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The Recovery of Family Life: Exposing the Limits of Modern Ideologies
The Sexual Revolution, which has been underway since the 1950s, is a rolling revolution--a set of unfinishable ambitions, all affecting marriage and family life. Feminists want to liberate women from childrearing as well as the home and build a world beyond gender; progressives aspire to build a society where human beings can choose their natures; and sexual liberation theorists would take human beings beyond repression. These ideologies have sunk deeply into our culture and our political regime. It is well past time to ask the uncomfortable questions about whether these ideologies betray human nature and undermine human happiness.
The Recovery of Family Life defends marriage and family life while exposing the limits and blind spots in these powerful revolutionary ideologies. After suggesting a general framework within which to understand the ends and means of family policy, Scott Yenor explores what a liberal society should seek to accomplish in marriage and family policy. The framework is applied to some of today's most important public policy debates on such controversial topics as gay rights, pornography, population decline, women's equality, rape law, the age of consent, and welfare state politics.
Those advocating for the rolling revolution often point toward necessary reforms, but they offer an incomplete picture of human flourishing. In an attempt to recover a healthier vision of life, Yenor asks that those already resisting the rolling revolution evaluate their own assumptions and aims advocates on both sides of the partisan aisle stand at risk of operating with truncated narratives. Public policy can be an important tool to help the resistance, but only if informed by a deeper vision in which marriage and family fit into the broader political regime. The Recovery of Family Life combines a focus on first principles with practical advice for lawmakers about how to undo the damage our policies have done.
The Recovery of Family Life defends marriage and family life while exposing the limits and blind spots in these powerful revolutionary ideologies. After suggesting a general framework within which to understand the ends and means of family policy, Scott Yenor explores what a liberal society should seek to accomplish in marriage and family policy. The framework is applied to some of today's most important public policy debates on such controversial topics as gay rights, pornography, population decline, women's equality, rape law, the age of consent, and welfare state politics.
Those advocating for the rolling revolution often point toward necessary reforms, but they offer an incomplete picture of human flourishing. In an attempt to recover a healthier vision of life, Yenor asks that those already resisting the rolling revolution evaluate their own assumptions and aims advocates on both sides of the partisan aisle stand at risk of operating with truncated narratives. Public policy can be an important tool to help the resistance, but only if informed by a deeper vision in which marriage and family fit into the broader political regime. The Recovery of Family Life combines a focus on first principles with practical advice for lawmakers about how to undo the damage our policies have done.
368 pages, Hardcover
Published October 1, 2020
3 people are currently reading
234 people want to read
About the author
Scott Yenor
8 books9 followersThe main focus of Scott Yenor's work is the family in political thought.
Yenor is a professor of political science at Boise State University. Yenor earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in political science. He earned his Ph. D. from Loyola University Chicago. He wrote his dissertation on "The Moral Sciences of John Locke and David Hume."
Yenor is a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute's Center for the American Way of Life. Also, he was a Visiting Fellow in the Simon Center at the Heritage Foundation during 2015-2016.
Yenor is a professor of political science at Boise State University. Yenor earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in political science. He earned his Ph. D. from Loyola University Chicago. He wrote his dissertation on "The Moral Sciences of John Locke and David Hume."
Yenor is a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute's Center for the American Way of Life. Also, he was a Visiting Fellow in the Simon Center at the Heritage Foundation during 2015-2016.
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March 10, 2021
You know what America needs? More mirrors for princes—the Renaissance genre of advice books directed at statesmen. On the Right, we have many books that identify, and complain about, the problems of modernity and the challenges facing us. Some of those books do offer concrete solutions, but their audience is usually either the educated masses, who cannot themselves translate those solutions into policy, or policymakers who have no actual power, or refuse to use the power they do have. Scott Yenor’s bold new book is directed at those who have the will to actually rule. He lays out what has been done to the modern family, why, and what can and should be done about it, by those who have power, now or in the future. Let’s hope the target audience is paying attention.
"The Recovery of Family Life" instructs future princes in two steps. First, Yenor dissects the venomous ideology of feminism, which seeks to abolish all natural distinctions between the sexes, as well as all social structures that organically arise from those distinctions. Second, he tells how the family regime of a healthy modern society should be structured. By absorbing both lessons and applying them in practice, the wise statesman can, Yenor hopes, accomplish the recovery of family life. (Yenor himself does not compare his book to a mirror for princes; he’s too modest for that. But that’s what it is.)
Yenor, in this 2020 book and in his 2011 book "Family Politics," focuses on family regimes, meaning the complex of social organization around families. His earlier book was largely historical; this book is largely programmatic. Feminism is the author’s main target. Feminism is one, perhaps the most destructive one, of the poisonous fruits of the Enlightenment—the ideology that emancipation, total freedom from any bond not freely chosen by each person, will create a new era of human happiness. In Yenor’s view, this new ultimate value of unlimited autonomy arose when Enlightenment thinkers and their successors merged the ideas of contract and conquering nature (I think the origin is somewhat more pernicious, but no matter). He calls the application of this ideology by feminism the “rolling revolution,” because it has no possible limiting principle; it must always seek fresh aspects of the traditional family regime to destroy.
