I married relatively young and remain married, but when someone chooses another way, I am not messianic about my own. Yet I’m amazed, whenever the marriage question is posed in the political arena, at the virulence, the stridency, the absolutism of those taking essentially the anti-marriage view. And it is not primarily men ”“ who might be accused of flunking commitment ”“ advocating this view; it is women. What is more, they are not for the most part young women facing the marriage decision for the first time, but women of a certain age ”“ my age.
So what is it they feel so strongly about? Did they perhaps decide, for themselves, not to marry, and want to justify that? Are they women for whom marriage went wrong? Or women resentful of the fact that the prospect never came their way? There may be some of this. In general, though, I suspect they are women who regarded their mothers, aunts or sisters as unfulfilled, or even “enslaved” by their place in a 1950s-style marriage. They see a tax bonus, however small, as a bribe to push women back to the three Ks: Kinder, Kirche, Küche. And, by the way, no one, least of all the Government, is going to make them “conform”.
Which might all show an admirable spirit of independence, if it had not become in many circles the new norm from which marriage is seen as an inexplicable deviation. And while the choice of marriage must be personal, the state ”“ in effect, the government of the day ”“ is surely entitled to a view where the family and the state intersect.
Read it all.
Mary Dejevsky: Why the state should invest in Marriage
I married relatively young and remain married, but when someone chooses another way, I am not messianic about my own. Yet I’m amazed, whenever the marriage question is posed in the political arena, at the virulence, the stridency, the absolutism of those taking essentially the anti-marriage view. And it is not primarily men ”“ who might be accused of flunking commitment ”“ advocating this view; it is women. What is more, they are not for the most part young women facing the marriage decision for the first time, but women of a certain age ”“ my age.
So what is it they feel so strongly about? Did they perhaps decide, for themselves, not to marry, and want to justify that? Are they women for whom marriage went wrong? Or women resentful of the fact that the prospect never came their way? There may be some of this. In general, though, I suspect they are women who regarded their mothers, aunts or sisters as unfulfilled, or even “enslaved” by their place in a 1950s-style marriage. They see a tax bonus, however small, as a bribe to push women back to the three Ks: Kinder, Kirche, Küche. And, by the way, no one, least of all the Government, is going to make them “conform”.
Which might all show an admirable spirit of independence, if it had not become in many circles the new norm from which marriage is seen as an inexplicable deviation. And while the choice of marriage must be personal, the state ”“ in effect, the government of the day ”“ is surely entitled to a view where the family and the state intersect.
Read it all.