Research

Quotes from this essay:

Marriage and love have nothing in common; they are as far apart as the poles; are, in fact, antagonistic to each other. No doubt some marriages have been the result of love. Not, however, because love could assert itself only in marriage; much rather is it because few people can completely outgrow a convention. There are to-day large numbers of men and women to whom marriage is naught but a farce, but who submit to it for the sake of public opinion. At any rate, while it is true that some marriages are based on love, and while it is equally true that in some cases love continues in married life, I maintain that it does so regardless of marriage, and not because of it.

I'd also venture to say that sometimes love can be harmed by marriage, as people may feel constrained by the social expectations of the institution. The very act of being married requires that a lot of people figure out their relationship to their potential spouse and how the state will view their relationship. There's a lot that is tied up in marriage, especially as the result of settler-colonialism.

I feel like this video by The Liberal Cook outlines a lot of the modern issues with state interference in relationships.

On the other hand, it is utterly false that love results from marriage.

The elements of 'settler-colonialism' are why I somewhat disagree with the paragraph this comes from. I don't think it's false; I don't think it's impossible. I do agree that, to some extent, it comes from the "adjustment to the inevitable."

Arranged marriages are not part of my culture, so this is not an area that I'm comfortable with speaking on and how this might be different today.

But I am confused by this: "... the spontaneity, the intensity, and beauty of love, without which the intimacy of marriage must prove degrading to both the woman and the man."

Why must love be spontaneous and intense? It's not even always beautiful, but I certainly don't understand why it must be spontaneous or intense. This certainly doesn't speak to the range of relationships or love that exist within the world.

Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is more binding, more exacting. Its returns are insignificantly small compared with the investments. In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, how ever, woman’s premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, “until death doth part.” Moreover, the marriage insurance condemns her to life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual as well as social. Man, too, pays his toll, but as his sphere is wider, marriage does not limit him as much as woman. He feels his chains more in an economic sense.

It's interesting in how some of these have changed (in places where 'names' were lost, we're now seeing an uptick in women keeping their names or hyphenating -- minor point), but there are aspects where these things haven't changed that much.

I'm also curious about "condemns her to complete uselessness." Which class of women was she speaking about? In 1911, a lot of lower-class women were working as maids and in textiles; they were doing piecework and taking care of families.

From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed towards that end.

Again, this is an interesting point because of which communities still seem to have retained this messaging. Thinking back to my time growing up (with everyone assuming I was a girl), it was very clear to me that I should "get married" and "have children." These messages are still everywhere, even as we're saying that it's okay not to, but some communities receive them more frequently.

Though, this phenomenon seems to be slowly decreasing in urban areas.

It is safe to say that a large percentage of the unhappiness, misery, distress, and physical suffering of matrimony is due to the criminal ignorance in sex matters that is being extolled as a great virtue. Nor is it at all an exaggeration when I say that more than one home has been broken up because of this deplorable fact.

This feels like an interesting area to look into, and I may have to. But I do feel that a lot of relationships (especially within the Western context) have this issue. Sex is still somewhat difficult to discuss, as are needs within a relationship. It's difficult to talk about these things when you've been taught otherwise for so long.

If, on rare occasions young people allow themselves the luxury of romance they are taken in care by the elders, drilled and pounded until they become “sensible.”

Though the conversations about what is "sensible" have changed somewhat, this still happens! (Also threats. I got a lot of threats about what would happen if I ever "turned up pregnant," and I suspect that didn't help a single iota in my relationship to sex.)

The important and only God of practical American life: Can the man make a living? Can he support a wife? That is the only thing that justifies marriage.

Again, I think it's clear that we need to ask which class of women is Goldman talking about or to. It's not to say that poor people didn't enter into marriage for economic reasons in the early 1900s, but it was definitely more likely that families of wealth had to consider that.

It's much like now. Poor people who want to get married are less often considering the financial status of each other (unless, for whatever reason, it impacts their ability to live a better life -- such as how disabled people can sometimes lose their benefits when marrying someone) because they generally have a better understanding of precarity and its impacts.

Yet with all that, but a very small number of the vast army of women wage-workers look upon work as a permanent issue, in the same light as does man.

Aha, here we go. I'd love to see numbers on how women viewed work (permanence) in the early 1900s to compare across decades until now.

The woman considers her position as worker transitory, to be thrown aside for the first bidder. That is why it is infinitely harder to organize women than men. “Why should I join a union? I am going to get married, to have a home.” Has she not been taught from infancy to look upon that as her ultimate calling? She learns soon enough that the home, though not so large a prison as the factory, has more solid doors and bars. It has a keeper so faithful that naught can escape him. The most tragic part, however, is that the home no longer frees her from wage slavery; it only increases her task.

This bit is something that I'd actually like to explore more, especially considering unions initially did not want to include women (as well as non-white people, particularly Black people). If the union didn't want to let you in, your outlook on joining them might be negative because they excluded you.

Early unions that included women were often run by women. (Wikipedia overview.)

Silk Stockings and Socialism actually discusses the history of the textile unions, which was among the first to start organising women in large numbers (because other than the top jobs, like knitters, most of the workers were women and girls -- think of the Triangle Shirt Waist fire and how many girls and women died there).