The underlying frame of this book is that feminism, properly viewed, consists of three sub-ideologies that collectively have corroded our previously-healthy family regime. One is the strict core of feminism, which is the simple yet perverse desire to socially and legally abolish any distinction between men and women. A second is the specific desire to end marriage, the core family institution of the West, as a drag on autonomy and a contributor to the view that men and women are different. The third is the desire to eradicate all supposed sexual repression, with first a focus on homosexuality and, that victory having been won, today more of a focus on new perversions, again all in service of unlimited autonomy. These are all tentacles of the rolling revolution, and for Yenor are properly contrasted, and opposed by, the Old Wisdom—those verities about men, women, and the family known to mankind for millennia.
You will note that this is a spicy set of positions for an academic of today to hold. You will therefore not be surprised to learn that Yenor was the target of cancel culture before being a target was cool. He is a professor of political philosophy at Boise State University, and in 2016, in response to Yenor’s publication of two pieces containing, to normal people, anodyne factual statements about men and women, a mob of leftist students tried to defenestrate him. Yenor was “homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic.” (We can ignore that the first two of those words are mostly content-free propaganda terms designed to blur discourse, though certainly to the extent they do have meaning, that meaning should be celebrated—I would have given Yenor a medal, if I had been in charge of Boise State.) They didn’t manage to get him fired (he has tenure and refused to bend), but the usual baying mob, led by Yenor’s supposed peers, put enormous pressure on him, which could not have been easy. He still teaches there; whether it is fun for him, I do not know, but it certainly hasn’t stopped him promulgating the truth.
I’ve never been the target of cancel culture myself, and now cannot be cancelled, but, little known facts about Charles, I taught for twelve years at Purdue University, in the Krannert School of Management, teaching Business Law and Entrepreneurship. Politics never came up in my classes, and I stopped teaching in 2016, before the modern era of the academic Two-Minute Hate. And that job was not my career—it was a side job, non-tenure track, I took (and enjoyed—I think very highly of Purdue) in order to feed my family while starting my business, although Purdue regarded it, and paid it as, a full-time job. But between my own teaching and that my father was also an academic at Purdue (he taught Russian history), as was my grandfather (he taught classics at NYU), I have some understanding of the academic environment, which makes me even more impressed with Yenor’s refusal to knuckle under to the bad people. (I was a popular teacher. And most importantly, on Rate My Professors, a review/ranking website for professors, I got a “chili pepper,” an indication of hotness, showing my students appreciated my good looks. Of course, the site removed that marker entirely in 2018, because ugly professors complained they felt unsafe and marginalized. Sigh.)
Yenor begins by examining the intellectual origins of the rolling revolution, found most clearly within twentieth-century feminism. One service Yenor provides is to draw the battle lines clearly. He does this by swimming in the fetid swamps of feminism; I learned a lot I did not know, although none of it was pleasing. He spends a little time discussing so-called first-wave feminism, but much more on second-wave feminists, starting with Simone de Beauvoir, through Betty Friedan, and into Shulamith Firestone, this latter a literally insane harridan who starved herself to death. The common thread among these writers was their baseless claim that women had no inherent meaningful difference from men, and that women could only be happy by the abolition of any perceived difference. This was to lead to self-focused self-actualization resulting in total autonomy, and a woman would know she had achieved this, most often, by making working outside the home the focus of her existence. Friedan was the great popularizer of this destructive message, of course, which I recently attacked at length in my thoughts on her book The Feminine Mystique.
Now, engaging with the “thought” of these writers isn’t easy, so you have to hand it to Yenor, that he bends over backwards to be fair—his book is not a polemic. He clearly states that he objects to the idea that humanity is plastic, but he tries to view the rolling revolution, as much as possible, as having both costs and benefits, even if the former outweighs the latter. He says he doesn’t want to be a “biological essentialist,” though he also correctly points out those only exist in the mind of feminists. Nonetheless, he makes plain that the real vision of all these writers was extremely radical—the destruction of all traditional aspects of the family, from ending monogamous marriage to negatively viewing having children at all to promoting the sexual availability of children. Sometimes they bothered to hide their radicalism; sometimes not; but there was no substantive disagreement among any of them, then or now, as to the goal—total autonomy. Except, there can be no autonomy to choose wrongly, meaning in opposition to the rolling revolution. For example, women should not have the free choice not to work outside the home (something on which Beauvoir and Friedan both wholeheartedly agreed, thought the latter wanted to lie about it for public consumption). Feminism is, in fact, the earliest example of what Ryszard Legutko calls “coercion to freedom,” where the state is enlisted to ensure that all choices are free except those that tend to limit freedom as defined by the Left.
There have since been written endless permutations based on these pioneers; Yenor notes that at Boise State, the library has 330 linear feet of such books published since 1980, all or nearly all of which parrot the basic claims of so-called mainstream feminism—in short, that what is male and what is female is a social construct, which if it can be destroyed, will lead to unbridled social flourishing and immense human happiness. No thoughts are ever really new; fresh authors focus either on narrow matters within the whole, or on political ways to make palatable to the masses feminism’s goals that are rejected by most people, such as the total destruction of the family. Yet ever the practical application of the ideas of the rolling revolution rolls on; hence the movement in the past fifteen years toward even crazier ideas, such as the existence of fictitious multiple genders, gender fluidity, polyamory, and the like, all based on the same core principles first enunciated more than sixty years ago.
