The problem of marriage in the era of women's liberation.

摘要

The Problem of Marriage in the Era of Women's Liberation examines legal, political, and cultural challenges to marriage during the years when coverture was unmade, an era marked by the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and the Report from the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1963 and the final defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982. Unmaking coverture vastly curtailed a legal regime founded on the family wage and transformed gender codes in both the private and public spheres. The dissertation argues that the legal revolution that eliminated the gendered roles of husband and wife emerged from struggles waged over the terms of marriage and divorce at the levels of both theory and practice. It reveals how feminists, men's rights activists, gay liberationists, welfare rights activists, and counterculture warriors assailed marriage as an institution that enforced not only gender inequality but also a repressive and outmoded sexual morality. These groups' challenges never cohered into a unified movement, but instead at times made strange bedfellows of critics who aimed to nullify a traditional regime rooted in sex difference. Ultimately, in response to challenges aimed at marriage, state legislators dismantled a wife's economic dependence on her husband and his right to his wife's household and reproductive labor. Notably, the destruction of coverture gave legal sanction to the foundering of the family wage, and homemaker-breadwinner model, as an economic and cultural ideal.;Yet unmaking coverture unleashed new questions about how family life would be ordered. This dissertation also argues that broad fears of marriage without sex difference helped to usher in the political triumph of the right. Legislatures and courts alike continued to confine dependency and sex to marriage. In dethroning coverture and creating gender equality, state legislatures had granted monetary compensation for household labor done by housewives. Notably, however, the federal government refused to extend this entitlement to welfare recipients. Instead, welfare agencies at both the federal and local level compelled women and men into marriage-like institutions. Moreover, neither the federal nor any state government widened the door to marriage for gay men and lesbians even after the marital revolution had stripped marriage of gendered roles. Instead, courts erected a closet of seemingly traditional relationships to keep gay partnerships out of sight and children out of homosexual households. Finally, a burgeoning conservative movement capitalized on broad public anxiety that, in eliminating the distinction between husbands and wives, the new gender order would undercut the status of middle-class families, reducing them to the situation of welfare families with mothers at low-paying jobs, lazy and dependent fathers at home, and government oversight of child-rearing by parents. Conservative fears about family were a key ingredient in the triumph of Reagan-era conservative politics and the growth of the modern conservative movement. These conflicts framed the terms of debate for decades to come in issues ranging from Clinton-era welfare reform to contemporary gay marriage debates.