University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox points out that marriage is under attack from the Left and the Right — from those who call it a patriarchal tool of oppression and from those who say it’s a sucker’s deal for men.
Wilcox’s new book, Get Married, makes the case that marriage is good not only for kids, but for adults. He (along with liberal economist Melissa Kearney before him) is arguing against many liberals, who say there’s no evidence more marriage would be good. This includes some feminists, who argue that marriage is inherently oppressive.
“Historically, it has been a fundamental site of women’s oppression,” argues political philosopher Clare Chambers. “Currently, it is associated with the gendered division of labour. … Symbolically, the white wedding asserts that women’s ultimate dream and purpose is to marry, and remains replete with sexist imagery.”
This is an extremist view probably present only in academia, but I spent years talking to young people for my book on falling birthrates and encountered a more modest and sadder, but overlapping argument against marriage and family formation.
A passage from Family Unfriendly:
“I believe I could find child-rearing incredibly meaningful and rewarding, but leaving the workforce would make me vulnerable,” one college woman told me in 2022. She worried that her skills and connections would wither if she took even a few months off. “Then if my marriage failed, I would have only the protections afforded me by divorce law in whatever state I happened to live.” This fear comes up every time I discuss stay-at-home parenting. It’s not unfounded. Adults who step out of the workforce for years — whether due to disability, chronic unemployment, or raising children — really do suffer career-wise. Young women are barraged with this message. “Consider this a warning to new mothers,” the headline at Salon.com read: “Fourteen years ago, I ‘opted out’ to focus on my family. Now I’m broke.” “My biggest handicap may be my history of spending daylight hours in the company of my own kids,” the author wrote, in a story picked up by National Public Radio. “Just having them is bad enough.” These articles come at young women like commuter trains on a brutally regular schedule.
The worldview here is that you simply cannot trust other people, and that you must therefore build a zero-trust life. Modernity seems to make that possible: make everything transactional and mediate everything through technology.
That sad, atomized, zero-mindset is also behind the red-pilled misogyny into which influencers like the one below have tapped:
Trad feminists and simps also shame men for not marrying now adays! Sorry ladies! We voted for policies that RUIN mens lives in divorce and family court! Most young men will not sign up!
Until these laws are fixed – only the upper class will marry! Middle class working men…
She preaches to men that they simply cannot trust women and uses the risk of divorce as a reason from ever getting married.
It’s the same zero-trust, atomized, alienated, misanthropic mindset that underlies some strains of feminism. What it rejects is love, commitment, and meaning in life. The result: dying sad and alone.
