The Master's Wives: White Girl Boss
The myth of the golden era of marriage (Part 3)
Well, Actually is an ongoing reader-supported newsletter series debunking the mythconceptions and outright lies told by those invested in upholding patriarchy. For the price of a monthly glass of wine, I’ll supply weekly facts, figures and funnies to break down all the patriarchal myths and nonsense you need to help you stay calm at the next family dinner! You can find the introduction post here.
Today’s entry is the final in a three part series. Please note, it discusses enslavement, the Stolen Generation and forced sterilisation of disabled women.
You can read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here. I have made this part available to everyone because I think the message supercedes subscription models. However, if you would like to become a paid subscriber then the link is below.
Most of us know that the idealisation of the 1950s housewife is bollocks. But all too many of us - and when I say ‘us’, I’m referring to white women like myself - believe in the archetype enough to frame our opposition as an expression of modern values. Today’s Woman(TM) has options. We don’t need to stay at home, keeping house and popping out babies. Haven’t you heard? Women work now! We can have our own bank accounts! We can buy our own flowers! Laugh laugh laugh at the silly, regressive men and their silly, regressive misogyny.
But while the myth of “traditional marriage” and the supposedly happy homes (and happy women in particular) that it produced may well be easily discredited, framing this as the beginning and end of the conversation only serves to uphold a view of history that is explicitly white in its so-called feminism. Arguing that women "don't have to stay home anymore, we have choice" as a kind of mocking rebuttal to misogynists is the wrong move, largely because it excludes a majority of women who have NEVER had the choice to be "a homemaker".
For a start, the title of ‘homemaker’ itself is predicated on colonialist ideals, reserved for a certain kind of woman who upholds white, Christian ideals and whose endless reproduction of children meets praise rather than punishment. When we discuss regressive conservative demands on women’s service, it’s imperative that these conservations acknowledge how non-linear and non-democratic feminist progress has been and continues to be. The conflict here is not between a time that was oppressive for white middle class women then and "liberated" middle class white women now. Because the technicolour toned fantasy of mid-century American suburbia, where women pumped to the gills with Valium smiled blankly at their brand new Hoovers, was never meant to include Black women, poor women, single mothers and anyone else who failed to embody the character description ascribed to the ‘helpmate’ - the Biblical term given to Eve, formed from Adam’s rib in order to provide him service, companionship and sex.
While it’s admittedly satisfying to ridicule dingdong men and their archaic boners for gender oppression, playing into this narrative helps to perpetuate the belief that the narrative itself is factually accurate. When we accept this technicolour toned archetype as fact, we create a simulacrum of women’s history and our journey towards “empowerment” that suggests its trajectory has been both linear and collective. Instead of confronting the insidious machinations of systemic power and the elaborate methods it employs to survive cultural transitions (including our own complicity therein), Today’s Woman(TM) feminism finds it more compelling to imagine ourselves as smarter, sassier and too evolved to be lassoed by a microphone cord and dragged back to the kitchen.
When we accept this technicolour toned archetype as fact, we create a simulacrum of women’s history and our journey towards “empowerment” that suggests its trajectory has been both linear and collective.
This is obvious not just in rapid fire responses to soundbites like Butker’s, but also in the way white women often speak of history. It’s not uncommon to see us say or write things like just because women weren’t allowed to work or women don’t have to stay at home with babies anymore.
But which women are we talking about?
Certainly not Black women in America, whose ancestors were enslaved by white traders and forced very much not just ‘to work’ but also to raise white women’s children while being denied the opportunity to raise their own. Victorian era scientists invented the idea that (white) women were biologically inclined to nurture rather than hypothesise or world build, and that fiction has carried down through the years. But this claim of women's supposedly innate desire to produce children and then nurture them is challenged by the existence of enslaved ‘wet nurses', the inhumane abuse of whom was reserved for the exact kind of white women modern conservatives yearn to return to.
Did you know that in 1850, around 20% of white enslavers (around 70,000 people forced enslaved Black women to breastfeed white children?
In Australia, Aboriginal women were not only forced to work in similar scenarios of enslavement but they were also denied the right to raise their own children. The legacy of the Stolen Generation is profound and ongoing, with the government’s policy of kidnapping Aboriginal children and removing to white homes to work and work houses causing catastrophic damage to countless women and their families.
More broadly, we know that certain demographics of women have had sterilisation inflicted on them. In Australia, disabled women are still subject to this dehumanising medical abuse, and worldwide disabled women are frequently denied the opportunity to keep pregnancies or raise children without significant state intervention.
