Framingham Community Forum; Margaret Mead: Marriage In An Age Of Social Change

It is my pleasure to introduce a very eminent forum speaker. Dr. Margaret Mead, is presently curator emeritus of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York as well as professor of anthropology at Columbia and Fordham universities. She has authored numerous books and monographs, some of which are cited in the bibliography you received this evening. Her professional specialty is the study of contemporary cultures in the light of perspective gained by the study of small homogeneous stable societies and the further development of cultural theories of human behavior. Dr. Mead has a daughter and one grandchild. I welcome you to the forum and present Dr. Margaret Mead. [loud applause] [loud applause] [loud applause] [loud applause] Madam Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, Everytime that there is upheaval in the world people try to do something to the

family. If the family is gotten very tight, they loosen it up and if it's been very loose they tighten it up. But because there's a general feeling whenever there's any kind of tremendous sense of change and movement, got to do something to the family. And in a sense it's a very safe thing to do because the family is the toughest institution we have. Is the oldest and the toughest and they can stand a lot of buffeting. And so people getting very upset and trying to do things to it doesn't do too much harm. It's much safer than monkeying with a lot of other things. In 1948, we had the First World Conference on mental health in London, and it was very striking there that all the people from the United States from North America and Canada. From the United Kingdom and from Scandinavia, were terribly worried about the family because it was too weak. And all the people from the Mediterranean countries from Greece and Italy and Spain and Portugal were terribly worried about the family because it

was too strong. And you could see people steadily, moving in and out through time as we as a family appears to us to be too weak or too strong. In the 1940s, Mr. Lawrence K. Frank was one of the people that did most in this field, was talking about the fact that the family was subsidizing every other institution in our society. It was taking care of the sick it was looking after the unemployed it was nursing the insane. You know, it was bringing up the handicapped children. It was doing all the things that the community ought to do. But it wasn't more than 15 years later that we could say every institution in the United States was being bullied by the family. This was the period when you couldn't get young men to take new jobs. You couldn't get young men to take promotion. It was going to interfere with family picnics. And when the big institutions like the Ford Motor Company when they got ready to

promote people would tell them to go home and talk it over with the family and see if the family were willing to let them. Which we've never heard of before in human history. You call a family council the six year olds and ask them whether they'll let father to take another job and then washed up about half of the candidates right away. The family said they wouldn't. The other half were then desperately bullied. Saturday morning they just waited until they thought the picnic basket was packed and then they'd telephone some of them back to work. And they bullied them and hurried them and interfered with their family lives and that lost another half, and then the ones that still stuck to it got promoted. This was the early 1950s. This was a period when we instead of having the tired business man in the home we had the tired father in the office. Now those of you who also can remember back to the dear dead days beyond recall in the

late 1940s may also remember this was a period when we thought we had the best families we've had in the whole of American history. We had the most devoted young fathers. This was the GI's who came back and who had been dreaming about having babies while they looked at the kids on Oppennau (?) and gave them oranges. And they came back on the college campuses and lived in trailers and the baby sat on father's term paper and he had to pay attention to it. And we got fathers who were loved having babies is in those days it was my father's, if I asked my students to identify themselves, it was the boys who told how many children they had not the girls. And on Wall Street young fathers were carrying around pictures of their children. And it was said that the kind of camaraderie there used to be on Wall Street when people cursed Roosevelt was now being replaced by showing each other pictures of their babies in what

looked like a very good period. And if the young parents were interested in their children, and more interested than they'd ever been, possibly. And they were all moving to the suburbs and setting up housekeeping and interested in their children. Now one of the things that is confusing people today is why the children of those marriages, are being some of our most obstreperous critics of present day society. Because it is, on the whole, the children of the marriages that were people that were very interested in children. And thought they were bringing them up in the best possible way. Many of them are having the most trouble. But not, I think, because of the nature of those marriages. I think the point because the trouble that we're having today with young people isn't about parents and children. It isn't about teachers and pupils and it isn't about professors and students.

It's just about everybody born before World War II and everybody born afterwards. Wherever they are anywhere in the world. And it is not to be traced back to the failure of particular families, as many people feel it is. And there we've got a tremendous number of worried guilty self reproaching parents. Well, America always had its guilty self reproaching parents because we've built up the notion that every child could be turned into a first rate citizen if only people did the right thing. We really have no suspicion that there may be some children that just aren't first rate citizens. And if we can trust our notion of the family with the British notion who believe that every child is born with a large amount of the devil in them, and if the parents do the right thing they may get the devil out of most of them, and they rest are sent to Australia or somewhere. [laughter] It's a very striking difference because we have felt in this country that the

parents can make the child into whatever they want which means that if the child does well the parents get all the credit and take it. And if the child does badly, of course, the parents feel miserable and guilty and to blame. Now the other version of it that we have today is in the Soviet Union, where everything that a child does it's right the party takes credit for and everything it does wrong they blame the family. Which is a really very tough place to live, your child doesn't do well in school. Fathers trade union calls him up and I asked him why. The youth, the brothers and sisters in the youth group are called in, why isn't Jimmy doing well. And it all points back again. So the family has to take up the slack. You'll hear people today who are writing an incredible amount of nonsense. Is the family finished?

Is marriage finished? All sorts, because at the present moment people are prepared to have anything finished, at the drop of a hat. And so, and of course so quite a large number of people that think that our civilization is finished, the planet's finished, the solar system is finished, galaxy is finished, and family goes along with it. I think it's a good it's very useful to realize that the family is the oldest but toughest institution we have. The functions it served will still have to be served and the chances of the family going out, I think are absolutely minimal - nonexistent. Unless the whole planet goes out with it. At the same time, you know, this country has been too married. Now, we are the most married country in the world today. And we thought everybody should be married all the time. From 16 to 90. We're always delighted when an old lady of 88

marries an old man of 90. [laughter] And marries him with exactly the same economic, legal and religious arrangement as if they're going to have twins tomorrow morning. [laughter] And in the 1950's, we certainly overdid marriage. Mothers pushed their daughters into marriage and of course if mothers, for every daughter that a mother pushes into marriage, some boy has to marry her. So even though the mothers of boys weren't so anxious for them to get married the same number of boys got married. And we were beginning to see in the 1950s, the result of, now being the second this being the second generation of the nuclear family. The nuclear family was not named after the bomb but it probably should have been. But it was named after having a nucleus the same way the bomb was. And of course, the family that consists of father and mother and minor children

and has no tolerance of any adult. The same time that the nuclear family became the prevailing style of this country, we invented the only new kinship term that's been invented for, oh, a couple 100 years and that's, babysitter. And we invented the word babysitter to be used for in-laws particularly. [laughter] And we solved the in-law problem because everybody knows what a babysitter is. You only have them there when you're going out, so as your mother or your mother in-law comes in the door you say, 'Good evening, Mother. Take off your hat. The children's food's in the ice box, the baby's bottle's there, you only have to heat it, goodbye.' And daughters, in-laws and daughter's in-law never have to talk to each other again. It was a very great invention, at any rate. And but we set up the standard family where there's nobody there except the parents and the children. No one to hold the baby, while the [saucepan?]

