To some people this idea grates, and there are, regrettably, too many couples who view marriage as a contest in power. One woman insisted, "There is no way I would let a man have the last word." Well, who is going to have it? You? There cannot be a majority vote in a partnership of two; someone has to have the casting vote. Or does she think it should be made by the one who whines, shouts, or digs in his or her heels the most?
Of course, the male equivalent is the fellow who mounts his high horse and insists on the symbolism of his headship. ("Now, look here, woman! I wear the pants in this family. What I say goes.") This is foolish. Apart from it causing resentment, a real man seldom needs to throw his weight around to gain a woman's compliance. There are some roles which human beings naturally fall into.
You doubt it? Take a look at popular culture. The most popular genre in fiction is love stories, which make up 40% of mass market paperbacks. Their readership is almost wholly female. And they all feature alpha males. Female editors fresh out of college and feminist indoctrination tried to get their authors to produce what they perceived as "more equal" scenarios, but it didn't work. The authors didn't want to write them, and the readers didn't want to read them. To be sure, not every woman reads them, but the opposite type of story is much rarer, if it exists at all.
Pornography is, of course, a perversion of natural tastes, but it says a lot about the way the natural taste is directed. And the most successful pornographic novel in all history is Fifty Shades of Grey. Who would have thought that a book about a woman being subjugated and abused by a dominant male would be written by a woman, promoted by women reviewers, read predominantly by women, and sell 50 million copies?
Women are hard wired to look for an alpha male. Even highly educated women who expect to earn high incomes look for a husband of equal standing to their own. Only as a last resort will a woman marry, or even date, a man who ranks below her, socially or financially, with the result that high flying women cannot find husbands. When they do, they are much more likely to get divorced. An interesting Swedish study revealed that winning the lottery increased a man's chances of marriage and reduced his chances of divorce, while it increases a woman's likelihood of divorce in the short term.
Research has shown that, at the birth of the first child, both parents, despite their original attitudes, revert towards the traditional ie natural gender roles. The researcher, of course, considered this a bad thing, but that merely reveals her bias towards modern ideology. Other research has consistently found that women, even those of general feminist persuasion, prefer men who exhibit the traditional male role of protector and provider, because they intuitively recognize that they would make better husbands. Of course, being politically correct, the authors called it "benevolent sexism" and claimed it was harmful to women, but when you look closer, it appears that the "harm" lies in encouraging them to adopt female roles rather than male ones.
Some of my female workmates once joked about how a certain feisty female supervisor would become quiet and demure in the presence of her boyfriend. However, this is by no means uncommon. As anthropologist, Peter Frost explained:
In a mixed group, women become quieter, less assertive, and more compliant. This deference is shown only to men and not to other women in the group.
He then cites a lady professor of sociology that this behaviour has evolved by sexual selection for a mate. In other words, just as faint heart never won fair lady, being loud and assertive didn't win the handsome prince.
Families work best when the husband is the head and the wife is the heart. When a system is universal, and has existed as long as human memory runs, it usually means it is hard wired into our genes. Culture normally functions by socialising people along the lines of their natural bent. It is only in our own society for the last fifty years that we have been attempting to run it in reverse, and it isn't working very well. Modern women are impaled on the horns of a dilemma: nature attracts them to male dominance, and ideology insists they reject it. Of course, the men who buy into this fantasy also tend to come to grief.
Evolution
I gained my degrees in zoology at a time when the study of the behaviour of primates - monkeys and apes - in the wild was all the rage. Every species has a slightly different social structure, but nearly all involve male dominance. Of course, there are exceptions. Among bonobos, although males are more aggressive, the females combine and manipulate to dominate them. But this would cut no ice with their nearest relatives (and ours) the chimpanzees, where virtually any male can dominate any female. The societies of baboons and macaques are centred around a coterie of dominant males which protect the females and children. Gorilla males control harems. So do the male hamadryad baboons, who will actually punish a wife who tries to stray. Just the same, if she is really determined to change her allegiance to another male, there is not much he can do about it. This should remind us that it is not just about male power. As with human beings, the system exists because it benefits both sexes.
In my essay on The Science of Sexual Morality, I explained that human marriage evolved, as it has in not a few other species, because the large brained human child requires the care of both father and mother. And for the mother, obviously the most valuable "catch" would have been the dominant male, not only because he had the best genes, but because he was best able to protect and provide for her and her children. Being submissive and sexually available was a winning evolutionary strategy.
