The changing status of marriage in Sweden over the past 100 years can be summarized through five transitions:
From a regime where marriage was an open expression of Christian values with claims of its own to a regime that is intentionally secular and designed to protect the interests of the individual;
From a legal order that granted legal marriage special status to one granting nearly equivalent rights and obligations to non-marital cohabitation;
From a regime that assumed a breadwinning husband/father and a homemaking wife/mother to a regime giving priority to gender equality, universal adult employment, and self-support;
From a legal order that encouraged marriage as an economic partnership resting on a vital home economy to a regime dedicated to what one analyst calls “statisation,”[6] where the state deliberately takes over family functions, moves women into state employment and children into state care, encourages the economic independence of married adults, and crafts universal dependence on the welfare state;
And from a regime that presumed marriage to be exclusively heterosexual and monogamous to one that grants nearly equal status, benefits, and obligations to same-sex couples and—soon—to polygamous and other polyamorous arrangements, as well.
And from another speech on the same subject by the same author:
Dominant voices in the European Union believe that the country of Sweden has solved the population and family problems of modern societies. They argue that the depopulation which threatens all of the developed, industrial world has been countered in Sweden by an aggressive, feminist-inspired reconstruction of the family and by the single-minded pursuit of gender equality in all other aspects of social, cultural, and economic life.
These opinions are advanced by leading European policy experts with an almost religious zeal. As Jean-Claude Chesnois summarizes, “in Sweden, …empowerment of women insures against a very low birth rate.”[1]
With Sweden especially in mind, sociologist Peter McDonald asserts that “[i]n a context of high gender equity in individual-oriented institutions, higher gender equity in family-oriented institutions will tend to raise fertility.”[2] J.M. Hoem links Sweden’s success to a “softening” of “the effects of women’s labor force participation on their life sufficiently to reduce the inherent role conflict [relative to motherhood] to a manageable level.”[3] Other recent articles claim to show that the gender equality provisions of Sweden’s generous parental leave benefit, which push fathers into staying at home with infants while the mothers work, actually increase the odds of having a second or third child.[4] Referring to Sweden, Paul Demeny concludes that “[f]ew social policies enjoy greater unqualified support from demographers and sociologists than those seeking” to make “participation of women in the labor force compatible with raising children.”[5]
Of course, the deeper source of anxiety driving these analysts is the plummeting fertility of the European peoples, a continent-wide development. In the year 2000, the whole of Europe (from Iceland to European Russia) recorded a Total Fertility Rate of only 1.37, meaning that the average European woman will bear 1.37 children during her lifetime, only 65 percent of the level needed to replace a generation. The generation “replacement” figure is slightly over 2.0. In that same year, 2000, 17 European nations already recorded an absolute decline in numbers, with deaths outnumbering births. Within two decades, unless there is a dramatic change, all European nations will predictably be in the same circumstance. Some regions of Spain (such as Catalonia and the Basque country), of Italy (including Rome, Venicia, and Tuscany), and of Germany (such as Saxony) have total fertility rates well below 1.0. The figure for the Czech Republic in 2003 was 1.18. In the whole world, only Bulgaria—at 1.13—was lower that year. In Northern Europe, marriage is increasingly rare, replaced by cohabitation; in Southern Europe, young adults increasingly avoid both marriage and cohabitation, refusing to form childbearing unions of any sort. This is the essence of the joint European family and population crisis of the 21st Century.[6]
...And so, Sweden now charges to Europe’s rescue, with claims of a unique solution to the joint family and population crisis, a solution which is applicable to all of Europe. Recently, the Swedish Institute—what might be called that government’s propaganda arm on social and cultural matters—published a paper entitled “Gender Equality—A Key to Our Future?” The author, Lena Sommestad, is professor of economic history at Uppsala University and director of the Swedish Institute for Future Studies. This short document perfectly outlines the Swedish family policy model for the European future.
