What Will He Suggest Next? Take Away Women's Right To Vote?

NTodd from Doyihi Mir alerted me to this bone-headed article by David Brooks, who thinks that married couples with separate banking accounts are teetering on the edge of disaster. Mustang Bobby from Bark, Bark, Woof, Woof also wrote about the same article.

Brooks wrote:

It also illustrates how the family is a countervailing force in society. Public life is individualistic. It's oriented around goals like self-development, self-advancement and personal happiness. (This is, of course, even more true in America today than in the Russia of the 19th century.) The goal of family life, on the other hand, does not revolve around individual choices but around the unconditional union of souls. When we get married, and then when we have kids, we learn, sometimes traumatically, to say farewell to the world of me, me, me.

He's not talking about "family life" or "couples." He's talking about the "danger" of married women having bank accounts separate from their husbands. He wrote, "I'm not saying that people with separate accounts have marriages that are less healthy than anybody else's. I'm saying we should pause before this becomes the social norm. Private property is the basis for our market democracy. But private property in the home is an altogether trickier proposition."

It's the old slur - women are selfish! They're too concerned about their own selfish indulgences "individual choices" and that kind of concern leads to his unspoken conclusion - divorce. It's a well-known fact that women file for the most divorces, and that makes Bobo unhappy. So, to keep women from leaving bad marriages, he proposes that she lose control of her finances - keep them in the hands of husbands who can keep these wayward women in line, just like the good ole days when women "knew their place."

Of course, he doesn't quite phrase it that way. His true feelings would be too harsh to put in print. Instead, he channels Leo Tolstoy. He quotes Tolstoy's novella "Family Happiness," in particular a mushy part where a married woman expresses chagrin at the dying down of the courtship period. She waxes eloquently, saying, "That day ended the romance of our marriage; the old feeling became a precious irrecoverable remembrance; but a new feeling of love for my children and the father of my children laid the foundation of a new life and a quite different happiness; and that life and happiness have lasted to the present time."

Bobo chastizes independent women, saying that "the difference between romantic happiness, which is filled with exhilaration and self-fulfillment, and family happiness, built on self-abnegation and sacrifice."

The thing is, it's the woman, not the man, whom he expects to build her marriage based on self-abnegation and sacrifice. That means doing away with her financial independence by closing those separate bank accounts.

He wants to set women back to The Time That Never Was.

Gimme a break. I'm sorry that financially independent women scare him. I wonder if he's married, and if he is, does his wife have a separate bank account? Especially one of which he is not aware? That'll show those uppity women - take away their control of money so they can't leave his controlling ass if they've had enough of him.