to fill days and lives, just as such things fill the lives of bloggers now. That it matters to nobody but them does not matter, so long as it matters to them. It is a life, and, between work and society, a full one. What I tried to point out in the Snow-White essay is that the vanishing of the female-based domestic society left much of the female life feeling increasingly false and empty; women came to depreciate it just as much as men already had, and began to cast their idea of "liberation" into a conquest of those active and satisfying male preserves, which had not been destroyed by social change, namely work, sports, clubs and male social life, even the army and the church. Very few women before the eighteen-nineties would have told you they felt oppressed; many of them would have laughed at the suggestion - "if anything, it is I who oppress my husband!" And indeed, a good deal of the male areas, especially pubs and clubs, had the sense of being places of refuge from female predominance.

The collapse of the extended family with servants, due entirely to the progress of technology, changed this balance completely. You can follow it in the image of women in fiction: the women of Wilkie Collins and Trollope (Dickens is a case apart) are ten times as adult and powerful as the flappers of the twenties, let alone Snow-White.

Cliches?

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

Should I beware of cliches, even when they are yours?

"The role of housewife now has a lot less life in it than that of mistress of the house had a century or two ago, and as a result women want out of it".

Re: Cliches?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That was poorly phrased, but I tried to make it clear from the beginning that I was speaking about the whole female world of the household.

Re: Cliches?

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

It was clear, I just couldn't resist a wee poke.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You have to remember that the Western woman always did have powers of her own. Let me tell you a story that sums up a few facts I learned from Bernard Lewis, the great Arab/Muslim historian. When, after the French invasion of Egypt and the British conquest of India, the Muslim ruling classes began to realize that they had been completely outpowered by infidels from the thus far despised Europe, they began to study them with a care they had never before given them. From about 1810 on, dozens if not hundreds of upper-class travellers from Muslim countries, mostly highly educated and intelligent, visited all Europe in search of the secret of the West. They emphasized all sorts of things: the organization of the military, the political system, the property laws, the technological advance and the legal institutions that underlay it, the transportation, the mentality, even the sports and music. (In about 1838, the Sultan of Turkey hired the brother of the Italian composer Donizetti to establish and run an Imperial Military Band, which apparently Mr.Donizetti did with great success.) But practically every single one of these travellers, reporting home, stressed one thing: "You," they said to their fellow-countrymen, "are wasting the energies of one half of your people." They saw, and wondered, that aristocratic European women sat at dinner with their men and discussed all sorts of things with them, including politics and business. They saw that when someone was invited somewhere, it was the mistress of the house, and not the master, who was the host. They saw that European women could own, buy and sell property, go out on their own, own and run businesses, write and publish (a particularly precious evidence of status in the eyes of a Muslim), run schools and teach, even, in some countries and sects, preach. All these things were accessible to most women, in most of Europe, before 1850. That the women of the West have become more powerful is due to the fact that they always have been powerful. In the late 1700s, for a while, the two most powerful leaders of the West were two formidable women, Maria Theresa of Habsburg and Catherine II of Russia, both wearing the title of Emperess in their own right and the only ones in their time to claim it. Since the Middle Ages at least, European women have owned large estates, governed states, led armies (Joan of Arc was only untypical in that she was not a noblewoman), owned and ran businesses, held official posts, been governors and diplomats.

Another cliche' is "a return to simpler times." We live in simpler times now. The Victorian or Georgian household was an infinitely more organized and demanding environment than most people experience today. So that makes your question pointless. But in so far as it has a point, we cannot go back in time. That road is blocked. Anything that happens now will not, except superficially, have the character of a restoration.