In the Matriarchal System the reproductive unit consists of the mother and her offspring, the father playing a marginal role, wandering into and out of the "family," subject to dismissal at the mother's bidding. The central fact about this kind of family is its naturalness. Roman jurists spoke of maternity as a natural fact, "natura verum," and of paternity as merely a matter of civil law. "In all but a few species," writes Sarah Hardy, "females are permanent residents in social groups, males mere transients." This is the reproductive arrangement of all lower mammals. It has been the reproductive arrangement of the human race itself until recently. Its biological backup is awesome--what Margaret Mead meant by saying the female role is a "biological fact."

It is the reproductive pattern which re-emerges in times of social catastrophe. When men are killed on battlefields or cast into prisons, female-headed families carry on. When there is divorce, the mother takes custody of the children. When ghetto males sit on curbsides and get stoned, ghetto females and children stay home and watch T.V. The matriarchal family may result from catastrophe, but it may also result from doing nothing, from biological and social drifting. It is always on standby, always waiting to resurface and re-establish itself. It is what society lapses into when the upkeep and maintenance of the patriarchal system is neglected. It is the pattern which is re-emerging at the present time under the aegis of the feminist/sexual revolution.

It is the pattern found in surviving Stone Age societies. A 19th century German ship's doctor described the situation in the German African colony of Cameroon thus:

With a large number of tribes, inheritance is based on maternity. Paternity is immaterial. Brothers and sisters are only the children of one mother. A man does not bequeath his property to his children, but to the children of his sister, that is to say, to his nephews and nieces, as his nearest demonstrable blood relatives. A chief of the Way people explained to me in horrible English: "My sister and I are certainly blood relatives, consequently her son is my heir; when I die, he will be the king of my town." "And your father?" I inquired. "I don't know what that means, 'my father,' answered he. Upon my putting to him the question whether he had no children, rolling on the ground with laughter, he answered that, with them, men have no children, only women.

"Originally," writes W. Robertson Smith, "there was no kinship except in the female line and the introduction of male kinship was a kind of social revolution which modified society to its very roots." "Kinship through females," says John McLennan, must be a more archaic system of relationship than kinship through males--the product of an earlier and ruder stage in human development than the latter--somewhat more than a step farther back in the direction of savagery. To prove its existence on such a scale as to entitle it to rank among the normal phenomena of human development, is, we may now say, to prove it the most ancient system of kinship." "Wherever non-advancing communities are to be found," he informs us, "--isolated in islands or maintaining their savage liberties in mountain fastnesses--there to this day exists the system of kinship through females only." "The maternal totemic clan," writes Robert Briffault in reference to this female-headed reproductive unit and to the larger matrilineal ties it creates,

was by far the most successful form that human association has assumed--it may indeed be said that it has been the only successful one....All human associations that have subsequently arisen have been bound by loose and feeble ties compared with the primitive maternal clan. Political organizations, religious theocracies, States, nations, have endeavored in vain to achieve real and complete social solidarity. They are artificial structures; social humanity has never succeeded in adequately replacing the primitive bond to which it owes its existence. Even those loyalties which took its place have now to a large extent lost their reality, and individualistic interests rule supreme. Human society finds itself in the precarious position of being no longer held together by those bonds of sentiment which constitute the distinction between a social group and an aggregate of individuals.

The term "family" properly refers to the male-headed patriarchal unit. "The relations arising out of the reproductive functions, which constitute the only analogue of social relations to be found in the animal world," says Briffault,

differ conspicuously from those generally connoted by the term "family." That term stands, in the tradition of civilised societies, for a group centering round the interests, activities, and authority of a dominant male. The husband is the head of the family; the other members of the group, wife and children, are his dependents and subordinates. The corresponding group arising out of the reproductive functions among animals presents no trace of that constitution. It consists of the mother and her offspring. The male, instead of being the head and supporter of the group, is not an essential member of it, and more often than not is altogether absent from it. He may join the maternal family, but commonly does not. When he attaches himself to the female's family his association with it is loose and precarious. He has no functional place in it. The parental relation is confined to that between mother and brood. Paternity does not exist. The family among animals is not, as the human family is supposed to be, the result of the association of male and female, but is the product of the maternal functions. The mother is the sole centre and bond of it. There is no division of labour between the sexes in procuring the means of subsistence. The protective functions are exercised by the female, not by the male. The abode, movements, and conduct of the group are determined by the female alone. The animal family is a group produced not by the sexual, but by the maternal impulses, not by the father, but by the mother.