saucepan upset, the doorbell and the telephone are both ringing at once. No one to help when the mother is sick. She can't get sick, just flat. No one to turn to, no one to, for the children to spend time with, in many instances at all. And we have more and more and more young families, tremendous distances from their kin. kin. Distances from everyone. Right after WWII, 30 million people moved in this country. And we had a situation that has never really obtained in history except in moments of terrible war or refugees or something. But this wasn't a war or refugees, this was just getting another job somewhere. In which we had these very isolated families. With no one. I remember when my sister, who lived in California, moved to Washington during the war. And after she'd

been there about six months she said I need a grandmother I need a grandmother who knows how to live in Washington D.C. You know she put the mattresses down cellar and of course they were all extra ones. They were all mildewed. She didn't know what to do with the ants. She just didn't know how to live in Washington D.C. She done more housekeeping in California. all her housekeeping in California. And it isn't only what you do with the mattresses but what you do in any emergency. There's no one to turn to. There's no one to turn to. And we now have very good studies that show, that the chances of a young mother having a postpartum psychosis after the birth of her first child are definitely a function of how far she lives from either female relatives or female, female friends and you can chart it out on a chart. She's nobody to tell her it won't be like this always. The baby's bath won't take up the whole day and leave you exhausted the end of it. [laughter] You know, in another week you'll feel like a human being. But there's nobody to tell her.

So she buries all the knives in the garden and runs down the police station and says she's afraid she'll murder her baby. And it's not very funny, you know? I know that was a nervous laugh, but still, it's not very funny, the number of young mothers that we're living alone this way. So that, I think that this country is beginning to realize, looking at the life that people are living, beginning to realize the nuclear family, as isolated and as lonely as it is, is not a safe place to bring up children. And we're also, of course, equally seeing a tremendous amount of failure of first marriages. And I think this is a very important thing to recognize. The number of people who can't manage marriage without trying it once and not doing it successfully. The next time they don't do it so badly. But that means it's very wasteful and it's terribly wasteful if they've had a child and in the 50s they always had a child.

If not, they weren't pregnant before they got married, they'd have a child close to 9 months after marriage as possible. And so we have this tremendous number of broken homes with young mothers trying to look after their children. With no one to help them. And not adequate daycare centers. The real issue of daycare centers is not Women's Lib, and what they'd like, but is the number of working mothers that have no place to put their children. While they work and they have to work. And no allowances that will help them. And this is the really serious issue. So that I think that, after 25 years of looking at the nuclear family, looking at young people marrying the first time. Primarily to get away from home. Not because they want to be parents they weren't old enough to be parents, they weren't economically self-sufficient enough to be parents, they weren't experienced enough to be

parents. But they wanted to get away from home. They wanted to be independent. They wanted to be independent. And the only way the average girl in this country can get away from home is to get married. Still. You know, if the family can afford to send her to Vassar and then send her for the experiment in International Living every summer. She doesn't spend more than two weeks at home during her four years of college and people survive. And some of the marriage rate among girls who lived in residential colleges was lower. Quite a few got through college. You know, not as, nearly as many as should have but quite a few. But the girl who has to live at home and go to a nearby college or work, her only way out at present is to get married. And the result is, that we had tremendous numbers of marriages of convenience. As a marriage of convenience is when you get married for some other reason beside love.

Your parents' wealth or royalty and they need an heir or something of that sort convenience. be called marriages of convenience. And we had masses of marriages of convenience and of course, as we don't believe in marriages of convenience, As we still believe that there should be real choice. They didn't work very well. work very well. And a great many of them broke up. One of the interesting things of the 1950s is that lovers disappeared. You can of lovers because they'd get married. [laughter] Lovers don't come back. Lovers have come back now, this is the background, the background, I think, against which we're having the kind of discussions that we're having of where young people are rebelling against the isolation and the fragility of this kind of marriage. And of course they're going

to opposite extremes, they're talking about group marriage. Now everybody's really worried about group marriage, you can just forget it. There's no society where women the have anything to say, that anything but monogamy has a chance. has a chance. [laughter] In Germany after WWI, there several million women more than men. And And everybody said maybe they'll try polygamy but they didn't. As far as we can tell most women would rather prefer have no man than a part of a man. They'll hold out for a whole man. [laughter] So, we get serial monogamy but we don't get polygamy. And the experiments, that are [laughter and reactions].... And the experiments that the mass media pick up and make so much of, are interesting commentaries on the state of society but they're nothing else. As far as we

know there never was group marriage in the whole history of the human race. You know, there are I, you know, there are various sorts of odd arrangements happened through history. Polygamy is very common on the whole. Most men like it. [laughter] Um, But there are men who don't, you know, because if you if you having 3 wives, means you have to build three houses and three canoes and plan three gardens. Only the very strongest men can get away with this. And lot of people prefer peace and quiet. and quiet. But there's been a great deal of polygamy in history as a way of taking care of spare women when you don't know what to do with any woman that isn't married, obviously you have to marry her to somebody. There's been a little polyandry, that doesn't work very well. That's several husbands and one wife. That, it has happened a few times in history. They're pretty peculiar and rare and we don't think it's a But group marriage we've never had.

group marriage we've never had. And as nearly as we look back and try to reconstruct the early history of man. We have to realize it's reconstruction we don't have a reconstruction, we don't have any evidence. What we think of is, couples formed in which a man takes care of a woman. takes care of a woman, brings her his hunt for her to cook and she feeds him and he takes care of her children. Now, he does not, there was a long period in history where he didn't know they were his children but he would take, Maybe they didn't have the word wife then. Maybe they didn't have the word wife then. And he came home to the same cave, most of the time. If you noticed women's look of anxiety when they kissed their husbands You see that we have a residual fear [laughter] that maybe they won't come back to the same cave. they won't come back to the same cave. [laughter] And the basis of human marriage, as we know it, is cooking.

