How We Ended Up With Such Vile Ideas About Marriage

By Josey Vogels, My Messy Bedroom. Posted March 5, 2009.

JV: How can couples better achieve a true "partnership?”

FD: When I talk about expanding the possibilities for imagining true partnership in marriage I don't mean that each partner has to be equally good at everything or has to contribute exactly the same talents, and efforts, and income to the marriage.  I mean that, over time, each person's contributions might be equally valued; each person's happiness might be equally important in the marriage. My research looks at the history of assuming that one spouse has to subordinate his -- or very often her -- needs and desires in the interests of the marriage. In order to explore the possibilities of equality within marriage we need to confront that history so that we can move beyond it rather than romanticizing sacrifice as what true love entails.

JV: Why are we so slow to embrace this idea of "true partnership?”

FD: I think there are lots of reasons why change is slow. One is a tendency to blame feminists and feminism for creating conflict in marriage by encouraging women to make too many demands, to expect too much. The assumption that women should subordinate self-interest to marital harmony has a long history and it's not easy to escape. My argument is that feminism isn't the problem, women and men aren't the problem, a restrictive notion of what marriage is and means is the problem. Another problem is that there is not enough support outside the family for more equitable relationships within it: external supports such as childcare. And another is that we are in the habit of describing marriage, of telling stories about marriage, that associate equality with competition, rivalry, and conflict. We need to let these familiar ways of thinking about and depicting marriage go so as to make room for new ways of imagining the couple, especially the married couple. My approach, as a scholar who specializes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is to argue that we can loosen the past's grip on us by confronting this history and thinking through how it limits our options and constrains our imaginations; noticing how often we tell stories in which one spouse absorbs, subordinates, or eliminates the other can help us stop and question the logic of those stories. To shake off the burdensome legacy that is the history of marriage, we need to take marriage as a question rather than a given, as an as yet-unfulfilled-promise rather than a guarantee.

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