"In the great majority of uncultured societies," writes Arthur Evans, "women enjoy a position of independence and of equality with the men and exercise an influence which would appear startling in the most feministic modern civilized society." "Women," he adds,

had a very high status in the Stone Age, as we have seen. Archeology, myth and comparison to still existing nature societies all point to their dominant position.

He quotes Jacquetta Hawks:

There is every reason to suppose that under the life conditions of the primary Neolithic way of life, mother-right and the clan system were still dominant [as they had been in the paleolithic period], and land would generally have descended through the female line. Indeed, it is tempting to be convinced that the earliest Neolithic societies throughout their range in time and space gave woman the highest status she has ever known.

The matriarchal family pattern is being restored by the welfare system, by the feminist/sexual revolution, by women's growing economic independence and by the legal preference for mother-custody following divorce. Writing of the educated and economically independent women created by women's liberation, Elizabeth Nickles and Laura Ashcraft say, "The Matriarchal woman who finds that her relation with a man is undermining her sense of self-esteem will not consider it necessary to cling to the relation for the traditional reasons, and she will have the self-sufficiency to stand on her own." Because "the Matriarchal woman" can afford it, she reverts to the mammalian/matriarchal family pattern. The choice is hers; the father has nothing to say about it. She knows she has the chivalrous support of lawmakers and judges who suppose that a biological fact needs the help of lawyers, whereas merely social arrangements such as the marriage contract do not--these can be set aside if Mom decides they should be set aside. The result: educated, economically independent women have a divorce rate five times greater than the fifty percent divorce rate of other women. The man who marries such a woman will find himself without bargaining power and, if his wife chooses, without children, without home, without a large part of his future income. "In the coming matriarchy," continue Nickles and Ashcraft,

families will be thought of as sets of divers individuals rather than homogeneous social clusters, and the definition of "family" will broaden to include many kinds of living arrangements, as is happening now without widespread social recognition. We may see the advent of the rotational family, in which there is no single, stable cast of characters for a lifetime, but rather a series of individuals--male and female- -who will be added to or phased out of a continually reconstituted family unit as the needs, interests, and emotional commitments of the couple, individual, or group dictate. The first five years of a woman's adult life may be spent living with male and female roommates; the next five years with a male mate; the next five with a husband and a child; the next three with two female friends, and so on. This pattern is already emerging, but when it occurs on a large scale, we will see the rotational family replacing the nuclear family as the status quo.

The family pattern is called "rotational," but it does its rotating around the fixed figure of Mom, who remains at its center while males make their entrances, do their orbiting, and make their exits. It is the pattern of the Hopi Indians, of whom Fred Eggan gives the following description:

The central core or axis of the household is composed of a line of women--a segment of a lineage. All the members of the segment, male and female, are born in the household and consider it their home, but only the women normally reside there after marriage. The men of the lineage leave at marriage to reside in the households of their wives, returning to their natal home on various ritual and ceremonial occasions, or in case of separation or divorce, which is frequent. Into the household in turn come other men through marriage....The household revolves about a central and continuing core of women; the men are peripheral with divided residences and loyalties.

A. I. Richards calls this pattern the "institution of the visiting husband or the visiting brother," and remarks that the pattern is characterized by unstable marriages: "A man who cannot stand the situation in his wife's village leaves and goes elsewhere. This might be described as the solution of the detachable husband."

It is the pattern of the ghettos, where illegitimacy now exceeds 50 percent and where men and boys grow increasingly roleless and violent--and where women live in poverty and complain of their insufficient subsidization. It is the pattern of increasing numbers of households in the larger society. According to the Washington-based National Center for Policy Alternatives, 40 percent of girls in school today will be heads of households. "Ten percent of the nation's families are headed only by a woman," writes Joreen, "but 40 percent of the families classified as poor have female heads." Implying, naturally, that society should do more to help these poor Moms and their kids. The matriarchal days of the Stone Age are thus nostalgically described by feminist Marilyn French:

From 3.5 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago, was a peaceful period, when "marriage" was informal, casual.... Yes, there was a garden and in it we gathered fruits and vegetables and sang to the moon and played and worked together and watched the children grow. For the most part life was good, and we made art and rituals celebrating our participation in the glorious spectacle and process of life within nature.

Referring to those same happy days, feminist Evelyn Reed writes,

A woman did not need a husband as a means of support; she was herself economically independent as a producing member of the community. This gave women, like men, the freedom to follow their personal inclinations in sex relations. A woman had the option of remaining for life with one husband, but she was not under any legal, moral or economic compulsion to do so.

