Newsletter
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On Marriage
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Love, Lives and Scare Tactics
18 Oct 2011 by Dalma / No Comments
A very long piece in The Atlantic this month has pointed out several things we’ve been talking about in my books and blogs for over a decade. Which only illustrates the extreme disconnect between what has been going on statistically in this country for years and what the culture wishes to deny. The author of this piece, “All The Single Ladies,” Kate Bolick, tells us many things, among which are that marriage has changed. That women, who are on the ascent in the workplace, no longer need men to put a roof over their heads, which frees them to choose men for emotional rather than strictly financial reasons. That many men, who are not on the ascent in the workplace and aren’t earning as much as they once did, are not as traditionally “eligible” as husband material of yore…which means choosing a husband for financial reasons isn’t a winning proposition. That traditional marriage was predicated on the men-as-provider; women-as-nurturer model, and if we still have a yearning for that model, we have a decidedly shrinking chance of getting it.
First, notice how The Atlantic entitled its two major articles this year regarding women’s ascent in the workplace and the shifts in the marriage landscape. The first was “The End of Men?”, and this one, “All The Single Ladies.” Both are Scare Titles, reminiscent of newspaper headlines in the 80s that sent those women hoping to find husbands OUT of the workplace and back into the home, while recapitulating the preposterous idea that if women do well, men plummet.
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Lucy Stone: A Place of Honor on National Women’s Equality Day
26 Aug 2011 by Dalma / No Comments
One day, when I was seventeen, I approached my father with questions about love, like Why should a woman marry? This confused him because he and my mother loved each other, their marriage was good, and their other daughter, my older sister, was already also happily married.
Nevertheless, I said.. Why? And what’s this “obey” business?
We exchanged ideas. He was patient. “So: you want a Lucy Stoner marriage, is that it?” he said. Thankfully, since I didn’t know what a “Lucy Stoner marriage” was, he went on to tell me about his early brief marriage to a writer named Hagar Wilde that ended on friendly terms. “We had a Lucy Stoner Marriage,” he confided. They had lived in Greenwich Village, he told me, but she had insisted on a separate studio, one outside their home, for her work. (Hagar, by the way, wrote the famous screwball comedy with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, “Bringing Up Baby,” which I later decided was successful because she had a place of her own.) I hadn’t heard about his first marriage, of Hagar, or of a “Lucy Stoner marriage,” whatever that was, until then. He also told me that he and my mother did not have a Lucy Stoner marriage.
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The Coming Backlash
11 Aug 2011 by Dalma / No Comments
Okay, so Treasury Bonds are being grabbed; gold is being hoarded; God is being called upon like never before to save us all from chaos, as He was in Houston a few weeks ago, by tens of thousands of evangelical Christians. Many have written about the problem of harking back to our belief systems, and our superstitions, and our specific faiths , instead of using better means to solve problems, like clear thinking, open-mindedness, conciliation, and negotiation. (See Frank Bruni, “True Believers, All of Us, The New York Times, August 6, 2011.)
I worry particualarly about women, vulnerable now to similar magical-thinking-solutions. I’m hearing young women talk about finding a guy to marry—quickly. I’m hearing older women talk about the futility of trying to reinvent themselves and instead figuring they’ll just hang on for dear life. As with trying to solve the world’s problems with faith and belief systems, trying to stay safe through all the old conventional means is dangerous to our collective psyche. When the economy is tight, and when men get scared, certain things happen like clockwork: There’s more domestic violence. Women tend to retreat; to return to the home, if not literally, then figuratively, as if the homely virtues ever paid off. We imagine that things were so much better long ago.
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Why the Very, Very Righteous Make Me Very, Very Nervous
05 Aug 2011 by Dalma / No Comments
Now that we’re no longer a married culture; now that we have more single people floating about the country than wedded ones, it’s fun to watch the family-values contingent race to point fingers. Who is responsible for this cultural sea-change? Who, they want to know, is bad, and who is good?
I always want to know who’s doing the asking.
When you see a study claiming to somehow assess our morals, be suspicious of interest groups conducting that study—just as you’d be suspicious of a drug company conducting a study of one of its drugs. You want to know if it’s the Christian Right surveying people on their infidelity habits, say, or if it’s a neutral organization like the Pew Research organization, which analyzes census data. For when the Very, Very Righteous claim to be objective about a moral issue, I get very very nervous.
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“So, Fred, When You Gonna Make Me A Grandma?”
25 Jul 2011 by Dalma / No Comments
So now young gay couples are feeling the heat from their parents: One friend of mine, a man who has been a couple with another man for years, got more than “So, when are you and Fred getting married?” He got a whispered, “So, when will your dad and I be grandparents?” My friend said, Mom! Stop! Just ‘cause I can doesn’t mean I want to! And a BABY? Whoever said I want a kid? Are you insane?”
While the parents of gay men and Lesbian women are ecstatically pushing marriage and children on their kids, these same kids are finding themselves under a startling new kind of societal pressure, not always welcome. “Just as I got my parents used to the idea that I was a societal flop, a cultural bad girl, a institutional drop-out,” says a young woman friend of mine who has been living with another woman for a few years, “along comes my eligibility into the most sanctified status of all, the one state-of-being the culture worships: marriage. And my parents have gone into deranged White Picket Fence mode. They asked me—really—if Samantha and I wanted a Dalmatian puppy after we were married.
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