OLD TIME VALUES

Lawyer-turned-freelance writer Charlotte Allen brought a wholly unexpected message to the College of William & Mary on March 29 and 30. Traditional manners and extended families allowed women more freedom, privacy, power and self-worth than they gain from the fragmented families and communities produced by the modern "cult of self-fulfillment," she argued.

Extended families have been the basic social unit worldwide and throughout history, even when people physically reside in nuclear households, Allen claimed, citing several studies. People in such families have important relationships with different family members, so that their self-worth and contentment do not depend on a lifelong emotional and intellectual romance with their spouses. Allen described a way of life that is now largely abandoned. It was characterized by families bound by duty and necessity rather than by a quest for self-fulfillment. They were economically productive units in which women did socially respected work in or near the home, children helped with chores, and older people helped raise children. Allen read an excerpt by feminist author Germaine Greer that described a mid-20th-Century Italian family. The married couple grew apart as their romance wore off, but maintained a web of relationships with in-laws, siblings and parents. In contrast, Allen explained, American women who moved to the suburbs after World War II found themselves isolated from any extended family or community. Their only long-term relationships were within the household, and they were forced into inescapable intimacy with only one person. Their husbands became their only source of adult conversation.          

OLD TIME VALUES
Suddenly, women began noticing that men weren't "supportive," or "responsive," and didn't share their feelings. Their discontent focused on the only family relationships they had left. Middle-class women and young people began emphasizing "self-fulfillment" and "feelings," and eventually every generation embraced the new value structure. Baby boomers retained the emotional desires of adolescents well into middle age. Older people gathered in their own communities and no longer had much influence on the young. Today's youth are the first generation to be raised within the "cult of self-fulfillment" rather than being converted to it. They are a "Me Generation" upon a "Me Generation," Allen warned. They are both frightened and frightening. Now "we have no traditional customs" because contact between the generations has withered, Allen continued. People "have to reinvent everything" for themselves. Marriage, childbirth, child-raising and aging are wholly new and terrifying experiences, rather than basic, familiar phases of life. The postwar move from settled extended families and neighborhoods also put women's working lives and self-esteem in crisis, Allen said. Women's work maintaining the household came to be seen as second-class drudgery, a mere support system for the breadwinner. They were not respected unless they had a career. By now, said Allen, every woman is expected to be a "Superwoman" who does it all, balancing a full career and a happy family. Even when this model satisfies the needs of some upper middle-class women, she noted, it is imposed much more rigorously on working-class women, who have less to gain from being expected to work outside the home. The 'Superwoman' model has eroded respect for single women, as well, Allen claimed. Until recently, unmarried career women were able to do great things that they couldn't have done while raising a family. They seemed self-assured, well-respected by their male peers, and were often closely involved in their extended family. Now, Allen said, if a woman has no husband or no children, people think there is something wrong with her. Successful working women, she continued, pursue marriage far past the point of diminishing returns. Allen also read extensively from Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, the autobiography of Florence King, who is the National Review's spinster columnist.