Marriage is good for men, women, children--and
society. Because of this simple fact, President George W. Bush has
proposed a new pilot program to promote healthy marriage. Despite
demonstrated evidence in every major social policy area of the need
to rebuild a strong and healthy culture of marriage, President
Bush's new marriage initiative is still opposed by the extreme wing
of feminism that sees no good in marriage or in unity between men
and women, and between mothers and fathers.
Moderate, mainstream feminists have long
rejected this animus against marriage; the vast majority of such
feminists either are married or intend to marry. Mainstream
feminists are focused on a worthy concern: removing obstacles to
the advancement of women in all walks of life.
Radical feminists, however, while
embracing this mainstream goal--even hiding behind it--go much
further: They seek to undermine the nuclear family of married
father, mother, and children, which they label the "patriarchal
family." As feminist leader Betty Friedan has warned, this
anti-marriage agenda places radical feminists profoundly at odds
with the family aspirations of mainstream feminists and most other
American women.
Although radical feminists often claim
that their opposition to the President's healthy marriage
initiative is a matter of efficiency or program details, it is in
fact rooted in a long-term philosophical hostility to the
institution of marriage itself. The Washington Post underscored
this point in an April 2002 editorial, stating that the unwarranted
animosity to the President's policy grew out of "reflexive
hostility" and the "tired ideology" of "the feminist left." Decision-makers in
Congress should not allow the badly needed initiative to strengthen
healthy marriage to be blocked by organizations, such as the NOW
Legal Defense Fund, that are still wedded to the "tired ideology"
of the radical feminist past.
The
Washington Post editorial found "something puzzling about the
reflexive hostility" to the President's proposal. This paper
unravels much of this puzzle by reviewing major statements made by
radical feminist leaders about marriage over the past three
decades. Congress should review these radical feminist views on
marriage, reject their influence, and uphold legislation that seeks
to increase stable, healthy marriage--a better solution for men and
women who are parents of children. Congress should never forget
that it is children who suffer most when an anti-marriage agenda
triumphs.
THE EMERGENCE OF RADICAL FEMINISIM
In
its initial stages, modern American feminism was not hostile to
marriage. True, in her magnum opus, The Feminine Mystique, Betty
Friedan did describe the traditional homes where wives were not
employed as "comfortable concentration camps." But Friedan's criticism was focused
primarily on the role of the non-employed housewife. Her goal seems
to have been to increase the employment of wives and mothers rather
than to attack marriage itself. Thus, Friedan's criticism of
marriage was limited; she never called on women to abandon the
institution.
However, in the late 1960s and early
1970s, a new wave of radical feminism emerged that quickly moved
beyond the positions espoused by Friedan and others. This new
feminism was overtly hostile to the institution of marriage itself.
Among the key figures in this new, more radical feminism were:
- Kate Millett, who wrote the 1969
best-seller, Sexual Politics;
- Germaine Greer, author of The Female
Eunuch (1970), an Australian who was educated at Cambridge,
England, and taught at the University of Warwick in the United
Kingdom and the University of Tulsa in the United States;
- Marilyn French, Harvard fellow, best-known
for her 1977 novel, The Women's Room;
- Jessie Bernard, author of The Future of
Marriage (1972) and influential Pennsylvania State University
sociologist who "converted" to radical feminism toward the end of
her academic career and in whose name the American Sociological
Association gives an annual award for feminist sociology; and
- Shulamith Firestone, author of The
Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) and
founder of Radical Women, the first feminist collective.
In
the late 1960s, attacks against marriage mounted swiftly, one upon
the other. In 1968, radical feminists Beverly Jones and Judith
Brown wrote the influential pamphlet "Toward a Female Liberation
Movement." It proclaimed: "The married woman knows that love is, at
its best, an inadequate reward for her unnecessary and bizarre
heritage of oppression." In 1969, radical feminist Marlene
Dixon, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago,
declared: "The institution of marriage is the chief vehicle for the
perpetuation of the oppression of women; it is through the role of
wife that the subjugation of women is maintained. In a very real
way the role of wife has been the genesis of women's rebellion
throughout history."