There is another factor which does not, strictly speaking, affect the relationship between husband and wife, but does impact on the relationship between men and women in the public sphere. The father's contribution to the family economy was meat. Men are designed as hunters, women as gatherers and nurturers. Since the roles require different skills and mind sets, it should not be surprising if, when given a free choice, men and women choose different careers. More importantly, if a male went hunting with two or three of his male buddies, they came back with more meat per person than if he hunted by himself. If, however, he took his wife with him, at best she would distract him or hold him back, and at worse, she would put herself in danger. Both problems would be exacerbated whether she took the children with her, or left them to fend for themselves. The result is that men are hard wired to try to recreate this primordial male hunting band: a male bonding group which excludes women. Should you be surprised, therefore, that they dominate public life? Ask any high flying woman about the "old boys' club"!
Patriarchy has been the default social system for both us and our ancestors for at least 40 million years. It isn't going away soon.
Anthropology
My mother (born 1909) once made an interesting observation on women's fashions. Those of the 1920s were very boyish. The flappers cut their hair short and, although they still wore dresses, they were straight up and down, not pulled in at the waist, and they sometimes came with chest flatteners. On the other hand, during the Second World War they were more masculine, with wide shoulders. She volunteered no explanation for this, but it is not hard to divine the reasons. It was probably not clearly thought out, but simply the result of intuition. The 1920s was the era of initial women's emancipation, so to be taken seriously, they had to downplay their femininity. During the war, however, women were filling occupations left vacant by men. Also, the nation's survival rested on masculine virtues. Following the war, femininity came back into fashion, but even now women in positions of power have to go in for "power dressing" ie looking more like a man. Nobody is going to take seriously a CEO or Prime Minister with a frilly dress or low neckline. "It is just a case," a woman told me, "of not letting your femininity get in the way of professionalism." But nobody suggests that masculinity gets in the way. It comes with the uniform.
For most of my adult life I have had an amateur interest in anthropology, so let me say it: in anthropology, "the patriarchy" is known as "human society". There isn't any other. Men dominate family and public life in all societies in every era. They may share it to a greater or lesser extent with women, and they may treat women well or treat them badly, but patriarchy is universal.
Now, this tends to upset some people, so they resort to a form of dishonesty: they diligently search among minor tribal societies, and confuse matrilinear ones with matriarchal entities. Matriarchy is the hypothetical system where the natural order is reversed, and society is run by women. On the other hand, matrilineality means that inheritance passes through the female line. The Minang Kabau of Indonesia are matrilinear and uxorilocal. The husband moves in with his wife's family. But the head of the house is neither the wife nor the husband, but the wife's father. In the macho warrior society of the Iroquois, the chiefs were elected by the elder women of the clan - but the chiefs were male. Many New Guinea tribes are matrilinear, but their women are still treated like dirt.
However, all this fussing around small tribal groups misses the forest for the trees. They are useful to see how far the human social template can be stretched before it breaks, but it is the major civilisations, which cover millions of people over hundreds of years, that are the successful societies. Furthermore, if patriarchy really were a social construct, one would expect an equal number of societies to be matriarchal, and others more or less neutral. Also, in the usual to- and fro-ing over the centuries, many of them would have flipped. If, every time the human dice box is shaken, men come out on top, something fundamental is going on. And it appears even on a small scale. Men are only a small proportion of nurses, but they are overrepresented at the higher levels.
This is human nature. You can't fight it, only direct it into its proper channels, because families function best when the father is the head and the mother is the heart. Ours is the only society which has ever questioned that, and then only recently. Everywhere else the natural order is taken for granted. No other society would think it strange for a bride to promise to obey; they would only be surprised that something so obvious need be mentioned. The universal moral law needs no defence.
The Bible
The people who condemn Christianity as some sort of male chauvinist cult don't appreciate the irony of it all. The only reason they believe in the equality of the sexes is that they are living in a society which has been Christian from time immemorial. No other society came up with the idea before. Modern feminism, like a lot of other modern trends, is essentially a secular heresy. It has latched onto the Christian teaching about the equal value of human beings, but removed it from the social morality which makes it workable. Worse, as I have explained elsewhere, it holds that feminine lifestyles are inferior, and insists that women compete with men in their own field.