From the moment that you've, you've got the kill or a woman gathered some food and cooked a meal, instead of each person going out and Without any meal, we have the beginning of the home. the beginning of the home. And it, the meal and laundry and [laughter]....In the West Indies, the principle the West Indies, the principle reason, that some West, West Indian Islands, the principle reason men get married is to have somebody do their washing. There no laundromats there and a man can't wash, so obviously you've got to have a woman to do the laundry. Eskimos had to have a wife but. [laughter] It's the division of labor it's the division of labor, and the companionability, and the cooking, and the and someone will wonder where you are. That's been going on, as far as we that's been going on, as far as we know, for hundreds of thousands of years,

institution that we know of as human marriage today. And the basis of marriages still. The companionability of people who have a place to come home to. And when they get there there's someone to feed them. there's somebody to feed them and to wonder where they were, and, or even beat you, if, in wives' cases, it often means they got beaten if they weren't there. But still it was homelike. And, because, of course, in societies where they beat women, women They behave in a way that provokes beatings and they'll be beaten. beatings so they'll be beaten. Then of course they discover it isn't necessary and then you have trouble and upheaval in the home when they become modernized. And then for a while things go very badly because the women still men can't beat them anymore and they have to work out a new system of relationship. And by and large, relationship. And by and large in the United States we don't believe in wife beating. Although,

in Penn, my own state of Pennsylvania, until fairly recently, you were allowed to beat a wife with a stick the size of a man's thumb, that was in the law. [audience reacts] But through and, if we look at the family, through human history, it's had two functions - to bring up children, and to settle the In an amicable method as possible so that people will settle down and bring up the children. And no society has ever found, society has ever found, over time, a way of bringing than the family, that has completely worked. completely worked. Now we have a few religious sects, like the Hutterites, centuries old, and who do bring their children up in a pretty [communal or common old] fashion. up in a pretty communal fashion into being Hutterites. They aren't, they don't bring them up

to be anything else. Um, and Hutterites don't They're stuck in a place where they've grown up. The same thing is true of the Kibbutz in Israel the same thing is true of the kibbutz in Israel that they can bring their children up quite And then that they stay on Kibbutz. Their so dependent on each other. They're so dependent on each other that they can't barely leave. Whereas about the real family, as we know it, is you can barely leave it. [laughter] And this is important. One of the principal One of the principal functions of, of you, of the American family of the American family particularly, is to bring up children look at me who can leave. Who can leave and become economic self-sufficient and get married and have their own families. This is one of the things that families are supposed to do. families are supposed to do. Now we've had quite a lot of experiments in history, though, where they've attempted to get rid of the family.

Soviet Union virtually tried to get rid of the family in early days and they were going to bring and divorce was going to be very simple and easy. Their now easy. They're now one of the most Puritanical countries in the world and if you want to make any progress within the party you don't get a divorce. Because they found they couldn't produce the kind of character Because they found they couldn't produce the kind of character they wanted without the Now, of course, we can't say that we may not invent some other way of bringing up children but we certainly haven't done it through history. children but we've certainly never done it through history, because what the family does is, to begin with, to teach people to accept relationships as given. I mean this is what you've got. This brothers and sisters. And you take them as given. Whether their dumb or Whether they're dumb or intelligent. Whatever their

temper is, whether they're red-haired or black-haired, you learn to accept them Furthermore, within the family, children learn what a boy is and what a girl is. Now, learn what a boy is and what a girl is. Now, this differs from one society to another but whatever it is, they learn it. What's masculine behavior and what's feminine behavior. And From seeing fathers and mothers follow[?] their children. fathers and mothers with all their children. And of course in a stable, unchanging society, the children have learned perfectly how to be fathers and mothers because they're going to be the same And an Eskimo woman, for instance when she discovers she's going to an Eskimo woman, for instance, when she discovers she's going to have a child, she makes a little separate fire and starts cooking her food on the separate fire. She never has the embarrassment of saying anything to her husband because he knows what it means . if she cooks on the separate fire. Perfectly solid, good communication. But

Barry's 'Mary Rose' - you may remember the line. 'How is a young husband to know remember the line, 'How when his wife throws a butter dish at him'. [light laughter] And he isn't, you know, because it isn't standard to throw a isn't, you know, because it isn't standard to throw a butter dish at your husband when you're pregnant so there's no way he could know. So when one wife did it -- and if one looks at any sort of stable old-fashioned society, you find that the young people have learned how to be husbands and Learn the whole role and they carry it out. carry it out. But of course here, they can't do that. Because no one is going to be the kind of woman their mothers were, no boy is going to be the kind of man his father was. The boy doesn't want his wife to be like his mother. The girl doesn't want her husband to be like his, his father or her father. The change is so rapid that you can't

We can use them a little bit more than we used to in the United States. United States. And this is evidence for the fact that today costumes for cold mother's-in-law. There's a shop in Philadelphia And, uh, there's a shop in Philadelphia that has hats, mother-in-law hats for weddings, and the two of them dress to match which is almost mothers-in-law a few years ago. But nevertheless, every marriage this contracted here, has to be worked out a new. With to be worked out anew, without any clear patterns of how to behave. And who have had, in many cases, no experience whatsoever of bringing up children. experience whatsoever of bringing up children, this is the first his often her own. And where she knows nothing about babies. where she knows nothing about babies, doesn't know whether they're going to break or not.

Arms will come off if she touches, and has to learn this afresh. And where there's a great deal more experimentation, a great deal more talk. [white noise] deal more talk. And if people can't can't go and make little fires like the Eskimo can't go and make little fires like the Eskimo and throwing the butter dish doesn't do any good and if they can't talk, they can't really communicate well with each other. And emphasis on communication. On attempts communication. On attempts to talk. Another thing about the American family that's very important to realize is that American culture is primarily a culture in which, which which was built by young adults, back to the first pilgrims that landed. They were young then they came here. And then generation after generation young adults came. generation after generation, young adults came. And you can't bring young

You can't take them and get them to sit at somebody's knee and learn nursery rhymes. So they all have gone through the whole experience of growing up in America. So you experience of growing up in America. So you write a book and we write a book about everything. We're really only people that write books about sex and marriage and love. Other and sort of cookbooks about peculiar things. But we're the only peculiar things. But we're the only country that writes out the most simple things For people because they just don't know them and don't really know how to tell them because you don't treat adults that way. So that our image of marriage is something that people don't know a thing about till they do it. Now we've had a good deal of talk in this country about trial marriage, at times. But marriage is something you can't try.

Because the thing about marriage is you're married. And a trial marriage is nonsense. Because the thing you have to figure out is can you bare each other 24 hours a day? And And can you bare the fact that all your relatives and all and all his relatives and all of your friends and all his friends you know your marriage [light laughter] And you're close all there. If you decided not to go home where you going to get clean shirt. Now these are things you can't try out, you see. You can go on a camping trip go on bicycles to Europe. People can experiment with pieces of marriage. You can even try out her cooking somewhere. You can get ??? But you can't try out the fact that those two people are there

together. And so, in the sense trial marriage is not a very feasible thing. Now we have at present, a great deal of advocacy among the radical young, something they call an arrangement. Now an arrangement is a case where you publicly live together with the approval of his family and your family and the minister and the dean of women. [laughter] Which isn't marriage. No! They wouldn't think of getting married. Far as I can tell, it has all the disadvantages of marriage and virtually none of the advantages and the girl peels the onions just the same. [light laughter] But it is, at the moment one of the demands of the young somehow they want, they want to keep the sense that a marriage will last forever. They feel that this is something

that our society developed and, hell, for a couple 2000 years on the whole. That once married, you could count on it. Women Women care more about this than men. And they still believe that there's some there's something about marriage. The word marriage, that once you've caught him you've got it. got it .And When she's calling you guys and so they want to keep want to keep themselves, state the fact that they're not certain what they're doing. Now, I think that the direction that we're tending towards now and what we'll be struggling with in next 10 years or so is one towards fewer marriages. It will not be necessary, hopefully for young people to get married in order to leave home. That we will have other things for them to do hopefully they can do usefully without having to get married