Professor Sommestad’s essay claims that Europe’s challenge of declining birth rates, population aging, tumbling marriage rates, and rising out-of-wedlock births has two sources: female emancipation and “a crisis of the traditional European male breadwinner family.” She says that nations such as Germany, Italy, and Spain, which have tried to protect or shore up the male breadwinner and his homemaking wife, have failed to understand the irrelevance of these roles for the future, and have paid the price with extremely low fertility.[7]
Sweden, in contrast, has recognized women’s full emancipation and complete gender equality as “social facts,” and as the keys to a sustainable future. Professor Sommestad points to the theories of Alva Myrdal from the 1930’s; she had also argued that under modern conditions, the breadwinner-homemaker model, premised on a family wage for fathers, could no longer produce a sufficient number of children. Myrdal instead insisted that “declining fertility rates should be fought with increased gender equality.” This idea, Professor Sommestad admits, went dormant in Sweden during the 1940’s and 1950’s when, during a time of affluence, male-breadwinner families become common in Sweden (another author calls this “the era of the Swedish housewife”). However, “[f]rom the 1960s and onwards, a growing number of Swedish women returned to gainful employment, and by the early 1970’s, the two-breadwinner norm had been firmly established.”[8] Today, Sommestad continues:
Swedish gender equality policies build on a strong tradition of pro-natalist and supportive social policies….No entitlements are targeted at women in their capacity as wives. The state uses separate taxation, generous public day-care provision for pre-school children, and extensive programmes of parental leave to encourage married women/mothers to remain at gainful employment.
In sum, using less lofty language, the Swedish model of family policy sees strong feminism as the answer to the fertility crisis. If European peoples want to survive in the 21st century, she argues, they should eliminate the full-time mother and homemaker, abolish the family wage ideal, end the home as an economic institution, welcome out-of-wedlock births and cohabitation, push all women—especially actual or potential mothers—into the labor force, enforce strict gender equality in all areas of life, engineer men into childcare-givers, and embrace expensive state child allowances, parental leave, and public day care programs. The result, she says, will be more babies!
These are not just the ideas of academics, I hasten to add. In its official statement of policy toward the European Union, the Swedish government summarizes its goal in one sentence: “We want to see a Union that is open, effective and gender equal.” Let me underscore this: the attainment of the feminist agenda is Sweden’s primary purpose within the EU. This government statement from April 2004 elaborates:
Sweden has a particular responsibility for increasing the pace of gender equality efforts in Europe. Decisions have already been taken to the effect that an equal opportunity perspective shall permeate all aspects of the EU’s employment strategy. Gender equality aspects should be integrated into all areas of policy. Modern family policies that promote the supply of labour regarding both women and men and which enable family life to be combined with a professional life, are needed in order to meet the demographic challenges Europe faces.[10]
Moreover, official documents pouring out of the European Commission emphasize ever greater attention to gender equality and so-called harmonization of European family policy around the Swedish model, stressing “an individualization of rights” and a “new gender balance in working life” involving basic “changes in family structure.”[11]
So what shall we make out of all this? To begin with, I do want to admit that there are aspects of the modern Swedish model of family policy that are attractive, and succeed in their goals. To begin with, the Swedish system does do a better job of bonding newborns to mothers and fathers, in the short run. The generous “parents insurance” program provides new parents with 390 days of paid leave, at 90 percent of salary, and another 90 days at a lower allowance. This means that virtually all Swedish children enjoy full time parental care during their first 13 months of life (compared, for example, to only a third of infants in the United States). This also allows new Swedish mothers to breastfeed their newborns. Again, the majority of Swedish babies enjoy the health-giving effects of mothers milk for at least six months, compared to only 20 percent in the United States. And even some of the more coercive aspects of Sweden’s parents insurance program—such as the requirement that fathers take 45 days of the paid parental leave for the couple to receive the full benefit—these have their human side: it turns out that Swedish fathers have a strong preference toward taking their parental leave during Sweden’s elk-hunting season![12]
However, the other claims made by advocates for the Swedish model—particularly the claim that this approach will be Europe’s demographic salvation—are far more problematic; indeed, these claims are not true.
