American Marriage

A Political Institution

Priscilla Yamin

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780812223330
• eBook ISBN: 9780812206647
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Sozialpolitik

As states across the country battle internally over same-sex marriage in the courts, in legislatures, and at the ballot box, activists and scholars grapple with its implications for the status of gays and lesbians and for the institution of marriage itself. Yet, the struggle over same-sex marriage is only the most recent political and public debate over marriage in the United States. What is at stake for those who want to restrict marriage and for those who seek to extend it? Why has the issue become such a national debate? These questions can be answered only by viewing marriage as a political institution as well as a religious and cultural one.In its political dimension, marriage circumscribes both the meaning and the concrete terms of citizenship. Marriage represents communal duty, moral education, and social and civic status. Yet, at the same time, it represents individual choice, contract, liberty, and independence from the state. According to Priscilla Yamin, these opposing but interrelated sets of characteristics generate a tension between a politics of obligations on the one hand and a politics of rights on the other. To analyze this interplay, American Marriage examines the status of ex-slaves at the close of the Civil War, immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, civil rights and women's rights in the 1960s, and welfare recipients and gays and lesbians in the contemporary period. Yamin argues that at moments when extant political and social hierarchies become unstable, political actors turn to marriage either to stave off or to promote political and social changes. Some marriages are pushed as obligatory and necessary for the good of society, while others are contested or presented as dangerous and harmful. Thus political struggles over race, gender, economic inequality, and sexuality have been articulated at key moments through the language of marital obligations and rights. Seen this way, marriage is not outside the political realm but interlocked with it in mutual evolution.

PART II

The Long Culture Wars

Chapter 3

“Marriage Is One of the Basic
Civil Rights of Man”

Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the majority in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, asserted that “marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.”¹ The court claimed that antimiscegenation statutes deprived Mildred and Richard Loving of liberty without due process of law. The state of Virginia could not deny “this fundamental freedom” on the unsupportable basis of race: marriage as a civil right could not be restricted by race. This ruling was seen as a major step forward in race politics. It reflected one aspect of the development of the country towards inclusion and racial integration. Yet as civil rights proponents hailed the right to interracial marriage as a victory, marriage politics played out differently in other arenas. Women’s movement activists challenged the obligation to marry as oppressive to women, and political elites claimed that the absence of marital family structure was a principal cause of black poverty. Marriage became a central site though which activists, policymakers, and state officials addressed pressing issues of the day, namely questions of social and economic inequality and the disempowered status of women, African Americans, and poor people.

The period we know as the sixties (which stretched into the mid-1970s) was a time of intense political, social, and cultural upheaval as societal norms and practices were upended with the rise of multiple social movements. In particular, social and political conflicts over issues of race and gender were central tensions of the time. In 1964, President Johnson announced his Great Society program to fight poverty and promote racial equality; and the courts by this time had begun the process of legal desegregation in schools, restaurants, and workplaces. Political activists were seeking to dislodge existing unequal power hierarchies and practices, while policymakers and politicians were trying to resettle them.

Various political and social actors invoked the legitimacy of obligations and the necessity of rights of marriage to frame struggles for inclusion, equality, and self-determination. Differing factions turned to the institution of marriage to promote, prevent, or settle the deep changes wrought during the period. Marriage, in other words, became a site of heated debate over social equality and liberation. Three major interventions in the laws and practices surrounding marriage reveal sixties-era attempts to define equality, to challenge the status quo, and to refashion a sense of normalcy and stability in this period of discord: first, the public policy framing of marriage as an institution to promote black equality; second, the feminist challenge to marriage as patriarchal; and third, the Supreme Court’s declaration of marriage rights over and against race-based restrictions. In other words, the why, if, and who of marriage became important questions in addressing pressing issues concerning social and economic independence and equality.

