The trouble with marriage

Kathy Lowe from Waltham Forest looks at the issues:

Marriage is making a comeback.  Although more people are bringing up children on their own, living alone or co-habiting than ever before, a huge ideological offensive is under way to persuade the younger generation to marry, conform and return to “traditional family values”.

Despite the recession the multi-million pound wedding industry, including the “pink wedding” sector, is booming.  Even those who may have been living together for years come under enormous social and financial pressures to conform in the end and opt for a civil ceremony of some kind.

For women especially this is bad news.  After being handed over, as Germaine Greer once put it, “from one man to another decked out like a Christmas tree”, a bride surrenders much of her economic independence and identity. The state treats her and her husband as a single legal entity with the spouse as senior partner. She (usually) takes his name and becomes merged into his tax liabilities and general finances. She may be the joint or only wage-earner in the household but her state pension rights are reduced on marriage on the grounds that she is now supported by her husband. Socially the two are treated as a couple, invited everywhere together, and assumed to share the same opinions – generally joined at the hip.

Religious ceremonies put the emphasis most overtly on women becoming a possession of the man on marriage. Until relatively recently the Christian wedding vows included the promise by the bride to love honour and obey her man. In the traditional Muslim union the woman receives a mahr, a payment for her youth and virginity, agreed beforehand by her family with the husband they have chosen for her. The Muslim wedding contract can be arranged signed and witnessed by male elders of the family without the bride actually being present at all. At Hindu weddings the emphasis is on uniting two families to create a new family unit and some vows encapsulate the idea of ownership rather than partnership.

The whole marriage process is, in fact, a confidence trick by church and state to reinforce control over how people live their lives. Most important, it underpins the traditional family as the basic unit of society.  Frederick Engels argues in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, that the family in class society is a key unit for the ruling class because it is where workers are produced and nurtured. And in our neo-liberal age it is also a prime unit of consumption with family members being urged by a rampant advertising industry to take comfort and status from products they often cannot afford.  At its best the family can be a place of creativity, enrichment and mutual support. At its worst, under capitalism, it is a place where the alienated and exhausted turn inwards, destroy one another and ruin their childrens’ lives.

The number of civil partnership ceremonies is also rising rapidly.  People in same-sex relationships, having suffered discrimination on grounds of their sexual preferences for so long, are taking advantage of the right to forge legally recognised partnerships that appear to offer stability and greater social acceptance. Yet they too are buying into the great marriage trick.

Central to both same-sex and heterosexual unions is the goal of monogamy, the notion that women and men can be completely fulfilled by finding the “right”person and staying “faithful” only to them.  (Single people, presumably, are incomplete, having failed in this regard.)  Monogamy, though promising apparent emotional security in an insecure world, is actually being used as a moral imperative to help to prop up the institution of the traditional family.

For those co-habiting, who have in many cases pooled their resources over years and had children together, the lack of legal protection and property rights in the event of a relationship breakdown or the death of one of them is a very real concern. For these reasons and for the tax breaks, marriage can sometimes seem like a necessary insurance policy even to those who do not swallow all the reactionary rationale surrounding it. But reciprocal wills and other legal agreements can be made without giving credence to the state of holy matrimony and all it signifies in our society.

Building a more just and equal society where women in particular regain a lot of lost rights and win new ones will only be possible when people become open to forging wider networks of comradeship and solidarity instead of looking for marriage to the “perfect other”.

In the words of the old Joni Mitchell number, ‘We don’t need no piece of paper from the City Hall, keeping us tied and true…’

This is an abbreviated version of an article that first appeared in Socialist Resistance magazine