Against Marriage and Motherhood by Claudia Card - Arguments: (1) wrong to deny us something, and (2) what they
y us something, and (2) what they would
The current advocacy of lesbian and gay rights to legal marriage
and parenthood insufficiently criticizes both marriage and motherhood as
they are currently practised and structured by Northern legal institutions.
Marriage and motherhood in the histories of patriarchies, have
been mandatory and oppressive to women. However, the concern is more of
the children as for the women that some of these children become and for
the goal of avoiding the reproduction of patriarchy.
Skepticism of the Author
1. Using the institution of motherhood as a source of paradigm for ethical
theory (ethical theorizing)
2. Legal marriage as a way to gain a better life for lesbian and gay lovers or
as a way to provide a supportive environment for lesbian and gay parents
and their children (lesbian/gay activism)
Author's Oppositions
1. Marriage
- not to intimacy but to the State being its essential third party
- to the availability of marriage in modern Northern democracies to any
adult heterosexual couples neither of whom is already married to someone
else
2. Motherhood
-not to guidance, education, caretaking, forming of bonds between children
and adults, existence of homes
-to motherhood as part of the larger conception of family
- to the concept of family as a resemblance concept, that fits no patriarchal
stereotypes of a patriarchal society (a post-patriarchal concept)
*Legal marriage sets the contexts in which and the background against
which motherhood has been legitimated, and it defines contexts in which
mothering becomes easily disastrous for children.
LESBIAN (OR GAY) MARRIAGE?
- No consensus on whether or not to pursue the legal right to marry a same-
sex lover
- The question whether lesbians and gay should pursue to marry is not the
same as the question whether the law is wrong in its refusal to honor same-
sex marriages.
- The ways we have been treated are abominable but it does not follow that
we should seek legal marriage.
deny us is something that we should fight for the right to have.
-The author questions whether we should fight for legal marriage even if we
do not mean to exercise them.
-If marriage is a deeply flawed institution, even though it is a special
injustice to lesbians and gays, then it would not necessarily advance the
cause of justice on the whole to remove the special injustice of
discrimination.
-When there are legally necessary, there will be an enormous pressure to
marry. (Example: marriage enables lovers to have sex legally, but that right
should not be necessary for that purpose)
- let us not be eager to let the State regulate our unions. I would rather see
the state deregulate heterosexual marriage than see it regulate same-sex
marriages.
- Marriage need not presuppose the gendered terms husband and wife.
- Sexual fidelity should not be a requirement. What remains is a mutual
adoption, or guradianship. Adoption, like marriage, is a way to become
next-of-kin that could have substantial economic consequences. (But the
law of adoption is still problematic: no specified responsibilities.)
- 4 Interconnected Kinds of Problems with Marriage:
1. Employers and others often make available only to married
couples some benefits which were presumed to be wanted by
everyone, married or not.
2. The consequences of divorce can be so difficult that many who
should divorce do not pursue it.
3. Northern democracies espouses monogamous unions, in the
sense that one spouse at a time, even though the law in many states
no longer treat adultery as a crime.
4. Legal rights of access that married partners have to each other's
persons, property, and lives makes it all but impossible for a
spouse to defend her/himself, or to be protected against torture,
rape, battery, stalking, mayhem, or murder by the other spouse.
- Then why marry?
- It is a tradition, glorified and romanticized.
- It grants status.
-Mark of adulthood in women for patriarchies.
-A way of avoiding hassles of life
-Material Benefits:
1. Related to problem one, the benefits are substantial and not trivial,
therefore one is pressured to marry, which makes it discriminatory to those
who are not married.
2. Related to problem two, people have motives to stay in a relationship so
as to avoid the consequences of divorce, even if they do not love each other
anymore.
3. Related to the third problem, they would be as legally monogamous as
heterosexual marriage because lesbians and gays might want the benefits of
marriage, regardless of the numbers of one's actual sexual partners.
-Those who previously never felt pressure to marry a lover might confront
not just new options but new pressures and traps.
-The concept of marriage is more like slavery than military. There is some
analogy with the economically coercive aspect of the marriage 'option.'
-Marriage or domestic partnerships as experimented, are both state-
defined.
-Marriage is a legal institution the obligations of which tend to be highly
informal, loosely defined, unspecific, inexplicit about exactly what one is
to do and about the consequences of failing (like a trustee paradigm).
-There is too much privacy given up in marriage. Consent is important, but
consent to what?
-The more important issue is not the ceremonials but the marriage license.
One person's license can be another's prison.
-To marry, applicants need demonstrate no knowledge of the laws
pertaining to marriage nor any relationship skills nor even the modicum of
self-control required to respect another human being. There are greater
concerns for victims of bad driving rather than that of bad marriages.
-Progress on crimes against marital rape and battering has been mostly on
papers.
-Therefore, it is a very bad idea for lesbians and gays to turn personal
commitment into a licensed regulable and enforceable union by the State.
WHY MOTHERHOOD?
-Mother is an ambiguous term for a female who gave birth and a female
who parents.
-Motherhood is ambiguous to experience of mothers who rears a child and a
social practice the rules of which structures child rearing.
-Family covers any committed partnership while motherhood covers any
mode of child rearing.
-Motherhood is a core element of patriarchy: first commitment to the father
and second to the children.
-It is uncertain what characteristics of a mother-child relationship would
have for there are many alternatives (contractual, day care workers, hired
help, older siblings).
-The love that children needs is more than spousal attachments have been.
They need intimate relationship with adults but they also need health care,
education and supervision, a variety of relationships with people of different
ages.
-Mother's own: her own is the child who has legal rights of access to her
and for whose waywardness she becomes answerable, although she is
largely left to her own devices for carrying out the entailed responsibilities.
-Marriage would involve the State in defining who really has the status of
'parent,' two persons at a time per child.
-Many lesbian and gay couples do their best to emulate heterosexual
models, usually means assuming responsibilities without the privileges.
-'Revolutionary Parenting' by bell hooks dilutes the power of individual
parent: there is still special affection with bloodmothers but accountability
for a child's waywardness is widely distributed.
-There is less pressure to make anyone of them constantly available for the
child, more pressure to make everyone somewhat accessible.
-Mothering is not necessarily for child care.
-the idea of improving the safety of the public environment is compelling.
-Mother-child relationship is fundamentally misleading if it suggests that
everyone need a single primary caretaker.
-Communal action is what is required to implement new models of
parenting.
-Lesbians and gay unions have great potentiality to further the revolution, in
part because we cannot marry.
-The children, if not the mothers, in the society are all of us.
-Experience of a child in general: experience of being a mother and having
been mothered, mothering should not be necessary, or that it should be less
than necessary than it has been thought, and that it has more potential to do
harm than good.
-What I have in mind is the contemporary norms of ideal motherhood.
-Everyone would benefit to a society which is more attentive to the needs of
children, to the relationships of children with adults and with each other,
and to the conditions under which children make transition to adulthood.
(Moral philosophy might be transformed as well)
-Doing service to feminism and moral philosophy at the same time.