That we will have higher standards of parenthood. We don't have any standards of parenthood presently. If you are over age haven't married somebody else and have the money for a license, a marriage license, you have a right to have as many children as you want in the United States. And you can be as unfit a father or mother as anybody can possibly be. You can have no money. You can have a criminal record but you don't tell the girl about it. You can have lethal genes in the family, anything. But at present, anybody in this county who is of age and unmarried to somebody else has a right to be a parent. And I think we're going to revise this to a degree. I don't mean revise it legally but I mean revise it in terms of what we're asking for. That instead of pushing young people into marriage so early as we did and some extent still do, we will suggest that they do not have children until they are certain

that they will make good parents and that they are willing to pay the price of parenthood. Which a minimum price is to stay around until the children leave home. And this would enormously reduce the number of parents in this country if they had this kind of a commitment. I think that I think this will come I think we will have more binding commitments. I don't know what form they will take but when people will become parents we need a more binding commitment. Then if their not parents and have different kinds of behavior and different kinds of religious ceremonies, legal ceremony for people who aren't going to be parents but would like to live together in comparative peace publicly and without reproach. But I'm not going to be parents parents yet, they are too young they're still in school, they don't have any money.

Or their too old, they've had their children. This is is a second marriage they don't want to disinherit their first children. or they are 80 and these will be recognized as other kinds of relationship because we've rather got stuck with just one form no matter whether people are going to be parents or not. I think to be a great deal more adoption that there has been. And a great deal more adoption of children who need to be adopted. Not what we thought of in the past as the adoptable child. Because the adaptable child of this country has been the child of impeccable parenthood, absolutely on both sides. The agent, you want the agency to testify to the impeccable integrity of both parents when the child is illegitimate. And you want it to be illegitimate so the parents will give it up and you will have absolute possession. I think this will shift in favor of people inviting

who are adopting. Parentless children who need to be adopted. It's very interesting now watch what's going on in Sweden. They were only 50 adoptable babies born in Sweden last year. And the Swedes are adopting Greek children, Chinese children children of mixed ancestry who have a particularly miserable time in the world because they don't belong anywhere. They have a sort of a slogan that says parents need children need parents need children need parents need children. So I think adoption will grow. And then also, if we're going to have a good many people who don't marry or who don't remarry, we have to have a place for them to live where they, where it's home. And where they have some access to children and where when they come home at night there's somebody to eat scrambled eggs with or play chess with or something. So I think

So I think we're going to have to develop forms of living. Where young people before they're married and widows, can also have some access to children. And the children in turn will have an extra batch of proxy aunts and uncles and godparents as children used to have when they grow up in small communities and have grandparents and aunts and uncles to ???to pattern themselves on. I think we're going to be experimenting with this kind of thing and some of the residential communes do experiment with this kind of thing. I think the economically self-sufficient communes are going to stay where they, where such communes all of these have, as extreme experiments outside society where I think some of the residential ??? outside. Well and then some of the residential home in which groups of young people some of them with children some not live somewhere close together and other people help to take care of the help take care of the children. I think this is one of the things that's going to have

Now what we're going to do with our idea of lifelong marriage, which was quite easy to manage in the days when the average expectation of life was 37 and it is a great deal harder to manage when the your expectation of life may be 77. I don't quite know. At present the woman who has brought up children and kept a man's house and done everything I mean couldn't possibly had all these things done if ??? it would cost him four or five times as much as you'd have to pay for it The cheapest labor in the world this was. And if you had to buy, had to hire, a housekeeper, cook permanent babysitter, permanent mistress, permanent chauffeur, permanent secretary, permanent accountant, you know and all the other things that wives do,

you know man would be bankrupt. Man don't stay with children they don't stay unmarried, because they can't afford it. They go find somebody else to do all these things right away. And at present women give their lives working in the home bringing up the children managing half of it and are giving no economic recognition at all. If their husbands want to leave them, they can just walk off and leave them and they don't have Social Security . Why shouldn't they have Social Security? They've been making as much of a contribution to the country as other people. And so in the past society has pretended, and that hasn't been true since the Industrial Revolution, but they pretended that in return for staying home and having children, a woman would be be cared for all her love.?? And would would always be fed always have a roof over her head Well this hasn't been true for a long time and we keep on pretending it. Now if we're going to cut down the number of

children in families and, I'm, we certainly are. And a girl has two children when she's 21 and 23, the society is not going to support her all her life in return for having had two children. It was very reasonable to support women who had 15 children died when they had 16th. Ah, it was very reasonable to support women who died when they had a third child and a fourth and a fifth because we expected all women to spend their whole lives having as many children as possible because so many would die, which isn't true anymore. And we should probably be looking toward some other way in which women can also have a sense of their people than the sense that we give them now. And now we still on the whole give them a choice. You will be a wife and mother and live in the suburbs. Or you give up being a wife and mother and live in the city. And you

can be a secretary and live in the city and have ??? children or you have the children you live in the suburbs and any sort of solution except this is very hard to manage. So one of the things that will probably happen and one of the things that the women's lib is sort of, in its extreme form, is a cranky precursor of is that if women are going to be asked to take a place in public life, then we have to give them a decent place. And of course we haven't been doing this. But none of this means that the family is going to disappear. Children will be reared in families but we won't have as many children, and we won't have as many families with children proportionately to the population as we once had . The children we be safe, hopefully the children will be much safer because if there's more of a demand that people should be good parents before they have children,

This will be safer for the children. There will be more adults who will be free to backstop emergencies because they don't have children of their own. So what we used to have when we had all those ????. Right after World War 2 Britain was run by ??? . They never would have gotten through World War Two that??? we used to have loads of ??? who did all these things who stayed with their married sisters and looked after the children. We need some back, only they won't be quite the same style. But we will have more people without children who are free to help with children and less of a burden on each family therefore, because they can help. But the family isn't going to disappear and children reared in families aren't going to disappear and hopefully they will be very ??? and better loved more cared for. Because there's one characteristic

that is very important to look at today. That the more we know about what we can do for children medically, psychologically, pedagogically, anyway, the more adult time takes to do it. One out of 30 children born does not have binocular vision. Now if you don't have binocular vision, you have trouble learning to read, You'll be taught but it takes hours and hours and hours of a highly skilled person to do it. You're born with your teeth out of ??? they can be corrected. But again it takes hours and hours to do it. If we are saving today, and we want to save, everybody that's born but the children that we save are more fragile than they were in the past when half the baby's born died. And so we need

more and more skilled adult time for every child. And one of the things we're suffering for in present is not enough adult time to do the things that children need, not enough nurses, not enough doctors, not enough hospital beds, not enough dentists, not enough good teachers. To but, and, reducing the number of children portions of the population. We'll have more adult adult time to care for them. But we still have the sort of an image of living on the farm with a father or mother bringing up 10 children for because the first five brought up the other five. And it was a fairly stable form of life and father mother did present pretty good models of what the future was going to be. But they don't do this now. And so we're going to have a lot, ??? lot more accessible adults for each child to be sure that each child find model ??? has enough health

enough care, so that we can bring them up even though they are more fragile than children have been in the past. So I don't think that any number of Mass media ??? and attacks and statements of the family is going to disappear need worries. But what we do need to worry about is the tremendous toll at present that is being taken, and especially on children with broken homes and the number of broken homes that we have this country. And we need to develop a form of marriage that is not so exacting. There's better support so that more young parents can look after their children and more young people don't have children they can't look after. All this has become overwhelming. Do you foresee a continuation of this trend?

