The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family

The acknowledgments of William Bennett's new book include a nod to the weighty matters that occupy the author's workaday life: someone named Nora Burns is thanked for having "kept the office running while I was buried in fourteenth-century histories." This may well have been a demanding task, but it can hardly have been a long-lived one; the fourteenth century is mentioned in exactly one sentence of The Broken Hearth. On the other hand, poor Ms. Burns must have been run off her feet on those occasions when her employer was "buried" in accounts of the sex lives of contemporary celebrities and in the prime-time television lineup, which he apparently watched in a state of some agitation, pencil at the ready to note examples of "infidelity, promiscuity, and half-naked bodies groping in bed." The book's thesis is that we've all gone to hell in a hand basket, our moral fabric rent by the combined, malevolent forces of divorce, the women's movement, single parenthood, and Suddenly Susan. The book is so often bombastic — Bennett is one to muse on "the Promethean arrogance of the last decades" — and silly that one feels almost unsporting pointing out its failings. Feminists with any history of cardiac irregularity should be separated from The Broken Hearth by doctor's orders; they might get to Bennett's recommendation that women — not men — ought to arrive at a "compromise" between their professional and parental duties and fall face forward, casualties of the cause.

But women with sounder constitutions would do well to read this book, because Bennett is on to something here, something that ought to be of central concern to feminists. It is this: the sexual revolution and the women's movement, which are perhaps boons to middle-class and rich women, have in many respects been disastrous for poor women. The growing acceptability of fatherless families may be an agreeable turn of events for the single professional woman who harbors a greater desire for a child than for a man, but poor women impregnated by men who feel no societal imperative to stick around are "forced to go on welfare or to get by on menial jobs, and their chances of improving themselves are bleak," Bennett writes. "Abandoned by their men, they have been abandoned no less cruelly by the American Left, by the enthusiastic advocates of female sexual 'liberation' and by the noisy critics of a 'patriarchy,' from which, in a benevolent form, they could only stand to benefit." Furthermore, we learn that the Centers for Disease Control concluded in one study that "birth certificates lacking a father's name were strong predictors of infant death." Add to this the well-documented fact that children living under the same roofs as their fathers suffer far less physical and sexual abuse than those living with a stepfather (or a mother's boyfriend), and it becomes abundantly clear that the various forces in our culture that seek to render fathers unnecessary members of their own families — including those feminists who champion women's personal fulfillment over virtually all their obligations — do so at the considerable expense of the poor. What a pity it's a message that only the William Bennetts of our society have the courage to deliver.

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