After this detailed examination of core feminist ideas, Yenor suffers more, slogging through the thought about autonomy of various two-bit modern con men, notably Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. He analyzes the dishonest argumentative methods of all the Left, in general and in specific with regard to family topics—false claims mixed with false dichotomies and false comparisons, what he calls the “liberal wringer,” the mechanism by which any argument against the rolling revolution is dishonestly deconstructed and all engagement with it avoided. The lesson for princes, I think, is to not participate in such arguments, and to remember what our enemies long ago learned and put into practice—that power is all.
Yenor describes how the modern Left (which he somewhat confusingly calls “liberalism,” but Rawls and his ilk are not liberal in any meaningful sense of the term, rather they are Left) uses the law to achieve its goal of the “pure relationship,” meaning the aim that all relationships must be ones of free continuous choice, that is, without any supposed repression. This leads to various destructive results when it collides with reality, including the reality of parent-child bonds, and more generally is hugely destructive of social cohesion. From this also flow various deleterious consequences resulting from ending supposed sexual repression; this section is replete with analysis of writings from Michel Foucault to Aldous Huxley, and contains much complexity, but in short revolves around what was once a commonplace—true freedom is not release from constraints, but the freedom to choose rightly, to choose virtue and not to be a slave to passions, and rejection of this truth is the basis of many of our modern problems.
After this complete tour, Yenor lays out, in precise detail, what the inherent limits of the three sub-ideologies of the rolling revolution are. This is a particularly compelling section, because it displays Yenor wrestling with the limits of his own principles, in essence exploring whether there is any truth whatsoever to any of the claims of feminism. He says he thinks there are, even describing some views to the contrary as “repugnant,” yet he doesn’t manage to convincingly identify any such truthful claim of feminism. That’s not surprising—I can’t think of any truthful claim of feminism either, and I wouldn’t have spent as much time as Yenor trying to find one. Any slogan or claim of feminists that seems self-evident (“women have value too!”) has nothing to do with feminism, and is used to distract from the actual aims of feminism; it’s classic motte-and-bailey argumentation, made easier by that we have all been falsely propagandized since our earliest youth that women of the past in the West were oppressed, a very dubious claim.
Yenor doesn’t shy away from controversy. He spends much of a chapter on consent as the rolling revolution’s touchstone talking about the law of rape, mostly through the prism of Stephen Schulhofer, a leftist advocate of so-called “affirmative consent”—that any sexual contact is rape unless accompanied by continuous provable consent. Schulhofer is a tool, an annoying and not-very-intelligent man, which I know personally because he taught me Criminal Law at the University of Chicago in the 1990s. What I most remember about the class, other than the stench of beta that rolled off Schulhofer, was that when he was to teach about the law of rape for two weeks, he instead turned his class over to harpies from the Women’s Law Caucus, a radical feminist group, to lecture us about what rape law should be, rather than what it was, which I was paying Schulhofer to teach me. I have never forgiven him for stealing from me and making me listen to that clown show. Anyway, let’s just say that Yenor doesn’t buy what Schulhofer is selling, which automatically makes Yenor himself radical in today’s environment, something I’m sure Yenor is just fine with.
Finally, Yenor turns to what should be done, which is the most noteworthy part of the book. As he says, “Intellectuals who defend the family rightly spend much time exposing blind spots in the contemporary ideology. All this time spent in the defensive crouch, however, distracts them from thinking through where these limits [i.e., the limits Yenor has just outlined in detail] point in our particular time and place. Seeing the goodness in those limits, it is necessary also to reconstruct a public opinion and a public policy that appreciates those limits.” Thus, Yenor strives to show what a “better family policy” would be.
This is an admirable effort, but I fear it is caught on the horns of a dilemma. The rolling revolution does not permit . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
"The Recovery of Family Life" instructs future princes in two steps. First, Yenor dissects the venomous ideology of feminism, which seeks to abolish all natural distinctions between the sexes, as well as all social structures that organically arise from those distinctions. Second, he tells how the family regime of a healthy modern society should be structured. By absorbing both lessons and applying them in practice, the wise statesman can, Yenor hopes, accomplish the recovery of family life. (Yenor himself does not compare his book to a mirror for princes; he’s too modest for that. But that’s what it is.)
Yenor, in this 2020 book and in his 2011 book "Family Politics," focuses on family regimes, meaning the complex of social organization around families. His earlier book was largely historical; this book is largely programmatic. Feminism is the author’s main target. Feminism is one, perhaps the most destructive one, of the poisonous fruits of the Enlightenment—the ideology that emancipation, total freedom from any bond not freely chosen by each person, will create a new era of human happiness. In Yenor’s view, this new ultimate value of unlimited autonomy arose when Enlightenment thinkers and their successors merged the ideas of contract and conquering nature (I think the origin is somewhat more pernicious, but no matter). He calls the application of this ideology by feminism the “rolling revolution,” because it has no possible limiting principle; it must always seek fresh aspects of the traditional family regime to destroy.
