In this episode, we welcome Dr. Harriet Fraad, a distinguished Mental Health Counselor, Hypnotherapist, and pioneering figure in the Feminist Movement. Dr. Fraad offers her profound insights into the ways political, economic, and personal spheres intertwine. With a lifelong commitment to political activism and substantial contributions to public education, childcare, and midwifery rights, she provides a unique perspective on the societal challenges and transformations of today. Dr. Fraad hosts "Capitalism Hits Home," a podcast that examines the intersection of economic and personal life, and "Interpersonal Update," a regular radio segment on WBAI.
Takeaways:
Chapters:
00:00 - The Evolution of the Feminist Movement
16:15 - Addressing Class Disparities and Intersectionality
23:21 - The Role of Unions in Advocating for Workers' Rights
26:44 - Building a United Movement for Systemic Change
27:41 - The Disintegration of the Nuclear Family
30:32 - The Financial Struggles of Single Mothers
35:26 - Income Disparity between Single Mothers and Single Fathers
46:57 - The Importance of Men's Involvement in Child-Rearing
52:44 - The Need for Government Support and Social Programs
In this episode, we welcome Dr. Harriet Fraad, a distinguished Mental Health Counselor, Hypnotherapist, and pioneering figure in the Feminist Movement. Dr. Fraad offers her profound insights into the ways political, economic, and personal spheres intertwine. With a lifelong commitment to political activism and substantial contributions to public education, childcare, and midwifery rights, she provides a unique perspective on the societal challenges and transformations of today. Dr. Fraad hosts "Capitalism Hits Home," a podcast that examines the intersection of economic and personal life, and "Interpersonal Update," a regular radio segment on WBAI.
Takeaways:
Chapters:
00:00 - The Evolution of the Feminist Movement
16:15 - Addressing Class Disparities and Intersectionality
23:21 - The Role of Unions in Advocating for Workers' Rights
26:44 - Building a United Movement for Systemic Change
27:41 - The Disintegration of the Nuclear Family
30:32 - The Financial Struggles of Single Mothers
35:26 - Income Disparity between Single Mothers and Single Fathers
46:57 - The Importance of Men's Involvement in Child-Rearing
52:44 - The Need for Government Support and Social Programs
You know, that's a bourgeois fantasy, that happy family fantasy. Most families are unhappy and they always were. Welcome to another edition of the Super Daddy Club podcast. I'm your host Lendo. Dr. Harriet Farad is a mental health counselor and hypnotherapist in New York City. She is a long -time political activist initiating movements for better public education, free public childcare, and midwife free rights in childbirth. She is a founding mother of the feminist movement. She has a podcast, Capitalist Hits Home. Her regular radio program, Interpersonal Update, appears on WBAI on Tuesday nights at 630 EST. Her work focuses on the mutual shaping of political, economic, and personal life. Dr. Harriet, thank you so much for coming onto our show here. Thank you for the invitation, Lindo. Absolutely. So we're going to be covering quite a few things here, but first and foremost, you've had such an extraordinary life that I wanted to go a little bit back and get some understanding of your background. And also like how you were introduced to the feminist movement and came to joining that movement. If you can tell us a little bit about that to just start the show here. The protests against the war in Vietnam. It was leftist women who realized we need to be treated as equals. We need to be full citizens and started organizing. And then I lived in New Haven, Connecticut at that time. And I thought, wow, we have to do this here. And I called. women who had been active with me against the war in Vietnam. Five of them showed up. And within about a month, we had a hundred people at a meeting because it was the time for women to realize that the mass of people in the United States, which are women, who are the majority of the population, didn't have equal rights. We earned 59 cents on the male dollar and we couldn't get and abortion if we didn't want to have a child and women who were not married couldn't even get birth control. Men could get birth control at any drug store, but women could not. And there was big discrimination against women in the workplace and in the university everywhere. And so we started that organization. Now, when I was reading about it, I mean, you described it as a second feminist movement. Yes. And so. Where did the first one end in terms of their achievements from where you had to pick up essentially? Well, it ended in 1920. A lot of the first wave feminist movement ended when women got the vote in the United States in 1920. Previous to that, there was a movement for women's equality, but it ended up focusing on one issue, getting women the right to vote, which we did in 1920. Then the movement ebbed and really mostly disappeared until 1965. The book by Betty Friedan came out. She was talking to bourgeois women who were confined to the home, bored to tears, on tranquilizers and so on. It was really geared towards privileged women because minority women, black women have always had to work and so have immigrant women. But at that time, the United States was a majority white country and white women didn't have to work if they were bourgeois women. And at that time, America was still king of the world. After World War II, every other industrial economy was decimated. China had started out as a terribly poor country. It didn't have industrial capacity. period, plus they were horribly slaughtered and destroyed by Japan during World War II. And then they