Unhinged: Love, Marriage, and the Continuing War over Family Values

Abstract

cey would like to see marriage and love unhitched. Actually, Stacey would like to see marriage keelhauled, but that would have been an unnecessarily provocative title. Many readers probably think of marriage as a relatively benign institution—one, in fact, with many positive virtues. Why does Sta cey have such antipathy for marriage? Feminist scholars have traditionally taken a dim view of marriage, viewing it as the fundamental site of women's oppression. Of course, given the substantial increases in women's education, occupational status, and earnings during the last half century, marriage is a lot less patriarchal today than it used to be. Indeed, the continuing shift toward gender equality in marriage (and society more generally) is feminism's great achievement. Gender equality, however, is not Stacey's primary concern. Stacey sees two problems with marriage. First, people's needs for eroticism (sexual variety) and domesticity (long-term stable partnerships) are in tension. Many, perhaps most, people are not monogamous by nature. Consequently, expecting them to remain in life-long monogamous marriages inevitably leads to high levels of adultery and divorce. As she states, modern, romantic, companionate union... represents a quixotic effort to plant durable domestic turf in desire's rocky soil. History teaches that this is a Utopian, or perhaps just a naive, strategy (pp. 203-4). If these two aspects of human nature are contrary to one another, then what are the options for those who mar ry? According to Stacey, you can either cheat on your spouse, or you can have a sexually frustrated, passionless life. This is a grim choice, indeed. The second problem involves the privi leged status of marriage in American society, where most people view it as the optimal basis for family life. But conferring a special