When women who fall into categories deemed ‘undesirable’ by the state choose to have children, they have rarely if ever been supported to be ‘homemakers’ or ‘stay-at-home mothers’. No, that's a "drain" on the system - because capitalism cannot thrive without white supremacy exploiting those it oppresses to labour for it and generate profit, even at the expense of the so-called imperative bond between mother and child that demands attention from women of a white, middle class bracket.
And so none of this 1950s dreamscape of “traditional marriage” would have been possible without the continued exploitation of people of colour (especially women of colour) and the working class, just as wealth hoarding now (anyone can be a millionaire, you just have to work hard!!!") is impossible without the exploitation of working class communities and the broader global south.
Here’s a thought exercise. How many of these 90 second viral responses to Butker were made by women who, well intentioned or not, were dressed head to toe in fast fashion? The kind made in factories staffed by drastically underpaid and unprotected women for whom opting in and out of work has never been an option as long as capitalism thrives? After all, whose labour has always been exploited to do the undervalued, underpaid and shitty work required to prop up aristocratic systems! Who do the billionaires expect should mop their floors? Nanny their kids? Clean their offices? It's not the people they consider to be their peers.
Women today have not been collectively liberated from the kitchen and thrust toward opportunity, an homogenous whole sticking it to The Man. In reality, a significant number of the world’s women are still in some version of that kitchen, invisible and underpaid and single-handedly making it possible for us Girl Bosses to show those old Dino-men just how far we've come.
Harrison Butker was not wholly incorrect when he said women have been ‘diabolically lied to’. But the lie we’ve been told - and that many of us continue to tell ourselves - is not that happiness lies at the bottom of a pile unfolded baby clothes. It’s that liberation lies in the arms of capitalist success and freedom.
As the great Audre Lorde said, ‘I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
Today’s Woman (TM) may find herself out of the kitchen and free to pursue her dreams. But that doesn’t mean the kitchen is out of women, whose dreams to pursue their freedom are buried beneath all that incredible progress we’ve achieved.
I’ve posted this on other articles and I will post it here. I may even make it an entry on my own page:
Women do not ever, ever need to legally marry men.
1. A lot of women like to marry men because they feel it will make them stay. If you need to make someone stay, they aren’t interested, and you won’t have their full commitment, even if their body stays.
2. Sure, there are a lot of perks and benefits from the government for getting married, but this is in order to entrap women and to make it so we cannot live without being stuck to men. Get help from other community members and family, so you don’t need to depend upon the legal marriage.
3. Our social set up, in which a woman is financially and socially abandoned when she breaks up with a man, including by his family and friends, and where partners are expected to never ever see each other again, creates an all or nothing scenario in which there are dire consequences to breaking up.
He can also use the excuse that the consequences are dire for him (never see “his” children again, etc), to force her to choose the other extreme option, which is to be stuck with him, preferably living with him, and with constant service so that he’s not the one who wants to leave.
4. The convention that married partners must live together, in an isolated house, away from other couples, family, friends, etc., is part of this black and white set up, which makes it harder for a person to get rid of a bad partner. Sometimes people do not want a stark, divisive breakup, and would prefer some vague time apart to think things through. Sometimes people work better living apart, even if there are no problems.
It makes it harder for women to leave because they feel the options are to completely lose access to him forever over what may be just suspicions, or go on indefinitely.
Freedom oriented living arrangements would also discourage abusive partners from feeling “shut off” when victims take a step back and triggering them to become violent.
The current set up also encourages hobosexuality, in which people, consciously or not, shack up with people in order to not be homeless. Our society kind of already encourages this, even if most people don’t do it as directly and obviously as actual poor/homeless people do. We encourage children to get married so they can weather the burdens of life, share economic resources, etc.
There are actually laws in some states preventing a certain amount of unrelated adults from living together, even if they’ve paid for the house. Discouraging or making it difficult for people to live with friends, relatives, etc. is a deliberate and contemptible attempt to force women to rely on men upon threat of homelessness and death.
Ditto for being financially tied. Capitalism is set up so that people have to “earn” money and goods. Since babies cannot earn goods, therefore, their mothers rely on capitalism – which usually requires a relationship with a man who has a job– to allow their babies to survive. After a difficult pregnancy, a woman might not be able to work, or work is hard. She must also depend upon the man.
