More Carlson
[Caleb Stegall  03/09 06:00 PM]

More from the article cited below:

The politicization of America’s family crisis did not begin during, say, the late 1960s. It goes back at least one hundred years, to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. The scourge of divorce (the Reno divorce mills were up and running by then), the immorality of birth control, the dangers of equity feminism, the peril of shrinking family size and depopulation: all drew Mr. Roosevelt’s frequent and often eloquent commentary between 1900 and 1919.

Roosevelt crafted his own ideology of the hearth, resting on the political and legal equality of women and men and their necessary complementarity in function. Indeed, he equated traditional familism with Americanism: “[I]n all the world there is no better and healthier home life, no finer factory of individual character, nothing more representative of what is best and most characteristic in American life, than that which exists in the higher type of family; and this higher type of family is to be found everywhere among us.”

And yet Roosevelt was nearly unique among early twentieth-century Republican leaders. The dominant spirit in the GOP came from the great bankers, financiers, and manufacturers who made up the corporate-financial wing of the party. Its views on the family were very different. In 1904, the National Association of Manufacturers adopted resolutions designed to subvert the “family wage,” including: “No limitation should be placed upon the opportunities of any person to learn any trade to which he or she may be adapted.”

When equity feminists formed the National Woman’s Party in 1917, they, too, pushed for equal work and equal pay for women outside the home. (There is evidence to suggest that the National Association of Manufacturers secretly funded the party.) When this party drafted its proposed Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, it came as no surprise that the National Association of Manufacturers immediately endorsed it and that Republicans served as its chief sponsors in both the US House and Senate. The Republican party also was the first to endorse the ERA in its Platform.

The common goals of the equity feminists and big business—hostility to the “family wage”; the inclusion of all women, especially young mothers, in the labor market; the commodification of all human activity—made this a strong political alliance. Once the Birth Control League of America cleverly changed its name to Planned Parenthood, it, too, found a compatible home in the GOP; indeed, by the 1950s, Planned Parenthood was a favored charity among Republican women’s clubs.