The underlying frame of this book is that feminism, properly viewed, consists of three sub-ideologies that collectively have corroded our previously-healthy family regime. One is the strict core of feminism, which is the simple yet perverse desire to socially and legally abolish any distinction between men and women. A second is the specific desire to end marriage, the core family institution of the West, as a drag on autonomy and a contributor to the view that men and women are different. The third is the desire to eradicate all supposed sexual repression, with first a focus on homosexuality and, that victory having been won, today more of a focus on new perversions, again all in service of unlimited autonomy. These are all tentacles of the rolling revolution, and for Yenor are properly contrasted, and opposed by, the Old Wisdom—those verities about men, women, and the family known to mankind for millennia.
You will note that this is a spicy set of positions for an academic of today to hold. You will therefore not be surprised to learn that Yenor was the target of cancel culture before being a target was cool. He is a professor of political philosophy at Boise State University, and in 2016, in response to Yenor’s publication of two pieces containing, to normal people, anodyne factual statements about men and women, a mob of leftist students tried to defenestrate him. Yenor was “homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic.” (We can ignore that the first two of those words are mostly content-free propaganda terms designed to blur discourse, though certainly to the extent they do have meaning, that meaning should be celebrated—I would have given Yenor a medal, if I had been in charge of Boise State.) They didn’t manage to get him fired (he has tenure and refused to bend), but the usual baying mob, led by Yenor’s supposed peers, put enormous pressure on him, which could not have been easy. He still teaches there; whether it is fun for him, I do not know, but it certainly hasn’t stopped him promulgating the truth.
I’ve never been the target of cancel culture myself, and now cannot be cancelled, but, little known facts about Charles, I taught for twelve years at Purdue University, in the Krannert School of Management, teaching Business Law and Entrepreneurship. Politics never came up in my classes, and I stopped teaching in 2016, before the modern era of the academic Two-Minute Hate. And that job was not my career—it was a side job, non-tenure track, I took (and enjoyed—I think very highly of Purdue) in order to feed my family while starting my business, although Purdue regarded it, and paid it as, a full-time job. But between my own teaching and that my father was also an academic at Purdue (he taught Russian history), as was my grandfather (he taught classics at NYU), I have some understanding of the academic environment, which makes me even more impressed with Yenor’s refusal to knuckle under to the bad people. (I was a popular teacher. And most importantly, on Rate My Professors, a review/ranking website for professors, I got a “chili pepper,” an indication of hotness, showing my students appreciated my good looks. Of course, the site removed that marker entirely in 2018, because ugly professors complained they felt unsafe and marginalized. Sigh.)
Yenor begins by examining the intellectual origins of the rolling revolution, found most clearly within twentieth-century feminism. One service Yenor provides is to draw the battle lines clearly. He does this by swimming in the fetid swamps of feminism; I learned a lot I did not know, although none of it was pleasing. He spends a little time discussing so-called first-wave feminism, but much more on second-wave feminists, starting with Simone de Beauvoir, through Betty Friedan, and into Shulamith Firestone, this latter a literally insane harridan who starved herself to death. The common thread among these writers was their baseless claim that women had no inherent meaningful difference from men, and that women could only be happy by the abolition of any perceived difference. This was to lead to self-focused self-actualization resulting in total autonomy, and a woman would know she had achieved this, most often, by making working outside the home the focus of her existence. Friedan was the great popularizer of this destructive message, of course, which I recently attacked at length in my thoughts on her book The Feminine Mystique.
Now, engaging with the “thought” of these writers isn’t easy, so you have to hand it to Yenor, that he bends over backwards to be fair—his book is not a polemic. He clearly states that he objects to the idea that humanity is plastic, but he tries to view the rolling revolution, as much as possible, as having both costs and benefits, even if the former outweighs the latter. He says he doesn’t want to be a “biological essentialist,” though he also correctly points out those only exist in the mind of feminists. Nonetheless, he makes plain that the real vision of all these writers was extremely radical—the destruction of all traditional aspects of the family, from ending monogamous marriage to negatively viewing having children at all to promoting the sexual availability of children. Sometimes they bothered to hide their radicalism; sometimes not; but there was no substantive disagreement among any of them, then or now, as to the goal—total autonomy. Except, there can be no autonomy to choose wrongly, meaning in opposition to the rolling revolution. For example, women should not have the free choice not to work outside the home (something on which Beauvoir and Friedan both wholeheartedly agreed, thought the latter wanted to lie about it for public consumption). Feminism is, in fact, the earliest example of what Ryszard Legutko calls “coercion to freedom,” where the state is enlisted to ensure that all choices are free except those that tend to limit freedom as defined by the Left.
