Criticism of marriage
These have included the effects that marriage has on individual liberty, equality between the sexes, the relationship between marriage and violence, philosophical questions about how much control can a government have over its population, the amount of control a person has over another, the financial risk when measured against alternatives and divorce, and questioning of the necessity to have a relationship sanctioned by government or religious authorities.
[1] Criticism of marriage comes from various cultural movements, including branches of feminism, anarchism, Marxism, Masculism and queer theory.
[2] In the industrial age a number of notable women writers including Sarah Fielding, Mary Hays, and Mary Wollstonecraft, raised complaints that marriage in their own societies could be characterized as little more than a state of "legal prostitution" with underprivileged women agreeing to marry for the sake of obtaining food, shelter, and other basic necessities of life.
Kierkegaard seems to have loved Regine but was unable to reconcile the prospect of marriage with his vocation as a writer and his passionate and introspective Christianity.
Brian Sawyer says "Marriage, understood existentially, proposes to join two free selves into one heading, thus denying the freedom, the complete foundation, of each self.
[9] In his From Sacrament to Contract, Witte has argued that John Stuart Mill's secular and contractarian model of marriage, developed during the Enlightenment, provided the theoretical justification for the present-day transformation of Anglo-American marriage law, promoting unqualified "right to divorce" on plaintiff's demand, one-time division of property, and child custody without regard for marital misconduct.
They argue that marriage reinforces the traditional paradigm of male-female interaction: subordination of the woman to the man in exchange for subsistence.
According to Sheila Jeffreys "the traditional elements of marriage have not completely disappeared in western societies, even in the case of employed, highly educated and well paid professional women.
[16] Dean Spade and Craig Willse write that:[16] The idea that married families and their children are superior was and remains a key tool of anti-Black racism.
Black families have consistently been portrayed as pathological and criminal in academic research and social policy based on marriage rates, most famously in the Moynihan Report.
Sociologists Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian wrote that marriage is also found to be often at odds with community, diminishing ties to relatives, neighbors, and friends.
Clare Chambers points to the sexist traditions surrounding marriage and weddings; she writes:[20] Symbolically, the white wedding asserts that women's ultimate dream and purpose is to marry, and remains replete with sexist imagery: the white dress denoting the bride's virginity (and emphasising the importance of her appearance); the minister telling the husband "you may now kiss the bride" (rather than the bride herself giving permission, or indeed initiating or at least equally participating in the act of kissing); the reception at which, traditionally, all the speeches are given by men; the wife surrendering her own name and taking her husband's.
The history of marriage in relation to women makes it an institution that some critics argue cannot and should not be accepted in the 21st century; to do so would mean to trivialize the abuses it was responsible for.
during the time when marital rape was not criminalized, contraception, abortion and divorce were all illegal, and the marriage bar restricting married women's employment outside the home was in force.
"[25] Mary Lyndon Shanley writes that police often "ignore complaints of domestic violence because they do not want to 'intrude' on the private realm of the married couple.
[28] In some conservative cultures, married women are not allowed to leave home without the consent of the husband - a prohibition that is supported by the law itself in many of these countries.
From the mid-20th century onward, changing social norms have led to, among other things, the decriminalization of consensual non-marital sex and the criminalization of marital rape.
Claudia Card, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writes that:[38] 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.
The United Nations General Assembly defines "violence against women" as "any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life."
Common concerns raised today focus on the health and general well-being of women, who, in parts of the world, have virtually no protection in law or in practice against domestic violence within marriage.
[40] Bad marriages, according to Gerstel and Sarkisian, result in higher levels of stress, suicide, hypertension, cancer, and slower wound healing in women.
Examples of legal rights include: "The punishment of a wife by her husband, the disciplining by parents and teachers of children under their authority within certain limits prescribed by law or by custom".
[53] Famous anarchist Emma Goldman wrote how marriage was not a love pact but an economic agreement that restricts men's and mainly women's freedoms.
[citation needed] Activist Andrea Dworkin wrote in the 1980s as part of her feminist anti-pornography campaign, using her characteristic "hyperbolic, overheated, enormously exaggerated prose",[56] that:
Early second-wave feminist literature in the West, specifically opposed to marriage include personalities such as Kate Millett (Sexual Politics, 1969), Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch, 1970), Marilyn French (The Women's Room, 1977), Jessie Bernard (The Future of Marriage, 1972), and Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, 1970).
The core of Engels’ formulation lies in the intimate connection between the emergence of the family as an economic unit dominated by the male and this development of classes.
[60] Marriage is a topic of concern for many masculinists, as they mention that the system is biased in favor of women, mentioning how some women use the laws to their advantage, leaving men at a great legal disadvantage, especially in the area of divorce laws[61] Likewise, there are studies that indicate that a large number of men avoid marriage because they see it as a loss of freedom and even a loss with divorce.
[62] Esther Vilar mentions in The Manipulated Man, that women use marriage as a way to subjugate men by turning them into slaves to work for them and their families: The historian Daniel Jiménez in his book "Deshumanizando al Varón" denies the idea that marriage exclusively oppresses women, mentioning how women exercised power against their husbands legally, and that more than an oppression it was a "infantilization of the female sex", In addition, Jiménez cites some Roman texts such as Satire VI or the poem "De coniuge non ducenda", where a criticism is made of marriage and domestic violence against men.
by Erin Pizzey (2000), Legalizing Misandry by Katherine K. Young and Paul Nathanson (2006) and The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys by David Benatar (2012) Within Queer theory a critique exists that the legalization of same-sex marriage simply normalizes the cultured gender norms and economic inequalities of marriage into the LGBT community.