To begin with, the Swedish model of family policy has not solved the birth dearth in that land. Assertions that it has rely primarily on a peculiar development during the 1988-1993 period, which has since proven ephemeral, not real. During the last decade of Sweden’s “breadwinner father/homemaking mother” era, 1960-69, the nation had a fertility rate well above the replacement level of 2.10. Contrary to assertions by Alva Myrdal and Lena Sommestad, this “family policy” system clearly succeeded relative to population. However, once Sweden implemented the new model built on the deconstruction of marriage, out-of-wedlock births, working mothers, parents insurance, and day care, fertility fell by 30 percent to 1.61 by 1983. However, during the late 1980’s, the number apparently started climbing again, and was said to reach 2.11 in 1991, just above the replacement level. Progressive social analysts around the European continent shouted hosannas! Sweden had found the answer! But it proved not to be real. By 1993, fertility was falling again, and by 2003, Sweden—at 1.54—was close to the European Union average. Indeed, in the year 2000, Sweden joined that group of nations where deaths actually exceed births: more coffins than cradles.[13]
It turns out that Sweden’s “success” in the early 1990’s was primarily a statistical fluke, an error. A change in policy regarding eligibility for parents insurance, called a “speed premium,” had the one-time effect of reducing the spacing between first and second births; but this change did not significantly increase the total number of children born per family.[14] Judged empirically, then, the Swedish model simply has not achieved replacement level fertility.
Second, Professor Sommestad’s brief history of the introduction of Sweden’s new family policy during the 1960’s also grossly overlooks its radical and coercive nature. As honest feminist historians have admitted, there was no pressure for change from young Swedish housewives and mothers during the mid-1960’s. By all accounts, they were largely happy with their situation. Instead, the pressure came from other directions. Government planners in the Labor Ministry foresaw labor shortages in Sweden’s future. Instead of opening the doors to greater immigration, though, they decided to pull Sweden’s young mothers into the workplace.[15]
At the same time, the radical wing of Sweden’s ruling Social Democratic party took power, inaugurating what feminist historian Yvonne Hirdman calls Sweden’s “Red Years,” 1967-1976. As their heart was a massive “gender turn” that would radically alter the nature of marriage and family in Sweden. In 1968, the Social Democrats joined with the labor unions in a joint report concluding that “there are…strong reasons for making the two-breadwinner family the norm” in all welfare and social policies. The next year, 1969, our old friend Alva Myrdal chaired a major panel “On Equality,” which concluded that “[i]n the society of the future,…the point of departure must be that every adult is responsible for his/her own support. Benefits previously inherited in married status should be eliminated.” The Report also called for an end to tax policies that favored marriage.[16] In 1969, a Ministry of Justice committee declared Swedish marriage law “clearly anachronistic,” based as it was on the Christian notion of “two becoming one flesh.” Instead, the law should focus on the new imperative of “personal fulfillment.” In 1971, Sweden’s Parliament abolished the income tax system favoring marriage, so giving this land the most “fully individualized taxation system” in the world. According to analyst Sven Steinmo, this single change “more or less eradicated” the traditional home in Sweden.[17] The Family Law Reform of 1973 introduced “no-fault” divorce, claiming that it was “only natural that if one of the spouses is dissatisfied, he or she may demand a divorce.” All social and welfare benefits tied to marriage were abolished.[18] By the time the Social Democrats were voted out of office in 1976, their forced revolution in family life was fairly complete; the Swedes had been re-engineered into a post-family order.
Moreover, Sweden—and Europe as a whole—now finds itself in new circumstances where the old calculations no longer apply. In the year 2000, a team of demographers reports in Science magazine, Europe’s population reached a vital turning point. Until then, although fertility was abnormally low, the overall age structure of the continent still had a “positive momentum;” that is, long term stability could still be gained if women raised their average family size to slightly over two children. In 2000, however, prior decades of low fertility produced a new effect. Europe’s population entered into “negative momentum,” which means that a TFR of 2.1 will no longer suffice to gain even stability. A TFR approaching an average of 4.0 children would now be needed to achieve the same end.[19]
Further, it is becoming increasingly clear that common sense still rules; that forced “gender equality” can never be the solution to fertility decline, no matter how hard feminist analysts work to manipulate the numbers. For example, a team of analysts recently noted that key components of the Swedish model—the reconfiguring of women’s education into equality with men, the movement of women into previously “all male” jobs, the deconstruction of marriage—these are the very same policies which have generated dramatic declines in the fertility of women in the developing world.[20]
While many governments, intergovernmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, and individuals may strongly support gender equality at work and in the home as a fundamental principle and desirable goal, it is not at all evident how having men and women participate equally in employment, parenting and household responsibilities will raise low levels of fertility. On the contrary, the equal participation of men and women in the labor force, child rearing, and housework points precisely in the opposite direction, i.e., [to] below replacement fertility...