There have since been written endless permutations based on these pioneers; Yenor notes that at Boise State, the library has 330 linear feet of such books published since 1980, all or nearly all of which parrot the basic claims of so-called mainstream feminism—in short, that what is male and what is female is a social construct, which if it can be destroyed, will lead to unbridled social flourishing and immense human happiness. No thoughts are ever really new; fresh authors focus either on narrow matters within the whole, or on political ways to make palatable to the masses feminism’s goals that are rejected by most people, such as the total destruction of the family. Yet ever the practical application of the ideas of the rolling revolution rolls on; hence the movement in the past fifteen years toward even crazier ideas, such as the existence of fictitious multiple genders, gender fluidity, polyamory, and the like, all based on the same core principles first enunciated more than sixty years ago.
After this detailed examination of core feminist ideas, Yenor suffers more, slogging through the thought about autonomy of various two-bit modern con men, notably Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. He analyzes the dishonest argumentative methods of all the Left, in general and in specific with regard to family topics—false claims mixed with false dichotomies and false comparisons, what he calls the “liberal wringer,” the mechanism by which any argument against the rolling revolution is dishonestly deconstructed and all engagement with it avoided. The lesson for princes, I think, is to not participate in such arguments, and to remember what our enemies long ago learned and put into practice—that power is all.
Yenor describes how the modern Left (which he somewhat confusingly calls “liberalism,” but Rawls and his ilk are not liberal in any meaningful sense of the term, rather they are Left) uses the law to achieve its goal of the “pure relationship,” meaning the aim that all relationships must be ones of free continuous choice, that is, without any supposed repression. This leads to various destructive results when it collides with reality, including the reality of parent-child bonds, and more generally is hugely destructive of social cohesion. From this also flow various deleterious consequences resulting from ending supposed sexual repression; this section is replete with analysis of writings from Michel Foucault to Aldous Huxley, and contains much complexity, but in short revolves around what was once a commonplace—true freedom is not release from constraints, but the freedom to choose rightly, to choose virtue and not to be a slave to passions, and rejection of this truth is the basis of many of our modern problems.
After this complete tour, Yenor lays out, in precise detail, what the inherent limits of the three sub-ideologies of the rolling revolution are. This is a particularly compelling section, because it displays Yenor wrestling with the limits of his own principles, in essence exploring whether there is any truth whatsoever to any of the claims of feminism. He says he thinks there are, even describing some views to the contrary as “repugnant,” yet he doesn’t manage to convincingly identify any such truthful claim of feminism. That’s not surprising—I can’t think of any truthful claim of feminism either, and I wouldn’t have spent as much time as Yenor trying to find one. Any slogan or claim of feminists that seems self-evident (“women have value too!”) has nothing to do with feminism, and is used to distract from the actual aims of feminism; it’s classic motte-and-bailey argumentation, made easier by that we have all been falsely propagandized since our earliest youth that women of the past in the West were oppressed, a very dubious claim.
Yenor doesn’t shy away from controversy. He spends much of a chapter on consent as the rolling revolution’s touchstone talking about the law of rape, mostly through the prism of Stephen Schulhofer, a leftist advocate of so-called “affirmative consent”—that any sexual contact is rape unless accompanied by continuous provable consent. Schulhofer is a tool, an annoying and not-very-intelligent man, which I know personally because he taught me Criminal Law at the University of Chicago in the 1990s. What I most remember about the class, other than the stench of beta that rolled off Schulhofer, was that when he was to teach about the law of rape for two weeks, he instead turned his class over to harpies from the Women’s Law Caucus, a radical feminist group, to lecture us about what rape law should be, rather than what it was, which I was paying Schulhofer to teach me. I have never forgiven him for stealing from me and making me listen to that clown show. Anyway, let’s just say that Yenor doesn’t buy what Schulhofer is selling, which automatically makes Yenor himself radical in today’s environment, something I’m sure Yenor is just fine with.
Finally, Yenor turns to what should be done, which is the most noteworthy part of the book. As he says, “Intellectuals who defend the family rightly spend much time exposing blind spots in the contemporary ideology. All this time spent in the defensive crouch, however, distracts them from thinking through where these limits [i.e., the limits Yenor has just outlined in detail] point in our particular time and place. Seeing the goodness in those limits, it is necessary also to reconstruct a public opinion and a public policy that appreciates those limits.” Thus, Yenor strives to show what a “better family policy” would be.
This is an admirable effort, but I fear it is caught on the horns of a dilemma. The rolling revolution does not permit . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
November 30, 2021
This book is more of a rant about why the author hates it that women want to become doctors and engineers instead of doing house chores. I guess his parents never bothered to teach him how to cook and sweep the floors and so he is utterly at the mercy of a woman to do these tedious tasks or else he will starve to death. Sigh.
January 24, 2021
THE JUGGERNAUT HARMING FAMILY LIFE TODAY
Scott Yenor, with rapier-like skill, deconstructs and obviates the divisive mores of radical feminism. He does this – and indeed, this is what makes the book so memorable- by using precise logic in the face of bombast and hyperbole: the pernicious tools of his detractors.
As the title would suggest this book can be regarded as a paean to family values; the greatest threat to which Yenor describes as the ‘Rolling Revolution’, comprised of the hydra-headed movements of feminism with liberalism, and the sexual revolution which have gained so much momentum in recent times. Ordinarily, you would think that anyone who opposes the liberal movement undergirding feminism is just another die-hard misogynist; intractable and incapable of changing his views, but such a view is as myopic as those of its proponents.
