Book Review

The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter May/June & July/August 2001, Vol. 8, No. 3-4. Love & Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work (Spence Publishing Co., 2001) by Jennifer Roback Morse Reviewed by F. Carolyn Graglia L ying on my heart, on my breast, you my delight, my joy! Joy is love, love is joy-- I will say it, and say it again! I thought I knew rapture, but now I have found perfect bliss. Only she who has suckled and cherished the child she nourishes, only a mother can know the meaning of happiness and love. O how I pity a man, who cannot know a mother's joy! My dear little angel, how you look at me and smile! Robert Schumann, Frauenliebe und-leben (Woman's Love and Life), Opus 42.

Choosing The Loving Family Over Its Second-Best Imitations

T he loving family celebrated in Love & Economics is characterized by its rejection of our culture's teaching that "paid employment is the only worthy activity of dignified adults" (p. 135) and its refusal to commit what the author describes as the "extremely negligent act" of "completely delegating the care of children to hired help" (p. 158). Jennifer Roback Morse, a libertarian economist who was mugged, as it were, by the reality of motherhood, has written a glorious and heartfelt paean to this loving family which dedicates itself to lifelong marriage and the parental rearing of children at home.

Her castigation of non-parental child-rearing, especially of institutional child care, should be well-received by social conservatives. That the libertarians she hopes to influence will join in the applause seems less likely. Even bleaker is the likelihood that many committed career women will welcome her message. They may, on the contrary, remonstrate that Robert Schumann's above-quoted depiction of maternal love precisely captures their own feelings towards their babies. They do not concede, however, that their loving maternal feelings are inconsistent with their ability--more or less happily--to leave those babies in the care of another in order to return to work.

I do not believe that a mother, who-like myself, for example, never resumed her career but became a full-time homemaker and child-rearer, can claim that she loved her children more than a working mother does or that only her kind of family is a loving one. We can only claim that we show our love in different ways and that we believe our way benefits both our child and us more and will be more likely to secure his well-being. Morse and I may find it incomprehensible that, absent dire necessity, a mother can leave her children, but our inability to understand this other woman is no ground for questioning the depth or breadth of her love.

The Loving Family and Libertarianism

But in the eyes of women like us, the loving family is as Morse describes it and is preferable to those second-best imitations so common in our society today-the single-parent family, the stepfamily, and the two-income family with its concomitant non-parental child-rearing. The two enemies of the loving family that Morse targets are "left-wing self-esteem feminism and right-wing income-maximizing capitalism," which have seduced women into believing that "the work women do in the market is more socially valuable than the work they do in the home, at least for high-wage women." Their message is that "some women are too important to take care of their own children" (p. 138).

Since this book is, as Morse says, about libertarian theory and free market economics and since libertarians-and Morse considers herself one-are committed to "right-wing income-maximizing capitalism," Morse must be seen as undertaking a kind of counterrevolution, one that seems to strike at the very core of libertarianism. Morse tells us that having lived in a laissez-faire family in which each member pursues his own self-interest, she has concluded that such a family does not work and does not make people very happy. But what could convince libertarians to compromise their hyper-individualism, which has always seemed intrinsic to their ideology, by acknowledging the reasonableness, if not the necessity, of restructuring family relationships with large infusions of selfless love, self-giving, a commitment to lifetime marriage, and a willingness to put loved ones' needs before one's own?

Morse rests her case on the argument that survival of our free-market economy depends on the kind of loving families she endorses. Libertarianism must, therefore, focus more on family life and community responsibility and especially must take account of infant helplessness. She seems to be saying that the ideology must be humanized. In skillfully elaborating this argument, Morse sprinkles her pages with many profound insights. Children, she argues, need to be raised one at a time by people who love them. Because taking care of babies is an extraordinarily time-consuming process, someone must take care of whoever is taking care of the babies. Hence the need for lifelong commitment in marriage. The opportunity to develop trust is what infancy is all about. Because the baby is helpless and needy, he needs people. And when his needs are satisfied, he develops the capacity to trust other people.

In this cycle of trust, the infant goes from contentment to need, to a cry for help, to satisfaction of the need, and then to contentment again. Normal mothers and infants, explains Morse, repeat this cycle many times each day, and thus the baby becomes attached to his mother and comes to trust her. When the cycle of trust is broken, however, the unmet need produces rage and despair. Growth of all the qualities one wishes to find in a mature, stable adult is grounded in the development of this sense of basic trust. The course of moral development requires the child to internalize prohibitions, which means internalizing the voice of the loving parent who has proved himself trustworthy. Trust in this person enables the growing child to learn to delay gratification and lengthen his time horizon.