The Swedish model flies in the face of other well documented causes of the decline in fertility. John C. Caldwell, one of the world’s most eminent demographers, recently examined the dozens of rival theories behind what he calls “the fertility crisis in modern societies.” He explores the perils of a liberal economy which create doubts among women whether they should devote themselves to children. He dissects the special circumstances behind fertility decline found in Southern, Eastern, and Central Europe and in Asia. And he considers the effects of varied social policies on fertility, looking for common threads. He concludes “that a social order that does not reproduce itself will be replaced by another” and that the Swedish model works no better than any other social welfare model in countering depopulation. In the end, he admits that he can do no better than repeat the conclusion of Kingsley Davis from 1937, when the Western world faced a similar challenge: “the family is not indefinitely adaptable to modern society, and this explains the declining birth rate.”[23]
Under this explanation, then, the Swedish model stands doubly condemned. First, it represents an attempt to engineer a wholly new family system, which can only fail in face of the constants of human nature grounded in the natural family. And second, the Swedish model represents a forced march of all its citizens into modern urban-industrialized society: the very problem to be overcome.
Taking another broad look at Europe’s population crisis, Paul Demeny underscores how the two-income, or two-career, family norm eliminates all incentives to have larger families:
…despite flexible work hours, generous paid vacation, father’s temporary home leave to care for an infant or a sick child, or other similar benefits—the actual chosen number of children in two-working-parent families gravitates toward…families that are either childless or have only one or two children.
He adds that as low fertility continues, the elderly base of the electorate grows, making it highly unlikely that state welfare benefits could ever be rechanneled toward young families. Demeny concludes:
What can be taken as highly probable is the failure of the now prevailing orthodoxy governing European social policies. These policies will fail to increase fertility up to replacement levels and thus will fail to prevent the long term numerical decline of the European population.[24]
Finally, Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaeghe underscores that “secularization,” defined as “the decrease of adherence to organized religion,” still serves as “the most powerful variable at the outset of fertility decline” and “the one with the longest lasting effect or the highest degree of persistence.”[25] He sees plunging European fertility during the late 20th Century as simply continuing the “long term shift in the Western ideational system” away from the values affirmed by Christian teaching (namely, away from “responsibility, sacrifice, altruism, and sanctity of long-term commitments”) and toward a militant “secular individualism” focused on the desires of the self.[26] And as you might guess by now, Sweden leads Europe in measures of secularism and feminist inspired individualism.
In sum, 21st Century Sweden embodies, even cherishes, the very social, economic, and cultural qualities that cause fertility decline. And we also know that the “magic” of the Swedish model does not really work. It is a dead-end.
And yet, it is true that Europe’s other, and older, family policy model—a system premised on the breadwinner/homemaker model of the 1950’s—has also failed to work since 1970. Still found to some degree in Germany, this model encourages the full-time maternal care of children through maternity benefits, child allowances, and homemaker pensions. All the same, Germany’s TFR for 2004 stands at 1.38, below Sweden’s already low figure. For some reason this approach, which had worked effectively in the decades following World War II, no longer does. I suspect that “secularization,” the retreat from religious faith, which accelerated during the 1960’s, is the cause. In any case, this model also seems to hold little real promise for the future.
