At some point she had an insight: she talks about two couples who were living together with kids involved. She said she got that it was silly to get the straight couple hurried off to get married while being expected to break up the gay couple. Sje just decided this made no sense.
This woman is the kind of person who goes off to Rwanda to help with relief work. She tells of one time when she was working with a group on relief and womens rights. She says after doing a lesson on women's rights as written in the UN for the widows' support project. Apparently when they got to the part that basically says women have a right not to have to endure beatings and rape within marriage, and the usual one might expect. One of the women raised her hand and said the widows in her group would be happy to have husbands evenif the husbands beat and raped them because that was much better than all the abuse women put up iwth in that country.
DoreneC Seattle WA
On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 3:33 PM, Jenny Brown <jbrown72073 at cs.com> wrote:
> Bill Bartlett wrote:
>
> >And although marriage is, as you say, a vile patriarchal tradition, women
> as a rule are big fans. Well, big fans of the wedding ceremony anyhow. I
> suppose it isn't quite the same thing.
>
> There are good and bad reasons for that. The bad reason is that women gain
> legitimacy and value by cleaving to a man, that's the male supremacist part.
> The good reason is that marriage is a stated public commitment that a guy
> will stick around when you have a child. Doesn't always work, but it's
> better than nothing. And before paternity testing, it was the only way to
> guarantee that if he didn't stick around, he'd at least have to take
> financial responsibility. So, you see, it's actually some protection. You
> know, state intervention in that 'private relationship.'
> In countries that have pretty generous welfare states, with public child
> allowances and childcare, there's less need to marry for this reason, so--to
> the horror of various authorities--marriage rates have gone down.
>
> Jenny Brown
>
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