Around the time of the Industrial Revolution, writers such as Sarah Fielding, Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft were questioning the terms on which women entered into and lived within marriage, with Wollstonecraft going so far as to call marrying for financial support ‘legal prostitution’. The pressure hit poorer women hardest; they had the most reason to marry and the least protection once they had done so. In the 1980s, I joined other feminists in speaking out against marriage as an institution that was outmoded and built on inequality.
It all began for me in 1981, when as a new (and rabid) feminist, I watched Diana Spencer, who was then, just like me, 19 years old, look up at Prince Charles with loving, puppy dog eyes as their engagement was announced on BBC News. We would shout ‘Don’t do it, Di!’ at the TV. Someone enterprising subsequently made badges and T–shirts bearing that slogan, which were very popular amongst my crowd.
In 1971, Jill Tweedie wrote, in a positive piece about gay rights, ‘Gay Lib does not plead for the right of homosexuals to marry. Gay Lib questions marriage.’ There was plenty to question. Before the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, it was legal to discriminate against women on the grounds of sex or marital status in financial services and employment, and banks required a husband’s signature for a married woman to get a credit card, loan, or mortgage.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was part of a group of women campaigning to criminalise rape within marriage. I saw the worst of the institution. I heard judges and members of the House of Lords argue, in grotesquely misogynistic terms, that this law should not pass because men quite literally owned their wives and had rights over their bodies.
In recent years, however, I have changed my mind about marriage. As one of the many women who helped reform it from a patriarchal plot to keep women subservient into what it is today, I would be a strange sort of political purist if I poured scorn on women wishing to enter it.
Some things really have changed for the better. For instance, the word ‘spinster’ has been removed from marriage registers and replaced with the word ‘single’. We feminists had pushed for this, and it came as part of the reforms accompanying the Civil Partnership Act 2004. In 2020, Oxford University Press announced that it would label ‘spinster’ as derogatory in its dictionaries, without deleting it. I feel the same about my former disdain for marriage: I wouldn’t want it erased, but it belongs to an earlier time, because marriage has since been improved immeasurably for women.
I would be a strange sort of political purist if I poured scorn on women wishing to enter it
For women marrying men these days, the pitfalls have less to do with the law than with the unequal relationships that would exist even if the couple were living over the brush. Divorce still tends to hit women harder financially than it does men, but it is those relationships, rather than the marriage certificate itself, that do most of the damage.
Divorce does not necessarily mean a 50/50 division of assets, and sexism persists within the legal system, including the family courts. But the courts are nothing like they were in the 1980s and early 1990s, when a woman who left her husband for another woman could – and often did – lose custody of her children to a violent and abusive man.
The old line that marriage involves three rings – the engagement ring, the wedding ring, and the suffering – no longer necessarily applies, but I would probably still caution any woman about to marry a man of the pitfalls that remain.
Even when equal marriage became law and same–sex couples rushed to the aisle, beside themselves with joy that they could now join the heterosexuals in making terminally long and boring speeches, eating coronation chicken, and carrying home a load of toasters and ice cream makers, I still thought it naff and regressive.
I used to say that I would rather fight for what we now call civil partnerships, open to all, and see marriage abolished. Well, what we’ve got now is the former ¬– and why would I bother with the latter? When I updated my view on marriage on the basis that it has since changed beyond recognition, I found myself trying to cling on to my dislike of it, continuing to hold forth about how ridiculous some of the traditions surrounding the ceremony are. But the fact is that the occasion can now be whatever you make it. It’s a party, a celebration of an event in which the woman, regardless of whether she marries a man or a woman, loses no actual rights – and which might ultimately afford her some protection if there are children involved.
Thanks to feminism, no-fault divorce has been an option since 2022. So much has changed that even my stubborn feminist brain has had to accept that I have no credible argument against marriage whatsoever, other than my dislike of some of the traditional pomp and ceremony.
Next year I will have been with my partner, to whom I was civilly partnered in 2006, for four decades. I think that’s something to celebrate, and so does she. We’ve never been big on anniversaries, Valentine’s Day, or any of that. But this one is too momentous to ignore; we can’t pretend it’s not hugely significant and joyous. We shall have a huge party, without worrying that celebrating a happy relationship somehow betrays my feminist principles.
There will be no coronation chicken, but plenty of dancing, and perhaps even a speech or two.
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