The core of trust that is created in individuals by their family life, argues Morse, is the foundation for our political institutions and for trade in organized markets, both of which require participants with the capacity for trustworthy behavior. The minimal state and democratic government depend on an ethic of mutual forbearance among citizens that can only be grounded in trust. Thus does Morse establish love as the glue which holds together the economy and the polity? A parent's love allows the child to learn trust and this trust enables the child to develop the qualities necessary to a smooth-functioning economy: delayed gratification, impulse control, cooperative behavior, and promise-keeping. Morse makes a good argument. In my own writing, I have made a similar one, seeking support for traditional families with homemaking mothers on the grounds that the survival of democratic capitalism depends on the kind of children raised in such families. The products of communal child-rearing are more suited to a welfare-state bureaucracy than to competing in an entrepreneurial democracy.

Support For The Woman At Home

The attempt to reform libertarian ideology, however, is not the most important contribution of this book. Nor is the effort to reach those working mothers who are deeply committed to their careers, who, I think, are largely unreachable. Of greater importance than these goals is the support Morse's writing gives to those women who have already left the marketplace for home or are considering doing so. They are her audience, and they need her. Morse reverently writes of the power of prayer and the grace of God that can enable us to "live out the commitments we make for the sake of love" (p. 220). I have written elsewhere that the woman choosing to be a homemaker and child-rearer in today's culture needs the courage of a heretic. Some of these women will surely find this section of Morse's book to be a source of fuel to stoke their courage.

But the greatest contribution of Morse's book is that it demonstrates her own evident joy in child-rearing and inspires confidence in the mother at home that she is engaged in an important activity of utmost worth to her society. Our culture is now imbued with the feminist teaching that child-rearing is an inferior activity to be shunned by anyone of moderate intelligence. Feminists have prodded women into the workplace, telling them that life at home with children is unworthy of their talents, is boring, tedious, and lonely, and that returning to work is an escape from oppression, boredom, and guilt. Morse is reluctant to believe these women really mean it.

Conceding that a "childcare provider might do a perfectly fine job with the child," Morse queries "but what mother really wants her child to attach to the babysitter instead of herself" (p. 140). Some do. Highly educated women who are committed to their careers are often well aware that their children will do best when the childcare provider is as much like a mother as possible to the child-that she is a true mother substitute. These women accept this fact because they believe that, on balance, they are happier doing the bulk of their giving and receiving within the workplace and its relationships rather than within an ongoing daily relationship with their children. While Morse sees self-giving as occurring mainly in personal family relationships, for these women it is more likely to occur in the public arena.

But many mothers do feel as Morse does. For them the example of other women who do not need workplace achievement to be happy and are contented in a life raising their children at home is an indispensable support. What women who leave the workplace for home are doing what can be analogized to witnessing in the Christian faith. Their lives are witness to a belief in the preciousness of their children and their marriage and to a conviction that their own daily efforts to secure the welfare of both is of paramount importance. Morse's pages glow with reassurance for these women, who are trying to maintain their dignity in the face of cultural contempt for homemakers and the accusations-often from their own husbands or other family members-that they are wasting their education and that paid employees can adequately perform their domestic and child-rearing roles.

Giving of Oneself

The concept of self-giving is crucial in understanding the importance some of us attach to the mother's daily activities with her children. The mother is giving the gift of herself, of her time and attention, to her child. This gift makes everything a mother does with her child a different event from what it would be if someone else did it because no matter how mundane the activity, it is transformed by the mother's love. I have always believed that the experience of having a diaper changed by one who thinks you are the most precious being in the world is different from having it changed by one who does the act for pay. We mediate a way of life to our children as we perform these simple daily acts with love. In Morse's words, the "real world is the world around the kitchen table, the world of the nursery, the world of the bedroom," and it is in this "mundane world of ordinary chores, ordinary joys, ordinary problems" that "any personal philosophy must bear fruit" (p. 9). Parents build relationships with their children while doing these daily tasks and conveying to the child that he matters. The personal philosophy transmitted to the child will be that of whoever performs these tasks.

In response to that most offensive feminist insult, Morse denies that the dependency of motherhood is "parasitic": "The mother is producing something of value to herself, the child's father, and the wider society" (p. 92). The so-called independence of working mothers, moreover, is only illusory for, as Morse notes, the dependency is simply transferred from the father to others, who the mother must, of course, compensate through work in the marketplace. Validating the traditional family of breadwinning father and homemaking mother, Morse argues that the baby "needs to trust his mother; his mother needs to be able to trust her partner to take care of her so that she can relax in her role in the child's life," and it will diminish her effectiveness as a mother if she has to worry "whether the babysitter will really show up on time for her to go to work, or whether her employer will fire her if she does not" (p. 93).