This freedom was destroyed with the advent of class society, private property and monogamous marriage.

It was destroyed by the advent of class society, private property, monogamous marriage and the creation of wealth and civilization which stable marriage made possible. The promiscuity which characterizes the matriarchal system denies men a secure role within families and the motivation provided by that secure role. The absence of that motivation is why the ghettos are the mess they are--why the women of the ghettos enjoy the "freedom to follow their personal inclinations in sex relations," but find that the families in which they enjoy their freedom are impoverished and underachieving. Ms. Reed lauds the freedom of such women. But there is a complementary freedom which is denied them. If they exercise their freedom to be promiscuous, they cannot enter into a stable and binding contract to share their reproductive lives with men who need to rely on their loyalty and chastity as a precondition for having legitimate children and stable families. Once women get the freedom to make the marriage contract non-binding, then they may suppose they have the "option" of either remaining for life with one husband or of not so remaining, but since the husband has no comparable option--the woman's freedom includes the freedom to throw the man out and take his children from him (and in the American matriarchy to take part of his paycheck as well)--the man is forced to share the woman's view of the marriage as non-binding. He becomes roleless and de-motivated, likely to become a drifter or a disrupter of society, likely to be regarded by women as poor marriage material, to be pointed to by feminists as proving the anti-sociality of males and the need for more feminism.

"If motherhood and sexuality were not wedged resolutely apart by male culture," says Adrienne Rich (she means wedged resolutely together), "if women could choose both the forms of our sexuality and the terms of our motherhood or non-motherhood freely, women might achieve genuine sexual autonomy." Quite so. Women are choosing it and thereby wrecking the patriarchal system. It is the declared purpose of feminists (including Ms. Rich) to do so. "Our liberation as women and as lesbians," write Barbara Love and Elizabeth Shanklin,

will never be accomplished until we are liberated to be mothers. Until we have the power to define the conditions under which we exercise our biological potential, until we define for ourselves the role of motherhood to include the power to determine the conditions of motherhood and to determine the environment in which our children are reared, we have no real choice. And until we have choices, we are not free.

The legal system, which divorces the parents of l.2 million children every year, and the welfare system which subsidizes the needs of 700,000 children born to unmarried mothers each year, are helping them to achieve this freedom--and passing the costs on to the shrinking numbers of patriarchal families. Only a fraction of those costs consists of immediate money payments. "The vast majority of neurotics," writes John MacArthur, "both children and adults, grew up in homes where there was no father, or the father was absent or weak, and the mother was domineering." A disproportionate amount of child abuse takes place in female-headed families. According to Neal R. Pearce, "there is a strong correlation between the single-parent family and child abuse, truancy, substandard achievement in school and high unemployment and juvenile delinquency." Most victims of child molestation come from single parent households or are the children of drug ring members. The pattern among victims parallels that among offenders. Researchers at North Florida Evaluation and Treatment Center report that "the pattern of the child molester is characterized by a singular degree of closeness and attachment to the mother." Feminist Carolyn Shaw Bell proposes "a special tax to pay for the total welfare benefits of families headed by women, and sufficient to increase these benefits so as to wipe out the income differential between poor children with only a mother and well-off children with two parents. The tax would be levied on all men." Feminists believe that the patriarchy ought to subsidize its own destruction by paying women to create fatherless families. According to Martha Sawyer, a Ph.D candidate at Howard University, the costs of these fatherless families should be paid by "the most advantaged category, monied white men." Paid, that is, by men who retain a niche in the patriarchal system which creates the wealth.

"What would it have been like," ask feminists Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor,

if patriarchy had never happened? To get an idea, we have to comprehend the first law of matriarchy: Women control our own bodies. This would seem a basic premise of any fully evolved human culture; which is why primate patriarchy is based on its denial.

The process of redefinition begins with women reclaiming total sexual and reproductive autonomy; for if the female body can be controlled or used, in any way, from the outside--via exploitive definitions or systems--then so, it follows, can everything else. (The definition and use of the female body is the paradigm for the definition and use of all things; if the autonomy of the female body is defined as sacred, then so will be the autonomy of all things.) Patriarchal men have tried to pretend that males can be "free" while females can be dominated and enslaved; just as white imperialists have pretended that they can be "independent and soulful" beings in private life, while publicly colonizing and brutalizing darker peoples.