It's amazing what happens when you spend time listening to and supporting people.

But the child, how is it to be protected, if not for marriage? After all, is not that the most important consideration? The sham, the hypocrisy of it! Marriage protecting the child, yet thousands of children destitute and homeless. Marriage protecting the child, yet orphan asylums and reformatories over crowded, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children keeping busy in rescuing the little victims from “loving” parents, to place them under more loving care, the Gerry Society. Oh, the mockery of it!

Children are actually an aspect of the nuclear family and marriage that I'd love to see discussed more because of how often they are entirely excluded (until someone needs to "protect" them from something). It really hurts their liberation from the whole system.

The defenders of authority dread the advent of a free motherhood, lest it will rob them of their prey. Who would fight wars? Who would create wealth? Who would make the policeman, the jailer, if woman were to refuse the indiscriminate breeding of children? The race, the race! shouts the king, the president, the capitalist, the priest. The race must be preserved, though woman be degraded to a mere machine, --- and the marriage institution is our only safety valve against the pernicious sex-awakening of woman.

I do think we need to go back to thinking about what the purpose of all the "birth rates are falling" news stories are. These questions asked are particularly poignant in that light.

Our pseudo-moralists have yet to learn the deep sense of responsibility toward the child, that love in freedom has awakened in the breast of woman. Rather would she forego forever the glory of motherhood than bring forth life in an atmosphere that breathes only destruction and death.

On a list of things that sound strikingly familiar over 100 years later.

Quotes are from the named essay in the book Queering Anarchism.

In 2009 I was helplessly kicking and screaming while the national campaigns for gay marriage descended on my mostly poor, mostly rural home state of Maine. Now, in the aftermath of the nauseatingly class-elitist failed campaign, gay and lesbian organizations, and the professional activists that prop them up, remain resiliently resistant to critically questioning what we, as queer and trans subjects, are seeking to be equal to in the first place. Do we really want full inclusion in the institution of marriage, a social contract that explicitly limits the ways in which we can organize our erotic and emotional lives? Furthermore, do we really want to reinforce a social institution where our immediate needs and access to collective benefits are contingent on this singular articulation of partnership? Or have many of us allowed ourselves to be convinced by some vague notion of equality, with all its empty promises,* that gay marriage is a battle worth fighting for?

All of these questions still need to be addressed and considered. Furthermore:

*The promise of health care, freedom of movement across nation state borders, the inheritance of property, etc. These promises only apply if one or both of the people entering into a marriage agreement have a considerable amount of wealth/property/assets, professional employment, and citizenship status. For many, this is not the case and therefore many will not gain materially from marriage.

Empiricism aside, the so-called healthy and privatized familial structures through which the institution of marriage seeks to minimize violence cannot be emulated if we, as a radical queer and trans community, are to confront the violence within our own community and families (chosen or otherwise).

In addition to the affective discourse outlined above, a more analytic approach is being deployed in tandem. This rhetoric relies on a certain brand of rugged American individualism that has spawned gay and lesbian organizations that invoke a rights-based discourse in their attempt at achieving what they contend is full equality. It is here we find numerous LGB and sometimes T activists in a rage over their 1,138 rights that federally recognized marriage will bring them, but are denied. These state benefits and privileges, as outlined in the Defense of Marriage Act, are overwhelmingly about the transfer of money and property (including children, as the only way marriage allows us to think about them is like property). The almost exclusive emphasis on property rights highlights that marriage has little to do with love, but with benefits and privileges as doled out by the state to those who adhere to a specific set of moral values determined by the church.

Gay marriage organizations are mobilizing this rights-based discourse focused on “equal” access to state benefits and privileges in tandem with highly effective love rhetoric to win over public opinion by appealing to socialized emotional responses while simultaneously making a more strategic/analytic argument for gay marriage. This two-pronged approach has successfully dragged many LGBT activists into its blinding double discourse by effectively motivating the engagement of many queer and trans folks who would be better off putting their energy elsewhere. What if we, as a queer and trans social justice movement, focused on achieving access to many of marriage’s forbidden fruits (i.e., healthcare, freedom of movement across nation-state borders, etc.) for all people, not just citizen couples, gay, straight, or otherwise?

This neoliberal fantasy of the nuclear family as the only provider of emotional and economic safety is being recovered and deployed by the contemporary gay rights movement. In a bizarre twist in history, gays and lesbians are turning their backs on the kinds of radical new configurations of “family” that have liberated straight people.

The question remains then: How do we, as radical queer and trans folks, push back against the emerging hegemony of rainbow-flavored neoliberalism and the funneling of our energy into narrow campaigns that only reinforce the hierarchical systems and institutions we fundamentally oppose? How do we reconcile the contradiction of our anger and fervent criticism of so called equality when presently many of our material lives depend on accessing resources through the very subject of our critique? Although I do not have concrete solutions to offer, I believe we must create more space and time to have these vital conversations, be more open and public about our critique of marriage, build coalitions with others who stand little to gain from marriage, imagine other worlds together, and dream up new ways of meeting our material and affective needs.