Yenor coins a term in the book: ‘The Radical Feminine’. An embodiment of all that is antithetical to family life and the personification of all the sentiments underpinning the rolling revolution. The rolling revolution seems to want to change the very concept of the family; now viewed as the dungeon in which the woman is confined and consigned to a life of servility. To emancipate the beleaguered woman you must produce another institution responsible for raising children, one that is termed: ‘Intimate Care Giving Unit’, which would receive cash payments from the State and subsidies for health care and day care. The guardians of ‘ICGU’ could be brothers, sisters, neighbours, in short- anyone. Such proposals beggar belief because they lack one fundamental component: common sense.
Sadly, one incontrovertible conclusion you do form having read Professor Yenor’s arguments, is that the Radical Feminine does not really have very much in the way of common sense; unfortunately, it seems, neither do the scores of scholars who attempt to bolster such arguments with cries of bodily autonomy and self-determination.
Yenor singles out one such scholar, Judith Butler, whose theories have become the foundational texts for the Radical Feminine. A summary glance at Butler’s publications gives you an idea of the spectrum of her dissent: Queer theory, The Subjection Of Women, Whipping Girl, The Second Sex, Undoing Gender. All of which are alluded to in the book; in fact, this book can be regarded as an eloquent rebuttal of Butler’s theories.
The most destructive and controversial being that of ‘Undoing Gender’ which has fuelled the juggernaut of the transgender movement. Yenor attacks the kernel of this theory with simple logic. Gender is not an imaginative construct. It is a biological fact which influences your personality and physiology. To uncouple your physiology from your gender is impossible; to construct an ideology that validates this separation would seem absurd to any rational person; and then to further accuse anyone who takes an opposing view as a chauvinist is ridiculous.
Underpinning the causal theory of transgenderism is the disorder known as ‘Gender Dysphoria’, which causes a persistent sense of unease about one’s gender. This has become the polarising issue in the debate about transgenderism, and Yenor makes the assertion that assigning a scientific name to an issue that might have gone unnamed is not science. This is not to belittle those who suffer from Gender Dysphoria: it is simply stating a fact. Modern research has identified a correlation between autism and Gender Dysphoria, it is after all derived from a sense of unease. And the alacrity with which those suffering from Gender Dysphoria are prescribed puberty blockers and invasive surgery is criminally irresponsible.
The cases of Meghan Davidson and Kieran Bell are salient examples of this irresponsibility; at the age of twelve Meghan decided she wanted to become a boy and without any further ado, her Doctor prescribed her puberty blockers. No counselling or therapy was even offered. Keira Bell’s story is even more shocking. At the age of sixteen she was rushed into life-changing medical treatment, which she now regrets- along with Megan Davidson who two years later decided she wanted to be a girl again.
Meghan and Kieran represent a wave of children in the Western world who have become victims of the rolling revolution. It is important to note that Yenor in no way disparages such children. He simply makes the point that if you choose to abolish your gender you have to be informed about the consequences. The very fact that people are not shows the pervasive influence of radical feminism on the medical establishment. An ideology founded on the works of philosophers such Beauvoir and Foucault cannot trump biology: no matter how much you want it to. And it does seem that there are a community of scientists who do want it to. Yenor informs us that Alfred Kinsey (an American biologist who died in 1956) and his colleagues wrote: ‘In spite of the widespread and oft-repeated emphasis on the supposed differences between male and female sexuality, we fail to see any anatomic or physiological basis for such differences.’ A shocking illustration of the subversive power of radical feminism.
A mental construct cannot have the same validity and certainty as the law of gravity. Unfortunately the mentality of the Radical Feminine abounds with such constructs.
The primary one is that the family unit is a patriarchal prison in which the woman languishes, and for her to be happy she must liberate herself from the manacles of the family. Freedom now becomes her creed: it is no longer just a democratic right. Instead, it is an ever expanding space in which morality seems to have no place. It comprises of her gender, her sexuality, her responsibility and any filial duty. And for her to be happy she has to destroy all of these components.
There is however an oddity in all of this: the identity of this radical revolutionary can only be confirmed if it is affirmed by everyone else around her. The media, the state, the medical Doctors and the psychologists. The law-makers and the law-breakers. Everyone has to pledge allegiance otherwise you are deemed a bigot.
At this point, Yenor asks a question which is often overlooked. Does empowering the Radical Feminine to do whatever she wants to do make her and the people around her any happier? The answer does not lie in the theories of Butler or in the opinion pieces of Sociology Professors. It is common sense. Fractured families produce fractious children who are prone to delinquency and depression. Removing the stigma from acts of immorality and indecency increases the risk of sexually transmitted diseases: the AIDS pandemic being a case in point.
It must be emphasised that this is not a discriminatory book. Yenor does not vilify anyone. But what he does do is explain the relentlessly widening prism through which the advocates of feminism and liberalism see the world, and in doing so he brings a much needed balance to a debate that has spun out of control.