Now here's how it is [writes black feminist Patricia Robinson]. Poor black men won't support their families, won't stick by their women--all they think about is the street, dope and liquor, women, a piece of ass, and their cars. That's all that counts. Poor black women would be fools to sit up in the house with a whole lot of children and eventually go crazy, sick, heartbroken, no place to go, no sign of affection--nothing.

Ms. Robinson's complaint is that men won't love, honor and protect their families--which is patriarchy. She cannot see that the first law of matriarchy has deprived these men of families and therefore of the motivation which would keep them working. When Othello becomes convinced of his wife's unchastity he bids farewell to his profession: "Othello's occupation's gone!"

Here's an example of how the Promiscuity Principle [identical with the first law of matriarchy] works, from Ann Landers' advice column in the Los Angeles Times of l November, 1988:

DEAR ANN: I'm writing this letter in the hope that you can help me. You have access to the best doctors and I am ashamed to talk to anybody I know.

I recently had a baby but I don't know who the father is. She looks like me. I had sex with Guy No. 1 on May 7, Guy No. 2 on May 14 and 15 and Guy No. 3 on May 27. I had my last period on May 1.

I never had any problem with my pregnancy and the baby came right on my due date, which was Feb. 7. She is adorable and I don't regret having her, but I would sure like to know who the father is.

My friends tell me I'm entitled to support money but I can't bring a guy into court unless I'm pretty sure I know what I'm talking about. Thanks for your help, Ann.

The Promiscuity Principle entitles her to paternity suit income. It is her right to control her own sexual behavior--including the right not to use contraceptives--and to impose the economic costs upon one of her sex partners--if the District Attorney can round up her playmates, compel them to take blood tests, and identify the lucky one. Then her sexual irresponsibility will pay off and reinforce society's acceptance of the first law of matriarchy, otherwise known as the Promiscuity Principle. The identified boyfriend will be reduced to years of involuntary servitude for the benefit of another person--slavery.

The feminist will insist that the boyfriend is equally responsible with the mother for the procreation of the illegitimate child and therefore equally bound to pay for its costs. Not so in the patriarchal system. Patriarchy divides women into good and bad, those who accept the Sexual Constitution (sexual law-and-order, monogamy, the Legitimacy Principle, the double standard, etc.) and those who reject it. This woman rejects it, and she is "bad" because she denies to a man the possibility of having responsible sex with her even if he wants to. Her unchastity deprives her child of a father and deprives men of the possibility of being a father to her children. She can have a sexual relationship only with a man as irresponsible as herself. She is a sexual Typhoid Mary who has inflicted illegitimacy upon a child and seeks to ameliorate what she has done by demanding to be paid for it. She will plead as justification that "there is no such thing as an illegitimate child," signifying there is no such thing as an unchaste woman.

Ramsey Clark assures us that "Women are not a threat to the public." This woman is. She has procreated a fatherless child several times more likely to become a delinquent. If the courts adopt the proposals of Senator Moynihan and Professor Barbara Bergmann and other feminists to garnish the paycheck of her child's father, he will become a less employable, less motivated, less marriageable, less productive member of society. He may drop out of the taxable/garnishable economy altogether and enter the underground economy, or become parasitic upon a female AFDC recipient--the pattern found in millions of ghetto households. The program for making men economically responsible for procreation outside of the Sexual Constitution has the effect of making them irresponsible within it. (Also it doesn't work--most men will evade its sanctions.)

The workability of the patriarchal system requires the regulation of female sexuality, including the enforcing of the double standard. In no other way can men participate meaningfully in reproduction. A woman violates the Sexual Constitution by being promiscuous. A man violates it by refusing to provide for his family. The new feminist sexual order proposes that women shall be free to be promiscuous and that the social disruption thereby created shall be made tolerable by compelling men to provide for non-families. But men cannot be held responsible for female irresponsibility if this irresponsibility prevents them from having families to begin with; and it is for this reason that patriarchy holds a man responsible only for the subsidization of a wife, a "good" woman who accepts the Sexual Constitution and her obligation under it to bear only legitimate children. The historical development of this arrangement in the second millennium B. C. is thus described by Dr. Gerda Lerner:

As we compare the legal and social position of women in Mesopotamian and Hebrew societies, we note similarities in the strict regulation of women's sexuality and in the institutionalization of a sexual double standard in the law codes. In general, the married Jewish woman occupied an inferior position to that of her counterpart in Mesopotamian societies. Babylonian women could own property, sign contracts, take legal action, and they were entitled to a share in the husband's inheritance. But we must also note a strong upgrading of the role of women as mothers in the Old Testament....This is quite in line with the general stress on the family as the basic unit of society, which we have also noted in Mesopotamian society at the time of state formation.

