the dangers of traditional marriage (thoughts on the feminine mystique, part 2 of 3) -- published ~February 2012
a post from my 2012 blog: exact publication date unknown (obviously forgot about this one)
Above: when I looked into the sky before my wedding and felt a sense of dread come over me (Seattle, July 2021)
thoughts on the feminine mystique: part 2 of 3
For ignorant people, Mitt Romney is making an irresistibly compelling argument when he says we should not “throw out 3,000 years of history” by allowing gay people to marry each other. For educated people, however, it is a worn-out cliché to point out the obvious fact that marriage has been in flux since the moment it was invented, and that marriage today in America looks virtually nothing like marriage anywhere did 3,000 years ago.
But still social conservatives tell us with straight faces that letting gay people and lesbians marry one another would be detrimental to the institution as a whole because it would destroy “the tradition.” We need to keep marriage static – the way it’s always been.
And yet a thought occurred to me while reading The Feminine Mystique. In the 1950’s, most marriages looked very different than most marriages do now. Like today, social conservatives claimed that tweaking at all with that sacred system, put into place by thousands of years of tradition, would be detrimental to society. And yet the truth was actually that the very social unit they believed to be so fundamental to the health of the country as a whole – the family – was actually threatened by “traditional” marriage.
In most cases in the 1950’s, marriages (and thus families) contained a very rigid, inflexible structure that sociologists, led by the Functionalist school, thought central to a healthy family and a prosperous society. Women and men were thought to complement each other in the sense that they were opposites. The husband must venture forth to the office during the day to earn money for his children and his woman, and the wife must stay at home in the suburb, washing clothes and making dinner and driving the kids and drinking lots of alcohol and playing bridge. She was expected to have no interests whatsoever outside this small realm. If she did, it was said, then her children, neglected, would turn to crime and drugs.
Yet this arrangement generated unstable, unloving, and weak families. The first manner in which traditional marriage accomplished this was by negatively affecting women’s relationships with their husbands.
Since women had no purpose outside the home even though housework was not enough to truly challenge their intellectual capacities as human beings, they felt restless and tried to make up for their feelings of pointlessness by living vicariously through their husbands. The social status their husbands achieved in the world was the only hope the wife had for advancing her own social status. Many husbands began to resent their wives’ pressure on them to succeed economically, while women with husbands who just didn’t get as many promotions as the other husbands started to resent their husbands as well.
This was often a path to adultery for women. Since the only meaning they had in life came from men and their children, many restless housewives wound up cheating on their husbands with more economically successful men in the suburb. If a rich, high-status man was interested in her, she took this as a sign of her own status and worth, and she jumped at the opportunity to sleep with him. Indeed, with no extra-domestic interests of her own, this recognition from men was all she could hope for.
On a related note, this also led to extremely unsatisfying sex lives between husband and wife. Women waited alone all day in the house for their husbands to come home, and that moment in bed when they would make love became an obsession for them. Many women interviewed during research for The Feminine Mystique described sex as the only time they really felt alive – it might be said that they were, after all, fulfilling their biological role, which was, according to society, the only purpose for a woman’s existence. But the high expectations they had for that moment of sex went unsatisfied – they simply could not find a purpose for their whole lives only by having sex with their husbands. And yet, still they tried to find a purpose by this route – only by committing adultery and having sex with other men who could perhaps give them the feeling of purpose and worth that their husbands could not.
There is also just the idea of what kind of relationship would exist between couples like these – that is, between a man and a woman who are expected to live in completely different spheres of life with virtually no overlapping interests whatsoever. The man’s domain is the world; the woman’s domain is the house. What on Earth would they talk about? And what kind of “love” would you make with someone with whom you had scarcely any kind of really developed intellectual, emotional, personal relationship? And how empty would the dinner table feel?
Adultery must inevitably follow such a situation. Of course the husband is going to have sex with the secretary, with whom he might have more in common. Of course the husband is going to resent his wife when she puts so much pressure on him because she has been told that her love for him and her children is supposed to be the only reason for her existence – how overwhelmed would he feel because of that expectation? How overbearing would she seem to him? How much more attractive would the secretary look in that situation – the secretary who has her own interests, her own sense of purpose that does not put so much stress on him, that does not cause her to need to live vicariously through him, and with whom he actually has something to talk about? And of course the wife, unable to find the meaning for life in her sexual relationship with her husband, will go for another man and see if she feels the electricity she’s been craving.
She could also start to resent her whole family. She could be jealous of her sons who are out in the world doing things she wanted to do when she was a little girl. She could be jealous of her daughters if they lead more enlightened lives than she did by pursuing careers. She could be jealous of her husband when he won’t take her to every corporate dinner party he goes to, on every business trip he takes. In the long run, the bonds of this family can become superficial, existing scarcely even on the surface when there is nothing to talk about during dinner, and looking even blacker underneath when the husband is taking off his secretary’s dress and the wife is unbuttoning the neighbor’s pants and the children dread going home for break.
Social conservatives say we need to protect the integrity of traditional marriage, the kind of marriage we find in the Bible, whereby God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. And yet we can also find passages in the Bible that support the 1950’s-style marriage described in The Feminine Mystique. Women, wrote St. Paul in the New Testament, should not talk in church, and if they have any thoughts, then they should ask their husbands in private when they are home. Wives, says the Bible very explicitly in the New Testament, should submit to their husbands exactly as they submit to God. By this formula, they have no identity of their own; they are subservient, and they are expected to find all meaning for life in their sons and husbands. The result can be unhealthy, prison-like marriages, leading to adultery and suicide.
To me, it seems that a successful marriage is one based on genuine love between two people, both of whom have their own unique personalities, interests, and goals that they can talk about and share. They grow together as unique human beings whose characteristics transcend the limits and boundaries gender, not as one man and one woman fulfilling their biological roles, and as a result they do not need to live vicariously through one another to find meaning in life. It is an equal partnership. And with both bringing their own personalities and experiences to the table, they each have a lot to teach their children about the world – not by virtue of one being a father and one being a mother, but by virtue of both of them being unique human beings with a commitment to each other and dedication to their children. And with their love being real rather than simply a product of role-play, their marriage will last.
The idea that marriage has been the same for centuries and we therefore need to defend it from change is a social conservative myth (it has not always even been just a system of one man, one woman). Marriage has been evolving for centuries. It looks nothing today like it did 3,000 years ago, or even 50 years ago. This is good. It is an invention of mankind, and as such we should always be working to improve it, because, reflecting its inventors, it is a flawed system in constant need of refinement. And there have always been social conservatives saying that tweaking with the system will bring ruin upon society. But they have usually been wrong, and there is no reason to suddenly keep it static.
I will be posting my final reaction to The Feminine Mystique on Wednesday.
