Can [this] marriage be saved?

[lolaraincoat]

I forget which women's magazine of my childhood, back in the early 1970s, used to run a monthly column titled "Can This Marriage be Saved?" but I remember reading it while my mother did the grocery shopping, and I remember that the answer was always yes! it can be saved! with just a little more feminine self-abnegation! etc. Even as a cranky eight-year-old trailing through the supermarket behind my mom, a miserable housewife, I knew that something was not right (as Miss Clavel used to say) with that notion. Marriage was some kind of trap; marriage was How They Got You. My life plan in third grade involved becoming a nun, as soon as they started accepting little Jewish girls into the convents, because nuns lived with each other and didn't have to spend all their time catering to men and nobody made them wear stupid, itchy girly clothes that were too tight at the waist and elbows. (It was an era of liberation movements of all kinds, so my dream of convent-integration wasn't so farfetched.) Also, my Catholic friends told me that nuns were mean, and that appealed, oh yes it did: could I grow up into a woman without having to become nice, or sweet, or agreeable?

By fourth grade my plan had evolved, and I was going to live in outer space or else be a jockey.

It wasn't that my own parents' marriage was so gruesome -- well, it was, but that isn't what worried me about the institution of marriage -- it was that everything I saw on TV, and soup can labels and newspapers and comic books too, told me that good marriages were all about women being nice to men, taking care of their physical and emotional needs, in exchange for men supporting women financially. That seemed like a bad deal to me, and in fact it still does. So for me the idea of marriage was linked to all the ways of being a woman that I wanted nothing to do with, there in the darkness of 1971, and luckily the world changed enough that I have been able to avoid much of that crap -- though I haven't been able to avoid thinking about it.

I'm not opposed to your marriage, of course, or to my own (very happy) household arrangements. I am opposed to the model of heterosexual sanctioned-by-the-state marriage, the one that the legal code and the economic system of the US so strongly support, the one that the religious right fears will be rejected by most people if they have better options.

And women in the United States are, it turns out, rejecting marriage. An article in The New York Times today reported that 2005 census data show that 51% of adult American women do not live with a male spouse, up from 35% in 1960. (47% of American men do not live with a female spouse, with the difference accounted for by female longevity as compared to men and men remarrying more quickly after divorce -- in other words, women on average spend more years outside of marriage in their lifetimes than men do.)

I don't know for sure what this means, and neither does the Times. This is an intensification of the same demographic trend that when it was first noted twenty years ago resulted in a lot of very silly newspaper articles aimed at women warning us that we would, oh NO! be single forever! if we didn't shape up and start simpering. Now the Times is reporting this trend as a triumph of happy individualism on the part of tough career girls. Who the hell knows what it really means?

But I believe that a lot of little girls were thinking more or less what I was thinking, back in the supermarket checkout lines of 1971.

Comments

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

A few years ago, there was an article in Slate - Why Men Pay to Stay Married - which I found interesting. Seems that men's net income goes up when their marriages end and women's go down, with the opposite when they get married. Yet men marry again sooner than women do. Although he also assumes that this shows men are looking for Ms. Right but women are willing to settle for Mr. Right Now because of that ol' biological clock.

I think that applies only to a certain class of women - those who are willing to put off marriage/family until they feel they can't wait any longer, as opposed to women who get married in their twenties and therefore start looking earlier. Too many caveats in this article, maybe.

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

There is a great big hole in that story, and the name of the hole is CHILDREN. Even if both partners have identical incomes during the marriage, the woman is much more likely to gain custody of any children. If she is the primary parent, she must continue to live in a home large enough for the whole family, even though her income is only half of what was available for housing before the divorce. In addition, she must provide food, clothing, and transportation for the children when they are with her. The husband's child support contribution will probably be assessed at 15% or less of his income -- if he actually pays it regularly, which fewer than 50% of divorced men do. Meanwhile, his expenses actually go down, since he no longer needs a large home and can keep all his earnings (outside the child support) for himself.

Women are paying a whole lot more than men to get divorced. Apparently it's worth it.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

On a somewhat similar note, Barbara Ehrenreich had an article some years back pointing out that marriage does not offer poor women an escape from poverty--to raise herself and her children above the poverty line, a low-income woman would have to be permitted to marry *several* poor men.