The economy is set up so that tax benefits, financial arrangements, etc., are much easier for couples than for siblings, friends, and whole communities. Capitalism encourages the monogamous, heterosexual relationship, especially one in which the wife does free, unpaid labor, which allows the man to go off and work for a rich boss and discourages him, or the rich boss, or the economy, from reciprocating her labor.
Consider the fact that it is very difficult to leave a marriage without consequences such as financial abandonment, lack of access to the children, a disabled wife not being survive without the husband caretaker, and loss of social ties, and we can see that marriage actually enslaves women.
In the USA, it was illegal for women to have their own credit card or resist marital rape until well within living memory. The people who lived under these types of laws, and perhaps some of those who authored or upheld them, are still alive and it is naive to think their attitudes aren’t still influencing how society runs.
5. The assumption that a married heterosexual couple will be having sex, and that sex always equals PIV (penis and vagina), which has the greatest potential of getting the woman pregnant and therefore even more dependent upon the man, legally, and also physically, if she has a hard pregnancy.
This is a conveyor belt designed to force women into the eventual meat grinder of “sex with a man“, which is encouraged to be as degrading to her and “beneficial” to him as possible. It also focuses as a kind of barrier door; if you want to be loved and cared for, not homeless, successfully have a child and provide for them, not be lonely, etc., you have to vow to service The Dick.
The idea that there even HAS to be a child in the first place, that it is seen as the ultimate or even only fulfilling thing in a woman’s life, also serves the purpose of getting her to bow down before Dick.
6. Monogamy prevents women from comparing and contrasting relationships with different men. Of course, I’m not saying that non-monogamy should include hierarchy, comparing one partner with another, or dumping one partner for a newer one. But it allows someone who is being abused to see that there are other options, and also allows for a wider network of close relationships that can help protect the victim.
Monogamy also encourages men to ignore, mistreat, and cast off everyone but “the chosen woman.” If you have one favorite, then there is an excuse to treat everybody else poorly, while looking like you are a swell guy. You can also provoke other women to chase you by implying that if they were “the favorite woman“, then they would have access to your heart.
You can triangulate women against each other by picking one as the wife and the other as the mistress, and convincing each one that the other is “the favorite,“ and hide the fact that the real favorite is yourself.
Monogamy as it currently is allows men to go on having sexually degrading attitudes toward women, because it is supposedly a plug to limit those attitudes, which would be acted upon the masses of women if not stopped up by the relationship with the one worthy woman. No one questions why those urges should be there in the first place, or why sexuality should, or even can, be mixed with hatred and indifference.
Monogamy does nothing to say that men should not sexually abuse women; it only states that sexual abuse perhaps shouldn’t, but still CAN,
be acted out upon the multitude of “whores“ (unchosen women) who are juxtaposed with the saintly wife. It naturalizes, even if doesn’t overtly encourage, male sexual degradation of women en masse, by saying that a woman’s qualities – this time her NUMBER- justify this abuse, rather than what she was wearing.
It implies that male sexual deviance is so natural that one need only add multiple women to the scene in order to activate it.
Marriage serves as a “stamp“ of approval that allows chosen women to appear “better“ than the multitudes of women who were not chosen, leaving the majority of women feeling like crap and thinking they have to earn the man’s approval somehow, or at least find another man who will approve of them.
A woman who wasn’t officially chosen by a man has a different label (“side piece,“ “other woman,” “mistress“…) than one who was chosen, cementing the idea that a man’s interest, even if it’s secretly just for the women’s sexual and domestic labor, literally changes a woman’s identity. This encourages the unchosen woman to believe she is being shut out from what is otherwise a great man and that she is missing out on all this love and commitment, rather than realizing that a man who treats most women like shit isn’t a great guy, regardless of how well he treats one singular partner.
Monogamy also allows men to turn into social shutoffs and misers, who now have an excuse not to interact with anybody except perhaps the wife and kids- if even them…
7. “Till death do us part,” sounds like it’s about romance and commitment, but what it really means is that she has to die to escape. Married men live the longest and married women die the soonest. I can’t think of a starker and more obvious proof that marriage is not beneficial to women, and that it is set up for men to leech off of us.
Instead of marriage, let us put focus on bonding with community friends, family, and other relationships. Buy a house with a couple of best friends. If you have children, there will be somebody who you know will actually help raise them properly. If the man is interested, and a proper parent, he can always come visit. Even if you do go off to live with him, keep one foot in the original house, so there is always somewhere to escape.
In short, marriage is not beneficial to either sex, but is especially degrading and enslaving toward women, and seems like it was deliberately set up like this.