Scott Yenor, with rapier-like skill, deconstructs and obviates the divisive mores of radical feminism. He does this – and indeed, this is what makes the book so memorable- by using precise logic in the face of bombast and hyperbole: the pernicious tools of his detractors.
As the title would suggest this book can be regarded as a paean to family values; the greatest threat to which Yenor describes as the ‘Rolling Revolution’, comprised of the hydra-headed movements of feminism with liberalism, and the sexual revolution which have gained so much momentum in recent times. Ordinarily, you would think that anyone who opposes the liberal movement undergirding feminism is just another die-hard misogynist; intractable and incapable of changing his views, but such a view is as myopic as those of its proponents.
Yenor coins a term in the book: ‘The Radical Feminine’. An embodiment of all that is antithetical to family life and the personification of all the sentiments underpinning the rolling revolution. The rolling revolution seems to want to change the very concept of the family; now viewed as the dungeon in which the woman is confined and consigned to a life of servility. To emancipate the beleaguered woman you must produce another institution responsible for raising children, one that is termed: ‘Intimate Care Giving Unit’, which would receive cash payments from the State and subsidies for health care and day care. The guardians of ‘ICGU’ could be brothers, sisters, neighbours, in short- anyone. Such proposals beggar belief because they lack one fundamental component: common sense.
Sadly, one incontrovertible conclusion you do form having read Professor Yenor’s arguments, is that the Radical Feminine does not really have very much in the way of common sense; unfortunately, it seems, neither do the scores of scholars who attempt to bolster such arguments with cries of bodily autonomy and self-determination.
Yenor singles out one such scholar, Judith Butler, whose theories have become the foundational texts for the Radical Feminine. A summary glance at Butler’s publications gives you an idea of the spectrum of her dissent: Queer theory, The Subjection Of Women, Whipping Girl, The Second Sex, Undoing Gender. All of which are alluded to in the book; in fact, this book can be regarded as an eloquent rebuttal of Butler’s theories.
The most destructive and controversial being that of ‘Undoing Gender’ which has fuelled the juggernaut of the transgender movement. Yenor attacks the kernel of this theory with simple logic. Gender is not an imaginative construct. It is a biological fact which influences your personality and physiology. To uncouple your physiology from your gender is impossible; to construct an ideology that validates this separation would seem absurd to any rational person; and then to further accuse anyone who takes an opposing view as a chauvinist is ridiculous.
Underpinning the causal theory of transgenderism is the disorder known as ‘Gender Dysphoria’, which causes a persistent sense of unease about one’s gender. This has become the polarising issue in the debate about transgenderism, and Yenor makes the assertion that assigning a scientific name to an issue that might have gone unnamed is not science. This is not to belittle those who suffer from Gender Dysphoria: it is simply stating a fact. Modern research has identified a correlation between autism and Gender Dysphoria, it is after all derived from a sense of unease. And the alacrity with which those suffering from Gender Dysphoria are prescribed puberty blockers and invasive surgery is criminally irresponsible.
The cases of Meghan Davidson and Kieran Bell are salient examples of this irresponsibility; at the age of twelve Meghan decided she wanted to become a boy and without any further ado, her Doctor prescribed her puberty blockers. No counselling or therapy was even offered. Keira Bell’s story is even more shocking. At the age of sixteen she was rushed into life-changing medical treatment, which she now regrets- along with Megan Davidson who two years later decided she wanted to be a girl again.
Meghan and Kieran represent a wave of children in the Western world who have become victims of the rolling revolution. It is important to note that Yenor in no way disparages such children. He simply makes the point that if you choose to abolish your gender you have to be informed about the consequences. The very fact that people are not shows the pervasive influence of radical feminism on the medical establishment. An ideology founded on the works of philosophers such Beauvoir and Foucault cannot trump biology: no matter how much you want it to. And it does seem that there are a community of scientists who do want it to. Yenor informs us that Alfred Kinsey (an American biologist who died in 1956) and his colleagues wrote: ‘In spite of the widespread and oft-repeated emphasis on the supposed differences between male and female sexuality, we fail to see any anatomic or physiological basis for such differences.’ A shocking illustration of the subversive power of radical feminism.
A mental construct cannot have the same validity and certainty as the law of gravity. Unfortunately the mentality of the Radical Feminine abounds with such constructs.
The primary one is that the family unit is a patriarchal prison in which the woman languishes, and for her to be happy she must liberate herself from the manacles of the family. Freedom now becomes her creed: it is no longer just a democratic right. Instead, it is an ever expanding space in which morality seems to have no place. It comprises of her gender, her sexuality, her responsibility and any filial duty. And for her to be happy she has to destroy all of these components.
There is however an oddity in all of this: the identity of this radical revolutionary can only be confirmed if it is affirmed by everyone else around her. The media, the state, the medical Doctors and the psychologists. The law-makers and the law-breakers. Everyone has to pledge allegiance otherwise you are deemed a bigot.
At this point, Yenor asks a question which is often overlooked. Does empowering the Radical Feminine to do whatever she wants to do make her and the people around her any happier? The answer does not lie in the theories of Butler or in the opinion pieces of Sociology Professors. It is common sense. Fractured families produce fractious children who are prone to delinquency and depression. Removing the stigma from acts of immorality and indecency increases the risk of sexually transmitted diseases: the AIDS pandemic being a case in point.