had a civil war. And finally, in 1949, they had, they called it the Socialist Revolution. But there was no competition. And so there was money everywhere in the United States. It wasn't equally distributed because it's never been. But any white man could go to work. and get what was called a family wage, which is a wage that could support a dependent wife and children. That party was over in the 1970s when we didn't have a communist or socialist movement that fought against outsourcing our jobs. And so millions of well -paid male union, that's why they were well -paid, they were unionized jobs, were exported to countries that didn't have ecological constraints, that had the lowest salaries, that didn't have benefits like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China. China was the primary one because it had a disciplined workforce, but salaries were at most $3 .10 an hour, whereas by that time in the United States, a white male, or anyone working in an industry like the auto industry or any industry that was mass producing were earning about 25 or$30 an hour. So corporations shifted and outsourced jobs. They could do that because between the computer, the fax, fast jet travel, they were able to run a business in a foreign country. and not be present, but be communicating all the time. And since we didn't have a left union movement, our union movement became an anti -communist union movement with Joseph McCarthy's anti -communist crusade after World War II. And so we didn't have some kind of antidote to the poison of outsourcing. And so millions of well -paid male jobs were exported. to China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, any countries that had no constraints on capitalist accumulation. And those people brought their money back to the United States and bought our political system, which is the best that money can buy. We allow money in private elections and therefore the rich decide who's going to be running. Our last presidential. election, the two candidates, Republican and Democrat together, spent $4 billion on running the election. And, you know, it's not like even other countries like France, where everybody, they only have two weeks to run, there's no private money allowed. And people get on television and talk about what they stand for and everybody's together. And they don't allow television and radio time. They allow posters and that's it. But the United States allows people to buy whatever. And so American voters realized, wow, we don't have much of a voice. And they became passive. They're only now getting activated. But women realized, wait a minute, now we have to work outside the home, and yet we're expected to go home and do a second shift. There's a book by Arlie Hochschild. called the second shift about that phenomenon, which was widely recognized that women were expected to do two full-time jobs, one outside the home to make ends meet because male salaries couldn't, they couldn't manage it. And another in the home, doing all the domestic labor, the cooking, the cleaning, the provisioning of the house, the watching the children, the taking responsibility for them, the connecting men with their friends and relatives and with emotionally taking care of men. and sexually serving men. Well, that was too much. And that gave rise to a women's liberation movement, which is in its third wave now and strong because women realized we are oppressed, we can't manage this and became very organized. And now for the first time in US history, the majority of women are single by choice because particularly blue collar, working class men can't support women and still expect them to do everything. So women say no. The whole landscape of gender has changed. And I have been part of that as a feminist. And I also think as a feminist, our movement was in many ways perverted by the CIA and the FBI. They had a big operation. called the Great Wurlitzer, because a Wurlitzer is an organ that can play in all different, as if it were all different instruments. And they invaded the civil rights movement and made it black power. So blacks were enemies of whites and the women's movement and made it a gender movement only. We started out feeling that if we stand up and we're at the bottom together, and if we stand up together, the whole class system will change. Well, Gloria Steinem, a very expert CIA agent, invaded our movement. We were so naive. When we got Ms. Magazine and it had no ads, we thought, isn't that great? We didn't think, no ads. Who's paying for this? And the movement got sidetracked and perverted into a gender -only movement. And that was a terrible thing. Women are now beginning to change. and understand that class is important. But between the anti -communist movement of the 50s and our naivete, we didn't realize the same thing was true of the black movement that was invaded to make it black power. So it wasn't a movement based on class with sensitivity to race and gender. And so our movement changed from a movement for equality for all into a movement for equality for women within a system of ever greater inequality for the mass of people. And that was a terrible thing. And I saw it happen. So that's where I come from, that movement and the realization of how that movement was perverted into a gender only movement, even though gender is important. And that should be a factor, but not the only factor, because really, if you are rich, Or even if you just have a decent income, you buy other women's labor to do your housework, to take care of your children. You go to restaurants or take expensive takeout food for dinners. You have babysitters or nannies or expensive preschools because we don't have universal free preschool in the United States. And so