Also
in 1969, Kate Millett declared in Sexual Politics that in
"contemporary patriarchies...[wives'] chattel status continues in
their loss of name, their obligation to adopt the husband's
domicile, and the general legal assumption that marriage involves
an exchange of the female's domestic service and [sexual]
consortium in return for financial support." Millett argued that the impetus of the
sexual revolution had the potential to collapse antiquated
patriarchal systems, including the institution of marriage, thereby
creating "a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit." In Millett's view, a
dismantled patriarchy--resulting from the destruction of
traditional marriage--would generate the downfall of the nuclear
family, a goal she called "revolutionary or utopian."
Millett suggested another alternative:
that "marriage might be replaced by voluntary association, if such
is desired." The
influence of Millet and others can be seen in the subsequent rise
of cohabitation. In
either case, Millett argued that the complete destruction of
marriage and the natural family is necessary to produce an ideal
society.
The
Feminists, an organization formed in the late 1960s, whose leaders
included authors Pamela Kearon and Barbara Mehrhof, became
well-known for its hostility toward marriage. In 1969, The
Feminists declared that "Marriage and the family must be
eliminated" and
implemented a marriage quota when establishing membership
guidelines for itself. The Feminists declared:
Because THE FEMINISTS consider the
institution of marriage inherently inequitable...and (b) Because we
consider this institution a primary formalization of the
persecution of women, and (c) Because we consider the rejection of
this institution both in theory and in practice a primary mark of
the radical feminist, WE HAVE A MEMBERSHIP QUOTA: THAT NO MORE THAN
ONE-THIRD OF OUR MEMBERSHIP CAN BE PARTICIPANTS IN EITHER A FORMAL
(WITH LEGAL CONTRACT) OR INFORMAL (E.G., LIVING WITH A MAN)
INSTANCE OF THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE.
In
1970, radical feminist intellectual Shulamith Firestone, co-founder
of the radical feminist group The Redstockings, proclaimed in The
Dialectic of Sex that "The institution [of marriage] consistently
proves itself unsatisfactory--even rotten.... The family
is...directly connected to--is even the cause of--the ills of the
larger society."
Sheila Cronan, a member of The
Redstockings, in her 1970 essay "Marriage," declared: "It became
increasingly clear to us that the institution of marriage
`protects' women in the same way that the institution of slavery
was said to `protect' blacks--that is, that the word `protection'
in this case is simply a euphemism for oppression," and proclaimed that
"marriage is a form of slavery." She concluded: "Since marriage
constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the Women's
Movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom
for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage."
In
1970, leading feminist author Robin Morgan referred to the
institution of marriage as "A slavery-like practice. We can't
destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy
marriage." Morgan
went on to become an editor at Ms. Magazine.
In
1971, Germaine Greer, scholar and lecturer at the University of
Warwick, England, argued further in The Female Eunuch: "If women
are to effect a significant amelioration in their condition it
seems obvious that they must refuse to marry." She asserted:
The plight of mothers is more desperate
than that of other women, and the more numerous the children the
more hopeless the situation seems to be.... Most women...would
shrink at the notion of leaving husband and children, but this is
precisely the case in which brutally clear rethinking must be
undertaken.
Having argued that ordinary women should
leave their families, Greer called for the establishment of
"rambling organic structure[s]" that would "have the advantage of
being an unbreakable home in that it did not rest on the frail
shoulders of two bewildered individuals trying to apply a
contradictory blueprint." In short, Greer encouraged women not
to marry, advocated that those already married leave their
families, and proclaimed that transitory and free-form
relationships should replace intact, two-parent homes.
(Regrettably, a substantial transformation like that espoused by
Greer has occurred, especially within low-income communities over
the past three decades; this replacement of stable, two-parent
homes with transient fragmented relationships has proved
overwhelmingly detrimental to children, women, and men.)
