Marriage is generally understood to be a more or less formal, conventional intimate couple relationship. Typically, marriage is celebrated as the exclusive and permanent union of one man and one woman as husband and wife. Marriage is often presented as the ‘natural’ or ‘proper’ way to couple. While marriage is certainly a popular and enduring social arrangement, assuming that it is natural is troublesome on two counts. First, while marriage exists across time and cultures, it is by no means uniform. Rather, marriage is constituted in widely divergent forms. The couple marrying in van Eyck’s famous 1434 painting, Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife, for example, would have entered into a very different set of obligations and expectations than a couple marrying in the Netherlands today. Similarly, marriage in contemporary Lebanon comes with a different set of threats and promises than its counterpart in South Africa. As a social practice marriage is robust and resilient, but its nature and effects vary. In this sense, marriage is not one institution but many; as a social regulation it endures even as it is renovated and rebuilt. Second, appeals to the naturalness of marriage conceal the social, legal, religious and political means through which it is constructed. As Hunter explains, unlike parenthood (but like the related concept of illegitimacy), marriage does not exist as such in the absence of socio-legal (or other forms of) authority. Without social conventions, people may form lasting relationships, but to marry one needs a pronouncement, a certificate, a moment of cultural transformation (Hunter 1995). Marriage requires some form of underpinning social-conventional authority, whether religious, cultural or legal.
The study of marriage forms part of many disciplinary areas, including anthropology, theology, history, sociology, psychology, social work and law. Traversing and criticising these studies are feminist analyses, focusing on marriage as emblematic of relations between men and women. Very few studies, however, focus on the experience of men as husbands. The general impression left by countless studies is that marriage is, fundamentally, an arena which plays a crucial role in shaping women’s lives. As Friedan puts it, for men marriage is like a station on life’s journey, whereas for women it is more often understood as a destination (Friedan 1963). It is not difficult, however, to extrapolate theorisations of men and marriage from feminist analyses.
Even in feminist studies not directly concerned with marriage, questions about the relationship between husbands and wives often arise. This is not surprising, given that feminism examines relations between the sexes while marriage represents a formal and structural aspect of sex/gender relations. While feminists generally agree that marriage serves husbands better than it does wives, speculation on the nature and design of this relationship varies widely. Historically, two views have dominated feminist debates. The view that marriage is recuperable competes against the idea that marriage inherently and perhaps deliberately oppresses women and is thus irredeemably patriarchal.
The first view—that marriage is not necessarily antithetical to gender equality—has prompted feminists to identify and seek to remove double standards in matrimonial law and to argue that spouses should have the opportunity to stand in a structurally symmetrical relationship to each other. In many jurisdictions, husbands and wives are treated differently in the eyes of the law. Some matrimonial codes have allowed a husband to divorce his wife on the grounds of her commission of a single instance of adultery, for example, while requiring that a wife prove repeated instances of adultery or grounds in addition to adultery on the part of the husband before she might seek a divorce. In Thailand, for example, a man cannot be divorced on the ground of his adultery unless he ‘keeps’ a mistress—that is, unless he offers continuing economic support to a woman other than his wife. Thai wives, however, commit adultery as soon as they have sexual intercourse with a man other than their husband, regardless of whether or not the relationship endures (Ekachai 1997). Responding to this sort of double standard, some feminists have argued that until husbands and wives are granted identical status and rights, marriage will continue to operate at women’s expense.
Others argue that reforming matrimonial law is unlikely to solve marriage’s problems for women. Given that marriage assumes sexual difference—and is perhaps thus, by definition, a coalition of unequal elements—efforts to render husbands and wives equivalent in law may be doomed from the start. Analyses adopting this point of view have sought to explain the part marriage plays in establishing the gendered social order, arguing that marriage does not reftect gender inequality so much as create it. The most influential of such accounts is Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988), which argues that an origin-myth of marriage as endogamous and monogamous operates alongside (and carries similar explanatory weight to) the political myth forming the basis of social contract theory. According to Pateman, the ‘sexual contract’—that is, the sum of these myths—disguises coercion and subordination as ‘contract’, incorporating women into the body politic as it simultaneously enslaves them.
Accounts such as Pateman’s leave several questions unresolved. If marriage is inherently and irredeemably patriarchal, it is unlikely ever to serve women well, no matter how it is reformed. However, the alternative and (arguably) less contractual arrangement of cohabitation in lieu of marriage seems to present the same range of problems—particularly in those jurisdictions where the two forms are treated identically. It follows, then, that marriage as such may not be the oppressive heart of intimate relationships. Further, if cohabitation (sometimes also referred to as ‘de facto’ or ‘common-law’ marriage) offers a range of male privileges identical to bona fide marriage, perhaps the problem with marriage is symptomatic of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and its institutions more generally. In any case, with the advent of poststructural explanations of power, feminist advocacy of the simple abolition of marriage is dwindling. Attention is now more likely to focus on any of several intersections of marriage, gender and privilege. Here, marriage has often served as a site at which feminism’s broadest political concerns have been refracted. Indeed, marriage continues to operate as a sort of theoretical pivot for a range of key feminist concerns, including labour, wealth and violence. In these analyses, marriage is rarely characterised as the single cause of women’s oppression, but as an institutional facilitator of women’s subordination through exploitative economic exchange, male violence, and so on.
