The following is an excerpt from I…Do? Why Marriage Still Matters (Cascade Books, November 2024) by Andrea Mrozek and Peter Jon Mitchell.
Marriage is good for women. Given the volume of literature written in recent decades making the opposite case, it’s fair to wonder how this is even possible. For decades, even centuries, feminists have made the case that marriage is a form of slavery, an institution that keeps women under men’s thumbs and treats them like chattel. But is this true?
Of late, a new generation of feminists is naming marriage as not just a social good but a good for women, specifically mothers. That marriage is a social good is as true for women as it is for men, though the case may be slightly more complicated to make. At least one of the problems with being against marriage for women is that those same voices are not uniformly against women having sexual relationships with men, which have something of a probability of resulting in children. And thus far in human society, there is virtually no solution so helpful on the horizon as marriage to help women who become mothers.
Because sex is still consequential, Louise Perry says, and because the results of sexual activity do not have the same outcomes for women as for men (a form of “sexual asymmetry”), women even today in a world with few stigmas around extramarital sexual activity can find themselves in traumatic situations when the father does not stick around. Lone-parent poverty is almost entirely made up of single mothers (not to diminish the difficulty the rising numbers of lone fathers experience, but this is still statistically true). And lone-mother poverty is something to which our current policymakers have dedicated time and attention attempting to fix.
Yet even where finances could be sorted—in Canada, cash benefits for parents geared to income seem to have reduced the rate of child poverty—the children of lone parents still face the same obstacles any child outside the two-parent privilege faces. Women who become mothers need care and protection themselves to care for and protect their babies. The fathers of those children make very good candidates to take on this role. And there is much reason and research supporting the notion that marriage is not incidental to fathers sticking around. Yes, fathers are valuable, necessary, and nonnegotiable to their children whether they are married to the mothers or not. But fathers are more likely to stick around to care for their kids when married to the mother of those same children. There is also evidence that married women are indeed happy—and happier than their unmarried peers. American survey data from 2022 show higher happiness rates for married women, with or without children. The “biggest happiness dividends” for women, write Wilcox and Wang, are found in a combination of marriage and parenthood. The women most likely to say they are “not too happy” are unmarried women without children.
Young women today have a vast range of options for career, service, and work. Prioritizing these options, however, can overshadow getting married and starting a family, and this can create a conundrum when women grow older without any change in family status. Canadian and American surveys tell the story of women at the end of their reproductive lives wishing for more children than they have. Contrary to the point of view that marriage works to the benefit of men but enslaves women, marriage particularly constrains men in ways that are more conducive to a happy, healthy, and wealthy life for women.