The mother is the head of the family with no male present. And how will this affect the male role identification in the future. I think most of these males that have left these homes should never have had children, and a very large number of them were kids who got married because some girl wanted to get married and the girl wanted to get married ??? home Or, this is true in the affluent classes, and in the inner city it's because there's no work for the men and men without work in this country don't make very good fathers and so they get pushed out. So that what we need to correct is premature immature marriages and we need to correct the conditions where there are men with no work where their families do better on welfare. We have families today, for instance, nice stable solid families with ??? children where a man can support them. So if you marry

If he married his wife, they've been very much worse off than if he doesn't ??? you see. Well that kind of organization of welfare doesn't exactly solidify the home and we need to change that sort of thing to put it to set up a situation so fathers can be self-supporting and support their families. And we need both these. Now we keep talking about the male role. Males never being very good at a role if he couldn't bring home the bacon if you have a society where you expect male to bring home the bacon you can't get a job. The mother takes over. Father leaves. Mother leans on her son and she leans too hard on her son. When he gets married he leaves and this goes on generation after generation. This is Heline??? Warner. What about the woman who at 40 to 50 is unable to start a new family or has a man

has no problem in this area. This is one of the uncomfortable facts of life. And as far as we can see we're not going to change it. And it's one of things that, of course, people are going to feel it as an injustice. But you know there's a there's a parallel in justice. It's very hard on men. Men have no post-menopausal zest, zest. [laugh, claps] Now they substitute with a new wife. And she helps ??? but most men in this country by the time of their fifties, have gotten as far they're going to go. You know they may be working for another 15 years but if they've only made the second vice president that's where that's where

stuck. Or they're only going to be principal of that size of high school. They've lost their chance to be superintendent in schools in New York City. And on the whole, most men who aren't, you know, president of the United States are governors. There is a handful of men that have a very interesting life for quite a long time. Judges of the Supreme Court and the like. But the majority of men have gone as far as they're going to go by the time they are 50 and they'd like to have a quiet life and do more fishing. Children are grown up. Their daughter hasn't brought home three children yet for them to support. And there's a little interval there. of quiet. And at just that moment, by Jupiter, their wives start being so filled with beans ??? around the house. And I think this is the compensatory factor now.

You see one of the great inventions of human biology was the menopause, ????which man made it possible to save women's lives at a very primitive time in history when you couldn't save the men at all. They went they went out and they were caught by lions and they were drowned going over the reeves and they were killed in warfare. And there was no way of saving their lives. But by stopping childbearing, women could live longer and could be there to tell people where you found food. Twenty years ago when there was a family And probably this was one of the very important things in making civilization possible. But it has worked out unevenly because women can't have children after 50 but they can have the best years of their active life after 50. Men on the whole can have more children at seventy but at the same time they,

on the whole, don't have the same extra climactic effect. So maybe it's fair. If you really start eyeing about and look at all the neighbors. [laugh] Why don't you cite the Second World War as a dividing line between the generations. John [last name]. Because of the things that happened at the time of the Second World War. It's not the war but it's the bomb, beginning of space, the electronic revolution, television, the computer, all these things came in at a time of World War Two. All at once and the world became one. We explored it at all we flew over it at all we knew where everybody was for the first time. Now the experience of the world becoming one world not politically but

actually now beginning to go into space where people never really believed they could go into space. On television that let you see what was happening everywhere else instantly. This was an extraordinary number of things to happen at once and by happening all at once, all around the world at once, we introduced a gap between generations such as we've never had before and we have no reason to believe that we will ever have again. I figure that to produce the same kind of breath and experience, I mean we'd have to have something of the order of putting a colony on the moon and then blowing up the earth. Now that would be a real gap between the people who see the earth and the people that grew up after there was no earth. I would be quite a hard thing to explain to the children. Worse than the depression. [laughs]

And we have to realize that this generational gap is not a gap between parents and children. It was 5 years ago. And we have to realize that this generational gap is not. They will be ???when we needed the oldest were 20 and they were all in school. Now the oldest are 25. They are out of school. There are young teachers, young doctors, young lawyers. Ten years from now they'll be 35 and they'll still be the same gap in experience because it isn't the gap in knowledge it's a gap in experience. Bob Davis: How do we know if one will be a good parent beforehand? Well you know there's a lot of things that you can practice. You can borrow the neighbor's children and keep them for 24 hours to start with. You can go and visit people who have three children under 4. [laugh] I'd like to see as a requirement for graduating from high school,

like learning to swim, I like to require every student spend a weekend, solid weekend, in a household with three children under four. We will not have so much premature parenthood. [applause] And you know it will be a very good idea if the future parents knew each other long enough to have some idea what the other person believes and was able to do. I saw a couple, and it wasn't the first marriage either, the second marriage for both of them they must have been 35 or something like that. They've been married for six months and we suddenly start to say something about religion. And the wife said "Oh I don't believe in hell do you dear?" [laughter] Dr. Susan ??? I'm not probably not pronouncing it right but you probably are used to the mispronunciation.