For example, the subordination of women both in unpaid household labour and in the paid workforce is at least partly premised on their being actual or potential wives. Indeed, whether or not an individual woman is married or unmarried, her life’s opportunities and experiences will be coloured by social regimes linking marriage and the institutionalised sexual division of labour. Women are disciplined, from an early age, to comply with social expectations that housework is women’s work. Certainly until the mid-1970s, wives’ contributions both to their household and husband’s prosperity were routinely ignored by society at large and by judges settling property in divorce cases in particular. Even with the enactment of law reforms designed to redress this failure, it has been argued that women continue to be routinely short-changed upon divorce. Moreover, feminist analyses of the sexual division of domestic labour in marriage are by no means limited to household applications. As Okin points out, the ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms work to buttress male privilege and exacerbate women’s subordination in each arena (Okin 1989:146). In the (paid) labour market, women’s job opportunities are constrained by social expectations that they will also labour at home, as a wife. In the public realm, women are typically clustered in certain occupations and industries, reinforcing the notion that some kinds of work are inherently more suitable for women than others. These ‘women’s’ jobs tend to be cast in service roles and industries, conforming to a domestic model that places wives at the service of their husbands (Delphy and Leonard 1992). Along with the sexual divisions of labour and wealth, violence has been theorised by feminists as intrinsically linked to the institution of marriage. Of particular concern has been the incidence of domestic violence and rape in marriage. The majority of female homicide victims in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia are murdered not by strangers but by their husband or de facto husband (Mouzos and Rushforth 2003). The situation is no better in the majority world, where brutal punishments against a wife’s adultery (or other matrimonial ‘offence’) include death by stoning, acid attacks and ‘honour killings’. The situation regarding sexual assault is similar: despite popular misconceptions, women are more likely to be raped at home than outside it, and by a husband (or other sexual intimate) than a stranger (Easteal 1994:5–6). And again, like domestic violence laws, sanctions against rape are historically linked to matrimonial law—where, for example, the husband of a raped woman could sue her attacker for damaging his ‘property’ (that is, his wife) (Miller and Biele 1993:50). The repeal of such laws, and even the criminalisation of rape in marriage, has not remedied the problem: if rape in general is notoriously difficult to prosecute, marital rape is even more difficult to prove. Similarly, while formal regulations governing the dissolution of marriage in developed industrial nations might lead us to infer that it is now easy for women in such places to leave a violent relationship, the reality is different.
It is well known that marriage has at various times endowed husbands with tremendous power over their wives. The eighteenthcentury English doctrine of coverture—that is, the idea that, in marriage, husband and wife become as one, that one being the husband—is frequently cited to illustrate the legal privileges of marriage afforded to husbands. The doctrine meant, in effect, that upon marriage women entered into a strikingly subordinate relationship: their property, and to a certain extent their liberty, became subject to their husband’s direction. Under coverture, husbands were permitted to beat their wives ‘within reason’, and could forbid them from going to certain places or associating with certain people. If a wife murdered her husband, she could be charged with treason as well as homicide, having killed her husband and ruler (Yalom 2001).
The role of marriage in implementing various racist programmes is less frequently acknowledged. However, inscriptions of race have been regulated through marriage, particularly in the historical prohibition of marriage between ‘mixed race’ couples. As recently as 1960 in Australia, for example, marriage served as a model of racial and cultural assimilation whose coherence depended on governmental links connecting white privilege and male privilege (Brook 1997). That the repeal of racist prohibitions on ‘inter-racial’ unions is now being cited as an analogous precedent for the legal recognition of gay and lesbian relationships suggests that the matrimonial landscape is continuing to shift—and for some, quake. Recent debates concerning ‘same-sex marriage’ have brought feminist theorisations of marriage back into the spotlight as an arena in which sex, gender and sexualities are tightly intermeshed (Calhoun 2000). And, just as there has never been any straightforward feminist consensus on marriage, opinions as to the usefulness of marriage as a vehicle which might challenge homophobia are mixed (Baird and Rosenbaum 1997).
While most of marriage’s more obvious racist and sexist double standards have been removed from the legal codes of Western societies, and in some places efforts have been made to divest marriage of its homophobic and heteronormative trappings, problems concerning labour, domestic and sexual violence remain hinged to marriage. Feminist analyses have thoroughly debunked the belief that marriage serves women or that it exists to ‘protect’ women. While some of the masculine power and privileges of marriage have gradually eroded, in many places marriage is now understood to be a relationship of equals. In their study of contemporary families, Bittman and Pixley (1997) adopt the useful term ‘pseudomutuality’ to describe a preference for ‘equal’ sharing of housework. They report that while most of the people they studied described their own relationship as ‘equal’ by design, very few reflected equality in fact. For household labour, as in domestic-sexual violence, the rhetoric of formal equality may disguise ongoing problems. There is no doubt, however, that in places like the United States, divorce is less difficult and painful than it once was. Childrearing and housework are now recognised as contributions to marital prosperity, and assault between spouses has been criminalised. The price of some of these improvements has been an angry backlash (Flood 2004). In other places, however, women continue to struggle against the heinous effects of deeply misogynist marriage systems.
The gradual removal of legal ties binding women to the service of their husbands, coupled with increased opportunities for women’s economic and personal independence, has seen the popularity of marriage—particularly as a life-long commitment—wane in developed nations. This is evidence, perhaps, that marriage is becoming less compulsory and less necessary to those social orders in which women’s participation as workers and citizens is recognised. Whether this signals the rise of more egalitarian or perhaps self-centred relationships is debatable. What does seem clear is that completely just systems for regulating intimate relationships remain an ideal—but an ideal well worth women’s and men’s continuing attention.
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