Minnesota radical feminists Helen
Sullinger and Nancy Lehmann also released a manifesto, the
"Declaration on Feminism," in 1971 that vowed hostility toward
marriage and a determination to destroy it:
Marriage has existed for the benefit of
men and has been a legally sanctioned method of control over
women.... Male society has sold us the idea of marriage.... Now we
know it is the institution that has failed us and we must work to
destroy it.... The end of the institution of marriage is a
necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore, it is
important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not
to live individually with men.
In
1972, in a highly influential book entitled The Future of Marriage,
sociologist Jessie Bernard of Pennsylvania State University wrote
about the "destructive nature" of marriage for women, arguing that
marriage generated "poor mental and emotional health" for women
when compared to unmarried women or married men. "Being a housewife," Bernard asserted,
"makes women sick."
Bernard, however, had difficulty
explaining why, given the supposedly destructive nature of
marriage, married women consistently reported they were happier
than were unmarried women. To resolve this paradox, she further
asserted that society as a whole warped the minds of women:
To be happy in a relationship which
imposes so many impediments on her, as traditional marriage does,
women must be slightly mentally ill. Women accustomed to expressing
themselves freely could not be happy in such a relationship....
[W]e therefore "deform" the minds of girls, as traditional Chinese
used to deform their feet, in order to shape them for happiness in
marriage. It may therefore be that married women say they are happy
because they are sick.
Bernard also asserted that raising
children reduced adult happiness. She envisioned a future in which
marriage would increasingly be childless and would involve an array
of "free wheeling" and transitory relationships.
In
1974, the outcry grew still harsher. Ti-Grace Atkinson, a member of
The Feminists and author of Amazon Odyssey, called married women
"hostages."
Atkinson concluded:
The price of clinging to the enemy [a man]
is your life. To enter into a relationship with a man who has
divested himself as completely and publicly from the male role as
much as possible would still be a risk. But to relate to a man who
has done any less is suicide.... I, personally, have taken the
position that I will not appear with any man publicly, where it
could possibly be interpreted that we were friends.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s: radical
Feminism Continues to Decry Marriage
Feminism's shrill animosity toward the
married family continued beyond the 1970s. In 1981, radical
feminist author Vivian Gornick, a tenured professor at the
University of Arizona, proclaimed that "Being a housewife is an
illegitimate profession.... The choice to serve and be protected
and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn't
be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that."
Some
influential feminists asserted that marriage was akin to
prostitution. In 1983, radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin
declared, "Like prostitution, marriage is an institution that is
extremely oppressive and dangerous for women." In 1991, Catherine MacKinnon, a
professor of law at both the University of Michigan Law School and
the University of Chicago Law School, added, "Feminism stresses the
indistinguishability of prostitution, marriage, and sexual
harassment."
In
1990, the organization Radical Women issued a group manifesto
affirming that the traditional family was "founded on the open or
concealed domestic slavery of the wife." The manifesto celebrated the growth of
single-parent families and serial cohabitation in low-income
communities as a positive step toward the liberation of women.
In
her 1996 book In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values
in the Postmodern Age, Judith Stacey, Professor of Gender Studies
and Sociology at the University of Southern California, consigned
traditional marriage to the dustbin of history. Stacey contended that "Inequity and
coercion...always lay at the vortex of that supposedly voluntary
`compassionate marriage' of the traditional nuclear family." She welcomed the fact
that traditional married-couple families (which she terms "The
Family") are being replaced by single-mother families (which she
terms the postmodern "family of woman"):
Perhaps the postmodern "family of woman"
will take the lead in burying The Family at long last. The [married
nuclear] Family is a concept derived from faulty theoretical
premises and an imperialistic logic, which even at its height never
served the best interests of women, their children, or even many
men.... The [nuclear married] family is dead. Long live our
families!
Stacey urged policymakers to abandon their
concern with restoring marital commitment between mothers and
fathers and instead "move forward toward the postmodern family
regime," characterized by single parenthood and transitory
relationships.
In
1996, Claudia Card, professor of Philosophy at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, continued the attack:
The legal rights of access that married
partners have to each other's persons, property, and lives makes it
all but impossible for a spouse to defend herself (or himself), or
to be protected against torture, rape, battery, stalking, mayhem,
or murder by the other spouse.... Legal marriage thus enlists state
support for conditions conducive to murder and mayhem.
