Women's Crossroads

Maybe because it’s early summer, a time when many new marriages are being consummated, that there seems to be so much buzz about marriage lately. Unbelievably, that Amy Sutherland article about “training your husband” remains Number One on The New York Times “most-emailed” list—possibly the longest a single story has ever retained that position to date.

Times columnist Maureen Dowd noticed this too, and wrote a response entitled “How to Train a Woman,” for which she interviewed Helen Fisher, a Rutgers anthropologist and the author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. Fisher agreed with the Sutherland principle of rewarding pleasing behavior and ignoring irritating behavior, but with certain refinements depending on the gender of the spouse—women prefer their rewards face to face, while men “get intimacy by doing things side by side.”

Why this distinction? Fisher says women’s preference for face-to-face contact “comes from millions of years of holding your baby in front of your face,” while men prefer side by side contact “because for millions of years they faced their enemy but sat side by side with their friends.”

This is evolutionary biology / cultural anthropology at its worst, and I’m surprised to find Maureen Dowd falling for it. But she seems to be lost in the haze of sentimental summer marriage mode right now, since her very next column is also about marriage: this time addressing the important question of how men and women should change their names when they enter into marriage.

Maybe Maureen just wasn’t up to dealing with the real news this week on the marriage front: that the New York State appeals court ruled against gay marriage, sending the question over to the state legislature to be hashed out there. Or maybe she’d be more interested in finding an expert to discuss whether “training” a gay spouse would be more successful with face-to-face or side-by-side rewards?

The truth is that marriage is a very conservative institution, and I speak with the authority of someone in a longterm heterosexual marriage here. I often discuss with my women’s studies students whether women gain or lose from marriage—the answer always being “it depends”: it depends on whether the culture sanctioning the marriage conceives of marriage as an equal partnership, or is still operating within the traditional idea of the husband having more rights within marriage and society than the wife. These discussions sometimes lead to my suggesting that if a couple really wanted to be radical and free, they’d avoid marriage altogether. This is not something most of my students want to hear.

And it wasn’t what I wanted to hear at their age either. I was just as obsessed with getting married as the next twenty-something girl in my time. When I did get married, though, it was as much a question of legal necessity as romance—my boyfriend was Mexican, I wanted him to come live with me in the U.S., and the only way to get him here was to get married.

So we did. We went to City Hall in Staten Island and got our license; we were married in front of friends and family by an Ethical Culture minister (a woman) at the United Nations Chapel in New York. And immediately we became, in society’s eyes, each other’s “significant other,” automatically welcome in each other’s hospital rooms, given joint custody of our yet-to-be-born children, and awarded society’s pat of approval in the form of tax breaks, easier credit lines, and access to housing.

The ease with which we transitioned from dating to marriage should be available to anyone in the United States, regardless of sexual preference. My husband and I, in marrying, crossed other lines that previous generations would have found intolerable: a Catholic marrying a Jew, a Mexican marrying a woman of European descent. As Times reporter Anemona Hartocollis points out in her commentary on the New York State Court of Appeals gay marriage ruling, “history has shown that normality is a flexible standard,” which can change over time. If this were not true, a woman entering into marriage in this country would still be forfeiting to her husband all her rights to her children and property, a tradition it took years of determined work by feminist activists to overcome.

I feel sure that we’re going to look back on this time of gay activism for marriage rights the same way we now look back on the years of struggle for women’s electoral enfranchisement—with a kind of disbelief that the people of the time were so obtuse as to resist what was so obviously right and necessary.

That doesn’t make it any easier for today’s gay partners, though, or for the activists who now have to gird their loins for the battle in the state legislature.

And why is it, a little voice keeps whispering in my ear, that these divisive issues always seem to come up at election time? While gay marriage is certainly as important as any other human rights issue of our time, what really matters just now is getting rid of the crew in Washington: the Bush gang and their cronies in Congress. We all need to keep our eye on that prize, even as we move forward as best we can on other fronts.

# posted by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez @ Saturday, July 08, 2006