“Happy wife, happy life” is one of the most repeated pieces of marriage advice in America. Delano Squires thinks it’s backwards — and he explains why in about ninety seconds that will reorganize how you think about your household.
Squires is director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing at the Heritage Foundation and author of The Vanishing Black Family: How Welfare and Feminism Made Marriage Optional and Children Vulnerable (Sentinel/Penguin Random House). He’s back on Disturbing the Peace, and John spends a full hour on chapter three alone — the chapter Squires says is the most controversial in the book.
That chapter is about second wave feminism. Squires is careful about what he’s arguing: not the right to vote, not property ownership, not work or education. He’s surgical about it. What he critiques is a specific ideology that taught women femininity is weak, masculinity is toxic in men but empowering in women, marriage is oppressive, the home is a prison, and children are a burden.
He builds the case from the primary sources — Betty Friedan calling the suburban home a comfortable concentration camp in The Feminine Mystique, Gloria Steinem diminishing the role of homemaker, Eleanor Holmes Norton writing in the Black Women’s Manifesto that women reading bedtime stories won’t make it in the revolution, Alice Walker’s daughter describing being raised to see family as a form of slavery. Then he turns to Anna Julia Cooper, the mother of black feminism, who argued that a dedicated Christian wife and mother was more needed in black homes than any missionary — and argues her intellectual descendants abandoned her.
