Elder Bruce C. Hafen, Ph.D.

My topic is motherhood and the moral influence of women.  I begin with a personal perspective that lets me put my gratitude for this World Congress into the framework of my own experience with the United Nations’ recent involvement in family law.

As the traditional home of UN treaty making about human rights, Geneva has become the modern headwaters of thought about UN family policy.  This week’s grassroots World Congress of Families will add to those headwaters a crucial new stream–the mainstream.  This group is sending to the UN, and to people everywhere, a family message of the heart from people representing the international heartland of democracy.

Family policymaking in the UN and elsewhere now emphasizes dysfunctional and alternative family types, while the traditional family withers as an endangered species.  Exceptions have become the rule, as self-appointed lobbyists have replaced the UN policy agenda with their personal agenda, like a rebellious child seizing the steering wheel of the family car while at full freeway speed.  I find it incredibly ironic that now, when democracy is more widespread than ever before, the United Nations – a very undemocratic forum that is far from the world’s homes and families – would have allowed this adolescent style rebellion.

Here’s how I came to this view.  I have long believed that the UN has value.  I applaud the original declarations on Human Rights and Children’s Rights adopted here in Geneva many years ago.  But I discovered that today’s UN had lost the plot about family life when, during my days as a law professor, a Japanese legal scholar asked my opinion of the UN’s new 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child–the “CRC.”   He prompted my study of the CRC that led to my 1996 article in the Harvard International Law Journal entitled, “Abandoning Children to Their Autonomy.”

In doing that work, I found in a UN Publication this description of the CRC: “A new concept of separate rights for children with the Government accepting [the] responsibility of protecting the child from the power of parents.” Hello?  Did anyone notice that this “new concept” uproots one of the most fundamental natural rights about family life-- that parents may rear their children as the parents see fit, as long as the parents are fit?

The 1989 CRC was written primarily by American lawyers whose trendy arguments about child autonomy were ultimately rejected by the U.S. legal mainstream in the 1970's and 80's.  The U.S. still hasn’t adopted the CRC, and probably won’t–even though most other countries have.  This odd outcome reflects the herd mentality of naive governments who fear being criticized for not embracing an international treaty that has the word “rights” in its title.

The CRC shows how political activists who have lost their arguments in such democratic forums as parliaments and courtrooms have learned to use the UN to exploit the naiveté of local governments.  If the activists can clothe their extremist visions of personal relationships (note that this term is different from the word “family”) in the vague but lofty language of international law, they’ve built a trojan horse that lets them slip like an undetected virus into a country’s legal system and, hence, its culture.

The UN’s current approach to motherhood and women reflects this very problem, because recent UN documents have accepted the extremist claim of radical feminism that motherhood is an oppressive concept designed to perpetuate male domination.  For example, many countries still want to protect motherhood as intended by the original UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948: “motherhood [is] entitled to special protection.”  But today’s UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) criticizes these protections as “paternalistic,” promoting a supposedly outdated concept of motherhood that discourages women “from seeking greater fulfilment in paid work.”[1]  This bias misses the fundamental point that, as Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon has said,  “There can be no authentic progress for women without respect for women’s roles in the family.”[2] 

Let’s place this issue into its historical context. We are now living through the biggest change in attitudes and laws about the family in five centuries.  Writing recently in the Atlantic Monthly, Frances Fukyama regards today’s family disintegration as a central part of what he calls “the Great Disruption,” a wave of history as significant as the shift from the age of agriculture to the industrial revolution.[3]  Essentially, people have become skeptical about the very idea of “belonging” to a family.  After centuries of seeing family bonds as valuable ties that bind, people now see those ties as sheer bondage.

What is happening to us? Broad scale forces are eroding our foundations of personal peace, love, and human attachments.  Whatever held mother-father and child-parent relationships together suddenly feels weaker now. This strange disruption feels like an ecological disaster, as if a vital organism in the environment is disappearing.  