Other radical feminists suggested that a
culture of self-sufficiency and high turnover in intimate
relationships is the key to independence and protection from
hostile home life. Activist Fran Peavey, in a 1997 Harvard article
ironically titled "A Celebration of Love and Commitment," suggested
that "Instead of getting married for life, men and women (in
whatever combination suits their sexual orientation) should sign up
for a seven-year hitch. If they want to reenlist for another seven,
they may, but after that, the marriage is over." Also in 1997, radical feminist author
Ashton Applewhite, in her book Cutting Loose--Why Women Who End
Their Marriages Do So Well proclaimed: "Women who end their
marriages are far better off afterward."
Another feminist widely read during the
1990s was Barbara Ehrenreich, a former columnist with Time magazine
who now writes for The Nation. Throughout her work, Ehrenreich extols
single parenthood and disparages marriage. Divorce, she argues,
produces "no lasting psychological damage" for children. What
America needs is not fewer divorces but more "good divorces." Rather than seeking
to strengthen marriage, policymakers "should concentrate on
improving the quality of divorce." In general, Ehrenreich concludes that
single parenthood presents no problems that cannot be solved by
much larger government subsidies to single parents.
Ehrenreich writes enthusiastically about
efforts to move beyond the narrow limits of the nuclear married
family toward more rational forms of human relationship:
There is a long and honorable tradition of
"anti-family" thought. The French philosopher Charles Fourier
taught that the family was a barrier to human progress; early
feminists saw a degrading parallel between marriage and
prostitution. More recently, the renowned British anthropologist
Edmund Leach stated, "far from being the basis of the good society,
the family with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the
source of all discontents."
While Ehrenreich recognizes that men and
women are inevitably drawn to one another, she believes male-female
relationships should be ad hoc, provisional, and transitory. She
particularly disparages the idea of long-term marital commitment
between fathers and mothers. In the future, children will be raised
increasingly by communal groups of adults. These children apparently will fare
far better than those raised within the tight constraints of the
nuclear married family "with its deep impacted tensions."
College Texts: Mainstreaming the
anti-marriage message
As
their influence grew over three decades, radical feminists'
sentiments increasingly found their way into college textbooks and
whole college courses on feminist studies, consistently expressing
opposition to the natural family and to marriage. Over the years,
these writings have exercised considerable detrimental influence on
the intellectual formation of millions of college students, not
only in many overtly hostile feminist studies courses, but even in
the more mainstream family studies courses.
Many
current college textbooks on the family rely heavily on sociologist
Jessie Bernard's erroneous arguments, now long contradicted by
subsequent research, that marriage has harmful effects on women's
mental health. For instance, in her textbook Changing Families,
Judy Root Aulette states: "Bernard's investigation showed that the
psychological costs of marriage were great for women."
In
another text, professors Randall Collins and Scott Coltrane (then
both at the Department of Sociology, University of California,
Riverside), assert: "We do know, for instance, that marriage has an
adverse effect on women's mental health." In another text, authors Maxine Baca
Zinn and D. Stanley Eitzen, imitating Jessie Bernard, explain away
the enduring paradox that married women are more likely to report
they are happy than are un-married women: "If marriage is so
difficult for wives, why do the majority surveyed judge themselves
as happy?... [The reason] is that happiness is interpreted by wives
in terms of conformity. Since they are conforming to society's
expectations, this must be happiness."
THE RADICAL FEMINIST VISION: MAN'S WAR
AGAINST WOMAN
Many
radical feminist novelists have carried the same message into
popular literature. Marilyn French, popular radical feminist
novelist and
prominent social critic, is one such writer with wide
influence. French's writing, both fiction and non-fiction, is
characteristic of more recent radical feminism that moves beyond
hostility to the institution of marriage toward hostility to males
in general.
In
her 1992 landmark work of social criticism, The War Against Women,
French declares that, "In personal and public life, in kitchen,
bedroom and halls of parliament, men wage unremitting war against
women." In French's
view, the "war against women" is quite simply a war of men against
women. Across all institutions, the attitudes of men toward women
are characterized by hostility, domination, violence, and
exploitation.
