Feminism brought freedom to women, but with that came certain vulnerabilities. It’s time for feminists to address those, says Samantha Eyler.
Last week in the Atlantic’s latest installment of its Women in Poverty: An American Crisis series, Emma Green drew attention to a Wall Street Journal editorial where yet another neoconservative attempted to get the government off the hook about income inequality by—ta da!—urging more people to get married.
Feminists everywhere are chagrined by such talk, and for good reason: no woman should be forced to marry, or forced to stay married, out of fear of falling into poverty if left alone. Policies that propose tax incentives for married couples may indeed lead to more stable social units, but haven’t we realized that marriage breaks society down into very small nuclear family-sized units that are horrendously bad for women?
Should we women trade our freedom for more social stability? Absolutely not.
But Green does make a valid point: Having the option to reject marriage at all is a privilege for many women, and conservatives aren’t making those numbers up when they say that matrimony makes people richer, despite the reflexive rejection of feminists like Barbara Ehrenriech to the “get yourself a husband” recipe for social well-being. As Ari Fleischer pointed out in his WSJ column, the poverty rate among families with two married parents was 7.5% in 2012, compared to 33.9% for single mothers. “It is important for the resistance against ‘patriarchy,’” says Green, “to be mixed with a recognition of statistical reality: Marriage is good for women economically.”
I think Green is onto something here. Patriarchy is an immoral social institution that represses women’s freedom and endangers their physical integrity. But the reason that patriarchy continues to exist in every single country is that it serves an economic purpose that I don’t believe feminists are fully prepared to admit.
Across the world, the dilemma facing societies is: How do we take care of our dependents? To care for the world’s hoards of children, elderly, and otherwise dependent people, patriarchy was invented, defining “roles” for the sexes, and then pushing women to provide free labor in their dependent-carer role, and in doing so, freeing men up to dedicate themselves completely to their careers and become the capitalist cogs they were ostensibly born to be.
We women rightly threw off that carer mantle with the legal and sociocultural activism of the feminist movement, but the economic reverberations have yet to be fully addressed, and modern feminism doesn’t seem to be taking these challenges very seriously. Pulling away from our pre-set carer roles and demanding that our men take over their half of the parenting responsibilities creates enormous problems for businesses that believe they are entitled to nothing less than 100% commitment on the part of their male employees.
There is a reason that conservatives who constantly extoll the virtues of the nuclear family also tend to be economic liberals: Modern capitalism and patriarchy have became so incestuously interdependent that feminism is now perceived in many spaces as anti-growth.
And in a world where 85 people own the same share of wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion, I don’t think we Anglo-American feminists are likely to have much luck convincing our governments to spend money on the gender equality-enhancing social programs that other countries have proven to work.
In the absence of organized solutions on the part of the Big Money-controlled state, I predict the refrain calling for “family values” to remedy the social vulnerability is just going to get louder.
I think it’s time we feminists start taking the economic vulnerability that has happened to women in the wake of women’s lib more seriously. (This is not helped by the fact that many of the most vocally feminist writers in the blogosphere are themselves, as Emma Green wrote in the Atlantic, well-off enough to be independent, and therefore apparently oblivious to class-based injustice.) We need to start creating intentional communities (be they babysitting co-ops, religious and community centers, or—the variant that seems to be working for me personally—sprawling networks of friends and lovers) to help us deal with the vulnerability often entailed in our new freedom.
I’m asking for feminists everywhere, men and women, to set their minds to developing more organized, collaborative solutions to this social-vulnerability problem. Feminism may be an individualistic, humanistic movement based on our rights as women to freedom and equality. But sometimes I think we are so worried about proving our own independence that we are loathe to admit that, actually, we desperately need each other.
Samantha Eyler is a freelance writer and editor raised in Kentucky and London and now based in Medellín, Colombia. She has written about politics, immigration, Latin America, and social justice for publications such as NACLA and the New Statesman, and is one of the founders of the London Fields Feminist Book Group. You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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