The more important point is the upgrading of the role of men as fathers--which is to say the strengthening of the family's weakest link, the father's role, which depends in turn upon "the strict regulation of women's sexuality" which today's feminists seek to get rid of. The "time of state formation" [read: the creation of civilization] was the time which stressed the family as the basic unit of society, just as today's social and sexual anarchy is the time which stresses women's desire to wreck the family and return to "beena marriage,...a form of marriage which allows the woman greater autonomy and which makes divorce easier for her." This is the arrangement Ann Landers' correspondent is interested in, one with sexual freedom and no responsibilities-- plus the advantage of having bill-paying men around as long as they behave themselves and accept second class status.

"The various laws against rape," says Dr. Lerner, "all incorporated the principle that the injured party is the husband or the father of the raped woman." Feminists think this is outrageous. What it signifies is that the protection of female chastity is normally the function of the husband or the father--in contrast to the feminist Promiscuity Principle which declares that a woman's reproductive life is entirely her own business. The ancient Mesopotamian and Hebrew societies Dr. Lerner refers to stipulated that the law would interfere when the husband or father could not handle his own family matters, and when he delegated the responsibility to the state. The underlying difference of opinion between the feminist view and the Mesopotamian/Hebrew/patriarchal view is whether society should be understood as composed of families or of individuals. Those who today believe the latter might be asked whether sexual behavior is better regulated in the ghettos on the basis of the Promiscuity Principle than it was in the Kingdom of Hammurabi on the basis of the Legitimacy Principle. The Legitimacy Principle can only operate if its implementation is in the hands of men who conceive of it as operating to preserve their families and their meaningful role within them. It is the purpose of feminism to deny men this role.

Nothing has changed in four thousand years. In ancient Mesopotamia, as in the United States today, women were more concerned with maintaining their sexual autonomy, men more concerned with maintaining the integrity of families, and per corollary the regulation of female chastity upon which the family depends. What Hammurabi's legislation shows is what contemporary lawmakers fail to see--that the Sexual Constitution is a male creation and must be supported by males. Men, not women, are the ultimate guardians of morality; and while men may delegate the responsibility to women (as in the Victorian age), when women subvert the moral order, men must reassert their responsibility to restore it.

"The discoverers of the matrikinship system," says Evelyn Reed,

correctly inferred it to be a survival from a prefamily period when, as some put it, "fathers were unknown." They reasoned that cases where kinship ties and the line of descent passed through the mothers, without recognizing fathers, were evidence that the matriclan had existed before the father- family. The matrikinship system persists up to our times in many primitive regions, even where fathers have become known.

This persistence is, of course, the chief reason why these regions are primitive.

Jamaica is a another textbook case. "Many Jamaican women live alone," says Honor Ford Smith, artistic director of Sistren, a women's cultural organization there.

When I say alone, what I mean is live without a man. It's often one woman with a lot of children in the house. But unlike many societies there has been a tradition of women being able to live without men and without living within the bosom of the extended family. So that there's been a tradition of independent women living on their own, but the price that traditionally women have paid for that is that they then have to become the sole supporters of their children....But it brings with it certain benefits in the sense that unlike in the Middle East, or say Asia, some other countries, it's possible to not be ostracized for having many sexual partners, it's possible to live a little independently, to dress in certain ways, to move differently than has been traditionally possible in European or Asian societies.

Jamaican women practice the first law of matriarchy and thereby deny a meaningful role to males, many of whom become anti- social:

The situation of women has gotten worse in many ways. If you look at some of the so-called traditional indicators of progress, which is employment, etc., the situation of women hasn't gotten any better. It's got worse....In terms of the streets, in times gone by, in days of yore, women controlled the streets. Now the streets is not a woman's domain. Violence of Jamaican society which is virtually taken for granted by everybody. I myself am looking for a place to live with grills [iron bars over the windows for security] everywhere at the moment....For a lot of women it is a matter of you can't go out of the house after six o'clock, you must get home before dark, if you go to the theatre they have a special six o'clock matinee which is almost completely attended by women because that is the time when they have to go out. So that is a situation which has gotten much worse, too....Of course the level of sexual violence has increased so much that now the streets are not the domain of women, certainly the docks aren't.