privileged women got advantages. that the mass of women didn't get. And that is beginning to change as Americans begin to understand class. They begin, happened in 2011 with the Occupy movement, which introduced the concept of the 99%, the overwhelming mass of Americans, and the 1%, the wealthy who manipulate everything. And the union movement now in the United States, which is a recognition, of the huge class division between employers, which are 3 % of the population, and employees, who are 97 % of the population, and are doing very badly. The biggest employers in the United States are abusive employers. They're Walmart, which has a desk in the front of every Walmart helping people get food stamps because they pay so little people need the government to subsidize Walmart by paying people food stamps. And another is fast food, notorious in its abuses. Another is call centers. And, yes, Amazon. With its abusive working conditions. All those jobs are on the clock, which means you have a certain amount of seconds to fill every need. And if you don't, a buzzer goes off in your ear. You can't... put your elbows on the counter at any fast food place because the buzzer goes off. You better run over and refill the ketchup or something. At Amazon, if your department that you work in helping people doesn't have anyone in it, you're still not allowed to sit down and you're on the clock. The same thing is true with call centers. You make a certain amount of calls and if you stop, you know, you are zapped. In Amazon, they have to... keep working so continuously with so many repetitive movements that they get hurt. And all over Amazon are free vending machines with pain medications so they can keep working. So that these are abusive jobs that most people have. It's one of the reasons that unions are finally having a huge, huge increase just this year. 340 ,000 United Postal Service workers threatened a strike and they had a strike at UAW. That's 400 United Auto Workers. That's 400 ,000. And now they're busy organizing the 150,000 auto producers that are not unionized. There's a recognition of the problems in the quality of life here. And women are part of that. You know, the Starbucks union was started, which is against the coffee shops, has been picketing and publicizing for a long time. The nurses unions, 14 ,000 of them threatened or actually did walk out in New York City alone to get a lower patient nurse ratio. 48 ,000 workers at the University of California who are not professors, but are agile professors, are graduate assistants, are tech workers united together and won better salaries. America is waking up that way, but for a long time we hadn't. And the women's movement is now recognizing that, recognizing that women are two thirds of fast food workers who often get $15 an hour and are often single mothers and can't live. Women are the majority of call center workers and the majority of fast food. A good portion of the Walmart workers, also Amazon workers, and they are abusively treated and underpaid. Walmart has huge parking lots because their employees can't afford housing often and sleep in their cars. That's where we are in the United States. Wow. Wow. There was so much there and it touched based on something that I read about some time ago. And it was, there's a racial access to gender equality debate where up until today you have white women. And from what I'm hearing is white women of a certain class whose salary has increased. But when we come to black women, indigenous women, there's a significant gap in between their gender pay. And I kind of understand because of the time, but then. When your movement tried to correct that particular issue, it was co -opted and rerouted into a way that only focuses on a niche issue amongst all the other issues, which was gender. And it's interesting because I'm in university right now and I can see a similar movement growing that addresses gender, but does not address income disparity or at least like the disparity in between rich and poor. It also does not really address race thoroughly or in depth. Like the current movement again, is just focusing on gender. And I'm almost seeing a reoccurrence of what occurred back then where it's like, I wasn't aware that we're in the third wave of the feminist movement and it is picking up. You're talking about the union movement. So the people trying to get the power back into their hands so they can be able to move forward. The other element that you made me think of was as the history of labor was evolving in America and you had this shifting of all the manufacturing jobs overseas. For us people here in Canada, what was going on? Because I know Canada picks up. a lot from the United States. And of course we get pulled into the trends that are going on over there. So how does Canada relate to that history as well that you just presented in terms of shifting of job and decreasing of quality of work for the lower classes here at home? Yeah, well, I think, look, racism and sexism are still huge problems. Canada exterminated its native population, the United States. settler colonialism killed over 11 million Native Americans to establish our settler colonialism. We really wiped out a whole set of cultures and Native Americans are still the poorest Americans and the most discriminated against. And they were driven into areas that you could really call concentration camps. They're very poor and inadequate. But Racial things are still an enormous part of our culture, but they are reinforced economically because economically, black Americans have never gotten family wages, even in the early 70s and the 60s. Black women have always had to work outside the home as well as within it. Black marriage ended. much more quickly