Patricia Holland has said, “If I wanted to destroy society, I would launch an all-out blitz on women.”   What did she mean?   Men and women share all of the common traits of human nature and often perform the same tasks.  But some of their strengths are gender-specific. And we are losing what women have traditionally contributed to cultural cohesiveness.  Like the mortar that keeps a brick wall from toppling over, women have held together our most precious relationships–our marriages and child-parent ties.  But now we’re seeing cracks in that mortar, which reveals some things we have too long taken for granted.

A salesman walked down a street past a group of boys playing baseball.  No one answered the door at the house where he was to call. Through a side door, he saw a boy the age of those playing in the street, dutifully practicing the piano.  Baseball gear leaned against the wall.  He called, “Excuse me, sonny, is your mother home?”  The boy glanced at his baseball gear and said glumly from the keyboard, “What do you think?”

On a broader scale, studies of third world development show that of all the variables that affect social, economic, and political development, perhaps the most significant factor is the literacy of women. Women have always impacted entire cultures.  Their influence begins in each society’s very core--the home, where women have always taught and modeled what Tocqueville called “the habits of the heart”--the mores, or civilizing habits, that create a sense of personal and civic virtue, without which free and open societies can’t exist. 

Shakespeare’s MacBeth teaches us powerfully about the moral influence of women.  He first uses his phrase, “the milk of human kindness” when Lady MacBeth is persuading her husband to murder the king and take his throne.  As MacBeth hesitates, his wife sneers, “Thy nature [is] too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness. ”Then in a haunting passage, Lady MacBeth pleads with the evil forces of the universe to take away her own milk of human kindness, her life-giving, nurturing female nature:  “Come, you spirits/ that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/ And fill me from the crown to the toe topful/ of direst cruelty! Come to my woman’s breasts,/ And take my milk for gall, you murth’ring ministers /  Come, thick night.”

Take my woman’s milk for gall, she cries; unsex me here.  Shakespeare’s mastery of human nature shows us that Lady MacBeth’s womanly heart made her incapable of taking a life unless she renounced her nature.  A woman naturally gives and nurtures life. To take life, she had to reject the distinctive essence of her female being.  Later, after she and MacBeth have killed the King, Lady MacBeth goes insane, then dies--not just from guilt, but from her symbolic renunciation of nature.

“The milk of human kindness” is a symbol of female nurturing with many shades of meaning, but especially it means the moral influence of women.  Consider now four ways in which modern society has begun to devalue female nurturing.  Seeing more clearly what we’re losing will help us regain it.  Let us talk first about the devaluation of motherhood.

For most of Western history, the very word “motherhood” meant honor, endearment, and sacrifice.  Victor Hugo wrote,  “She broke the bread into two fragments and gave them to her children, who ate with eagerness.  ‘She hath kept none for herself,’ grumbled the sergeant.  ‘Because she is not hungry,’ said a soldier.  ‘No,’ said the sergeant, ‘because she is a mother.’[4]    Yet this spirit of self-sacrifice has become a contentious issue in recent years, thus making contentious the very idea of motherhood.

For example, a recent feminist essay entitled “the problem of mothering” tells us that, “Explorations of women’s oppression [look at] the social assignment of mothering to women [because] women’s oppression is in some way connected to mothering.”[5]  Others have attacked the sacrificing mother whose selflessness has allowed and even encouraged male domination.   They argue that stereotyping the motherly role forces women to accept a sexist “division of labor in every area of existence, most especially in family relationships.”[6]

These critics do have a point, but they have swung the pendulum too far.  As Newsweek magazine reported a few years ago, the radical feminist critique has “sometimes crossed the line into outright contempt for motherhood.”[7]   Still, at its best, feminist criticism is justified against those who have exploited women’s willingness to accept the relentless demands of motherhood.  And some women in the past did feel undue social pressure to conform to overly rigid roles that denied women’s sense of self.