If there are a large changes to come in living styles and at present there are stigmas attached to these, How do you feel these stigmas will be removed so the broader kinds of lifestyles will be acceptable? Well [background noise] ???do particularly refers to religion? Well, we've put up with changes of religion for a very long time. You know one of the reasons I think that we have a lot of things that went on in the 50s was there were so many changes in religion. I tried to get large numbers of the clergy in this country to refuse to married girls who were seven months pregnant in a white veil. You know because their mothers would have kept them from getting pregnant or their mothers couldn't have a white wedding. And if we had said of course they should marry I mean the

church will say if you made a mistake and if you're willing to correct it, you could become married and become parents we'll marry you. But why should they have married them all in white veils and allow them to register their silver and have all the things that went on in the 50s. And we could have cut down on all this miracle pregnancy and premature marriages . They said clergy willing to cooperate but they said it wouldn't be kind. and I think we've had we're having an enormous change in ??? of the church today. That's one of the reasons people are so nervous. It's very nerve wracking. What's going on with the church. You know, you don't you can't you met them. You go to meet the sister talk to you in a school with mini skirt It's disconcerting. But I am not at all afraid that we won't make the adjustments. I don't think that's the real danger. There is just

a little tiny bit of danger that we might have are all full of talk of ??? and go back and punish everybody that experimented 20 years before. This could happen but I don't think it will actually. But we have had cases where a party's been in power too long and they want to get rid of the other party that been there too long, they have been there too long that's true. When they call women in and said when you were married 11 years ago your first baby was born seven months after marriage. Do you wish to fight the case or resign? Now whether we would ever do this again I don't know but it's a reason I advise people to get married instead of have arrangements because we can't be sure. Has there ever been a society where a stigma against unmarried women has not existed? Do you the stigma will dissolve this country? Can you read

Can you read that? [name] ????? No, I think there have been periods where there was no stigma on married woman. After all the middle ages and in many communities a third of the women were nuns. they weren't stigmatized they were treated with reverence they were given the economics of ??? They skipped parenthood and took care of God's children as they were sick or they were orphaned, and they were also given a quite lot of freedom. the women had the greatest freedom in the middle ages for people like St. Terassa??? who went charging up and down down the country making bishops nervous, as no married women could possibly done. But they got their freedom and their respect and their lack of

stigma by not having children. This was the the price. And there are good many societies who, if a woman won't have children they let her to do other things. And one of the things we've been fighting about in this country is the right of a woman to have children and do other things and have a style of life doesn't demand that the only way you can get married is to spend your life in our present very time consuming style staying at home for three weeks waiting for the plumber. [laughter / applause] Elizabeth Barlin, is that right? You know I wish you to stand up when I call your name so the rest of the audience knows whether you're 16 or 60. Would you please explain according to your

prefiguretive?? model That's a reference to my last book. What post the World War Two adults may learn in their attempt communicate ???? with the young. I'm using the word prefiguretived ??? to mean that we live in a society now where the children have had experiences the adults have not, that none of the adults have had, and therefore the adults are going to have to learn from the children what the children are like in order to be and therefore the dogs are going to have to learn from the children what the children are a to teach them things. The simplest bit is if you are a school teacher and teaching children on the theory that they know what you knew when you were young. Your teaching isn't what they call relevant because the children probably learned all of that several years ago. The most important thing I think is for the us older people on the other side of World War Two to learn to listen. Now at present we're getting to something very interesting. That the parents who will not

listen to their children while they're in college. The minute they get out of college and get a job they listen. Now this is not really surprising because we respect people who are standing on their own feet are economically independent and college students in this country are treated like second class citizens. They're being supported by their parents or by the taxpayers, scholarships, or something. something. And we don't think they have any rights to openion. We only think we should be able to draft them and send them out to fight, and we think it's alright to let them be pilots of planes that if they drop a bomb they may destroy the world, but they haven't any right to opinions as long as they're in school. But the minute they get out of school and get a job the parents do listen. So now we're getting quite a lot listening parents. Mr. Hickle??, for instance, nobody ever thought he turns to a listening parent. But he did! [claps]

Now I think we've got to learn to listen younger. We've got to learn to really listen to a 10 year old and not say well I was a 10 year old once I know what it's like to be a 10 year old. We we don't. We never were 10 year olds with a man on the moon. We never were 10 year olds with television. We never were 10 year olds in this kind of world. And if you watch American parents, the children show off to them all the time and the children talk all the time, in fact that they yell most of the time, but the parents don't listen. They really don't listen at all. And you can't blame them with this much talk, but that's what we have to learn to do and to realize that when they say something, when you get a 14 year old boy who says, "You know I used to be interested in space when I was young." It's pretty hard for a 40 year old teacher to understand.

To whom putting a man on the moon is a magnificent event. event. You better find out why he is so bored in space. This is Anne Marie Donavin? Can you find her? If, as you said, there may eventually be special arrangements for people who don't wish to have children, Does this mean that children are seen as the only purpose of marriage? No. You know I think it would be wonderful if we reinvent the the idea of marriage without children. It virtually disappeared you know. Lots of people in the 20s didn't want children. If a man had a special kind of career he was going to be a musician or an artist or the governor of the state or something. And his wife felt he was an important person and she wanted to give her full time to to take care of him. They didn't have children and nobody persecuted

them. And nobody wondered if it was his fault or her fault. Nobody told them to try artificial insemination or test tube babies. My mother used to, my mother had five children, and she used to say our luxuries are our children. About those people who went to Europe every summer because they didn't have. children. But you know It was perfectly respectable in the 1920's not to have children and for young people to say we don't want to have children. We want to do other things. We want to be missionaries we want to be working harder at politics, we want to be able to travel, I want my husband to be be able to do what he likes because remember the most married men's lives are just as ruined by children as married women. That's a thing that women's lib forgets. That for every woman that's boxed up in the suburbs there's a man that's boxed up in the job. We've forgotten these things. So

from the really from 1945 on. if you didn't have children you adopted, and there was a period where people thought that somebody ought to produce. I figured out at one point we needed 5 million ??? bright illegitimate children to produce the number of children that young families, young couples, in this his country thought they had right to get from somewhere in case they never take the trou???/ whether they had a fertile marriage or not. Or whether they were capable of having children at all. So I think there will be a lot of marriages without children in the future. People who decide that they will do a better job in society by not having children they may have ??? genes you may have illness will carry them off early in life or have family history that might carry them off early in life. But they will then want children to see on weekends. There are lots of people who only want children on weekends. They are aunts, good aunts. Now these unmarried couples could have children on weekends. That would give the married people a rest.

This is some name: Mallory? Did I really guess? ??? a lady staying until the children are grown. How do you talk about a dead marriage when people begin to be destructive to each other? Well there are marriages where the children aren't ??? that are so bad that the children are all outside and we all know this today. It certainly it isn't good for children to grow up in an atmosphere where they distrust of everything and because of the way they see their parents treat each other. The British position about divorce now is, on the whole, what you have to do is to declare a marriage dead. And a relationship is a living thing, it's just as living as a flower or the child. And it can die. And if it's dead I think we ought to then have

a funeral. I don't think people ought to crawl out the back door and the first time you hear about their remarriage is as a Christmas card with a different woman on it. I think people ought to be able to, with dignity, recognize they try. Have this relationship is dead, and then we ought to be able to weep over it without taking sides and without having 18 fights and without dragging people through legal proceedings that if they didn't hate each other from start they'll certainly hate each other afterwards. Now, I didn't read the last sentence here. I see emotional versus legal divorce. Ah. I suppose all I've been talking about that what we need in every case is protection for the children. I hope we're going to reach the stage

where we recognize that two people who had a child are irrevocally??? related to each other just irravacally??? related as a brother and sister Now, at present, we say if you're born with the same parents you are irrevocably related. I mean nobody can divorce a sister, you know. You can call her every name in the world, refuse to see her, but you can say she's not my sister. There's no way of disowning a sister, there she is. I don't think there should be any way of disowning a co-parent because you are joined in that child. You can disown a wife, because that's a partnership between adults that doesn't work, in some instances but you remain co-parents. And if we began to realize this, I think we'd have quite different world. People would make an effort to continue to be co-parents even though they found that they weren't good spouses. [silence]