According to marriage scholar Stephanie Coontz, the period from 1947 through the early 1960s was the time marriage had shifted fully into a love-based model, where couples married for love, independent of extended family. As Coontz writes, “Never before had so many people agreed that only one kind of family was ‘normal.’ ”² While the relationship between men and women had shifted dramatically, with women gaining more legal and social rights, a commitment to monogamous, male-headed family based in love and personal fulfillment prevailed as the norm. As legal scholar Milton C. Regan, Jr. explains, marriage in the 1960s had come to be understood as a relationship “constituted by personal choice, the natural character of which is rooted in the desire of individuals to seek happiness through intimate association with another.”³ With such a view came the expectation that marriage should be the focus of people’s emotional and moral strivings; the nuclear family came to be seen as the central repository of loyalty, obligation, and personal satisfaction. At the same time, the more that people hoped to achieve personal happiness within marriage, the more critical they became of “empty” or unsatisfying relationships (setting the stage for the “divorce revolution” of the 1970s).⁴

This privatized and personalized approach to marriage converged with the politics of the time and figured significantly in shaping the political terrain in terms of the definition of individual rights and the practices of self-determination. The civil rights climate also encouraged people to think of marriage as a basic human right. Both state and non-state actors used marriage when conceptualizing individual rights, civil rights, black liberation, poverty, and women’s movement politics. Prior political conceptions of marriage as a right to be limited and protected were opened up as its constitutive relationship to the goals of desegregation, equality, and citizenship became more prominent. On the one hand, the right to marry became a vital sign of rights and freedom. On the other, feminist and black power activists questioned the importance of the right to marry in creating a politics of equality and self-determination. In fact, many activists viewed marriage as a source of institutionalized gender and racial inequality. Thus, for many activists marriage was a critical site to deeply question the prevailing social and political order in the name of individual rights.

At the same time, the declaration of the right to marry did not eliminate the role and view of marriage as an obligation. Some women’s movement activists saw marriage only as an obligation and not a right. Policymakers in the Johnson administration, drawing on the Freedmen’s Bureau “Marriage Rules” framework, offered marriage and family structure as crucial to building paths out of poverty for poor, single-mother-headed households. Policymakers and judges pushed marriage to address questions of inequality and to create order and stability. Marriage, in other words, fostered a policy of obligation to encourage economic independence. Finally, in the context of civil rights, the acceptance of interracial marriages represented a “domestication of rights,” or in other words, rights and inclusions grounded in acceptable familial structures.

This period from the mid-1960s to the 1970s marks a turning point in marriage politics, when policymakers advocated for marriage in one arena, it was challenged by activists in another, and in still another realm, marriage was declared a fundamental right by the Supreme Court. By the late 1960s, legislation and court rulings had lifted racial limits on marriage, opening up the right to all heterosexual couples, a positive assertion of marriage rights not seen before. Progressive era concerns about national identity and civic belonging were replaced by questions of social equality. Rather than asking: Who belongs? On what grounds? People were asking: What do women want? How could equality among the races be created? Who is responsible for poverty? Social movement actors and policymakers turned to marriage to answer those questions, and in turn marriage shaped the meaning of equality in this period. The focus on marriage politics shifted to asserting marriage rights rather than limiting them. Thus, the politics of marriage during this period reveals marriage as central both to the reestablishment of order and to cultivating the seeds of change and challenge to that same order.

The Great Society

Extraordinary and destabilizing changes marked the 1960s. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, the Vietnam War, the explosion of social movements, and unprecedented urban unrest helped produce a society steeped in discord. Accepted hierarchies between whites and people of color, and between men and women, came under assault. Civil rights protesters had already placed the issue of racial inequality on the national agenda, and Johnson placed the Democratic Party firmly on the side of equal rights for blacks. Introducing and successfully signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, among other pieces of legislation in the context of the Great Society, Johnson made the federal government an engine of civil rights promotion.⁵

As the federal focus on supporting civil rights developed, changes in the civil rights movement also occurred. The onset of urban rioting in Watts in 1965 and in several other northern cities over the next few years, the increasing visibility and authority of the “black power” movement, the rejection of the integrationist ideal, and the extension of the civil rights struggle to the North all served to nationalize the politics of race and merge it with other developing social movements. The new left and counterculture, based on campuses across the country, engaged in civil disobedience, protesting the Vietnam War and challenging conventional norms of behavior, particularly around sex and drug use. The rise of the women’s movement and sexual liberation also was aligned with these developments, and the Supreme Court issued a series of decisions that seemed to support this questioning of tradition.