If being “selfless” means a woman must give up her own inner identity and personal growth, that understanding of selflessness is wrong.  That was a weakness in some versions of the Victorian model of motherhood, which viewed women as excessively dependent on their husbands.  But today’s liberationist model goes too far the other way, stereotyping women as excessively independent of their families.

A more sensible view is that husbands and wives are interdependent with each other.  For example, the Proclamation on the Family issued recently by the First Presidency and the Twelve Apostles in our Church states that spouses are “equal partners” who “help one another” in fulfilling their individual roles.  And a good marriage surely enhances each partner’s opportunity for personal development.

For instance, I once said in frustration to my wife about one of our children, “The Lord put Adam and Eve on the earth as full grown people.  Why couldn’t he have done that with this boy of ours?”  Marie wisely replied, “God gave us that child to make Christians out of us.”  That is an equal opportunity blessing for the personal growth of both parents.

The critics who moved mothers from dependence to independence skipped the fertile middle ground of interdependence.  Those who moved mothers from selflessness to selfishness skipped the fertile middle ground of self-chosen service that contributes toward a woman’s personal growth.  Because of these excesses, debates about the value of motherhood have, ironically, caused the general society to discount not only mothers but women in general.

In an essay called, “Despising Our Mothers, Despising Ourselves,” one writer found that, despite many victories for women in the last thirty years, the self-respect of American women is at an all time low. Why?  Because we’ve experienced not just a revolt against men’s oppression, but a revolt against women: “Heroic women who dedicated their lives to the welfare and education of children, as mothers, teachers, nurses, social workers, have been marginalized and devalued, made to feel stupid and second rate because they [took] seriously the Judeo-Christian precept that it was better to do for others than for oneself.”  Devaluing motherhood devalues “everything else women do.”  When society devalues “the primary work of most women throughout history,” we tell women “that it is really women who” aren’t worth serious consideration.[8]      

Then what happens?  Society’s bricks begin to collapse. Consider the unprecedented appearance of child brutality. American schools have recently witnessed several cases of children shooting other children, something the world has never seen before.  The forerunner to these events was the world-shocking 1993 British case of James Bulger, where two ten-year-old boys murdered a two-year-old child.  

Some British researchers were so stunned by the Bulger case that they probed how children learn the difference between right and wrong.  They found that a child’s ethical sense emerges emotionally long before it emerges rationally.  Thus the orientation of a child’s conscience begins with its earliest relationship with its mother.

A child is an echo chamber.  If he hears the sounds of love from his mother, he will later speak those same sounds of love to others.  But if the mother’s signals are confusing and hateful, the child will later feel confused and hateful.[9]   Whether a mother feels support from her husband, her family, and her society profoundly influences whether she feels like a mother of hope–who values herself enough to nurture a child of hope with the milk of human kindness.  And children of hope create a society of hope. 

A second area in which social devaluation is endangering the species gift of women is that of sexual behavior.  The keystone of the archway to sexual fidelity was historically the intuitive sexual self-control of women.  Most women’s sexuality reflects an inner moral compass that can point true north, like a natural magnet.  Of course, just as a natural magnet can lose its power through damage or trauma, women can also lose their natural moral magnetism.  And many men have demonstrated the capacity for moral self-direction. But throughout history, women have tended to be society’s primary teachers of sexual mores.

As Leon Kass put it, “A fine woman understood that giving her body, even her kiss, meant giving her heart, which was too precious to be bestowed on anyone who would not prove himself worthy, at the very least, by pledging himself in marriage to be her defender and her lover forever.”  Thus, “It is largely through the purity of her morals, self-regulated, that woman wields her influence.  Men will always do what is pleasing to women, but only if women suitably control and channel their own considerable sexual power.”[10]

This view of female sexuality abhors sexual abuse of women.  It also celebrates the spiritual and emotional fulfillment of marriage for both women and men.  At the same time, women have too long endured the unfairness of a cultural “double standard” that tolerated promiscuity in men while condemning it in women.  Sociologist David Popenoe writes that “men the world over are more sexually driven and ‘promiscuous,’ while women are more concerned with lasting relationships.” Moreover, he says, “men are universally expected to initiate sex, while women are expected to set limits on the extent of sexual intimacy.”  As another researcher put it, “Among all peoples, everywhere in the world, it is understood that the male is more likely than the female to desire sexual relations with a variety of partners.”[11]  

A double standard that winks at this male tendency enough to excuse it is unequal and, hence, unfair.  Society might have responded to this inequality by demanding sexual fidelity of men.  But instead, our generation romped into history’s most staggering sexual revolution, seeking male/female equality by encouraging women to imitate the habitual promiscuity of men.  This unprecedented combination of sexual liberation and women’s liberation has, with incredible irony, now liberated men--not only from a sexual conscience, but also from the sense of family responsibility that women’s higher sexual standards once demanded of men.  And the biggest losers in this process are, sadly, children and women--the women who have lost their former power to demand lasting commitments from their children’s fathers.

Despite the apparent unfairness of the double standard, our concept of marriage made serious demands of men.  Men are simply not as “biologically attuned to being committed fathers as women are to being committed mothers.”[12]  As Fukuyama put it, “It takes a great deal of effort to separate a mother from her newborn infant; in contrast, it [takes great] effort to involve a father with his.”[13]  That is why George Gilder defined “civilization” as the time when men began learning from their women to care about their children.

Marriage was our culture’s answer to this crucial need, because it taught men to provide for and protect their families.  But our current culture of divorce shows us that Margaret Mead was right: Because male commitment tends to be a learned behavior, it “is fragile and can disappear” when the culture no longer expects or teaches it.[14]  Thus, said Mead, men won’t stay married in any society unless they are culturally required to do so.[15]

By expecting men to marry, our culture sent men a message that controlled the damage of the double standard. But in the rush toward women’s sexual liberation, we seem no longer to expect men to marry.  Thus we’ve given up not only the double sexual standard, but also the power of marriage to tame the male wanderlust. And the losers in this hasty bargaining were not men, but women--and even more so, children.

This brings us to the third area of devaluation: we have stopped prizing women’s innate yearning for permanent marriage bonds.  Ours is becoming an anti-marriage culture that literally throws out our babies with the bathwater of resentment toward the very idea of marital commitment.  The social wreckage produced by today’s confusion about sex, women, men, and marriage is well known.  Rates of divorce and illegitimacy have been raging out of control for years, with nearly a third of all American children now born out of wedlock, and over 50% of all new marriages expected to end in divorce. And many adults have essentially abandoned their children by “liberating” them from parental commitments.

Two experts describe all this as a “remarkable collapse of marriage, leading to growing family instability and decreasing parental investment in children.”[16]  After surveying the gale-force damage to children in this messy scene, Popenoe has concluded that our only hope today is what he calls “the female predisposition toward permanent pair bonding.”  That phrase sounds like a sociologist, doesn’t it.  What is he talking about?

One short answer to that question is in a terse phrase that most young women once uttered with forceful moral authority when first propositioned by a young man: “Not until you marry me.”  A more complete answer may be found in new evidence that women have innate qualities that differ from men’s.  One of these attitudes is women’s stronger preference for permanent pair bonding.   “Women, who can bear only a limited number of children,” and who must nurture them through lengthy gestation and dependency, “have a great [biologically ingrained] incentive to invest their energy in rearing [their] children, while men, who can father innumerable offspring, do not.”[17]  And especially because of the demands of childrearing during a child’s early years, women traditionally managed to find ways to keep their children’s father nearby for long term protection and support.

Because women invest themselves so completely in their offspring, they also exhibit  “greater selectivity in their choice of mates,”[18] meaning they want a mate who is committed enough to their children that he will stay with them for the long term.  This same female instinct, with the social benefits that flow from raising secure and healthy children, has led women and civilized cultures to find ways of enticing fathers to share the yoke of family responsibility with mothers, primarily through the bonds of marriage. 

The chain of being that moves from a mother of hope to a child of hope to a society of hope gives society an enormous interest in permanent pair bonding.  Thus the woman’s greater desire for marital permanence really is the mortar holding together the bricks of social stability.  Wendell Berry wrote, “Marriage [is] not just a bond between two people but a bond between those two people and . . . their children, and their neighbors.”  When this bond weakens, we face  “an epidemic of divorce, neglect, community ruin, and loneliness.”  That is why “lovers must not ... live for themselves alone.  They must turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. . . . The marriage of two lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to descendants, to the community, to Heaven and earth.  It is the fundamental connection without which nothing holds, and trust is its necessity.”[19]

The core of this connection is the female predisposition toward permanent pair bonding. When that core is secure, a wife stands at the center of moral gravity for her family’s universe, holding her husband close with the gravitational pull of a natural magnet.  When he moves to the perimeter of the home and community to guard and to sustain his family, he is like a falcon and she is his falconer.  If he strays too far, he will no longer hear her voice, ever calling him home.  William Butler Yeates has told us what happens then: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/ Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”  Sadly, society’s recent devaluation of the female center of moral gravity has created just such anarchy.

The image of the falcon and the falconer suggests an important distinction between the roles of fathers and mothers in pair bonding and childrearing.  The distinguished psychiatrist David Gutmann has found that in all successful human societies, fathers have been “creatures of the perimeter” who provide for and protect their families (I note that  “providing for” and “protecting” their families describe the male role in the LDS Proclamation on the Family) while mothers nurture young children (“nurturing” describes the mother’s role in the Proclamation). “Strong mothers build secure homes; fathers and father’s sons maintain secure neighborhoods.”[20]  Ideally, mothers first nurture children’s feelings about right and wrong, then fathers teach them the law of the family and community.  This places fathers and other men into disciplinary roles that teach sons with loving firmness to separate psychologically from their mothers until they internalize community norms within their own conscience.  By this process, young men transform their aggression and resentment of authority into a conscience-based sense of duty to protect and provide for their family and community.  Then they can form their own homes as mature husbands, rather than childishly needing wives who behave like mothers.

Gutmann is distressed about radical feminist criticism of male authority in this longstanding pattern.  That criticism has undermined the masculine role, relegating fathers to being “second fiddle mothers.”  This demeaning of men has driven them from marriage into the “masculine default habitats” of “the bar and the adulterous bed,” where they “feel like men, rather than failed mothers.”  When this happens, men tragically turn their aggression against women and community, becoming the enemy of their families instead of the protector and provider.

It is beyond the scope of my remarks to explore more fully the distinctive influence of men, but we must at least note that sound, permanent pair bonding requires us to value the complementary contributions and roles of equal partners to the pair bond.

We have now considered the past generation’s devaluating of motherhood, women’s instinct for sexual fidelity, and women’s desire for permanent marriage bonds.  There is a fourth category of women’s contributions – women have a gift for nurturing all   human relationships.  Recent research shows that women will often sacrifice an achievement for the sake of a relationship, but men will more likely sacrifice a relationship for the sake of an achievement.[21]  And relationships are the stuff of social and interpersonal mortar.

Other studies tell us that the much clichéd “feminine intuition” that values human relationships is clearly of genetic origin, showing up in females more than males.  And women’s capacity to develop and nurture personal relationships is needed in all intersections of community activity.   For example, a British economist recently praised this female strength as an asset in the economy of the future, with its emphasis on personal networks. [22]

Our Church has long involved women across the world in decision-making processes and the personal ministering of local congregations.  We sponsor one of the world’s largest women’s organizations--the “Relief Society,” whose motto is,  “Charity Never Faileth.” This is a sisterhood for all adult women through which mothers and other women learn to strengthen not only family bonds, but an endless multitude of other relationships that are nourished--sometimes kept literally alive by--the milk of human kindness..  Our experience is that women’s perspectives can profoundly influence and enrich many fields of human endeavor without compromising the primary value of home and family.