The violence is male violence, a fact heavily emphasized in feminist propaganda, which calls it patriarchal violence. But these violent males are not patriarchs; they are exiles from the patriarchal system, males denied a meaningful role by the first law of matriarchy. "The role of the male," says George Gilder, "is the Achilles' heel of civilized society....The man still needs to be tamed." The man's violence needs to be tamed, no doubt, so that his energies may channeled into a useful direction rather than becoming destructive. But the taming and channeling are impossible without a meaningful male role; and since the first law of matriarchy denies men that meaningful role, the female is as much in need of taming as the male.

According to Carl Williams, head of California's Workfare program, the unmarried teen-age motherhood resulting from the first law of matriarchy burdens the welfare system and contributes to illiteracy. 60 percent of California women under 30 who are now on public assistance began receiving welfare as teen-agers. 57 percent of them cannot read, write, add or subtract well enough to get a job or train for one.

The males procreated by these sexually liberated females, males exploited in feminist propaganda as illustrating male anti- sociality, could better be used as illustrations of female socialization. A survey of 108 rapists undertaken by Raymond A. Knight and Robert A. Prentky, revealed that 60 percent came from female-headed homes, that 70 percent of those describable as "violent" came from female-headed homes, that 80 percent of those motivated by "displaced anger" came from female-headed homes.

The first law of matriarchy implies the right of one woman to undermine the marriage of another woman. According to Laurel Richardson, a Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University, many liberated professional women prefer affairs with married men-- they're less time-consuming. Unfortunately for them, however, they usually get so involved that they "lose control" over the relationships, which "end up benefiting the men more than the women," surely no part of any feminist's intention.

The first law of matriarchy is good for the abortion business. It is projected that 46 percent of today's teen-age girls will have had an abortion by the age of 45.

Thanks to the first law of matriarchy, births out of wedlock have increased more than 450 percent in thirty years, with obvious consequences for the welfare system. According to Gary L. Bauer,

We know that women who receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits when they are less than 25 years old remain dependent on AFDC for long periods of time. In fact, 70 percent received AFDC for at least five years; more than one-third got it for at least 10 years.

Raised in an environment in which fathers don't provide for their young and dependency on government is assumed, few children will develop the skills of self-sufficiency, or even the concept of personal responsibility. Young men will not strive to be good providers and young women will not expect it of their men. Family breakdown becomes cyclical, out-of-wedlock births become cyclical, poverty and dependence becomes cyclical. And the culture of poverty grows.

Bauer quotes Charles Murray:

For the young woman who is not pregnant, "enabling" means she does not ask, "Do I want a welfare check badly enough to get pregnant?" but rather, "If I happen to get pregnant, will the consequences really be so bad?"

We are talking here about woman as function. We are talking here about fulfilling others' ideas about what one should be fitted for and for what one exists. Worse, we are talking here not about love, faith or goodness, but about fitting into the structures that others decide for you. We are talking about control.

To put it frankly, this kind of "concern" about one's chances at marriage is about ways of controlling women.

Marriage can be one kind of love, and at best it certainly is one of the two or three greatest kinds. But when dealt with in terms of controlling a woman, it becomes the antithesis of love and fulfillment.

Controlling a woman, she says. But the man equally submits to control; and one of the persistent demands of feminists is that the woman's emancipation from control by divorce shall not emancipate the man, but obligate him to make her "independent" of him by giving her alimony and child support money. The statistics on the unmarriageability of educated and economically independent women are factual. Ms. Geyer resents them because they suggest the advisability of women accepting a degree of sexual regulation. She wants female behavior thought of "in positive and freeing terms rather than in negative and controlling terms." One might describe a train which jumps its tracks as behaving in a "positive and freeing" way and a train which remains on the tracks as behaving in a "negative and controlling" way. The feminist would respond that women are not machines, but the comparison will stand for all that. Women (and men) require socialization as much as trains require rails if they are to avoid catastrophe. Controlling women (and men) is not the "antithesis" but the precondition of "love and fulfillment" as well as of social stability and civilization.

Let's consider a specific case. Brandon Tholmer, 29, killer of four women, suspected killer of eight others. Tholmer is illegitimate, but that's OK, because, as Ms. Phyllis Chesler says, "every child has the right to be wanted." It doesn't occur to Ms. Chesler that the best way of insuring this right is for him to have a father who would want him, protect him and provide for him. Anyway, Tholmer's Mom practices the first law of matriarchy and her kid is a killer. The jury which convicts him takes only an hour to decide that he should not go to the gas chamber, because of his "upbringing." According to a juror "there was nobody who took any interest in him. He had suffered most of his life." He came from a broken home and from the age of 8 was kicked out into the street at night. At age 11, he was put in a juvenile detention home by Mom, later sent to a state industrial school for stealing and loitering. He is "borderline retarded," a convicted mentally disordered sex offender, a rapist, a sodomite, an arsonist, a burglar. Blaming his "upbringing" signifies that the blame lies elsewhere, as indeed it does--with the acceptance by Tholmer's Mom and by society of the first law of matriarchy.

