Marriage Discourses

Historical and Literary Perspectives on Gender Inequality and Patriarchic Exploitation

Jowan A. Mohammed, Frank Jacob, Jowan A. Mohammed, Frank Jacob

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110751536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del siglo XIX

Marriage was historically not only a romantic ideal, but a tool of exploitation of women in many regards. Women were often considered commodities and marriage was far away from the romantic stereotypes people relate to it today. While marriages served as diplomatic tools or means of political legitimization in the past, the discourses about marital relationships changed and women expressed their demands more openly. Discourses about marriage in history and literature naturally became more and more heated, especially during the "long" 19th century, when marriages were contested by social reformers or political radicals, male and female alike. The present volume provides a discussion of the role of marriage and the discourses about in different chronological and geographical contexts and shows which arguments played an important role for the demand for more equality in martial relationships. It focuses on marriage discourses, may they have been legal or rather socio-political ones. In addition, the disputes about marriage in literary works of the 19th and 20th centuries are presented to complement the historical debates.

1 Idealized Romantic Love, Legal Issues, and Patriarchic Exploitation: An Introduction to Historical and Literary Marriage Discourses

Frank Jacob

Jowan A. Mohammed

The latest … dilemma I’ve encountered is a big one. Until I told my friends I was getting married, I didn’t know marriage and feminism could be considered mutually exclusive. I mean, just because a bride’s engagement ring is a symbol of ownership, and just because changing her name erases her identity as a separate individual, and just because the whole thing is ludicrously assumed to be the woman’s domain…¹

The British journalist and feminist Laura Bates here describes a marriage discourse that can be observed since and traced back to the 19th century. Marriage is often related to a romanticized image of love, due to which it is considered the final union of two lovers or the highest stage of a love relationship.² On the other hand, very often marriage is disadvantageous for women and represents a form of patriarchic exploitation. Another question Bates asks in her reflection consequently points to one basic dilemma: “Can a woman who’s fought for equality and respect, against sexism and misogyny, become a bride?”³ Of course, “[i]t’s not easy to go about your daily feminist business without encountering multiple dilemmas,”⁴ but when it comes to love, expressed by a legal union, i. e. marriage, that has been used by men to suppress women for centuries, the dilemma turns into a crux. What has been the backbone of the private form of living, i. e. the family, and the traditional criteria for living together as a couple and/or family have changed over the last decades in particular.⁵ The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek also pointed to some problems related to marriage and argued that “beneath the surface of the standard bourgeois notion of marriage lurk many unsettling implications,” especially since “we humans no longer just make love for procreation, we get involved in a complex process of seduction and marriage by means of which sexuality becomes an expression of the spiritual bond between a man and a woman, and so forth.”⁶

Along with the changes to what we have considered marriage to be since the early 19th century, a feminist debate about it developed and, as American philosopher Debra B. Bergoffen outlined, “[t]o date most feminist discussions of marriage have been either critical or reactive. Having declared that it is immoral to treat married women as property and unjust to position the wife as subject to the husband, feminists have either rejected the institution of marriage as exploitive or argued that they as individuals have found ways to make marriage work.”⁷ She consequently argues that “[i]t is not enough for feminists who value marriage to declare that marriage can escape its patriarchal trappings. To reclaim marriage for feminists we need to do more. We need to make the case that patriarchal marriage is a perversion of the meaning of marriage and that this perversion is of concern to feminists.”⁸ As marriage nowadays determines multiple levels of a relationship between people, i. e. “the erotic, the ethical, and the political,”⁹ the discourse about marriage needs to take different aspects of it into account when defining the necessities for change with regard to the character and structure of the marital union of the future. Since marriages are legally and socially “seen as a prerequisite to the provision of certain rights and material benefits”¹⁰ that are determined by societies in their specific chronological contexts, they are also considered “a public institution that creates a right to private sexual relations, and yet is defined by public policy.”¹¹ The famous US law professor William Eskridge, Jr. highlighted correctly in this regard that “marriage is an institution that is constructed, not discovered by societies.”¹² This means that the role marriages are supposed to play for individuals and societies as a whole need to be continuously debated, and marriage-related discourses represent a source to better understand the history of a given society in a specific time frame and can be used to analyze formerly existent norms and values related to this form of human relationship. These changes of marriage in regard to norms and social practices have also been stressed by legal scholar Renata Grossi, who argues that “[m]arriage has meant different things at different times. It has transmogrified from being a religious sacred institution to a contractual legal one, from a patriarchal institution to a more equal partnership based on freedom and equality.”¹³

Very often, the patriarchal social structure is identified as one of the core issues for marriage discourses¹⁴ as it has caused many problems for women all around the globe. A long history of forced marriages,¹⁵ the economic exploitation of women who are married, as criticized and legally challenged by feminists since the 19th century,¹⁶ and the issue of abuse within marriage are major concerns about the concept as such. Women, whether feminist or anti-feminist, and men, often representing the patriarchic system that was reluctant to accept change, struggled about what marriage meant as well as if and how it could be ended, especially by wives who were demanding to get divorced.¹⁷ However, not only is the marriage discourse complicated by the issue’s public and private implications but also “questions raised by same-sex marriage … [indicate] a need to rethink many aspects of the legal regulation of families as they affect democratic citizenship.”¹⁸ It is therefore not surprising, as political scientist Jyl Josephson further remarks, that “[a]dvocates of same-sex marriage compare their quest to those of other social movements, particularly the civil rights movement, that sought equal status as citizens before the legal institutions of the state.”¹⁹ A continuation of the patriarchic instrumentalization of marriage norms would therefore not only prevent women from acting as equal citizens with the same political and social rights as men but also representatives of the LGBTQ+ community, whose ostracization from equal marriage rights would represent a limitation of their rights as individuals as well. In this regard, one can only agree with the evaluation of marriage of Josephson, who argues that it “has a significant place in our understanding of responsible citizenship in a democratic polity”²⁰ and that “[m]arriage has become a centerpiece for both opponents and proponents of greater rights for the members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.”²¹ It took, however, a long time for such aspects to become part of the marriage discourse, which itself was not very prominent or taking place in the form of a truly public debate before the 19th century.

Early Debates about Marriage

Before the Enlightenment stimulated debates about existent social no...