When women start doing what men have traditionally done, yours is a civilization of the setting sun. This is brought to mind when pondering a recent Pew Research Center study showing that women are now the primary or sole breadwinners in 40 percent of American households. You may have heard the story -- it created quite a stir on Fox News, with Greta Van Susteren and Megyn Kelly (who became quite hysterical) taking exception to male colleagues' warnings about the development's sociological implications. But if these two ladies, and the other critics, had reacted rationally and not emotionally, they would realize what is obvious:

The rise in female breadwinners is a sign of a civilization in decline.

Let's start by first examining the study. While the term "breadwinner" conjures up images of pleasingly plump paychecks, the real story here is the rise of poor single mothers. Among the 40 percent of women in the breadwinner group, 63 percent are single mothers. This isn't surprising, since the rate of single motherhood has risen from about 4 percent in the 1940s to 41 percent today (72 percent in the black community). So what kind of "bread" are we talking about? Writes Amy Langfield of CNBC, "The median income for a single mother who has never been married was $17,400 as of 2011." And, obviously, having large numbers of single mothers, with essentially fatherless children, struggling to make ends meet isn't good for the women, the children, or the society as a whole.

The picture looks better for the married 37 percent of the breadwinner group, but only by comparison. Twenty-nine percent of these women's husbands are unemployed. Moreover, Pew describes these women as older, college-educated, and white. Translation: they're the one-child wonders. These are often women who postpone childbirth in deference to careerism and then, perhaps after dropping a tidy sum at a fertility clinic, have their sole son or daughter. Why does this warrant mention? Because as the documentary Demographic Winter points out, this phenomenon is a significant contributing factor to the plummeting birth rates among Western peoples. Outside New Zealand, there isn't one major European-descent group with a replacement-level birth rate. And for all you secular-feminist chauvinists so proud of your cultural hegemony, what do you think happens to values that cause people to erase themselves?

So why can't the Megyn Kellys of the world perceive the rise in female breadwinners as the warning sign it is? Because their feminist dogma teaches that any female "gain" relative to men is positive, and any criticism of it is blind male chauvinism. These are the people who cheer girls' "better" performance in schools even though this is largely attributable to boys' worsening performance (and improved female test scores aren't relevant, because the exams, like the boys, have been dumbed down). It's a mindset that would consider it a good thing if women won every future marathon because men either lost their legs or stopped running.

And that is the point. If a warring nation must move a few divisions from the southern front to shore up the northern, it isn't a victory for those divisions; it means the war effort is waning. And if the divisions' generals view it as a personal victory because they'll have the opportunity to distinguish themselves, they're self-centered and ignorant.

Likewise, it was a sign of crisis when women had to assume men's roles in the factories during WWII, but the idea was that the crisis would end and normalcy resume. But today we are in perpetual war -- culture war -- in a never-ending crisis in which we fight ourselves and confuse losses with gains. No, the intersex wage gap isn't a bad thing, and it isn't good when it starts to close. The size of that gap correlates with the health of the nuclear family; the larger it is, the greater men's ability to support their families and women's opportunity to stay at home with the children. No, it isn't good when girls outshine boys in school, as this reflects a society of undisciplined lads and a hostile yet permissive, feminist-oriented academia.

And, no, it isn't good when you destroy patriarchy. Why? G.K. Chesterton put it best when he wrote, "What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible." If you want matriarchy, just go into the black community. Women rule the roost there, but they reign in a hell born of degraded morals and family breakdown. There has never been a successful matriarchy -- the notion of a matriarchal prehistory is a myth -- and there never will be.

This is why, ultimately, the feminist model is destined for the dustbin of history. The only system that ensures the perpetuation of civilization (replacement-level birth rates) is patriarchy; the only system that compels women and men to fulfill their responsibilities to hearth and home is patriarchy. And this is why, barring the end of man or a dystopian future in which children are lab-created assembly-line style to be the collective's drones, patriarchy is inevitable.

There is no substitute for tradition. The Soviets learned this the hard way, for after undermining the family, sex roles, and religion, mass murderer Joseph Stalin actually outlawed abortion in a vain attempt to combat a bottomed-out birth rate. But today Russia's population is still declining by 700,000 per year -- the wages of their statist sin.

When a people would be invaded or conquered years ago, the men and boys above a certain age would sometimes be killed. Emasculate a society, and it's no longer a force to be reckoned with. But we have emasculated ourselves, killing off manhood by neutering men emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. This won't end well, but for sure it will end. Because the feminist band can play on, but the rising water will soon drown out their music -- for good.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com.