{"id":51323,"date":"2012-10-03T11:00:26","date_gmt":"2012-10-03T16:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=51323"},"modified":"2013-04-26T02:33:40","modified_gmt":"2013-04-26T07:33:40","slug":"is-marriage-a-universal-human-value","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/10\/03\/is-marriage-a-universal-human-value\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Marriage a “Universal Human Value”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at PolicyMic<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

In this clip from a campaign rally, Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan argues that “traditional marriage” is a “universal human value.”<\/p>\n

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Ryan could not be more wrong. In fact, few practices have undergone more fundamental transformation.<\/p>\n

For thousands of years, marriage served economic and political functions unrelated to love, happiness, or personal fulfillment. \u00a0Prior to the Victorian era, love was considered a trivial basis for marriage and a bad reason to marry.\u00a0 There were much bigger concerns afoot: gaining money and resources, building alliances between families, organizing the division of labor, and producing legitimate male heirs.<\/p>\n

These marriages were patriarchal in the strictest sense of the term.\u00a0 Men were heads of households and women were human <\/strong>property, equivalent to children, slaves, servants, and employees.\u00a0 Women didn\u2019t choose to enter a marriage that defined her as property, she was entered into the marriage by her father, who owned her until he \u201cgave her away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, in response to feminist activism as well as other forces, marriage would change.\u00a0 By the 1950s, a new kind of marriage would become ideal. \u00a0This is the one that Ryan likely means when he uses the terms “traditional” and “universal.” \u00a0In this model, men and women\u00a0married by choice and were expected to find sustenance in their relationship.\u00a0 Women were not legally subordinate to their husbands (that is, she was no longer property).\u00a0 But the rights and responsibilities of husbands and wives continued to be defined differently.\u00a0 Women owed men domestic services (cleaning, cooking, childcare, and sex); in return, men were legally required to support their wives financially.<\/p>\n

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This type of marriage signed its own death warrant, a story I’ll tell in another post, and was relatively short-lived (and not at all universal, even at its peak in the U.S.). \u00a0It was soon replaced by an ideal of marriage based on gender-neutral roles that spouses could work out for themselves. Today married couples are free to organize their lives however they wish.\u00a0 And they do. \u00a0Stephanie Coontz, famed historian of marriage, writes:<\/p>\n

Almost any separate way of organizing caregiving, childrearing, residential arrangements, sexual interactions, or interpersonal redistribution of resources has been tried by some society at some point in time.\u00a0 But the coexistence in one<\/em> society of so many alternative ways of doing all of these different things\u2014and the comparative legitimacy accorded to many of them\u2014has never been seen before.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ryan is right, then, in that “traditional marriage,” however you define it, is not normal in the U.S. \u00a0He’s completely wrong, though, it calling it universal. \u00a0Even a quick review of American history reveals it not to be so.<\/p>\n

Sources:<\/p>\n