Might Europe as a whole look elsewhere for answers? Is there any modern nation that has beat the depopulation problem? Yes, as a matter-of-fact, there is. The surprise, perhaps, is that it is the United States of America. As John Caldwell suggests, instead of studying Europe, “[p]erhaps what [really] needs explanation is the curiously high fertility of the USA.”[27] Indeed, while the U.S. led the Western world in fertility decline between 1964 and 1976, the U.S. birth rate began climbing again during the 1980’s. By 2000, the USA could claim a Total Fertility Rate of 2.06, by far the highest in the developed world, and nearly 20 percent above the 1976 level. The U.S. figure of 2.08 for 2004 is even higher than the figure for Albania, Europe’s last high-fertility area. The U.S. Census Bureau projects the American number to rise to 2.12 by the year 2010.
One response is that this must be due to America’s greater ethnic diversity, particularly to the flow of high fertility Hispanic immigrants from Latin America into the USA. This is part of the puzzle, but not all. In fact, American women of European descent actually recorded the greatest increase in fertility between 1976 and 2000, rising 24 percent to 2.05. Another retort is that this American difference must be due to a rising number of out-of-wedlock births. Again, this is part of the explanation, especially before 1995, but not the whole story. Rather, marital fertility has also risen: by 11 percent since 1995. As The Economist magazine ably summarizes: “Demographic forces are pulling America and Europe apart…America’s fertility rate is rising; Europe’s is falling. America’s immigration outstrips Europe’s….America’s population will soon be getting younger. Europe’s is aging.” The Economist predicts a U.S. population of 500 million by 2050, an 80 percent increase over the figure for 2000.[28] Indeed, the European nations might consider looking to America, not to Sweden, for answers.
If they did, what explanations might they find for this American exceptionalism? Simply put, certain groups of Americans have crafted new ways, often in spite of poor public policy, to counter the modern forces driving family fragmentation and fertility decline in the developed world.
To begin with, the last three decades have witnessed a remarkable experiment in the de-industrialization of a key aspect of American family life: namely, education. Starting back in the 1840’s, the American states had taken over the schooling of children, using industrial organization to displace parents as the chief educators of the young. Demographer Norman Ryder has shown how this modern interruption of the parent-child bond was critical to the emergence of both “modernity” and fertility decline. There was a struggle, he reports, between the traditional family and the modern state for the minds of the young. The state school served as “the vehicle for communicating “state morality” and a modern political mythology designed to displace those of families.[29] And there is clear evidence that this spread of state schooling was closely tied to a sharp decline in family size among Americans.[30]
However, starting in the mid-1970’s, a growing number of American parents—for various reasons—turned to home schooling. At first, they faced hostile state authorities: hundreds were arrested, and some imprisoned for seeking to reclaim this pre-modern family task. Yet the home education movement grew, and by the early 1990’s had regained this natural right in all 50 states. By 2004, over two million American children were in home schools. The educational results have been impressive. And relative to family life, there are also significant results. Virtually all home schooled students are in married-couple homes. And 77 percent of home schooling mothers do not work for pay, compared to 30 percent nationwide. Importantly, the fertility of these families is substantially higher. Sixty-two percent have three or more children, compared to only 20 percent nationwide. And slightly over a third (33.5 percent) have four or more children, compared to a mere 6 percent in all homes with children.[31] By rejecting “modern” state education, and by embracing “pre-modern” approaches, these American families have grown stronger and larger.
Second, America also rediscovered about 20 years ago an alternative to state child allowances and paid parental leave that has a positive fertility effect. Specifically, after two decades of neglect, the U.S. Congress in 1986 nearly doubled the value of the personal income tax exemption for children to $2,000 per child, and indexed its value to inflation. Repeated studies have found that European child allowances—where the state pays mothers a monthly stipend for each of their children—have little positive effect on fertility. However, in the U.S., there is strong evidence of a “robust” positive relationship between the real, after inflation value of the tax exemption for children and family size. Economist Leslie Whittington has actually calculated an astonishing elasticity of birth probability with respect to the income tax exemption of between .839 and 1.31. This means that a one percent increase in the exemption’s real value results in about a 1 percent increase in birth probability in families.[32]
Why this difference? It appears that allowing families to keep more of what they earn while raising children—that is, turning children into little tax shelters—has a positive, even life-affirming psychological effect on parents that money coming from the state cannot replicate. In any case, the significant increase in overall American fertility coincides with the sharp increase in the exemption’s value in 1986. More recently, the rise in marital fertility, starting in 1996, correlates precisely with the introduction of a new, additional Child Tax Credit that year. It seems that pro-family tax cuts work!