It must be emphasised that this is not a discriminatory book. Yenor does not vilify anyone. But what he does do is explain the relentlessly widening prism through which the advocates of feminism and liberalism see the world, and in doing so he brings a much needed balance to a debate that has spun out of control.
February 4, 2021
Quite good. A ton of material covered. Some parts difficult to read, but a fascinating study.
February 21, 2025
Some helpful ideas, but the author’s writing style held the book back for me. Was hoping for a clear vision of the future to be articulated at the end, but most of the last chapter was spent refuting specific slogans you’ll hear about feminism, which was a disappointingly trivial conclusion.
April 20, 2021
Illuminating and prescient book for our times.
September 25, 2022
Very good study, but some parts are very hard to read.
November 26, 2020
Dr Scott Yenor has written a really important book about recovering marriage and the family after the more corrosive effects of the 'sexual revolution'.
Scott examines some of the key thinkers and trends to show how and why things went so far off track, by the measure of the common good and human fulfilment- eudaimonia rather than just pleasure.
This is a bitter pill to swallow and the author has sifted through the darkest recesses of political philosophy to unearth and expose the purveyors of sexual perversion. He does this through pointed questions like Socrates. These fundamental questions undermine modern myths of liberal 'neutrality', 'autonomy' and the like. In fact, the deconstruction of 'autonomy' is central to the book and compares to Christopher Lasch's demolition of the myth of 'progress' and its impact.
'Liberalism' is seen as a delivery system for radical leftist ideology, without the philosophical backbone to resist, and its claims to neutrality exposed for the fiction they are. There is a relativity to history that they must account for, including their own presuppositions and purposes, without giving up claims to objective truth and wisdom. The law cannot set morality for us. We need a vision of the good life and thick mechanisms for living it out. By repressing this facet of human civilisation, liberals have let more nefarious forces (Neo-Marxism, Libertinism, etc) seize the day.
Yenor redraws the tarnished map and charts a course back to some semblance of charitable and embodied communal living. He proffers a rich communal life outside of state control and the crushing tenterhooks of contemporary consumerism. The family are understood as belonging to the right order of life rather than the new chaotic orders that the 'liberationists' usher in- womanhood and motherhood are celebrated. So is difference and masculinity. Yenor rightly argues that masculinity and femininity have their place on top of and in sync with maleness and femaleness.
Social constructs can fit with reality, as revealed by God and played in the light of long history.
Dr Yenor interrogates the crude ideological notions at the core of individualism, which make us all poorer as communities, and reminds us of the greater good at our fingertips. Marriage and the family, as essential incarnate realities, transcend each. A sacramental understanding of marriage, with the purposes of intimate love, procreation and the like, provides us with a way out of our disordered chaos pretending to be 'diversity'.
The Recovery of Family Life is equally as in-depth and well researched as it is lucid, and filled with hope. Even though it is challenging, it is worth attending to closely for the academic or general reader alike.
Scott examines some of the key thinkers and trends to show how and why things went so far off track, by the measure of the common good and human fulfilment- eudaimonia rather than just pleasure.
This is a bitter pill to swallow and the author has sifted through the darkest recesses of political philosophy to unearth and expose the purveyors of sexual perversion. He does this through pointed questions like Socrates. These fundamental questions undermine modern myths of liberal 'neutrality', 'autonomy' and the like. In fact, the deconstruction of 'autonomy' is central to the book and compares to Christopher Lasch's demolition of the myth of 'progress' and its impact.
'Liberalism' is seen as a delivery system for radical leftist ideology, without the philosophical backbone to resist, and its claims to neutrality exposed for the fiction they are. There is a relativity to history that they must account for, including their own presuppositions and purposes, without giving up claims to objective truth and wisdom. The law cannot set morality for us. We need a vision of the good life and thick mechanisms for living it out. By repressing this facet of human civilisation, liberals have let more nefarious forces (Neo-Marxism, Libertinism, etc) seize the day.
Yenor redraws the tarnished map and charts a course back to some semblance of charitable and embodied communal living. He proffers a rich communal life outside of state control and the crushing tenterhooks of contemporary consumerism. The family are understood as belonging to the right order of life rather than the new chaotic orders that the 'liberationists' usher in- womanhood and motherhood are celebrated. So is difference and masculinity. Yenor rightly argues that masculinity and femininity have their place on top of and in sync with maleness and femaleness.
Social constructs can fit with reality, as revealed by God and played in the light of long history.
Dr Yenor interrogates the crude ideological notions at the core of individualism, which make us all poorer as communities, and reminds us of the greater good at our fingertips. Marriage and the family, as essential incarnate realities, transcend each. A sacramental understanding of marriage, with the purposes of intimate love, procreation and the like, provides us with a way out of our disordered chaos pretending to be 'diversity'.
The Recovery of Family Life is equally as in-depth and well researched as it is lucid, and filled with hope. Even though it is challenging, it is worth attending to closely for the academic or general reader alike.
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