Conservatives in the Anglo world have been maddeningly slow to respond to the enormous damage feminism has done to the values they usually claim to adhere to, such as two-parent families, legitimacy of children, marriage, sexual restraint, etc. Many of these men dodged the bullet by just barely managing to slide through before the door closed to traditional families for middle class, urban Americans. This tipping point occurred some time in the early 80s, about when women passed men in college enrollment, American industry began its long decline, and affirmative action kicked in for real. Today, only the upper class still practices what could be called traditional marriage.

I often encounter men in their 50s and above who still lay the blame primarily on men, thinking that if a marriage fell apart, the guy wasn’t doing his duty. Or, if a man can’t pay his burdensome “obligations” to his babymomma, then he must be a lazy cad. The worst, however, is the assumption that the man married “the wrong kind of woman.” This is frustrating because it implies that 50% of women (if one takes the 50% divorce rate as a guideline) are the wrong kind of women, so only half of men should be able to expect to marry.

But some of the conservatives are getting the message, and it looks like Peter Hitchens is one of them. Feminism is not just a silly little tantrum, but rather a very serious power-grab that has done unprecedented damage to families.

Here, Hitchens puts the blame for the dissolution of the family squarely on the feminists:

The more fuss we make about mothers, what with all those soppy cards and special Mothering Sunday lunches in restaurants, the less we seem to want them to bring up their own children.

The view seems to be that it’s just about all right for women to give birth, but after that can we please separate them from their young as soon as possible, for the sake of the economy?

New Labour was frank about it, with that terrifying commissar Patricia Hewitt describing the dwindling numbers of full-time mothers as a ‘problem’.

The Lib Dems’ chief feminist, Lynne Featherstone, says with her usual simple-minded bluntness that having a baby is a ‘bit of a setback’, adding that: ‘One of the main barriers to full equality in the UK is the fact women still have babies.’

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Nobody ever questions the claim that it is automatically good for mothers to go out and be wage-slaves. Once, this idea was widely hated, and every self-respecting man worked as hard as he could to free his wife from the workbench.

Then the feminist revolutionaries began to argue that the home was a prison and marriage was penal servitude, chained to a sink. Most people thought that was nuts – until big business realised that women were cheaper than men, more reliable than men and much less likely to go on strike or be hungover than men.

What’s more, all the really beefy men-only jobs – mining coal, rolling steel, stoking furnaces – had been abolished.

Some MRAs may take issue with the idea that men should work so their wives can stay home and care for children. Given today’s reality, it’s understandable that men expect women to pull their fair share economically. However, as Hitchens points out – rightly – it hasn’t been a matter of women augmenting men’s earnings, but instead replacing them, and where does that leave the men?

Are women going to put the men up for free? I didn’t think so…