Deadbeat Dads Are A Feminist Side Effect

Now, to be clear, the patriarchy that feminists have raged against is certainly something that has been abused at times across various cultures and periods of history, but it is simply not the cause of fatherlessness.

By definition, “patriarchy” means “father rule,” something that is irrefutably lacking from our culture today.

The rise of fatherlessness in American homes is a devastating phenomenon, one that is eroding the fabric of our society and damaging the hearts and healthy development of millions of American children.

As feminist narratives have gained a firm foothold in the zeitgeist of the American public, fatherlessness has increased drastically.

Yet, while many a feminist may cite a wayward father’s absence as further proof that men are worthless, unreliable, and anti-woman, the uncomfortable reality is this: as feminist narratives have gained a firm foothold in the zeitgeist of the American public, fatherlessness has increased drastically.

The Collapse of Marriage and Family Norms

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how much the landscape surrounding sex, marriage, and bearing children has changed over the last 50 years, but let’s take a look at the statistics anyway.

For most of the twentieth century, American family life was overwhelmingly centered on marriage and two-parent households. In 1960, just 5.3 percent of all U.S. births occurred outside of marriage. By 1970, that number had doubled.

What happened between 1960 and 1970? Only a little thing called the Sexual Revolution, a subversive cultural movement that, building on the damage done by the introduction of the birth control pill, normalized “free love,” rejected traditional chastity and monogamy, and permanently altered the way Americans related to marriage and sex and, thus, childbearing for generations to come.

By 1990, the rate of out-of-wedlock births had climbed to 28 percent. Today, roughly 40 percent of all American children are born to unmarried mothers.

This was not a slow, organic cultural shift. This was a demographic earthquake that caused the cultural institutions required for children to grow up in a two-parent home to come crumbling down, namely chastity, monogamy, and the burden of fathers to remain faithful to their wives and children.

Fatherlessness in America Today

You may argue that correlation does not equal causation, but the convergence of second-wave feminism’s overt rejection of marriage and the Sexual Revolution’s normalization of casual sex show us, in the resulting data, a sharp increase in fatherless homes that is impossible to ignore.

It is equally impossible to deny that the structure of American households changed dramatically following the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 70s.

In 1968, only about 11 percent of children lived in a mother-only home. By 2020, that number had nearly doubled to 21 percent, representing more than 15 million children growing up without a father in the household. Over the same period, two-parent households declined steadily, while single-mother families became a normalized feature of American life.

These are not merely parents who decide to “co-parent” while no longer living together as a committed couple, by the way.

Today, roughly one in four children lives without their biological father in the home.

Today, roughly one in four children lives without their biological father in the home. Just let that sink in for a moment. These are not abstract numbers, and it’s certainly not a result of “the patriarchy.”

This is the absence of patriarchy, and the data shows us just how devastating it can be for children, who need both mothers and fathers.

Father absence is strongly associated with higher rates of poverty, emotional distress, academic struggle, and behavioral problems in children. Families headed by single mothers are nearly four times more likely to live in poverty than married-parent households. Children raised without fathers are more vulnerable to school failure, substance abuse, and long-term instability.

The data reveals a society that has normalized father absence, institutionalized male disengagement, and offloaded the cost of abandonment onto women and children. Mothers and children need engaged, present husbands and fathers. This is why, before feminism, marital monogamy was the norm.

When “The Patriarchy” Held Men Accountable

For most of American history, male responsibility for wives and children was not merely a moral expectation. It was a legal obligation. Marriage carried with it enforceable duties of provision, protection, and support. Fathers were expected to financially sustain their households, and abandonment of one’s family was widely understood as both a social failure and a legal offense.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so-called “desertion and nonsupport” laws allowed local governments to prosecute men who abandoned their wives and children without providing financial support, and these were not merely symbolic laws. They were serious and sensible methods of enforcement against the “deadbeat dad” phenomenon.

Before feminism ever took root in the Western world, men could be fined, jailed, or forced into wage labor programs to ensure their families were provided for. Family desertion was treated as a crime because pre-feminist societies understood that children and their mothers need fathers to take their roles seriously.

Marriage itself functioned as a binding institution that tied men to their offspring through law, reputation, and community expectation. Divorce was rare, socially stigmatized, and difficult to obtain for men, not just women.

Before feminism ever took root in the Western world, men could be fined, jailed, or forced into wage labor programs to ensure their families were provided for.

Sexual behavior was more tightly regulated by cultural norms and the expectation that it would be restricted to the sanctity of the marital covenant. This did not mean that everything was perfect by any means, but it does mean that men were widely expected to remain faithful to the mother of their children and to remain present and provide for their children.

These days, it’s not even a given that the father of your children will marry you, let alone provide for the children he fathers.

For most of American history, men were not simply expected to stay married to their wives; they were pressured to by other men, including men in the government. Does that sound like female oppression, or a society that understood the importance of holding men accountable to the vows they make and the children they father?

Sadly, the drastic cultural shifts of the late twentieth century did not merely expand women’s options. They removed the consequences that once restrained male irresponsibility.

Feminism’s Critique of the Family

It would be remiss not to mention the impact that feminism had on the degradation of the traditional family unit. The most influential feminists infused into the minds of Western women the idea that motherhood and marriage were restraints on female autonomy, and that dependence on a husband was a form of oppression and weakness rather than stability.

Simone de Beauvoir, one of the most impactful feminist thinkers of the twentieth century, argued in her treatise The Second Sex that traditional motherhood and domestic life trapped women in biological and social limitations. She described the family as a structure that confined women to reproductive labor and emotional dependence, warning that motherhood could reduce women to what she saw as a diminished social role. For de Beauvoir and many of her ideological successors, liberation required distancing women from the traditional family model altogether.

And before Beauvoir’s time, the predecessors of the Sexual Revolution were arguing that marriage tied men down unfairly, such as early feminist Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy B. Shelley, who made such arguments in his own writings as early as the nineteenth century.

When marriage is framed as oppressive and dependence as weakness, men are no longer seen as necessary. And when men are no longer necessary, they stop behaving as if they are accountable.

The critique diffused into the culture by the likes of Beauvoir and Shelley has clearly not been confined to smoky, bohemian apartments and philosophy departments at prestigious universities.

It would filter its intoxicating promise of a twisted brand of “freedom” into popular culture, education, law, and media.

Over time, marriage would no longer be regarded as a moral anchor for men, and fatherhood would no longer be seen as the imperative duty it once was. After all, destroying “patriarchy” became a rallying cry, and men would come to be seen as broadly incompetent and immoral.

When marriage is framed as oppressive and dependence as weakness, men are no longer seen as necessary. And when men are no longer necessary, they stop behaving as if they are accountable.

The Decline of Marriage and Male Accountability

And so, as marriage rates declined and nonmarital childbearing rose, the social pressure that once bound men to their families weakened.

In 1972, the U.S. marriage rate peaked at nearly 11 marriages per 1,000 people. By 2018, it had fallen to 6.5 per 1,000, the lowest level in modern American history.

To be clear, feminism did not create immoral men. But it did create an environment in which immoral men could thrive without consequence by severely wounding the moral framework that once demanded male commitment to mothers and children.

For a society to enforce the duties of fatherhood, society must be prepared to do so with community standards, legal requirements, and homes in which future fathers are being raised to understand the responsibilities that come along with being a man.

That really is the bottom line. Fatherhood is important because little boys and little girls are going to grow up to be men and women, many of whom will be fathers and mothers themselves.

Society needs fathers to beget good fathers, and a society that tells men they are unwanted and women that the highest virtue is to be “independent” from men is simply not a society in which good fathers are being raised up.