Profile: Historical context of marriage
  October 31, 2003
  NPR News
  ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
  
  MARGOT ADLER reporting:

  This is not the first time that marriage has been in transition.
  Originally a transaction to preserve property and lineage with fixed
  roles for each gender, it was not until the middle of the 19th century
  that married women in America could own property and have legal status.
  Fifty years ago, interracial marriage was viewed by many as unacceptable
  as same-sex marriage is viewed by some today.

  But Mary Shanley, a professor of political science at Vassar College,
  argues that the most radical change in marriage did not come about
  because of feminism or the pill or cultural changes in the 1960s. What
  has been called the silent revolution of no-fault divorce came about
  because lawyers did not want their clients to lie. Before no-fault
  divorce, couples who mutually wanted to end their marriage had to
  pretend their was cruelty, desertion or adultery.

  Professor MARY SHANLEY (Vassar College): The notion that the partners
  might themselves decide that their union was over was nowhere in the
  legal landscape. That is, our understanding of marriage changed very
  radically without people noticing it in the late 1960s, and it came from
  the legal profession itself.

  ADLER: It's not far from the belief that two individuals can end their
  own marriage to the belief they can begin it. David Blankenhorn is the
  president of the Institute for American Values. He says for a couple
  getting married in 1960, the institution was bigger than the
  individuals.

  Mr. DAVID BLANKENHORN (President, Institute for American Values): By the
  end of the '70s, that entire notion had been shaken fundamentally. And
  the new notion was that it's the couple that's bigger than the
  institution. The couple defines for themselves what it means to be
  married. It's the privatization of marriage.

  Today, most couples make up their own vows when they get married. They
  are the gods of their own marriage, whereas the old system was more the
  vow made them. They were supposed to conform to the vow. And, of course,
  the old vow said, `Till death do us part,' and most couples today don't
  say that.

  ADLER: The upside of the old system was an institution embedded in
  family and community. The downside was rigidity and fixed roles; women
  in the home, men in the public realm.

  For Blankenhorn, same-sex marriage is a deep conundrum. On the one hand,
  it could bring more people to view marriage as a crucial social
  institution, as well as give more children the protection of marriage.
  At the same time, he fears it will erode the belief which he holds
  strongly that a child needs a mother and a father, and that a man and a
  woman are two halves that make a whole that two persons do not. So
  Blankenhorn believes two goods are in deep conflict.

  Prof. BLANKENHORN: The very story of the country itself is the unfolding
  and the expansion of this notion of, `We're all one.' We have this
  fundamental sense of equality, and so in that respect, changing the
  definition of marriage to include same-sex couples--we would be more
  American the day after we did it. At the same time, redefining marriage
  as a union of two persons, we would no longer be holding up in law, and
  to some degree in the culture generally, the notion of the mother-father
  unit.

  ADLER: Some people dispense with that notion easily. Laura Kipnis has
  written a book opposing marriage called "Against Love: A Polemic." She
  says all our gender roles are up in the air right now, and that's fine.

  Professor LAURA KIPNIS (Northwestern University; Author, "Against Love:
  A Polemic"): Whoever wants more freedom is the guy. Whoever, you know,
  waits at home and worries is the wife. But those roles can be played by
  either gender.

  ADLER: Kipnis, a professor of media studies at Northwestern University,
  says she is saddened by the rush of gays, once in the forefront of
  alternative lifestyles, to the altar. She says no one is discussing how
  the institution could be transformed. The only rebellion and protest
  against state-sanctioned marriage these days, she says, is adultery.

  Professor KIPNIS: So people are, you know, doing it in these little
  private enclaves of two instead of having a larger social discussion
  about it.

  ADLER: If you think about the gay couple in the beginning of our
  program, they want a more traditional marriage than Kipnis or many
  heterosexual couples want today. The controversy over marriage goes
  beyond same-sex marriage. It involves gender roles and the question of
  whether marriage is a relationship of two or a relationship that society
  has a stake in. Professor Mary Shanley says we need to have a broader
  conversation about marriage when she looks at present-day marriage,
  where women are still mostly caregivers and men are mostly the ones in
  the public realm, she says.

  Prof. SHANLEY: It has got to be more flexible than that, and that is
  going to require deep rethinking and it is going to require public
  action.

  ADLER: Despite all the arguments over same-sex marriage, she says, the
  discussion of what a truly vital marriage would mean in this culture has
  barely begun. Margot Adler, NPR News, New York.

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