Third, Americans stand almost alone among modern nations as a people bound to active religious faith; and active faith commonly translates into larger families. At the most dramatic level, some religious communities still on the margins of American life—the German-speaking Old Order Amish found in rural communities in 20 states, the Hutterites in Montana and North Dakota, and Hassidic Jews in New York, Cleveland, and other cities—continue to report average completed family size in excess of six children. Closer to the mainstream, the fertility rate of the state of Utah is nearly twice the national average, reflecting a TFR among Latter-day Saints or Mormons there of about 4.0. Surveys also show that “fundamentalist Protestants” and traditional “Latin Mass” Catholics who attend religious services at least once a week also record higher total fertility.[33]
Finally, Americans are generally held less hostage to the anti-natal dogmas of pure “gender equality” than are the “Swedenized” Europeans. As the University of Virginia’s Stephen Rhodes’ new book, Taking Sex Differences Seriously, reminds us, women and men are hardwired to be different. Denying these differences can only result in violations of human nature, doing particular harm to existing and potential children.[34] After decades of work by feminist ideologues to re-engineer human nature, some Americans remain resilient, open to the natural power of gender complementarity. For example, despite massive Federal financial preferences and incentives for putting small children in day care, a full third of young American mothers still find ways to remain home full-time with their pre-school children. And this proportion appears to be growing again. The imperatives of biology, of human nature, are still active in the USA. The Swedish model, resting on state child allowances, the mandatory employment of mothers, parents insurance, day care, and gender equality in all aspects of human life, has not worked. The current fixation of European scholars and policymakers on this response to depopulation is both a delusion and a death wish. If Europe’s political leaders seriously want to renew their nations, they need look elsewhere: even, perhaps, to “the American model” involving the empowerment of families through home schooling, tax cuts sensitive to marriage and family size, religious belief, and respect for the natural complementarity of man and woman, wife and husband. The issue is, after all, a matter of the life or death of nations.
And from another essay:
FAMILY UNDER “THE NEW TOTALITARIANS”
A philosophically related, if physically non-violent, campaign against marriage and family has also been waged by “The New Totalitarians,” historian Roland Huntford’s label for the Social Democrats of Sweden.[30] This need not have been Sweden’s fate. Within the early Swedish labor movement, there were advocates for the natural family. For workers, they sought a “family wage,” a living income for the father and husband that would also support a wife and mother and her children at home. Welfare policies would also be built around this breadwinner-homemaker-childrich home model. This was Swedish Social Democratic policy between 1940 and 1967. Relative to the family, it worked reasonably well.
But egalitarian feminist pressures for change grew during Sweden’s so-called “Red Years,” 1967-1976.[31] Oddly enough, but with perverse wisdom, these social radicals turned their first attention to tax policy. The feminist writer Eva Moberg complained that the current tax system, resting on the joint return for married couples and the principle of “income splitting,” condemned educated women to “lifetime imprisonment within the four walls of the home.” Mathematician Sonja Lyttkens argued that the Swedish tax code had “a large discouraging impact on married women’s labor supply.”[32] In 1968, a joint report by the Social Democratic Party and the trade union alliance (the LO) concluded that “there are…strong reasons for making the two breadwinner family the norm in planning long-term changes within the social insurance system.”[33] The next year, the Social Democratic Party issued its “Report on Equality,” prepared by a panel chaired by the arch- feminist Alva Myrdal. The document concluded that “[i]n the society of the future,…the point of departure must be that every adult is responsible for his/her own support. Benefits previously inherent in married status should be eliminated.” As part of this legal deconstruction of marriage, the Report called for a tax-policy that abolished the joint return, taxing instead individual earnings without preference for any so-called “form of cohabitation.”[34]
Analysts of modern Sweden are virtually unanimous in labeling this 1971 shift from “joint” to “individual” taxation as the most important policy change affecting Swedish social life during the last 40 years. Sven Steinmo calls it “the most significant” and “radical” reform of the turbulent 1970’s, because “it meant that the Swedish tax system would ignore family circumstances.”[35] Through this change, reports Anne Lise Ellingsaeter, the traditional male provider norm was “more or less eradicated.”[36] The influential feminist author Annika Baude adds: “If I were to choose one reform which has perhaps done the most to promote equality between the sexes [in Sweden], I would point to the introduction of individual income taxation.”[37] Using a different interpretive lens, it is fair to conclude that Sweden’s current regime of few and weak marriages, fragile homes, widespread cohabitation, extensive day care, a retreat from children, and universal employment of young mothers derives—to a significant degree—from this one change in tax policy.