than white because they didn't have the basis of a supported wife because black people were paid less and black women were paid even less. And that's true that there are racial barriers across the spectrum. It's much less for Asians, but even in the way the Me Too movement works, which calls out sex abuse, the people who have gone to jail for it, are black or Jewish. They're either Bill Cosby or Kelly, Harvey Weinstein. They're in jail, but all the others aren't. They're fired once they've shown themselves to be sexually abusive, but they're not jail because there are still these biases. The LGBTQ movement, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, asexual, you know, old sexualities that aren't mainstream are still discriminated against in spite of gay marriage passing. And they have been considered more acceptable, but they have lost their class component also. Because gay men as men have always been paid more than women. And whites have always been paid more as a whole than blacks. and certainly more than Native Americans or Puerto Ricans. And so, you know, we live not only in a race -stratified and gender -stratified society, but a class -stratified society. And the FBI and CIA have tried to keep people separate by having Blacks blame whites, having women blame men, and so on. And class is what unites us. We are the majority, if you count everyone who's upset, whether it's climate activists, women, African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, unions, all of those LGBTQIA Americans, if we all could. get under the umbrella of class, then class would be the handle of the umbrella and all the panels could be the different kinds of people uniting to end class discrimination, which gets conflated with racial discrimination in a way that's very terrible. A popular book in the United States was called Lean In, and it was a book written by a woman, who's a very good writer and who was the head of Facebook for a while. She was right up there. And she says, women can do it all. And I've done it all. I had two children and I've done it all. She didn't mention though that she had nine servants. Of course that helps, you know. I'm sure it does. Yeah. But there is this class blind narrative that people have been able to get away with. And that's only beginning. to change in the United States. And class is what would unite us all because the majority of, for example, fast food, the majority of fast food workers are people of color. And they're paid badly and have awful labor conditions and are mainly women, two thirds are women. So you meld the oppressions together, but you only emphasize on the things that divide people. their sexual choices, their colors, their gender, and their race, you know, whatever. Instead of what would unite us and what the establishment is most afraid of is class. Obama shut down every Occupy on the same day. You know, because he represented the corporate interests and they were getting much too successful at bringing up the class issues in the United States and showing an alternative way of organizing people. And I think Canada has the same idea, although much less dramatically. Canada has been ahead of the United States in revealing the terrible conditions of its native populations, which were put in boarding schools, ran by priests where they were massively sexually abused. and physically beaten and where their culture was beaten out of them. You know, it's the same idea across the board, but Canada has been a little bit ahead of the United States. Also, Canada's students have been organized as American students haven't. And that has really helped keep tuition down. So our tuition at a fancy university is$45 ,000 a year. Yeah. And that doesn't even count meals and other things. whereas Canada's is far lower in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands. So that Canada is ahead and they have more of a socialist movement than we do. They didn't have as bad a period of destroying the left after World War II, which they did very systematically, that anyone who was interested in the communist party, the socialist party, or the left was considered un -American. and people were deported, sent to jail, and lost their jobs and so on. And they did that because during the war, our biggest ally was the Soviet Union. They referred to Joseph Stalin on television and radio then as Uncle Joe. And the Communist Party was very influential. And FDR's cabinet was full of communists and socialists. And that was okay. Every fourth family had a member who was a communist in the Communist Party. That's fine. And so they were threatened. Also, under FDR and under the New Deal, during a depression, he raised taxes on the rich to 96 .4 % of their profits. And he did because people were organized into socialist and communist parties. And he said to his rich, cohort because he was from a rich old family too, you better let me tax you or they'll take the whole thing. But after the war, they changed that. So now the nominal tax on the rich is about 30 something percent, not 94 .6 percent. And you used to be able to inherit even in the 80s, you could inherit without tax$600 ,000 a year. Now it's 11 million and for a couple 22 million. So that incomes at the top have risen sharply while incomes in the middle and the bottom have fallen dramatically. In 1970, we were the most egalitarian nation in the whole Western world. Now we are the least equal economically because incomes have been shifted upwards. And Americans are starting to realize that, which is part of the union movement. But we're way behind because of the anti-socialist and anti -communist crusades, which even the AFL -CIO kicked all the leftists out of the unions. And so it lost its whole