In Defence of Wives!

I had a bit of a dummy spit on the "Oz Married Gays" e-list recently, when one of the guys posted a bunch of those tiresome 'jokes' about marriage - you know the sort of thing -
"Woman inspires us to great things, and prevents us from achieving them." Dumas
"I had some words with my wife, and she had some paragraphs with me." Anonymous
"A good wife always forgives her husband when she's wrong." Milton Berle

Later I sat and tried to figure out why it had ‘pressed my buttons’. Partly because I’ve been hearing these same sad jokes my whole damn life. Yes, there are anti-male equivalents now, but these are a very recent development, and there certainly hasn’t been 5000 years of history with everyone from Moses to Socrates to Confucius to Luther to Shakespeare to Shaw to Freud to bloody Mark Latham discoursing at length on what is wrong with men-as-a-sex, as they have done about women-as-a-sex. And that’s not counting all the knobs and tossbags (thanks Mark) that have tried to prove our inferiority ‘scientifically’ from the size of our brains to the ‘wandering’ nature of our wombs! But don’t get me started . . .

But my reaction was also formed in part by what I’ve learned from sociology about marriage as a social institution.

Marriage as an institution has been shaped over centuries to serve the interests of men as a class (note, I’m not saying all marriages work to the advantage of all men as individuals, I’m talking about statistical generalities). The institution evolved to ensure that men were able to pass their property to their biological offspring, by policing women’s sexual fidelity whilst allowing men a lot of sexual latitude. As recently as the 1950s in Australia, a man could divorce his wife for one act of infidelity; a wife could only secure a divorce if she could prove repeated and long-term sexual infidelity of the husband (and presumably once he’d been caught by a private detective, he’d be a bit more circumspect!). Marriage as an institution also worked to ensure that men had access to the unpaid domestic, sexual and emotional labour of women; it gave no corresponding guarantee of financial support to women. Until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1898, upon marriage everything a woman owned automatically became the property of her husband, and any money that she earned was also his by right. So Louisa Lawson, Henry’s mum, had to surrender the money she earned from washing, sewing, and taking in boarders every time Henry’s dad decided to come home, only to see him drink it all – not a thing she could do about it. It has only been the last hundred years, really, that women could get an education and training to be able to support themselves – before that the vast majority of women had to be supported by a father or husband because they simply weren’t allowed to earn their own living. The Harvester Decision of 1907 granted every man (whether married or not) a ‘family wage’ sufficient to support a wife and three children in ‘frugal comfort’; women’s wages were pegged at 55% of this, irrespective of whether they were single, or a widow supporting a tribe of kids. Yes things have changed a lot, but marriage still confers more benefits on men than on women. The statistics show that men today do on average one hour a week more housework than they did 20 years ago, and that the full-time employed wives of unemployed men do more hours of housework each week than the full-time homemaker wives of full-time employed men. Rape in marriage only became a legal offence in the ‘90s. Women still earn only about 60% of what men do for exactly the same work. The fact is, all the measures show that married men live longer, are healthier, suffer less depression, have higher rates of employment, higher wages, and higher rates of promotion, than single men. Married women, however, have higher rates of mental and physical illness, worse prospects for employment and promotion, less disposable income, and lower life expectancy than single women. Women who have children either leave the workforce completely, or interrupt their careers, only returning to the workforce in part-time, often casual positions, with no prospects of further training or promotion. The tax system and costs of child care make it more profitable for married women to stay at home and care for children, but Welfare to Work forces the unpartnered mothers of very young children back into the workforce, without offering substantial opportunities to acquire skills.

And yet what the ‘jokes’ seem to suggest is that women are all busily scheming to trap men into marriage and life-long bondage and then act as their jailers. I get incensed by the hypocrisy of a society that does its best to force women into marriage and motherhood, and then blames them for being dependent on men.

I was 19 when I married, and 41 when my marriage ended – and I was absolutely petrified. I was not your clinging violet kind of wife, and had worked my way up to middle level management of a large company, with company car etc (all without formal training – it couldn’t happen today, you need a TAFE certificate to do filing these days) – but I honestly didn’t know how I was going to cope on my own. I gave the dog away because I didn’t think I could afford to feed her, and I couldn’t eat or sleep for six weeks after he moved out. And I was glad to see him go! As women we’re made to feel that we’re incomplete without a man, and that our highest calling in life, irrespective of any of our other achievements, is to be a wife and mother (just look at the nauseating parade of female celebrities earning megabucks for every movie or high-ranking politicians or bureaucrats who piously proclaim that being a mother is the most important thing in their life – and maybe it is, but no-one’s requiring a similar affirmation of their commitment to fatherhood from blokes).

I confess I hadn’t realised until joining that discussion group, how trapped and miserable many men feel by marriage, and that has made me rethink some of my attitudes. I guess in the final analysis that’s the problem with institutions, no matter how admirable their aims – no ‘one size fits all’ arrangement is going to work for the huge variety of human beings, and even when it does work quite well for some, there’s no guarantee it will do so throughout their lives. Which I suppose is why I find it so ironic, that a large number of gay and lesbian people who have a chance to do things differently are frantically trying to gain admittance to such a flawed insititution, when str8s are abandoning it in record numbers!