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."3 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." 4 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."5

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."6 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."7 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."8

Millett suggested another alternative: that "marriage might be replaced by voluntary association, if such is desired."9 The influence of Millet and others can be seen in the subsequent rise of cohabitation.10 In either case, Millett argued that the complete destruction of marriage and the natural family is necessary to produce an ideal society.11

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"12 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.13

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."14

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,"15 and proclaimed that "marriage is a form of slavery."16 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."17

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."18 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."19 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.20

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."21 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.)22

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.23

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.24 "Being a housewife," Bernard asserted, "makes women sick."25

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.26

Bernard also asserted that raising children reduced adult happiness.27 She envisioned a future in which marriage would increasingly be childless and would involve an array of "free wheeling" and transitory relationships.28

In 1974, the outcry grew still harsher. Ti-Grace Atkinson, a member of The Feminists and author of Amazon Odyssey, called married women "hostages."29 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.30

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."31

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."32 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."33

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."34 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.35

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.36 Stacey contended that "Inequity and coercion...always lay at the vortex of that supposedly voluntary `compassionate marriage' of the traditional nuclear family."37 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!38

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.39

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.40

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."41 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."42

Another feminist widely read during the 1990s was Barbara Ehrenreich, a former columnist with Time magazine who now writes for The Nation.43 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."44 Rather than seeking to strengthen marriage, policymakers "should concentrate on improving the quality of divorce."45 In general, Ehrenreich concludes that single parenthood presents no problems that cannot be solved by much larger government subsidies to single parents.46

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."47

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.48 These children apparently will fare far better than those raised within the tight constraints of the nuclear married family "with its deep impacted tensions."49

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.50

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."51

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."52 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."53

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 novelist54 and prominent social critic,55 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."56 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.57

...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.58

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....59

Male sexual aggression is endemic, if any sex act against a person's will were considered rape, the majority of men would be rapists.60

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.61

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.62

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."63 She believes that "men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness."64

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?65

Some women today believe that men are well on their way to exterminating women from the world through violent behavior and oppressive policies.66

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."67

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.68

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.69