spark. Unions are just coming back now and usually independent of the AFL -CIO. And one of the leading unionists, Sarah Nelson, is saying you want to join a union, you don't have to join the AFL. Go by yourself like the Amazon Union. You know, these are all big changes that are happening as America is changing. Also, the American empire is crumbling now. We have lost the last three wars in which we fought, even though we are the biggest weapons manufacturers in the world. We lost in Vietnam. We lost in Iraq. We lost in Afghanistan. None of those people even have an air force, but we lost anyway. And now we've really lost the proxy war we had in Ukraine. And so there's less money around. And because there's less money around, the rich are making sure that it goes to the top. Trump gave a $1 .7 trillion tax cut during his time. And when they say there isn't enough money for this and that, they don't say, let's undo that tax cut for the rich. New York has more billionaires than anyone else. We don't have a tax on those incomes that is anywhere near commensurate. And we have all sorts of tax loops. That's what corporate law is for. You can buy gold and put it in your safe deposit box and nobody has to know about it. You can buy paintings worth millions and just pass them to your kids or something. You know, the people who are most audited by our tax, the IRS, the International Revenue Service, are blacks who get financial assistance. And next are whites who aren't financial assistance. And they do that because there will be lawsuits if they go after the big ones, and that will be expensive. It's sort of a systematic woven in class bias with race bias, ethnic bias, and so on. and gender bias. These things are beginning to be realized. And they won't tax the rich so people are suffering. In New York City, they won't tax the billionaires. Instead, they borrow money. And who can they borrow from? Who has it to borrow from? The rich. So instead of paying higher taxes, they're paid interest. That's how it works. And Americans are beginning to catch on. That's the good news. Thank you all for tuning into another episode of the Super Daddy Club. If you've enjoyed our journey today and want to be a part of our growing family, make sure to hit that like button and subscribe to our channel. Your support means the world to us and it's what keeps this club going strong. Don't forget to share this episode with other Super Dads and Super Moms you know and join us next time for more adventures and insights. Remember, every like, subscribe and share helps us create content that celebrates and supports dads everywhere. Until the next time, stay super. The average person does not understand economics and does not understand exactly all the stuff that are going on. And it would be great right now to piggyback and just kind of like dive into the issue of like inflation and how it affects family. But I wanted to kind of like move backwards a little bit and just address the family structure because with all those changes that are happening or the family structure is, it is evolving with the economic situations, right? A woman integrating the. workforce during the 1940s, if I'm not mistaken around there. Like, no, in the 1970s, when they imported both male jobs, the majority of women had to work outside the home instead of, okay. Okay. Now I wanted to know if you could just shed the light on the nuclear family, where it comes from and where exactly it's going with all these changes that you've just highlighted here previously. Well, the nuclear family in the United States. was from the very beginning in the colonial period, the majority of women who came here were bondswomen, which means that their fare was paid by somebody here and they had to work for that person for seven years to be a free person. And that was often the women came to work as wives, so they had to bear children, they had to have sex with the man, they had to clean up his house for seven years before they were freed. So they were half slaves. And all they talk about is settling the United States is the Puritans were a very small number. So that that kind of family was a different kind of family. It was a family of a bought woman working off her passage. They also, because they wanted to settle the colonies, the British wanted to settle the colonies, they arrested women for every little thing. They did the same thing in Australia. and gave them the choice to go to jail or go to the colonies. And if they went to the colonies, their fare was paid by someone in the United States, and then they had to work it off for seven years. And so what's very interesting, and what I never learned about in school, was something called Bacon's Rebellion, which was the beginning of racism in the United States, because the bonds people, men and women, joined with Native Americans, joined with runaway slaves to form a union to contest the authority of the Virginia governor and with people who were angry at that governor for other reasons. And after they lost that rebellion, they instituted racism that no slave would ever be allowed to be an equal and work with a white person. They changed that and they instituted the racism to keep the class rebellion at bay. And they've done that consistently since. Now marriage in the United States for white people at least, and for most black people as well, from 1820 to the 1970s was based on, for white families, a family wage. supporting a dependent wife and child. And for black families, it was a much less stable family because women had to work. Women had to work usually in someone else's house or taking care of someone else's children. Those were the big jobs for black women. And it made it hard if you were living with another