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Written June 5, 1999

MEN'S LIB: A "CLASS ACT"? OR CLASS WARFARE?

Part Two

By: Beth Grimes

Prior to the emergence of the men's liberation movement in the fifties, there existed a social consensus around the notion that the average - the ideal - American family consisted of a male breadwinner and a female, child-rearing housewife. Hadn't the relative prosperity of the post World War II years created an economy which provided a "family wage" to the working class male, a paycheck which enabled him to enter the middle class and support a stay-at-home wife and their children? And wasn't it possible for any couple to enjoy the life of the "typical" American family as depicted weekly in such TV sitcoms as Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver and The Brady Bunch? The answer to both questions is "no".

WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD

Although such government programs as veterans' benefits, housing loans, subsidized education and job training helped many working class families move into the middle class, this was also a time when a fourth of the population was officially poor and half of all two-parent black families lived in poverty. As author Stephanie Coontz pointed out in her book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, millions of women lost their wartime well-paid jobs and were forced back into traditional domestic roles or low-wage service work - to the detriment of themselves and their economic status. By 1959, sales of the newly developed tranquilizers reached over a million pounds - mostly to women.

Nor did their husbands fare any better. Their postwar paychecks were better than before WWII, but these men still had to get up to the ringing of the alarm clock, work hard and put up with demands and disapproval from the petty tyrants so often found in management. It was, in fact, the supervisors and administrators, the executives, the order-givers, along with the intellectual elites of the university campuses, who completed the process of liberating men - some men - a process begun in the fifties. The "gray flannel rebels" of the fifties and sixties evolved into the New Age, self-actualized, navel-gazing, hot-tubbing, est-seminar-attending, BMW-driving males of the seventies.

THE SEVENTIES WELCOMES THE NEW AGE MALE

One of the leading theorists of the developing philosophy of men's liberation was Warren Farrell, whose work is highly praised by National Coalition of Free Men. Farrell is author of The Liberated Man, Why Men Are The Way They Are and The Myth of Male Power. After failing to get his Ph. D. - a failure he blamed on feeling pressured to "rush through my Ph.D. and assume my primary bread winning role" - Farrell suddenly understood how his wife's liberation could lead to his own. If she worked, he would be free from the responsibility of providing for the children. A man could "take risks on his job" without worrying about "leaving his family in the poorhouse if he is fired." He went on to speak out in favor of the newly emerging women's movement and was elected to three terms on the New York City board of the National Organization for Women.

In time, Farrell turned against the struggle for female equality claiming that feminism means ... "women are still invested in receiving the special protection (italics added) we accord the victim." His disparaging remarks characterized women's demands for equal treatment as claims to victim status and he began to portray the women's movement as an organized attempt to obtain "exceptional privileges."

He went on to promote men's liberation along with other advocates including Marc Fasteau, Jack Sawyer and human potential psychologist Herb Goldberg. And let's not forget Jack Rosenberg, who renamed himself Werner Erhard, self-appointed "Source" and leader/founder of Erhard Seminars Training. Erhard had walked out on his wife and four kids, later explaining, nonchalantly, that since public aid was available to them, he knew they would not starve. Erhard made a fortune in the seventies as one of the best-known baloney merchants of the decade.

The writers and philosophers of the human potential movement convinced themselves and discontented male members of the upper class and upper-middle class, that they were not abandoning their principles if they rejected existing responsibilities - to their families if not always to their careers. They were simply undergoing a healthy psychological transformation. Leaders and thinkers of the movement told men that each is "god in his own universe" and that "everyone creates his own reality." The New Age mystique stressed "personal responsibility" and promoted an exaggerated degree of individualism. It gave followers a rationale by which to justify pursuit of their own self interest to the exclusion of the well-being of anyone other than themselves, including their own children.

CLASS BIAS REARS ITS UGLY HEAD

In their efforts to advance the new vision of the good life, sociologists and other new-age pundits set about creating an intellectual structure to explain it. They came up with a three stage model which supposedly covered the evolution of male consciousness on the road to manhood. The first stage was the immature, physical expression of masculinity - the kind of bravado seen in little boys and the more macho teenagers. The second was the adult plane, attained as a result of education and the influence of "successful" role models (and usually at least a middle-class family background and income). On this level, was the managerial or professional man - the one who had collected the right credentials and developed the detached authoritarian style of one accustomed to making decisions for himself and others. The "sensitive New Age guy" had to get to this stage and transcend it to go on to the highest level - the gold ring on the masculinity merry-go-round - which was liberation: a man becoming fully human, self-actualized, in touch with his own emotions. A man who could cry - at least for himself.

Advocates of the"new paradigm" for men were soon confronted by hard to explain facts. Looking at the whole society they saw many variations in the temperaments of individual men and the ways men expressed the male role. Foremost was the skepticism of working class men. Not having had the luxury of spending their weekends at est seminars or hanging out with gurus at Esalen, these guys hadn't been exposed to the revelation that they "chose all the conditions of their lives" or that they had unlimited, godlike power to "create a different reality." Charles Reich dubbed these men "the arch-opponents of the new consciousness"and Joseph Pleck, sex-role sociologist, saw them as "trapped in the traditional male role" - in which sorry state the men's "interpersonal and emotional skills are relatively undeveloped." Warren Farrell labeled working class men "physical strivers" to separate them from the "leadership strivers" he had seen in grad school.

In short, the leaders of the seventies men's liberation movement saw working class men through the prism of their own assumptions and from the viewpoint of their own privileged lives. Theories so heavily grounded in purely intellectual speculation, without a realistic basis in human experience, runs the constant risk of sliding into absurdity.

WORKING CLASS WIVES

Meanwhile, what was true of the wives of lower middle class men? Better we should ask what was not true. They did not live in the spacious suburban houses portrayed in the sitcoms. They did not do their housework in high heels, nylons, a dress with a frilly apron like June Cleaver. Their hair was not perfectly coiffed like Donna Reed's. More likely they were in T-shirts, jeans and sneakers, their hair not-so-stylishly confined in a ponytail. That is, if they were home at all.

Working class wives were themselves workers. Even in the fifties and sixties, when stay-at-home moms were the supposed societal norm, many of these women worked. They worked at home providing child care for women with full time jobs. Or picked up extra money doing alterations or typing or selling cosmetics. And, yes, many of them worked full time outside their homes even then.

THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT

Increasingly, during the seventies, women went to work outside their homes full time, even when their children were small. By then, the wages of working class men were under attack and the wives' earnings were needed to provide for their families.

With careful planning, the savvy New Age male could take advantage of newly enacted laws governing marital property settlements, plan ahead for divorce with the help of how-to books and competent attorneys, hide assets, end his marriage in a financially favorable position and even reduce child support or avoid it altogether. Tens of thousands of them did it every year. With divorce more acceptable and more common, even affluent women began to realize that they and their children could drop out of the middle class, perhaps into poverty, in a stunningly short time if their marriages failed. The idea that a man's family had any claim to his earnings was on its way to the trash can of history. If women didn't want to risk seeing their kids end up in the same trash can, it behooved them to be gain financial independence.

Although it apparently occurred to no one that the 1970's wave of feminism was, in part, reaction to widespread male abandonment of traditional responsibility to children and the mothers of those children, it is clear that this was a factor.

The turning away from any sense of duty to support the families they had engendered was the original male "liberation" movement.