MARRIAGE AND LIBERTY
All these stories, from the terrible and violent campaigns against marriage mounted by the Nazis and the Communists to the quiet assault on marriage launched by Sweden’s “Red” Social Democrats, reveal a common truth. The first target of any totalitarian regime is marriage. Why? The great English journalist G.K. Chesterton explains the reason in his provocative 1920 pamphlet, The Superstition of Divorce:
The ideal for which [marriage] stands in the state is liberty. It stands for liberty for the very simple reason…[that] it is the only…institution that is at once necessary and voluntary. It is the only check on the state that is bound to renew itself as eternally as the state, and more naturally than the state….This is the only way in which truth can ever find refuge from public persecution, and the good man survive the bad government.[38]
Or, as Chesterton explained in his 1910 book, What’s Wrong with the World:
It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchist institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside the State….The State has no tool delicate enough to deracinate the rooted habits and tangled affections of the family; the two sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are glued together too tightly for us to get the blade of a legal penknife in between them. The man and the woman are one flesh—yes, even when they are not one spirit. Man is a quadruped.[39]
And that truth still exhibits itself in our time. For example, The Polish Sociological Review carried a recent article on developments in Uzbekistan during the period of Soviet Communist rule. The author writes:
[O]nly traditional relationships enabled the people to survive the particularly difficult conditions which prevailed throughout the Soviet period….[W]hile the sovietization of Central Asian society rocked the religious and cultural foundations of the family, its basic…features were preserved.
In many cases, the task of preservation fell to women. The author again: “I know of families where the father was a teacher of scientific atheism, while the wife said her prayers five times a day and observed ‘ramadan,’ so as to (as she put it) atone for her husband’s sins.” When the Communists fell, and Uzbekistan regained its freedom, these traditions were still there, so that husbands, wives, and their children could rebuild a nation.[40]
A second example comes from The People’s Republic of China. As noted earlier, the Chinese peasantry—collectivized on industrial farms by Mao Tse Tung—suffered terribly for nearly two decades, as the Communists sought to eliminate families as “fundamental habitation and production units.” But Mao’s death in 1976 brought a shift in policy, leading two years later to the introduction of the so-called “family responsibility system.” The collective farms were broken up, and families gained the use of land according to their size. After meeting a quota, farm produce was theirs to consume or sell. The new system also allowed peasant families to engage in side occupations.
Results between 1978 and 1990 were spectacular. Farm output climbed sharply, as did rural family wealth and well being. More importantly, traditional marriage patterns reappeared after decades of suppression, as did a preference for many children. In the more rural parts of China, three-quarters of women now wanted four-or-more children. Indeed, this “family responsibility system” subverted in the countryside the post-Mao leadership’s other innovation: namely, the “one child per family” population policy.[41]
Dutch scholars, moreover, have documented that the imposition of Communism on Poland after 1945 did not weaken the family system there. Instead, the oppressive Communist system actually increased family solidarity:
We [found] that the importance of the family increased, and that—as in Hungary after World War II,…the family increased its role as the cornerstone of society. Political and social suppression can have unexpected positive effects, like the strengthening of the family.[42]
As Chesterton had predicted, the natural family—“the one anarchist institution”—survived, and even triumphed over totalitarian Communism, one of its great 20th Century foes. Oddly enough, the family’s greater challenge may be the “soft” totalitarianisms of the early 21st Century, now packaged around a militant secular individualism, but still seeking to build a marriage-free, post-family order.