So let us examine the real doctrine. When the actress, Candace Cameron Bure caused a stir by describing her attitude to her husband as "submissive", she responded that it was a problem that there was no better word. All too true! "Blessed are the meek," suffers from the same problem. It is a defect of our society that, five hundred years after the Bible was translated into English, some basic virtues still sound negative. "Submission" implies accepting something which you don't like, and was probably unjust. Perhaps "defer to" might be better, but I suppose the political correctors would complain even about that. Just what is the appropriate word for the correct attitude of the first mate towards the captain?
In the New Testament, the Greek word is hypotássesthe, which literally means "appoint yourself under", the appropriate act of a subordinate. In the words of St Paul:
Wives be subject to (hypotássesthe) your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and in himself its Saviour. As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives be subject in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. (Eph. 5:21-25, RSV)
In the verse immediately before, he uses the same verb when he tells the members of the congregation to be subject to one another. Elsewhere, they were told to be subject to the authorities as citizens. However, children are instructed to obey (hypakoúete) their parents, and slaves their masters, the implication being that these had much less freedom of action than the other three categories. And, in case you are interested, similar instructions occur in Col. 3:18-19, and also by St. Peter (1 Pet. 3:1, 7).
A ship cannot have two captains, but the captain does not micromanage the first mate, who has wide authority, discretion, and field of responsibility. Similarly, you will find women explaining, in any number of websites and video clips, that "submission" does not mean subservience, nor that she is her husband's servant, nor that she has no influence and no mind of her own. But, seriously, the only people who believe this caricature as those who don't practice it. It is a strawman. The Enemy always seeks to make us flee from the least probable danger so that we will embrace the greater one. There will always be a minority who take a sensible rule to ridiculous levels but, realistically, in this day and age the danger of a woman allowing herself to become a doormat is significantly less than that of her aiming to take over command.
The same goes for that other strawman, that it might prime wives to accept abuse. As Matthew Cochrane so aptly put it, this is like saying that the commandment to "honour thy father and thy mother" primes boys and girls for child abuse.
It’s simply a rhetorical device that poisons the well by presenting God’s design of humanity as a dangerous curse rather than a blessing—as though pastors and teachers need to make God’s Word safe before we stoop to teaching it.
Love, Honour, and Obey
When the early feminist, Lucy Stone insisted on keeping her maiden name upon marriage, her sister-in-law, Elizabeth Blackwell (who was also the first woman doctor) commented that it seemed strange that she should want to be known by the name of a man she didn't choose, instead of a man she did choose. The point, of course, was that her "own name" is really her father's, so retaining it is hardly a blow against "the patriarchy". These days, of course, it is even more problematical, because it will imply that they are not really married, but merely living in sin.
A woman who has already made a name for herself may retain her old name for professional purposes, while using her new name socially. By and large, however, a refusal to take her husband's name means she is deliberately taking a stand against her husband - before the marriage has even begun! Her fiancé would be well advised to call off the engagement. Even raising the issue would be a bad sign.
As for the words at the top of this section, one wonders whether those who cite them recall their own marriage vows. They are thinking of the vows made popular by the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer of 1662, although they appeared in earlier editions. However, the phrase itself does not occur as such. In the early part of the ceremony, the priest asks the bride: "Wilt thou obey him, and serve him, love, honour, and keep him ...?", to which she is supposed to answer, "I will". They then recite their vows, in which the bride promises "to love, cherish, and to obey." The groom's vows are slightly different, and more detailed, but they are complementary.
The advantage of using traditional vows is that they embody what both the word of God and centuries of experience have shown to provide the solid basis of marriage. Writing your own vows may sound romantic, but it implies you can select your own particular brand of marriage, rather than accept that marriage is a fundamental institution independent of the individuals involved. In 1928 the Church of England produced an alternate service which deleted the word, "obey", and other groups followed. This was a mistake. It implies that you can have two different marriages, and that you can opt out of one of its requirements, even one mandated by both the Bible and nature. Indeed, the fact that some people resent the word is itself a good reason to retain it.
In 1947, Princess Elizabeth, soon to be Queen Elizabeth II, insisted on including "obey" in her vows, and every indication is that she followed it through for the remainder of her 74 year marriage. (The late Lady Diana once called Prince Philip "the real head" of the Royal Family.) In the lead-up to Queen Victoria's wedding, the Archbishop of Canterbury wondered whether "obey" should be removed from her vows. To this Victoria replied: "I wish to be married as a woman, not as a queen."
Too many women these days, unfortunately, wish to be married as a queen rather than as a woman.