Raymond ????Thank you. Do you have any opinion on the possible effects of the TV family series, such as Dennis, in which the father was depicted as a foolish incompetent. That is the young people's image of the father been weakened in our culture by such programs. Well if they haven't been weaken for many generations, you know. That we've always had as the comic character the ineffectual father. He wouldn't be so fun if there weren't as many top ??? But he's always been a joke. And you go way back to the comic strips of 1900, you'll find this kind of father depicted. But he's always been a joke. And you go way back to the comic strips of Now, in the standard American culture nobody wants a strong father, in this old sense, you know, somebody whose

word was law and everybody trembles when he came in the door, and the soup had to be hot or nobody would speak pick somebody ??? you know the strike??? kind of strong fathers not the American idea at all.This incompetent silly fathers are caricatures of the kind of strong father we don't want, because what Americans want on the whole is a kind of partnership where each person respects the other, where they can change rules if they need to, where they're tolerant and there's a certain sense of fair play, and American women don't want that kind of husband and American men don't want the kind of wife that goes with that kind of husband. Now sometimes I don't understand that. because some of those wives are models, you know the kind that every time you put your hand out they put under it what you want?

I had a girl who grew up in Turkey living with me for three weeks once, a student, and at the end of it I couldn't figure out why everyone didn't marry a Turkish woman. I never got my key out to open the front door didn't make any difference when I came home. She was there to I never got Mikey out of the front door and I get nervous when I can. She was there to open the door for me and never reach for anything, she hadn't put it down, and I don't see why men don't marry these women, but by and large American men don't, you know. They come home and marry American women, and, who don't do this sort of thing, and do anything but hide behind the door to open the door for their husbands. I haven't seen a woman that did that for years. So we don't want that kind of father and we don't want that kind of wife. We want the kind of marriage that is on the whole of partnership. want that kind of wife. We want the kind of marriage that is, on the whole, a partnership. style of American marriage is much more companionable, and equal, and fair

with them, but the general style of American marriage is much more companionable and equal and fair than that. Carol ?Malahan?, a young lady, what alternatives should I well you know there's quite a spectrum, of all the years ahead one of the curious things that has happened that as the length of life has gotten longer in reality people have gotten more hurried and we're going to feel that less time instead of more time There's a tremendous lot of time ahead. When I was an undergraduate we used to laugh at those dead days when you were an old maid at 25. How silly could you be because now we knew you could have a child at 40, so why rush?

Why not do what you want to do? Why not try things out? Why pin yourself down right away and tie yourself to something? Why not experiment? And I think one the most important one of the troubles of this country at present is that we tried so hard to make everyone make up their minds so young. In the 1950s a boy of 15 who didn't know what he wanted to do, the girls looked down on him. Hadn't made up his mind yet? Ok, won't have anymore dates with him. Then we had this tremendous pressure for everyone to make up their minds early. One of the funny things is that nobody wanted to marry geologists. because they got an idea that earth science dealt with such long periods that their husbands would be away from home a lot and all over the country couldn't anybody marry geologists.[audience laughter] Then we had the wonderful story one of the daughters of the president of MIT announced to her mother when she grew up

she was going to marry a mediocre man. and her mother asked her why she said "so he'll stay home". Wait awhile. Try several things. Find out who you really are. Join the Peace Corps. Just find out what you would like that. We do not need to make people settle down so soon. They've got an expectation of 77 years. A lot of time. A lot of work that needs to be done that is well paid for. that you can do and experiment before you try to get something to do. [inaudible] Did I understand you correctly when you mentioned the fact that home situation was more solid as the days of yore when there were more than two generations living in the same roof. I am referring to the grandparents living in the same home. I was always

under the impression that in-laws were a major cause of divorce. Yeah but they didn't have divorce. Actually that one's simple: there wasn't any divorce so you just went on living with them. People lived in the same house for 20 years and didn't speak to each other. This was fairly common. Not good for the children, but it happened. The three generation family or the four generation family was very solid, and the children grew up still today in France, a man is really not mature until his father dies. His father may not die til he's 60. But as long as his father's alive that's part of the whole system. And Americans are the ones that have decided that you can't have grandparents anywhere partly because we have so many cross marriages: cross-national, cross-religious, cross class, and those two sets of in-laws you can't leave the same room safely, which is one reason we try to send them both to Florida.

two sets of in-laws camping rooms [laughter] Mr. Barry Pressman, do you think marriage have a need for additional sex outside the marriage, and if so can this be neatly arranged in the future? [audience laughter] [audience laughter] You. Well it's been pretty well arranged in the past. [audience laughter and applause] The question of need, I'm not quite sure about that. The principal difficulty in this country is that we have no idea of any sex

that doesn't lead to marriage. So you have a man who's quite happily married. You know that they've been married for several years and the glamour is off and the secretary has to remind him of his wife's birthday but it's not a bad marriage and they have children and he really likes to stay married and then he meets somebody and starts an affair, and pretty soon she wants to marry him. So now he's got a woman he's married to and a woman who wants to marry him. ones. He's got to the trade one of them. There's no other course. If you have two betrayals facing you, you tend to choose the younger woman. That's what we need separately from whites as well. This is the way it has been for the number of man divorced woman and I married one who looks just like her 20 years younger because they get themselves in a fix where whatever they do is wrong and when you get into a position

where whatever you do is wrong, you do what you want to. Rene LeBlanc. Anthropologists like Robin Fox and Tiger-- isn't that, don't those wonderful names of two men that worked with animals? Think of things that we are going against our cultural evolution if we accept some of the views which is presented by women lib. What do you think? Well Mr. Tiger, his name is Lionel Tiger. [audience laughter] Mr. Tiger looked at some primates, not all and found that among some primates what they call bonding between males which is a name for friendship and that and in some primates instead of having one old man with a harem,

which is one of the pictures of ape life, in some of them you have a coalition of three males or four males that run everything, this is what is called bonding, the ability to form an alliance, and he looked at these animals, they don't all do it but a few do. We don't know that early man bonded but he thinks they might. Then he goes on constructs a theory that when men started to go hunting in parties and you had to have a group of men in order to catch a large animal instead of going around and catching little ones by yourself. That those men had to get on with each other in order to track a lion or an elephant and so mens' capacity for friendship developed, but as women didn't chase lions or elephants, they didn't need to develop it. Now he's forgotten what it's like to live with six women at home while all the men are away which takes just as much capacity to get along as hunting an elephant. In fact I think it's more trying

in many instances. There isn't slightest evidence that women don't get along well with each other. All of this picture that men have the special aggressive capacities which can be turned into friendship and the women don't, there isn't any ground for it at all. The cultural evolution points that we have to consider right through human history because women bore the children and children are heavy, the women stay home. And they were kept near home not by men's domination but by the fact that if a woman has to feed the baby and carry it she can't carry much else and she certainly can't chase any lions. The other point about cultural evolution I think is well worth considering is that women have never been given weapons.

