As I wrote last week, a prime target of the anti-feminist movement back in the 1970s and 1980s was people who didn’t want to get married. Men who didn’t marry were failures; the only ones who could prevent that were women, by marrying them, making them worthwhile members of society and then having their babies. Women, isn’t it worth giving up your freedom for the greater good of the human race?
While the criticism theoretically targeted men for resisting marriage, it targeted women more: rather than tell men to get their shit together, it was easier to tell women to take over and clean up men’s shit. Although writer Kay Hymowitz sometimes takes this view, she’s also pointed out “It is also a fairy tale for guys. You wouldn’t know how to become an adult even if you wanted to? Maybe a beautiful princess will come along and show you.” And it’s always easier to blame women than blame the capitalist system.
Today’s conservatives are likely to argue they push marriage because it’s good for you: it’s better for your kids, better for your finances, and so on. Therefore we need a big push to get people married! A lot of this is still gussied-up sexism: saying that men need women to amount to something is saying that if men are failures, it’s women’s fault (and again here). It’s also, as noted in last week’s post, another sign of how conservatives hate collective solutions. If “strong families” are the solution to getting people off welfare (they’re not. It’s way more complicated) then all we have to do is push women into marriage and presto, we can get rid of the social safety net.
This was one of the reasons given for Bill Clinton’s huge welfare reform in the 1990s: with less money for single mothers, they’d be forced to find a man. Instead, being forced to find jobs (all that talk about how motherhood is the toughest “job” in the world only applies to middle and upper-class women; poor women who stay home with the kids are lazy bums) convinced a lot of poor women they could make it without men … and they chose to.
They’re not unique. As Anna Louie Sussman writes, lots of women want to get married but can’t find anyone they’re compatible with: “‘It is the drug and alcohol abuse, the criminal behavior and consequent incarceration, the repeated infidelity and the patterns of intimate violence that are the villains looming largest in poor mothers’ accounts of relational failure.’ But it doesn’t take behavior this harmful to discourage marriage; often, simple compatibility or constancy can be elusive.” Sociologist Philip Cohen makes the same point: abstract rules about the benefits of marriage may not match up with the options in a given single person’s life.
I suspect this is why so many misogynists long for the days when women had less options. The Wall Street Journal‘s James Taranto, for example, longs for the days when employers could legally discriminate against women: that would have them back in the home, barefoot and pregnant, trusting in the man to support them. As last week’s post noted, those salaries for men aren’t as common as they used to be, nor were those marriages particularly happy but hey, it’ll get those uppity chicks out of public life, right?
Taranto is also nostalgic for shotgun weddings. Matt Walsh favors compulsory arranged marriages. Other conservatives want to end no-fault divorce, even for abusive marriages. And some conservatives still think it’s a good idea for women to get their “MRS” degree before they leave college. Some people would like women married much sooner (see here too). The WaPo would also like liberal women to marry lonely conservatives.
I think marriage is wonderful. My wife does too. But it’s not a guarantee of happiness, support, financial stability, health kids or anything else.
For more on misogynist marriage myths, Undead Sexist Cliches is available as a Amazon paperback, an ebook and from several other retailers. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights remain with current holders.
