As one of those Anti-Marriage Feminists Bay Buchanon was prattling on about.
(From the wayback machine: My blog, circa April, 2004. Present-day endnotes in Italics!)
I think marriage (and the frou-frou we call engagement) is divisive among women. It creates this hierarchy of socially acceptable sexual behavior/reproductive behavior.
Essentially, married = o.k. to be pregnant, not married = not okay.
If you refer to Babydaddy as ‘my fiance’ it makes your in-utero child more legitimate (though not actually legitimate). If you are a single mama, people sigh with relief when you say you now have a fiance; “Ah, she found a good man willing to marry her, all will be right with the world, God will smile upon them, she made the best of a bad situation. But too bad her kid is a bastard.” Men make us socially acceptable. But we never get to stop apologizing.
It is marginally more okay to be shacked up if you are shacked up with your ‘fiance’. This, as with everything, is also mitigated by class. When po’ folk shack up it’s trashy, when wealthy folk shack up it’s sophisticated or ‘European’.
Sadly, our lesbian sisters have no access to legitimacy. None whatsoever. We take our legitimization at their expense, our married privilege only reinforces their lack of privilege, their children’s social illegitimacy.
(As though children can be illegitimate – a Republican must have come up with that notion.)
And I see women using marriage and ‘fiance’ against the world like a shield, something to hide behind. As though we are not acceptable, our children and our sexual choices are not acceptable unless we are in a state-sanctioned relationship. That is so fucked up. And it only reinforces the idea that women and mamas without ‘husbands’ and ‘fiances’ are somehow lesser, lower class. You may not think that, but this culture does.
And it is transparent. When you are poor, when you are at the bank with your kid in tow and you are trying to convince them to cash your welfare check without an account. Saying you did it last week with your ‘fiance’ does not get you respect or your money. It just doesn’t.
And what is wrong here is that you don’t get respect in the first place, that you have to beg.
But please, ladies, please! Let’s stop buying into this bullshit, stop getting our little slice of privilege at the expense of our sisters, stop legitimizing the government’s role in our sex lives, in our children’s lives. It only hurts.
I was thinking of writing a blog about how I learned to stop worrying and love the Banns. (Too Ethan Frome? Well, I endorse torture of the language in this instance, as national security requires a literary/cinematic hybrid pun…)
Just for the sake of full disclosure, I decided to go dig out this gem written for a Con Law class my senior year as a Non-Traditional Student Undergrad. I was full of the fire of feminism, partnered long-term with a man (going on Year 11, as I recall), and quite angry about the Gay Marriage question.
I thought that the bit would be more cringe-inducing to post here in the present tense, but actually I find I still mostly agree with this girl. (I thought I had even announced ceremoniously that I wouldn’t get married even to a woman if I could. Luckily not, though I am sure I said it somewhere, and loudly. Oops.)
This girl isn’t as strident or judgy as I recall, and in essentials, I think she is right. People marrying in the full light and privilege of the State should consider how they can contribute to the cause of those who can’t. And most of all, let’s think of the children. But I am one dead-heterosexual-partnership and one years-long-battle over the assets of that partnership older now and I see that by choosing not to marry, I was choosing to lose financially if the partnership ended. It did, and I lost a beloved home, the decent credit rating needed to buy another, the benefit of all my unpaid or underpaid work to build my family’s security, and my son became the fatherless child of a poor single mother. Again.
Like many women, the price of my leaving meant dropping back under the poverty level just when I had finally risen above it. And like most men leaving a long-term relationship, my former partner only benefitted financially from our split. He left with a Master’s Degree and a middle class income. I had nothing to show for the 9 years of our relationship that he spent earning his curriculum vitae because I had been working low-wage, no-benefit jobs to pay the bills and be present to raise our son.
I can’t see telling women who have access to more financial protection than I had to forego it merely on principle – because women and poverty already have a far-too-cozy relationship as it is in this country. Women also are overwhelmingly the primary caretakers of children after a split, and so the reduced resources of the non-married woman impact on her children and increase their chances of living in poverty.
I am sad that I am too jaded to ignore reality these days and urge a marriage boycott, because I do believe that straight people of good faith have a huge responsibility to force marriage equality down the throats and into the churches of the minority of bigots who hold the line and block progress. I wish I could believe in a country where people with privilege will demand it be extended to everyone, to the point of refusing to accept that privilege until it is universal. Sadly, I think the cost of giving up the Marriage Benefit would fall where social costs almost always do – on women and children.
redzorah 