I was recently on a discussion programme with a fully signed-up card-carrying feminist. ‘Damn,†she said, as we came off, ‘I said ‘husbands’ by mistake, instead of ‘partners’.†She’d made the ultimate faux pas — the assumption that couples must be married. But is it right, particularly when so many feminists — like herself — have chosen to get married, that marriage should continue to be taboo?
Marriage and feminism came properly to blows in the Seventies. Germaine Greer famously branded married life ‘a legalised form of slavery” for women: politically and economically, women were subordinate to men, and the dynamics of marriage seemed to perpetuate this inequality. Financial reliance on male breadwinners made marriage synonymous with dependence on men. Together with the divorce laws, this dependence made it very hard for women to leave marriages. The way to reject male dominance was to reject marriage.
Throwing marriage out with inequality was to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Marriages are reflectors of gender relations at large. Thanks mainly to the women’s liberation movement, greater equality between men and women has led to greater equality between wives and husbands. Women have achieved greater independence not by not marrying but by earning.
Now a set of assumptions has settled around marriage. Although it’s an undoubted achievement that women no longer have to marry, there’s still a stigma attached to being a spinster. Persistent inequality is just as likely to exist in non-married relationships as in married ones. But most significantly, once children become involved, the idea that non-marriage is the key to equality can really be turned on its head.
The worry now for campaigners for women’s rights should be the close connection between cohabiting partnerships and lone parenthood. In the past 30 years, the number of both cohabiting and lone-parent families has rocketed. It’s no coincidence that the two have risen simultaneously. What distinguishes cohabiting households from married ones is not an egalitarian division of housework, but stability. Cohabiting families are a lot less stable.
While 70% of children born within marriage can still expect to live with both natural parents until 16, that’s the case for just 36% of those born into a cohabiting relationship. The instability of cohabitation is sold as freedom, but essentially this fragility has become a new form of women’s ‘enslavement”.
That women can today parent alone, and unstigmatised, is a triumph, but this is blighted by the reality of lone motherhood. While some middle-class single mothers are having a ball, they’re the minority. There’s nothing empowering about being left, penniless, holding the baby. Around half of lone mothers have no earned income and scrape by on benefits. Of those who aren’t officially poor, many have to do the jobs of two people.
Pared down to its core, what differentiates marriage is commitment. A married family is not only more likely to remain intact than a cohabiting one, divorced fathers are far more likely to pay child maintenance than never-married ones. So in parenting terms, marriage is more likely to bring about equality between partners than non-marriage.
The irony is that it seems to be some feminists who need to be converted — although crucially, not in their personal lives — to marriage. Polls show us that the young are as keen as ever to marry. Indeed, marriage rates are up for the third year running. What’s stopping today’s generation marrying is not principle, but circumstance. Unlike their Seventies counterparts, they’re are not rebelling against an institution, they’re saving up for a house. —