Once in a great while they got a few for a short period, but by and large they use brooms and rolling pins and other things of this sort if they were forced to fight, but we've never given them weapons and I think this was wise. [laughter] And it's wise for a very simple reason: that women don't fight for fun. Men do, most of the time they fight for fun, they fight to show off, they fight to show how strong they are. They fight to be sure they are brave and they are willing to obey rules. You don't fight at night or you don't fight when it rains or something. [audience laughter] Women fight only to defend something they value very highly, their children, their home and then they fight for keeps. I can't imagine a group of women who are defending

their homes agreeing to a Christmas to New Years truce. [audience laughter] [audience applause] [audience applause] Mrs ?Bushim?? Can you stand up I can't see you. Please. How does a child brought up in a commune identify with his own mother when he has so many people acting out the role of the mother of the day? Who will be his model and can this be traumatic to him? Well you know in the average extended family that we have had all around the world we've had families where there were 20 and 30 people the children know who their mothers are and children are quite bright. And even I've worked in societies where other women will breast feed a child but they everybody knows who the mother is the

fact that you have a lot of substitute mothers doesn't make any more difference than having godmothers and aunts. The children who live in Kibbutzim in Israel know who their mothers are perfectly well. Their mothers breastfeed them. Mothers come take them for an hour a day. The mothers take them over weekends. Their ties are rather weak but they're perfectly clear you don't have to lock every door and get a watch dog or live in a house in the suburbs where nobody ever enters, to find out who your mother is. It isn't necessary. Why is marriage counseling not to use the word so actively by our society to prevent divorce? Would mandatory marriage counseling be effective prior to the divorce hearings? Mr. Gordon Dwyer. I don't think mandatory therapy is ever very effective.

I think mandatory waiting before a divorce with children is given in which there's time for counseling, which is useful. But the most important thing we need is a time that says one needs comes and I think the way to have counseling, pre-divorce counseling, pre-proposed divorce counseling is to realize that you have to think about the children. If you're really going to have a divorce and break up a family and the family is going to be separated, you need time, you need time to think and you need somebody outside to give advice about the children. Now if that couple sit down and think and worry about the children, in the course of really worrying about the children, they may come together again. But the kind of counseling that is mandatory, and it is considered in some places under some laws,

is pretty perfunctory and I don't think it's going to work very well. Just as I don't think a man who pays to have his wife psychoanalyzed so that the psychoanalyst can persuade her to leave him is very good either. Dick Hodges. Are the roles of marriage going to reverse with the marriages of this young generation? I.e. will the wife bring home the bread and the husband do the housework? Well I think in some instances he may, you know. Men have been getting ulcers for thousands of years because they had to eat their wives' cooking. [laughter] There are lots of men that are better cooks than women. Now why in the world if they're better cooks shouldn't they do the cooking, once we decide it is not demeaning. There are lots of men that are better with little children than women, there isn't a thing as being a woman that makes a woman a good nurse

and lots of men are marvelous with small children and enjoy it. I think in the future we'll have more interchangeability in roles. And there are some women that would be much better if they went to the office every day. [audience laughter] And the cooking, family wouldn't have ulcers, children would go to sleep, all sorts of things might happen that don't happen now. We don't have the slightest proof that there's anything in a woman that makes her a good mother. Women are the only people that can produce children and I think are likely to remain so. [audience laughter] And on the whole, the woman who has born a child and breastfed it will be more devoted to it, but that doesn't mean she'll be a particularly good person to have around all day. So I think there will be interchangeable roles with less fuss

and people won't call the man names and things of that sort. But we haven't got there yet. I heard about a case a couple of years ago where the husband was a writer. He said "let's go ahead and have the baby and I'll look after the baby and write, I can do that. And you go on and teach." So they had the baby, the wife was going to produce the money because he was like most writers, hadn't gotten money out of it yet, he was going to write a great novel, and then he got sick and was in the hospital for five months and her mother in law wouldn't help with that baby because she should've been home behaving like a proper wife. So she had nobody to help her with the baby. So until we set things up a little more flexibly it's going to be tough both on the husband and on the wife. Can unmarried women who purposely have a child adequately bring them up?

Sharon Davis, lady from the front row. Well, widows bring them up. We know that widows brought up the best people in this country if you've ever read the ?Alger? books. I think it's a piece of arrogance for a woman to have a child when she has no father on hand. Now, if he dies, she has to bring the child up and we thought we'd got over this, this was 1902, women running around having children with their right to have children, then we discovered how important fathers as well as mothers were to children and we got over this nonsense. Now we are having another attack. We're going to go on living in the woods and chop their own wood and chop the umbilical cord with the same axe. [audience laughter] I think unmarried women should be allowed to adopt children, and we have silly laws that they can't in some places. I think unmarried men should be allowed to adopt children,

I think older people should be allowed to adopt children. Everybody should be allowed to adopt children that wants to. And it's only because the babies are scarce, the adoptable babies, that we don't let them. But the point about bringing it up is not that she's unmarried, but what was the degree of selfishness that said "I want to have a child and I am not going to bother to provide that child with the right kind of father," and as far as we can tell, one of the great theories, one of the great differences between men and women, is women have always known that it took nine months to have a baby and then you had to nurse it and bring it up, and you better pick a man that would help. Men have never had any such reservations. I think probably this better be the last question do you think so, because probably everybody has babysitters. [audience laughter] Mr. Fleischman.

How will the change in standards for higher quality marriages occur? Is this just part of a cycle you refer to? And two, this raising of standards for a marriage seems to be a solution to over-population. How about the need for procreation. Well you mean individual needs for procreation? We haven't any proof that it's there. Think of the thousands, hundreds of thousands of years that when men don't know anything about procreation, they thought the women produced the children, they didn't have a clue they had anything to do with it, and they managed. [audience laughter] Now we're here, we don't know for sure that it isn't better for a woman to have a child physically. We do know cancer occurs more in unmarried women than it does in married women, and it's possible that every woman who can possibly have a child ought to have a child which means that our standard of marriages will mean that we have children

evenly divided, and only two per family. We may however find out that isn't true, that a lot of women are better off that don't have children, then we can let the women who have babies very well have five, while somebody else doesn't have one. But we have no proof in the world that men have any need to procreate. It's very good for them, to know they are fathers and being responsible and to build a society where fatherhood is a responsible thing, but we don't have any proof that there's any psychological need whatsoever. Men are very very generous in procreation [audience laughter] so I don't think that's what we need to worry about, as many men do today. Then they decide to be parents and they decide to make the sacrifices necessary to be parents and they decide to find a woman they can stick with while they're indulging their need to procreate.

[applause]