Feminism Helped Pave the Way for Marriage Equality
Feminism Helped Pave the Way for Marriage Equality
The Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality is, as President Obama declared in his remarks following the ruling, “a victory for America.” It’s also a major win for feminism.
In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy recounted the history of marriage in brief, emphasizing that even though the institution has existed for millennia and across civilizations, “it has not remained static over time.” He points to the evolution of marriage beyond the law of coverture, which for centuries reinforced the wife’s legal subordination to the husband (the idea being that her identity was “covered” by his). “As women gained legal, political, and property rights,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “and as society began to understand that women have their own equal dignity, the law of coverture was abandoned.”
He goes on to explain that even after coverture laws were taken off the books, “invidious sex-based classifications in marriage remained common through the mid-20th century” and “[t]hese classifications denied the equal dignity of men and women.”
One state’s law, for example, provided in 1971 that “the husband is the head of the family and the wife is subject to him; her legal civil existence is merged in the husband, except so far as the law recognizes her separately, either for her own protection, or for her benefit.”
Such laws might have remained on the books had feminists not stepped up to argue against them and to promote greater equality for women. Without using the word feminism, he contends that the women’s movement profoundly changed the meaning of marriage by exposing the shortcomings of traditional gender roles:
[N]ew insights and societal understandings can reveal unjustified inequality within our most fundamental institutions that once passed unnoticed and unchallenged. To take but one period, this occurred with respect to marriage in the 1970s and 1980s.
As Justice Kennedy emphasizes, the changes made to the institution of marriage over the course of the 20th century were profound, producing “deep transformations in the structure of marriage” and “affecting aspects of marriage once viewed as essential.” And these redefinitions of marriage have been for the good:
These new insights have strengthened, not weakened, the institution. Changed understandings of marriage are characteristic of a nation where new dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations.
This decision is an important step forward for gay civil rights, the culmination of decades of struggle. Expanding marriage rights to lesbians and gay men will help to right longstanding injustices. As Justice Kennedy explicitly notes, lesbians and gays have suffered from discrimination and hostility; he faults the marriage bans for causing harm to gay couples and their children. Gay-headed families, he says, have been “denied the constellation of benefits that the states have linked to marriage” and “consigned to an instability many opposite-sex couples would find intolerable.”
. . . .
Let the wedding bells—and freedom—ring!
http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/06/29/feminism-helped-pave-the-way-for-marriage-equality/
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