Being a pre-baby-boomer, pre-Generation X, pre-entitlement-generation individual does give one a certain grasp on the postwar history of the demise of the family unit.

When Britain and America dominated the world as the greatest single empire and greatest single nation during the 19th through to the first half of the 20th centuries, monogamous marriage and the strong family unit were the backbone of their societies.

Revisionist history and perverse social documentaries to the contrary, that’s the historic reality.

During the glory phase of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, both men and women had clear roles. They were very clearly marked by mode of dress. As the history demonstrates, any confusion of gender inconsistent with the clear biblical teaching was in those days considered a crime and dealt with accordingly.

Gender-based occupations were tailored to the unique, God-given strengths and innate abilities of the male and the female in society. The man was the breadwinner, the woman, once married and particularly once she became a mother, was a “keeper at home.”

The result was a clarity in marriage and family relations.

During World War i, the duties of single women who wished to contribute to the war effort outside the home were restricted largely to those occupations that allowed her true nurturing capabilities to be used. Nursing and the provision of welfare services to the troops abroad and those repatriated home due to injury were the predominant occupations. It was not unusual for women to provide such needed services voluntarily.

The effects of the Industrial Revolution combined with the libertine influence of liberal socialism in full swing during the “gay ’20s” meant the role of women in warfare was to change considerably. During World War ii, women were drafted into traditional men’s tasks in the factory. Women were actually employed in uniform in the military forces. This began an early tendency for women to begin wearing trousers, the traditional garb of men. Already the demarcation between the sexes was being degraded.

The tasks given to women in the services during World War ii were largely secretarial and administrative, in addition to other services such as vehicle maintenance and driving. During that war, women again bore the brunt of providing the bulk of nursing and many welfare services rendered to the military and general community. In Britain, some women did man anti-aircraft batteries where men were in short supply. Some even operated as heroic spies in countries occupied by the enemy.

One of the outfalls of World War ii, in particular, was the inculcation in some women of a new sense of “empowerment.” In Britain, wide publicity given the moral excesses of the liberal Bloomsbury set, together with the setting of women to work outside the home during the war effort, resulted in a sea change in education on the woman’s role in society.

This all coincided with the injection of Darwinism, Marxism and Freudianism into the education system. Such influences penetrated Anglo-Saxon education curricula from those interwar years between the two great global conflicts on through the great years of post-World War ii reconstruction, to the 1960s.

The result of this injection of godless thinking into the minds of the “baby boomer” generation, together with the influence of such destroyers of wise child-rearing methods as the infamous Doctor Spock, caused a great explosion of anti-social behavior on college campuses in the late 1960s. This was the generation that spawned the feminist movement. It happened to also coincide with the seismic social changes caused by the sexual revolution as described so incisively by Mary Eberstadt in her recent book Adam and Eve After the Pill.

Out of the social revolution of the 1960s and ’70s marched the militant feminist, dressed in the jeans and pants that were to powerfully change the whole feminine image of women. Having no real anchor to the absolutes of gender-based roles as established by their Creator, these misfits penetrated every available institution within the Anglo-Saxon realm.

The upshot?

Walk through any airport now and count the dresses, if you can find any. It’s a sad commentary on the effect of the feminists masculinizing—even neutering—the appearance of the female population.

The major result of this great social upheaval of the 1960s and ’70s was a rapid loss of the very meaning of wifehood and motherhood, let alone true femininity. Careerism was injected into the minds of young girls. The most blessed of all female occupations, homemaking, was denigrated as women were taught to emulate men and find “self-fulfillment” outside the home.

The fashionable teaching became “women are equal to men.”

They are not.

It is on the spiritual plane alone that men and women are equal before God for the purpose of their salvation. When it comes to the God-ordained social structure of humanity, man and woman have distinctly different strengths and roles.

At the human level, as created by God, the male is the physically stronger, the female the physically weaker (1 Peter 3:7). As created by God, the man is the protector, the woman the nurturer. As created by God, the man is generally the big thinker, the woman generally the one with the eye for detail. As created by God, the man is the giver—the gestator—of life, the woman the receiver of that spark of life, and its natural nurturer toward birth and mothering. As created by God, the man ought to be the leader!

Put these God-given attributes together in marriage, and you have a complete whole. A God-given relationship designed to establish a balanced and unified haven, underpinned by a strong foundation, for the building of a family unit.

This is not to denigrate in any way the tremendous task that any God-fearing single and supporting mother is forced to shoulder in the absence of a husbandly protector and provider. As Herbert Armstrong said, he’d never marry a woman who would wear the pants (that was in a time before women actually started to wear trousers); yet he’d never marry a woman who could not wear the pants if she had to—meaning taking on the dual parental role in the absence of a husband.

Tracking forward to the 21st century, Western society now has to deal with the outfall of a century of devolution of the true roles of man and woman. This has now reached the point where both have largely lost any concept of their gender’s God-given identity and hence their natural roles in society. The greatest loss to society has been the woman’s true role as the keeper at home.

Sadly, government “social welfare” programs have greatly added to this problem. Such programs are too often constructed in a manner that rewards the sexual profligacy of single mothers and promotes the unemployability of the male. Such programs have largely destroyed the whole structure of traditional society in Britain.

Much cogent commentary has been made by observers of these anti-social trends in the Anglo-Saxon nations. Adam and Eve After the Pill is but one of the latest in a list of well-thought-out commentaries on this phenomenon. Others range from James Burnham’s Suicide of the West to Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Demoralization of Society, Stephen Bertman’s Cultural Amnesia and Roger Kimball’s The Long March.

All such incisive commentaries on our society highlight the deep-seated moral decline of the Anglo-Saxons due to gender confusion, but not one poses the solution! All are expert in focusing on the causes and effects of social decline and moral degeneration, but none offers real hope for any improvement.

Well, believe it or not, there is a solution to today’s dislocating society, and it is literally out of this world! That solution is even now being lived out by some who have chosen to adhere to, or return to, the God-given roles of man and woman. The men lead as saviors to their wives (Ephesians 5:23). The women submit to the leadership of their husbands (Ephesians 5:22). The men labor to feed, clothe and provide education and security for the family (2 Thessalonians 3:10; 1 Timothy 5:8). The women are true keepers at home (Titus 2:5). Each finds the maximum self-fulfillment by obeying their Creator in the pursuit of their God-ordained destiny—the fulfillment of their incredible human potential!

If you would like to find out more about that most extremely fulfilling way of life, then read our inspiring book The Incredible Human Potential. It has led to many lives being changed for the better. It could do so for you as well!