It might sound harsh, but it’s true. Modern heterosexual marriage is an oxymoron. In fact, for a feminist, it’s a bit hypocritical because marriage is intrinsically designed by both religion and state to control women and reduce both women and children to the status of property. I don’t include non-binary or gay marriage in this post because I’m not qualified to speak on the subject, though problems with equity could most definitely still be present in those marriages.
Before I continue, I must admit that I’m married and plan to stay that way. Divorce would be costly and senseless as I plan on living with my husband till one of us dies. Does this make me a hypocrite? Probably. Did I benefit from my marriage or was it oppressive? It depends on how you look at it. I spent many years not working, but that didn’t ultimately benefit me or make me productive. It made me one of the masses of under-appreciated, unpaid caregivers in America. Not only that, but marriage and choices we made within that marriage definitely posited me as a lifelong dependent to my husband. I wouldn’t recommend that status to any of my children. It now occurs to me that it was ironic that mass amounts of money was spent to place limits on my opportunities. I married my husband because I knew I wanted him and his daughter in my household. It didn’t occur to me that I didn’t need a wedding to accomplish that feat. Instead I fell into a system that had me relinquishing control of my life in both big and small ways almost immediately, and with my full cooperation. I did this in the name of tradition.
As a wife, I was expected to put my education on hold while my husband earned a second degree. This wasn’t because my husband was an asshole. We both acknowledged that he would earn more money in the long run, just being male and in the tech field. However, if I had continued my own education, I would have been able to spend more time developing theories and ideas that I am just now becoming aware of at 40+ years of age. This stagnated my learning process, my earnings and my self-esteem. There is no guarantee that I would have gone back to school earlier, but chances were good I would have. I mourned leaving college and moving to a city without a full university.
Later, as a married woman with children, I found myself in the position many of us find ourselves in. Daycare costs would have dissolved my salary. I found that it didn’t make sense to go to my $11/hour job as a copy editor at the newspaper when daycare was $10/hour. While part of me is thankful I had the privilege of stying home with my children. I am now aware that it came at a large cost represented in ten years of lost income and potential career development. If I hadn’t been married, I wouldn’t have felt secure enough to let go of my own earning potential.
When married, people treat you differently than if you’re living with a “partner”. You’re seen as an extension of someone else, which is something men don’t expirence in the same way. I was my husband’s wife or my children’s mother but rarely recognized for my own value until I went back to school. This lack of value can change way we see ourselves. Many women start seeing themselves through the same narrow lens other people view them by. I would often complain to my husband that my brain was being filled with baby poop and crafts because that’s all anyone would talk to me about. People never ask my husband about poop or crafts. It becomes this gender divide that felt insurmountable. Even other women would ask me about poop and crafts because that was all anyone would talk to them about. There was nothing more frustrating than going to a party and the women there would only discuss their kids and husband as if they were their family’s personal press secretary.
Politically, modern marriage refuses to recognize the problematic issue of government involvement in matters of culture and religion. This certainly doesn’t benefit women. When the government gives political status to a religious or cultural ceremony, it blurs the boundary of church and state. In some instances going as far as giving men authority over women’s bodies - especially in conservative states where husbands can determine whether an infant’s life is worth more than the mother’s or when laws against a woman’s rape dissolve with the signing of a marriage license. Many doctors also require men to give permission over ending a woman’s fertility if that woman is married, yet few women are asked to approve a man’s vasectomy.
Marriage is not a modern institution, nor can it be without a cultural and political revelation recognizing the folly in politicizing human interaction by giving one adult human more status than another in any one household. But that is exactly what marriage has historically been and for most, continues to be.
To modernize marriage is to politically dissolve it.