Another case. Dean Philip Carter is convicted of killing three women and suspected of killing two others. The evidence against him is overwhelming and his attorneys don't even try to refute it:

Relying instead [says the Los Angeles Times of 29 January, 1990] on an attempt to save him from the death penalty, defense attorney Howard Gillingham called 21 witnesses to testify about Carter's troubled childhood.

21 witnesses show that he had a troubled childhood and therefore is less culpable. Quite so. But who, then, is culpable for having inflicted the troubled childhood upon him? Part of the answer is to be inferred from the Los Angeles Times' assertion that Carter was "born the illegitimate son of a half-Eskimo woman in Nome, Alaska, on Aug. 30, 1955." Mom accepted the Promiscuity Principle and exercised her right to impose illegitimacy upon her boy, which placed him at greater risk of becoming a criminal, as the documentation given in the Annex to Chapter I shows.

Another case. Arlene W. of Wisconsin. "In the summer of 1977," writes feminist Phyllis Chesler, "Arlene W. met Red E. Early in 1978 Arlene became pregnant." Patriarchal socialization would have taught Arlene the importance of pre-nuptial chastity and would have prevented the tragedy which now unfolds. But patriarchal socialization is made inoperative by the first law of matriarchy.

Early in 1979, Red's paternity was established by the Welfare Department....Visitation was allowed....Red was physically abusive to both Arlene and [their daughter] Andrea during several visits. Arlene decided to refuse further visitation.

In the fall of 1980, Red legally demanded overnight visitation twice monthly. Judge John E. McCormick told Arlene to "give a man a second chance." He ordered visitation for one weekend day and one half weekday. Visitation began. At this point, Andrea started "acting out" behavior: aggressive hitting, crying, clinging, not sleeping, wetting herself, vomiting. Andrea complained of being hit by her father--and marks were detectable....The hospital report concluded that Andrea had been sexually abused....Arlene fled Wisconsin to her brother's home in the state of Washington....Police arrived with a warrant for Arlene's arrest. They separated her from her daughter, denied her bail and the use of the telephone, and jailed her for four days....Feminists, ministers, psychiatrists, incest victims, experts, academics, jurists, the department of social services--all launched a campaign against Arlene's extradition. Arlene's unedited "Chronology of Events" documents the profound isolation and vulnerability of a battered, unwed, and welfare dependent mother who has discovered paternal incest, and the state's absolute refusal to believe or assist her.

What the events document is the importance of not being an unwed mother. They also document the damage inflicted upon Arlene and Andrea by the first law of matriarchy and the incapacity of the legal system to patch up the mess created by Arlene's and Red's unchastity. Arlene is represented throughout Ms. Chesler's account as a victim. In fact she created her own miseries and those of her daughter.

The enforcing of the patriarchal sexual constitution in 1978 would have guaranteed, not infringed Arlene's autonomy, would have clarified her responsibility for the consequences of her sexual behavior--those she later tried (with the help of Ms. Chesler, and the feminists, ministers, psychiatrists, etc.) to blame society for. The whole thrust of Ms. Chesler's argument is that society should bail her out, thus legitimizing her unchastity in 1978. Little Andrea, whose life has been blighted by her mother's irresponsibility in disregarding the Legitimacy Principle, is put on display and her sufferings lamented in order to assist Ms. Chesler's program to further undermine the sexual constitution and the Legitimacy Principle and to promote more single motherhood, more feminism, more Andreas.

Ms. Chesler's point that the legal system is incompetent to do much for Arlene and Andrea is valid enough; but she chooses not to see how the mess she describes is created not by patriarchy but by the failure of patriarchy to regulate Arlene's behavior in 1978--by society's acquiescence in the first law of matriarchy.

The pattern being promoted by feminism is well summarized by a recent Canadian study of female offenders:

Among its findings in a survey of 100 women arrested, the majority had early sexual involvements, with over 40 percent reporting their first intercourse to have occurred between the ages of 10 and 15. Two thirds had children, but almost as many had never been married, and less than one in 10 was married at the time of her arrest. The majority, then, were single or divorced mothers. Most came from broken homes, with 73 percent of the women reporting problems such as one parent being absent all the time, divorce, foster homes, alcohol problems and child abuse. Mentally disturbed parents were common--indeed, female criminals had psychiatric problems in their immediate family twice as often as did male criminals. The authors speculate that "for women to break out of the traditional female role of compliance and passivity and become criminal they have to be products of a more disturbed background."