family, if you were gone all day, taking care of them to have the same energy for your marriage at home. Plus men were not paid. the family waves that would have supported their family. And so the black family was a different situation. And of course, they blamed that all on the fact that black men are lazy and promiscuous. Now, that that's a phenomenon of the white working class, someone named Charles Murray, who's a right wing author, had a very popular book called Coming Apart about why blue collar marriage is over. And he said, it's because blue collar men are lazy and promiscuous, right? The same thing, blame the victim. And these are class transformations. And we don't have the programs that would help that family. And now women want to be treated as equals, which is a big adjustment for some men. You can see it in Trump's followers. And that's why they've taken away the right to abortion and so on. keep women at home with children. But there is, you know, the family has changed. The only people who have numerous children now are the 1%. There's a book called Fifth Avenue Primates by, her first name is Wednesday, I'll remember her last name, but she's talking about life among the very rich. and she's looking at it as an anthropologist. But they're the only people who have a lot of children because they hire a whole bevy of other people to take care of their children and their homes. Everyone else, the biggest trend among married people in the United States now is no children. Our population is going down. And the majority of women are single because the old arrangements don't work. And new arrangements, like people are happening all over. There are apartments for single women with big communal areas where people can get together and so on, and small apartments. There are collectives on the West Coast and on the East Coast where single women live together and help each other and help support their children. There is something called co -housing, which is all over the country. We're a whole bunch of small houses. or a big apartment building is taken over and people live there, take care of each other's kids. Some people don't have kids, some people do. They have a communal kitchen where they can have meals and their attempts to recreate some kind of connection for people because the majority of marriages end in separation or divorce. Or actually only 50 % of marriages end in separation or divorce. But people without money or children to fight over don't go through the legal system, which is expensive. They just make a decision and split. And that's at least 15 or 20%. So you're there at 65, 70 % of people. Because people have antiquated ideas instead of living together as equals, sharing the household, sharing income. planning together, being deep friends, people don't have those skills. They can learn them in therapy, but therapy is expensive too. It means that if you don't have the funds, you're even more doomed to a separation or a divorce or just a split, which is what happens. I don't know, they don't count people who just split and don't go through the legal system. So no one knows. What? No, they don't count it. Nobody knows how many they are. My guess is 15, 20%, but I really have not done the research and I don't know how one would, but I haven't done the research to have that as a hard number. I just see it everywhere. And so that system, which was based on dependent women and wage earning males has disappeared to a large extent, not completely. And people still have the romance. I'm going to. the chapel and I'm going, there's a song I'm going to get married and I'll never be lonely anymore. Of course that's silly. When they're married and also that was a fantasy. It was captured in song, love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage. No, they don't. That's changed. And what America has not done is recognize that have good childcare centers. have 24 hour care if needed, have alternatives for children, have apartments for single people with collective areas, have collective childcare, the way the Swedish have done a lot on that, or have benefits for single mothers like the Dutch do, where they, you know, single mothers get preference in housing and all sorts of subsidies. The French do that too. Not preference in housing, but subsidies. And in France, excellent public daycare is available starting at two years old. And before that, you can have your kid in a daycare center for as much as seven in the morning to seven at night, and your child is returned in clean clothes and fed three meals. Because we always counted on immigrants in the United States. Immigrants would replenish our population. So we never had to take care of children. Now there's all this fascistic hatred of immigrants and children are really in trouble. In New York City, one out of four children doesn't get enough food. And they're the poorest people in the United States. Yeah. That is incredible. It is. It's incredible in the richest country in the world. Indeed. So essentially we have this dynamic where the family unit, as we knew it is disintegrating. So if I'm hearing what you're saying correctly is that that is something that is, that was almost bound to happen with the current changes, what were the changes in evolution with time? And the problem is that we don't have the social structures to be able to assist families better and the models exist, but we don't have the social structures in place to be able to assist people within this transition here. That's right. What the right wing has done is said that things like childcare and Education should be up to the family because they don't want to pay the taxes to pay for it. The very existence of the nuclear family is a tax evasion ploy. There was a wonderful book. There is a wonderful book called Policing the Family by Jacques Donsolot. It's hard to read because he's a French academic and so it's not so fun to read. But he talks about how after the French Revolution, which is true of the British once there was their revolution too, when the feudal family broke down, where the feudal father decided everything, once they had to get off the land and they moved into the towns and cities and the church no longer had a hold of them and the feudal father wasn't there, people were just screwing around, kids were abandoned on the streets, you know, everything was chaotic. And so, The rich met together because a big demand of the French Revolution was state support of children. That was a very big demand, even in Les Miserables, the play they mentioned this, but you know, and if you read Hugo's Les Miserables, it's there. So the rich who were in the church that was very rich, those people hadn't been killed because of their feudal estates, Catholic church that is, and the new capitalists who were making money, and the aristocrats who hadn't been killed got together and thought they want state support for children. Who's going to pay for it? We're the only ones with money. Whoa, we have to stop this. And they instituted the nuclear family, where the man gets to be the feudal lord of his family ruling over them, the woman gets support in pregnancy, and the children are chattel. And that became the family. But it wasn't always the family. You know, that was an adjustment in the beginning of capitalism, which has lasted. And it's at this point outlasted its ability to function. Now, if the system that was established here at that time, the woman had, were essentially bought where they have to serve the seven year contract. What was going on in Britain in terms of family structure at that time? Cause again, I'm speaking from my viewpoint of this nuclear family idea. And I'm thinking, well, that brings about stability because maybe during the old system, you had a parent who can stay at home with the child. Unfortunately, it had to be the woman at that time where it was made to be such as that. And what existed in Britain was the same similar nuclear family. Cause I see it as, it seems as though it brings about some degree of stability. And even as we move forward losing it, some people may say like, Hey, well, what about the children in here? If the parents. People don't wanna be married. People don't wanna stay long together. And she was in trouble. They're in terrible trouble in the United States and no doubt in, and in England as well because look what happened in England in those families. Engels wrote about that. If the woman has to work in a factory and the man's working in a factory, the kids are left alone. And then as soon as they're five years old, they went into work in the factories too. And it was a terrible existence. You know, that that's a bourgeois fantasy, that happy family fantasy. Most families are unhappy and they always were. And there was a stability in the United States. I can testify there was a stability. The divorce rate in the 1960s was less than 25 percent. Now it's 50 percent and then about 20 percent who just split. That's a huge difference. It's doubled. But the United States hasn't has this. propaganda of the happy family that you shouldn't disturb, even though people's families aren't like that, as an excuse for not spending anything to create supports like childcare, free healthcare, summer care, after school care. You know, I'm familiar with, more familiar with France as a foreign country and they have all of those things, plus they have excellent summer programs. that can't cost more than 15 % of your income. And if you have too low an income, they're free. And after school programs are free and daycare starting at two is free. And before that, it's very reasonable. Last time I looked, it was a dollar an hour. And if you have abused your child, they assign a social worker for five years to help your family. So families aren't abandoned there. the way they are in the U .S. Are they abandoned in Canada too, or are there supports? Canada, there's, I find that Canada is, we're not doing too bad. We could be doing much better. There's still support, but what's going on right now you'll see is that one parent still has to remain at home and take care of the child because they probably earn as much as it costs to put the child in daycare. So no matter what, we're still reverting. Yeah. Yeah. So we're still reverting back to the system when one parent has to stay at home. There's still some degree of like income disparity between men and women, depending on work. So if, as a man, if I can probably get a labor job that pays more than my female counterpart can get at the same level. Right. And so we still have that income disparity where I have to work. She has to stay at home with the children if we're going to decide to make that sacrifice. And that. makes more sense than having the children in daycare where we don't know what's going on. I mean, the socialization aspect is important, but at the same time, your children are out of, yeah, somebody else is raising them. So, and that's where I have so many questions about the nuclear family because it seems as though we're still reverting back to that, although people, ideologically, people are moving away from that. So that's a trend that you'll see in Canada mostly, but when you compare it to France, for example, we are. lagging significantly behind. When you compare us to the United States, we're doing pretty good. Yes, that's true. Also, the United States does not have any paid maternity or paternity leave. That's up to five years at some percentage of your salary. And that's true in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, all those places. And so you also ostensibly are paying a parent to stay home. In Norway, You have to take a paternity leave because they don't want men to skip out on their paternity leave and not get to know their kids. You know, they pay a very high percent of your salary. So that's another reason why the U .S. is so behind and why U .S. marriage is in such trouble because there isn't the support. One of the biggest indicators of future poverty is having a child and single mothers. are the poorest adults, children are the poorest people, and single mothers are the poorest adults because we don't have the supports. And they are often working in abusive jobs, four biggest jobs which are all abusive. Amazon, Walmart, call centers, and fast food. So, kids are in trouble. And also, I think the idea, that anyone who is biologically capable of having a child will be capable of taking care of an utterly vulnerable little life is bizarre. I mean, that was invented to try to usurp state responsibility and tax the rich, but everyone needs support. You know, that's crazy. And it's crazy to think that whoever got pregnant could take care of somebody. That's silly. Everybody needs help. And if you're rich, you buy the help. So it's a class issue. Yeah. It's a class issue, a hundred percent. And you had also previously spoken about the USSR. They also led in the way of creating social programs and social program for single mothers and to support the economy. And my understanding is that was during a time of war that they were doing that. As soon as the revolution was over, they were the In 1919, they had an equal rights amendment that the United States hasn't ever passed yet. They also had abortion rights in 1919. Women could vote in 1919. And by 1921, they had started creches, places for kids. They needed women in the labor force. And so they had nursery schools, they had meal preparation so a woman could take the meal and go home. and women were given equal rights before the Russian Revolution, you could kill your wife and although it was in bad taste, it was not pursued. She wasn't a full human being. Alexandra Kolontay, the first cabinet minister who was a woman in the whole world, instituted these programs because she was a commissioner of culture and of women. But in 1930, when Stalin took over, And the threat of being invaded by Germany was present. He suspended women's rights across the board, the right to abortion, the right to divorce on demand, a whole bunch of things, which put them back. Wow. It's such a fascinating history because we just do not have any parallels to really look out immediately and say, okay, well, that's where we were. Those are the historical antecedents and this is what's for the future. And I just wanted to highlight certain things that you said to make sure I understand it. With the current social changes that are happening, with more support from the government, we could have families, we could alleviate pressure from the families, whether we're talking about single mothers, single fathers, or still nuclear families. And I actually did see a statistic where income disparity in between, single mothers and single fathers. And I believe it was trending around every year, about around like 50 % of single mothers were living under the poverty line, when for men it was trending around like 9 to 12%. And that was a very, very shocking graphic that I saw because it was over a span of like five years that they have captured that. And to think that a single mother, I mean, their chances of living on the poverty rises up to 49, 50%. That is huge. That should be alarming to everybody. But if I can just ask you one last question before we go here on your thoughts on men's increasing involvement in child rearing, because my generation of men, there's a certain cultural shift that is happening, surely but slowly, where we're starting to understand that, hey, it is not natural for us to not be involved and we have to be there. And so I just wanted your thoughts on that aspect of. cultural shift that is happening as a last question here. That's a very hopeful cultural shift. It ought to happen. Children should have all the supports they can have and not just from mothers. Also, it's much healthier for children to have two people who are engaged with them rather than one because it's very wearing to have children. You need someone else. You need someone else to say, hey, take it easy. I'll take over. But men, of course, look, men have to be full people. And in the United States, they usually aren't. They suppress their emotional needs. They suppress their vulnerability. They suppress their need to be held and cuddled and understood. And they need those qualities that you get. No, because feminism is so underdeveloped. No one has ever done the research to establish what you learn from taking care of a vulnerable life. But there's an enormous amount you learn. If I had another life, I'd study that. But, you know, just to show what you learn. But men are understanding that they're missing out and they're participating a whole lot more, which is really important for children and for the men themselves. Yeah. Thank you very much for that answer. And on that note, we will end today's session. Thank you so much for taking the time to just shed light on all the histories. There's so much to unpack there. I really love it. Thank you. It's a pleasure to talk to you. Yeah, absolutely. And to our listeners, stay tuned. We'll have more for you. But this was Dr. Harriet Farad. And hopefully we get to hear more from her on this platform here because it's very enlightening. OK, thanks. Bye bye. you That was great. Yeah.