For feminism and family by John Milbank (via Philip Blond)

The family is the one institution of primitive participatory community that still survives. It involves the equal sharing of goods. Authority within the family is not necessarily patriarchal and aims self-denyingly at reciprocity. In these ways the family offers uniquely a training in mutual nurture. Of course it is the worst source of pathologies, but only because it is the strongest source of psychic health.

Of course also, there can be "unconventional" families which should not be penalised. But all families aim for fidelity and stability, and this very aim favours a social and political bias towards marriage rather than cohabitation. For commitment in time requires more than an endless reserve as to what one may think tomorrow, which causes "partners" to face an intolerable continuously renewed judgement from each other. Marriage suspends sexual competition and distributes sexual partners equally. It still today usually protects women physically and compensates for their lesser muscular strength.

In the case of liberal feminism, the left has shied away from the fact that its success has coincided with a regressive era that has involved an increase in economic inequality and a decline of civil liberties while covertly compensating sexual liberties. The archetypal female subject today is in one way a male capitalist subject writ large, as it is seen as autonomous in relation to biological reproduction as well as economic production. At the same time it remains a traditional "female" subject defined by private concerns now become consumeristic.

The downside of this hybrid female subjectivity is the continued enslavement of women in both workplace and home and the loss of a male code of honour as to the assistance of women and children, which has had devastating consequences for the working class. All this combines with an increased state and market control of reproduction which amounts to a new general rule of men over women.

Instead of this we need a true radical feminism more focused on the question of what constitutes good relations between women and men. This needs to include mutual equity concerning procreation and above all equal rights to the combining of work and child nurture without economic loss. In cultural terms we need women to play a public role neither as subordinate, nor as men writ large.

Such a feminism would promote the family as the first school of association and of resistance to the depravations of both market and state.

Is Dr. Milbank trying not to be too offensive? Or does he really believe everything that he writes in this article, along with their implications? Many men would take his point about marriage protecting women one step further, and say that the American legal system privileges women over men, unjustly, when it comes to family and marriage matters, and the assumptions that lead to special protection for wives are no longer warranted. What, then, does Dr. Milbank mean by "mutual equity concerning procreation." What is the public role of wives and mothers? What of single women? Who's to say that women are not active "participants in the political process" as women -- in accordance with their 'traditional' roles. That is to say, they bring their viewpoint as women and mothers when examining political issues. (Do single women and married women equally support the welfare state?) And has this not been harmful to Western societies, in so far as it has aided statism rather than hindering it?