In response to suggestions that the feminist movement has brought "a new era of emancipated female offenders showing some of the same patterns as male offenders," the authors acknowledge many similarities. For example, about the same percentage of female criminals commit violent offenses as do males (although "women's victims more so than men's have trouble defending themselves--for example, children, intoxicated, asleep, infirm").

The authors resist describing women criminals as "emancipated," but what their study does describe--sexual promiscuity, divorce, women who act increasingly like men--are familiar results of the sexual revolution.

The problems created by the first law of matriarchy were predictable--female promiscuity and illegitimacy, male rolelessness and anti-sociality. With more illegitimacy, come more second generation crime, more educational failure, more demoralization, less motivation, less productivity, reduced self- esteem, less commitment to the future as evidenced by reduced accumulation of stabilizing (and garnishable) assets such as real estate, annuities, pensions, stock portfolios, savings accounts, insurance. More sexual confusion, more hedonism, more infantilism (of which non-commitment is a variety), more emotional shallowness. And, of course, in consequence of all of these, more family breakdown, more family non-formation, more demands for freebies from the government's Backup System (welfare, day care, workfare, wage-garnishment as a means of financing families--with the consequence of yet further fear of commitment to family living). And so on, without end, each attempt by the Backup System to patch up the mess created by family breakdown working to further undermine the male role, and with it the family.

"If women were really people," wrote Ms. Friedan in 1973, "-- no more, no less--then all the things that kept them from being full people in our society would have to be changed." "Full" means something like "without sex-role socialization." Along with the abandoning of this socialization for girls, there has been a complementary abandoning of the sex role socialization of boys. The results can be witnessed by anyone who takes a stroll across one of today's high school campuses. Such a stroll reveals that a majority of girls have become shallow, sassy tarts, a majority of boys little better than slobs with little self-discipline, little frustration-tolerance, little character, little inner-direction. Back in 1963, when Ms. Friedan unleashed feminism upon us with her book The Feminine Mystique, she said that her ideas "may disturb the experts and women alike, for they imply social change." The change has gone on long enough to permit an evaluation. Are women happier? Are men? Are children better mannered, better socialized? Is there more premarital sexual activity? More venereal disease? More single motherhood? More shacking-up? More adultery? Is the family more stable? Is educational performance superior to what it was in the early 1960s? (Remember that the original "new life plan for women" was a program of education.) Are there fewer school dropouts? Is the level of public debate more civilized, more mature? Are better young people choosing teaching as a career and providing youth with better instruction and better role models? Are the streets safer? Do the media reflect a growing refinement of taste and morality? Are more or fewer women living in poverty? In substance abuse? Are the relationships between the sexes more refined and civilized or more cynical, trivial and exploitive? Is there more or less cheating in classrooms, business relationships and tax forms and everywhere else? Have the costs of welfare, police and government increased or decreased? Do we get more or less in services for our tax dollar? Is there more or less trash deposited on our beaches? Are public parks more or less inviting places of recreation? Does the legal profession eat up more or less of our earnings? Is service more or less courteous than it was a quarter of a century ago? Social change indeed. There is no area in which the undermining of sex role socialization has not been disastrous.

Here is the way today's women are coming to perceive their responsibilities towards society and society's responsibilities to them. The speaker is Byllye Avery, Director of the National Black Women's Health Project: "I have a right to life, to a house, education, job, food, a good, high quality standard of living, and a right to control my reproduction." This is the fruition of Ms. Friedan's program to make women stand on their own feet--and make demands upon others.

Let us now turn from the two-hundred-million-year-old biologically based mammalian/matrilineal reproductive arrangement and examine the patriarchal system which succeeded it a few thousand years ago and made civilization possible--the artificial, fragile patriarchal arrangement designed to elevate male sperm- providers into fathers and to allow them an equal share in human reproduction. It is the purpose of the feminist/sexual revolution to do away with this manmade superstructure built on the foundation of female reproductive biology and to restore the original mammalian/matrilineal arrangement--a purpose only vaguely perceived by a minority of radical feminists and as yet uncomprehended by the patriarchal males whose responsibility it must be to restore and stabilize it.

Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Annex to chapter I
Additional note
References