Countering the feminist claim that working outside the home empowers women, Morse wisely answers that for many women it is a devastating loss of power to surrender control over what is happening on a daily basis to their children. Raising children collectively, Morse argues, is comparable to centrally planning an economy. Because each child and each family is unique, no child can be raised "by the book." One of the defects of a planned economy is that it "squanders a vast amount of implicit, personal, local information" (p. 143). Similarly, there is no way to give sufficiently detailed instructions to a babysitter that will cover all contingencies. Each child has to be raised individually and personally, and decisions must constantly be made on an ad hoc basis and then reconsidered as interactions and responses change. Like a free market economy, child-rearing is essentially "winging it."

Having rejected our culture's elevation of market work over the world of the home, Morse confirms the conclusion some of us have reached that it is the market activities which are trivial. And so Morse laments the "intelligent and educated woman" who "is stuck in a law office doing house closings and title searches" rather than "staying home to enrich a few members of the next generation"; and then there is another woman in a university office who is grading exams rather than "introducing her own children to great literature and world history" (p. 147). G. K. Chesterton made the same observation a century ago: "How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone?"

Legislation to Help Loving Families

Yet, has Morse done all she can to reach her goal of loving families taking personal care of their own children? She declines to advocate legislation, choosing only "to encourage personal choices that will promote a stable, free society": she is committed, she says, "to the proposition that persuasion, not legislation, is the appropriate tool because my central claim is that the social order must be held together with love" (p. 228). Those who are actually striving to maintain loving families which take personal care of their own children are owed more than this. They deserve our efforts to create a society that supports, not hampers, them. They deserve the reform of no-fault divorce laws, for example, in order to protect the homemaker and her children as well as to protect fathers who do not want their homes broken up by wives seeking self-fulfillment elsewhere. Our laws perform an educational function, and the present no-fault divorce laws teach that the marriage institution and the interests of children in remaining in the home with both of their natural parents are of virtually no importance in this culture.

Morse extols the virtue of lifelong marital commitment. She cites studies demonstrating that living in the marital home with their natural parents-not just with one parent, not in a stepfamily, not in a cohabiting family-is the optimal outcome for children. She declines, however, to advocate legislation encouraging this outcome. She discusses the problems with non-parental child-rearing and cites the studies showing its harms, but she would do nothing to protect those women who want to leave the workplace in order to raise their children personally. She is asking these women to do something that is extremely risky in a society which has enacted no- fault divorce laws precisely to warn women to remain in the workplace and not become financially dependent on a husband. More mothers would stop working if they did not fear divorce. Their jobs are divorce insurance. Should not we fight for a reform of divorce laws to make such insurance unnecessary?

And should not we fight to change laws that give job preferences to women, thus undermining the ability of men to be breadwinners for their families? And should not we fight to eliminate the numerous subsidizations of the non-parental childcare that Morse deplores? Our tax laws, as she knows, reward leaving children with paid employees, and this is done, of course, at the expense of those raising their children at home. Morse celebrates the power of prayer to help us carry out our commitments. Why should we not also use the power we already have as citizens in a democracy to seek legislation supporting the loving families she endorses?

Conclusion

As a caveat, I must note that this book was published before the conviction of two therapists for the death of a ten-year-old girl during a therapy session to treat "reactive attachment disorder." According to an article in The Weekly Standard (May 28, 2001), the therapists practiced in Evergreen, Colorado, where psychiatrist Foster Cline had pioneered "rage reduction therapy." After an allegation of child abuse in 1988, Cline had moved to Idaho, but one of the convicted therapists continued to use his methods. In her "Selected Bibliography On Attachment Disorder," Morse cites several works by Foster Cline, describing him as a pioneer in understanding and treating attachment disorder.

I doubt that one can read descriptions of the so-called therapy used by the two convicted women without concluding that they were seriously misguided and suspecting that some practitioners in this field have gone much too far. I believe that writings on childhood attachment like John Bowlby's, which Morse also cites, and works like Erik Erikson's on the development of basic trust in infants, such as Identity, Youth and Crisis (1968), are highly reputable scholarship that has long been accepted in their profession. I have found both of these writers helpful in explaining early child development and helping me to understand the importance and dimension of my role as a mother. But since some therapists in attachment disorder seem to have entered an unacceptable realm, it would be wise to use caution when reading work in this field.

Whether or not Morse has the impact she seeks on libertarian theory, her book will surely encourage those who believe that personally raising their children is the most important undertaking of a woman's life. Years ago I accepted the teaching of child-development specialists that the "original mother-infant bond is the wellspring for all the infant's subsequent attachments and is the formative relationship in the course of which the child develops a sense of himself. Throughout his lifetime the strength and character of this attachment will influence the quality of all future bonds to other individuals." Marshall H. Klaus and John H. Kennell, Maternal-Infant Bonding (1976), pp.1-2.

I became convinced that a life rearing my children was not only personally satisfying but was the most socially useful thing I would ever do, certainly surpassing the writing of legal briefs. It is much harder for women today to follow their hearts back into the home rather than settle for the second-best imitations of family life that our culture now commends. Morse's book will be a fine companion for those who do want to take the path back home.