Consider now, in summary, a true story from Australian history that illustrates the power of women’s moral influence as mothers of hope, women of fidelity, wives of commitment, and nurturers of human ties.  In its early decades as a British colony, Australia was a vast wilderness designated as a jail for exiled convicts. Until 1850, six of every seven people who went “down under” from Britain were men.  And the few women who went were often convicts or social outcasts themselves.  The men ruthlessly exploited them, sexually and in other ways. With few exceptions, these women without hope were powerless to change their conditions.

In about 1840, a reformer named Caroline Chisholm urged that more women would stabilize the culture.  She told the British government the best way to establish a community of “great and good people” in Australia:  “For all the clergy you can dispatch, all the schoolmasters you can appoint, all the churches you can build, and all the books you can export, will never do much good without . . . ‘God’s police’-- wives and little children--good and virtuous women.”

Chisholm searched for women who would raise “the moral standard of the people.”  She spent twenty years traveling to England, recruiting young women and young couples who believed in the common sense principles of family life.  Over time, these women tamed the men who were taming the wild land; and civil society in Australia gradually emerged. Also, the colonial governments enacted policies that elevated women’s status and reinforced family life.[23]   As one historian said,  “the initial reluctance of the wild colonial boys to marry was eroded fairly quickly.”  Eventually, thousands of new immigrants who shared the vision of these “good and virtuous women” established stable families as the basic unit of Australian society more quickly than had occurred “anywhere else in the Western world.”[24]

This striking story of women’s moral influence grew from a conscious design to replace  “the penal colony’s rough and wild ways” with “a more moral civilization.” The reformers intentionally capitalized on women’s innate “civilizing” capacity. [25]   These women made Australia a promised land that flowed with a healthy ecosystem of milk and honey.  And the milk, literally and figuratively, was mother’s milk--the milk of human kindness.  That milk nurtures those habits of the heart without which no civil society can sustain itself.

Most radical feminists, which includes many of the people on the UN’s current CEDAW committee, would reject for today’s society the concept that women are civilizing agents.  They resist this concept because they believe that acknowledging any inherent differences between men and women will lead to negative gender discrimination that will somehow place women in subservient roles.  However, the evidence shows that, despite many similarities, men and women do differ innately in some crucial ways.  Hence the title of one popularized book,   Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.

Psychologist Carol Gilligan’s 1982 book shows how women and men perceive the same things in different ways, and they speak In a Different Voice from one another.  Gilligan found that women possess an ethic of care that is inherently stronger then men’s.  If society can value and encourage this gender gift without allowing it to cause discrimination against women, we just might experience, as Australian Anne Summers put it,  “a genuine breakthrough in our thinking about the qualities contemporary society now has the greatest need for.”[26] 

The women’s rights movements of recent years opened many valuable doors to women and pricked the conscience of many men who had exploited women’s willingness to give their bread to others and keep none for themselves.  But the gender equity pendulum of the past era has moved our attitudes too far, devaluing and damaging the culture’s support for motherhood, sexual fidelity, marriage, and women’s distinctive voices.

It is now time to swing the pendulum of attitude back to magnetic north, the point in the compass that will nurture our children and the future society with the milk of human kindness. Surely society can restore the confidence of today’s women in their own instincts without coercing them into being non-entities.  Surely we can invite men to emulate the ethic of care they see in their mothers, their wives, and their daughters.  We have already learned the hard way that women, children, and the entire culture are worse off when we seek gender equality by encouraging women to adopt permissive male lifestyles.

Therefore, as this World Congress sends a message from the mainstream into Geneva’s headwaters of thought about family policy across the globe, let us call for a more responsible form of gender equality that celebrates and preserves the natural moral influence of women.  It is time to equalize the sexes by asking men once more to follow the moral leadership of women, by honoring the equal yoke and lifelong commitments of marriage.  That kind of progress will make the civilization of the 21st century not only more equal, but infinitely more civilized.

Endnotes: