Binary distinctions lie at the heart of reality. “Truth value” comes in only two forms: true and false. There is nothing in between. Even as you read this, that is an absolute truth. At every instant, every circuit on your computer’s CPU is either open or closed. There is nothing in between.

A family, being a society with a form of governance, is a polity and is, in fact, the elemental polity of civilization. A family is itself binary, coming as it does in two flavors: nuclear and extended. There is nothing in between.

Even humankind may be binary. As Anselm Moynihan notes in The Experience of God’s Presence, “the root of the most radical division of mankind, that between the wise who keep God before their eyes and the fools who ignore him.” Ein Od Milvado. (Hebrew: אין עוד מלבדו, “There is none but Him [God].”) There is nothing in between.

That ultimate binary played out in World War II on the home front. It is often claimed that Detroit won the Big One. That carries with it the implication that Rosie the Riveter, slaving away in Detroit factories, mattered more than the men in battle.

Image: 1950s advertisement for a Magic Chef gas range. Provenance unknown.

Perhaps that’s true, but it could not have happened without Rosie’s rigid devotion to the binary nature of man and woman and the value of their issue. When the neighbors’ adult children vanished in the maelstrom of battle, and hubby Ralph went to war, Rosie did send the underage kids to war and take Ralph’s place in the factory. It wasn’t patriotism or feminism, though. It was the call of the wild trumpeted loud and clear and placing everything on maintaining her progeny’s welfare.

Herman Wouk attributed to Hitler the boast “Tanks, tanks, tanks, planes, planes, planes, bombs, bombs.” Detroit (and, of course, other manufacturers across America) accepted that challenge. So, thanks to Rosie’s help, America’s “arsenal of democracy” slipped into the harness and dipped the plow into the dirt.

Unfortunately, when it was over, and Ralph came home and wanted his factory job back, many Rosies found the riveter remuneration too addicting to give up. Soon, the economy adapted to the increased money supply by raising prices to the point where a normal family required two incomes. However, some things were impervious to change. Ralph no doubt preferred the house clean and supper hot—but not enough to clean and cook.

So now Rosie is beginning to think, “It was for the kids that Ralph went to war, and I went to the factory, so now that it’s over and Ralph has returned to the factory, isn’t it time for me to go home?” The truth binary—the necessity of the family—says “Return to the tradition so crudely interrupted by war.” The feminist movement, though, has made this impossible for many women, whether because they really like the work, or because divorce culture leaves women as the primary breadwinners, or because the culture ridicules women who want to be homemakers.

It's the women in the last category—the so-called “Trad Wives”—who have aroused the left’s ire. Many mock the trad wife movement as abject female self-abnegation, the prostration of the female before the male. Assert that in the company of married males and watch the knowing smiles expand and eyeballs roll, as if to say, “When we left the church that bright day in June, I had no idea I had taken a tiger by the tail.”

The left continues to pretend that the maternal instinct is a societal construct, rather than a binary truth that is, in its own way, the call of the wild. Leftists continue to ignore what Kipling so aptly described:

Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,

For the woman that God gave him isn’t his to give away;

But when hunter meets with husband,

each confirms the other’s tale,

The female of the species is more deadly than the male.