In response, and attempting to preempt further tumult, Johnson introduced the Great Society and the War on Poverty in 1964, a multitude of policy initiatives aimed at wholesale reconstruction of the social, political, and economic arenas. As part of this effort, the Johnson administration succeeded in passing not only the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, but also a host of social welfare initiatives, with federal money allocated to education, antipoverty projects, Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor, and hundreds of other programs.

The Great Society offered a vision of social equality that aimed to eradicate the ills of poverty and urbanization. As Johnson described in his 1964 State of the Union address, the approach was “cooperative” and community-based. “The war against poverty will not be won here in Washington,” he proclaimed. “It must be won in the field, in every private home, in every public office, from the courthouse to the White House.”⁶ Johnson also emphasized the importance of ensuring formal racial equality, employment opportunities, and access to healthcare and education. And he stressed the importance of both the home and family in pursuing and fulfilling the central aims of the Great Society.

The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (EOA) reflected Johnson’s community approach. Designed to help poor Americans rise out of poverty, the EOA directed funds for the creation of youth programs, work training programs, work study programs, and Community Action Programs (CAPs). The results are familiar to this day, among them Head Start, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), and Job Corps. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was even more fundamental, prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, and sex.

However, the combination of the expanded welfare state and the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam created some tensions.⁷ Funding for the War on Poverty and the war in Vietnam was difficult to maintain and led to increased inflation and higher taxes. Political scientist Michael Brown explains that beyond a financial tug of war between domestic and foreign policy, the Great Society’s welfare state program was destined to fail because it was “predicated on a strategy of fiscal conservatism, which necessitated targeting social programs on the ghetto,” and tension arose over taxes and spending.⁸ The aid, especially in the form of the EOA programs, was the object of severe attacks. The funding of these expanded entitlements was expensive, and they came to be viewed as the government giving “something for nothing.”⁹ A growing body of working and middle-class whites—a demographic Richard Nixon would later describe and claim as the Silent Majority—believed that the Johnson administration was making them pay for ever-increasing services to the primarily black poor. Middle-class whites increasingly lost sympathy for low-income urban minorities, especially as the economy declined during the 1970s, and this led to diminished support for welfare programs. Dissatisfaction with governmental intervention in social and economic problems began to mount.¹⁰ Amid this rising instability, within the government and in the streets, political and social actors turned to marriage to promote, prevent, and direct emerging tensions about the politics of race, class, and gender. In this political and social context, marriage played a central role in negotiating the tense terrain.

The Moynihan Report and the Obligation to Marry

On June 4, 1965, President Johnson gave the commencement speech at Howard University, in which he said that the next stage in securing freedom and equality for African Americans was to translate newly reinforced legal rights into “equality as a fact and equality as a result.”¹¹ The reorganization of the poor black family figured prominently in that process. Johnson declared in the speech that “family was the cornerstone of society,” suggesting an important shift in the civil rights stance of the federal government. The “next and more profound stage” of the civil rights struggle would not have to do with legal protection of rights, but with the provision of resources that would enable African Americans to turn freedom into economic and social equality. Real freedom would not be found in law and court-ordered guaranteed justice, nor simply in job creation, but in shoring up family life. Johnson turned to marriage as an institution through which to revise and rework federal policy on racial equality. While the policy was not ultimately developed by Johnson, he used the language of marital obligation as one approach to conceptualizing civil and economic rights, and sparked a debate on the role of marriage in racial equality.

As the Freedmen’s Bureau officials had thought during Reconstruction, so Johnson suggested that without the proper structure of a two-headed marital family, black Americans could not be proper citizens. At the heart of Johnson’s appeal in this Howard University speech was the metaphor that likened racial inequality to different “nations” inhabited by black and white Americans, made so by their different family structures. “In far too many ways,” he told the Howard audience, “American Negroes have been another nation, deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope.” The “breakdown of the Negro family structure,” in Johnson’s view, was perhaps the most important obstacle to black equality, and thus the family was crucial to articulating racial equality. But Johnson’s promised equality was premised on reorganizing the female-headed black family into one with a male head of household. Patriarchal marital family structure would create a bridge between the black and white nations.

The Howard speech was r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Marriage as a Political Institution
• I. Historical Development
• II. The Long Culture Wars
• Conclusion: “Is There Hope for the American Marriage?”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments