Marriage and Family: Understanding Radical Views and Realities

In my last post, I spoke about marriage and family – how these are are oppressive social arrangements that are perhaps best adapted for patriarchal nuclear families, how many of us, especially the underprivileged, labor under the expectations that come with ‘family values’, and how obsession with giving your children the best and leaving them a hefty inheritance makes family units selfish. I proposed that, as the ecological imperative on reducing human population also becomes more pressing, perhaps we need to do away with reproduction, getting over whatever biological/psychological impulses there are for making babies. What I perhaps failed to emphasize was that I was proposing a structural and cultural change to reduce the obsession with reproduction, and not advocating any Draconian law enforcement measures that would persecute those who do want to make babies.

The view I gave was that of a radical – a radical feminist who can’t reconcile with women being put to reproductive and domestic labor, an anarchist against institutional practices, and an environmentalist who believes in the inherent value of the biosphere. Such views are perhaps rightly criticized for being too pie-in-the-sky, obsessed with a revolution that is not happening anytime soon and not concerned with immanent realities.

The reality is that many women DO get pregnant and DO end up getting hitched. It might be that they felt in some way pressured to go for it. Or that they actually wanted to because of their internalization of the patriarchal emphasis on motherhood. Or even simply that they just wanted to experience what motherhood feels like and simply chose to be indifferent to the difficulties that might come along with it. The point is that they are women who are just as oppressed, if not more so, by cultural attitudes and institutionalized discrimination, and the last thing they need is radical feminists telling them is that motherhood is evil.

So while a critique of marriage and family is valuable, the reality is that the State and corporation-based institutions encourage married unions through distribution of economic and social benefits, and in a capitalist society marked by scarcity, we depend all too heavily on institutions. We can be institution-rejectin’ anarchists on principle, but when it comes to living our lives, we have to be pragmatic. Also, for a lot of us, a family life does give a meaningful dimension to the banality of everyday life. Of course a cultural change could take care of that, and we could find meaning in other experiences that life has to offer. But as things stand now, although it makes sense to demystify motherhood and work to reduce the society’s obsession with it, feminist activism should not detach itself from the experiences of mothers and mothers-to-be and the social and legal issues concerning them.

Here, another clarification is in order: my discussion on the end of marriage is not to be applied to LGBT rights activism for gay marriage, because as long as marriage exists, LGBT activists are justified in demanding an end to its heterosexual bias. Demanding institutional recognition of same-sex unions underscores the gay rights activists’ struggle for eliminating discrimination of alternate sexualities at the institutional level. The importance of this cannot be stressed enough, because as they face marginalization by the society, the LGBT community needs all its help from institutions.

And perhaps just such activism concerned with redefining marriage and making it less oppressive and exclusionary will save the day. And maybe then people will be less obsessed with reproduction too.