According to French, male oppression of
females is often most pronounced in the institution where men and
women live in intimate contact: the married family.
The family is the primary site of female
subjection, which is achieved largely through sexuality: women are
indoctrinated into their supposed "natural state" by male control
of their sexuality in the family.
...Men expect women to perform the most
important of all human tasks [child-bearing] with no reward,
without much help, and with almost no consideration.
In
French's view, women are the natural prey of male predators who
oppress them economically, mentally, and physically. Human
sexuality, marriage, and family life are permeated by violence and
aggression.
All women learn in childhood that women as
a sex are men's prey; many also learn that the men who supposedly
cherish them are the worst offenders. They learn that "love" is
about power and they are the powerless....
Male sexual aggression is endemic, if any
sex act against a person's will were considered rape, the majority
of men would be rapists.
My own informal survey of adult women
suggests that very few reach the age of twenty-one without
suffering some form of male predation--incest, molestation, rape or
attempted rape, beatings, and sometimes torture or imprisonment.
For
French, the fate of women in the world is bleak. Indeed, in her
view, the well-being of women has been steadily declining since the
Neolithic age.
For women, it has been downhill ever since
[the stone age].... Women not only did not "progress" but have been
increasingly disempowered, degraded, and subjugated. This tendency
accelerated over the last four centuries, when men, mainly in the
West, exploded in a frenzy of domination, trying to expand and
tighten their control of nature and those associated with
nature--people of color and women.
French's vision of the hostility of men
toward women verges on the apocalyptic. "Humans," she states, "are
the only species in which one sex consistently preys upon the
other." She
believes that "men's need to dominate women may be based in their
own sense of marginality or emptiness."
Whatever the root causes, according to
French, men's violent treatment, exploitation, and domination of
women is so ubiquitous and extreme that it appears to threaten the
survival of the species.
It cannot be an accident that everywhere
on the globe one sex harms the other so massively that one
questions the sanity of those waging the campaign: can a species
survive when half of it systematically preys on the other?
Some women today believe that men are well
on their way to exterminating women from the world through violent
behavior and oppressive policies.
Marilyn French's views should not be
lightly dismissed as the rants of a lone extremist. Her book drew
lavish praise from no less than feminist doyenne Gloria Steinem,
who declared, "If you could read only one book about what's wrong
with this country, THE WAR AGAINST WOMEN is it."
The
views of radical feminists help to explain the shrillness of the
opposition to President Bush's policy to promote healthy marriage.
Anyone who believes that marriage is harmful to the emotional
health of women, that men and women are locked in a predator-prey
relationship, or that marriage is a mechanism for the economic
exploitation of women will certainly regard any social policy to
promote healthy marriage with the utmost alarm. Though radical
feminist views are not widely shared within our society, they do
heavily influence feminist interest groups, which in turn influence
Congress.
Moderate Feminists react to radical
views
The
views of radical feminism have become so extreme that more moderate
feminists have felt compelled to react against them. In 1981, Betty
Friedan distanced herself from the feminist movement she helped
create, declaring:
The women's movement is being blamed,
above all, for the destruction of the family.... Can we [feminists]
keep on shrugging all this off as enemy propaganda--"their problem,
not ours?" I think we must at least admit and begin openly to
discuss feminist denial of the importance of family, of women's own
needs to give and get love and nurture, tender loving care.
Departing from her previous main argument,
Friedan also criticized radical feminists' hostility toward
housewives and mothers:
Our [feminists'] failure was our blind
spot about the family. It was our own extreme of reaction against
that wife-mother role: that devotional dependence on men and
nurture of children and housewife service which has been and still
is the source of power and status and identity, purpose and self
worth and economic security for so many women.... And not only for
the 49 percent [of women] who are still housewives. Most of the
other 51 percent still don't get as much sense of worth, status,
power or economic security from the jobs they now have as they get,
or think they could get, or still wish they could get, from being
someone's wife or mother.