Claudia Card, “Against Marriage and Motherhood”

Posted: Tue, Dec 3, 2024

In-Class Activity

  1. In your experience, why might people want to marry?
  2. Can there be long-term intimate relationships outside of marriage? Within marriage?
  3. Would you ever want to marry? Why or why not?

Card’s Argument against Marriage and Motherhood

Starting point: marriage is a historically and culturally specific way to socially organize long-term intimate relationships; motherhood is a historically and culturally specific way to socially organize the caretaking of children.

  • To oppose marriage as a social institution is not to oppose long-term intimate relationships; to oppose motherhood as a social institution is not to oppose the caretaking of children.

  • To oppose marriage and motherhood as social institutions is also not to deny that excluding queer people from them is wrong.

    • “Suppose that slave-owning in some mythical society were denied to otherwise free women, on the ground that such women as slave-owners would pervert the institution of slavery. . . . It would not follow that women should fight for the right to own slaves, or even for the rights of other women to own slaves. Likewise, if marriage is a deeply flawed institution, even though it is a special injustice to exclude lesbians and gay men arbitrarily from participating in it, it would not necessarily advance the cause of justice on the whole to remove the special injustice of discrimination.”

  • What’s distinctive—and problematic—about our way of organizing long-term intimate relationships and the caretaking of children is how their legitimacies are defined and controlled by state power.

    • It is not the ceremony but the state that marries us.
    • It is not childcare labor but the state that determines legitimate motherhood.

Card’s four problems with marriage: the first three are fixable, but if fixed, would unmotivated the desire to marry; the last problem is probably not fixable.

  1. The benefits that come with marriage—health insurance through spouse’s employment, visitation rights, inheritance rights, guardianships, tax benefits, social legitimacy, legal legitimacy (pre-Lawrence), etc.—create enormous economic and social pressure to marry.
    • Card: the choice to marry under these conditions is not entirely free.
    • Note also that such economic and social pressure is in an important way created by the state: e.g., universal healthcare.
    • If there is only one Internet company available—and you must have Internet—is the choice free?
    • Should we make these benefits available to everybody, or keep them exclusive to married persons except to allow queer people to get married?
  2. Ending a marriage comes with enormous economic and social consequences—all the benefits as above, child custody, joint finances, etc.
    • Card: this “traps” especially the economically disadvantaged partner (usually the woman in a heterosexual relationship) in a no-longer-wanted marriage.
    • Should queer people want to be trapped too?
  3. The state would recognize up to one partner per person.
    • Card: this is a fundamental incompatibility with many (both mono- and polyamorous) queer relationships.
    • “[M]y partner of the past decade is not a domestic partner. She and I form some kind of fairly common social unit which, so far as I know, remains nameless. Along with such namelessness goes a certain invisibility, a mixed blessing to which I will return. We do not share a domicile (she has her house; I have mine). Nor do we form an economic unit (she pays her bills; I pay mine). Although we certainly have fun together, our relationship is not based simply on fun. . . . We know a whole lot about each other’s lives that the neighbors and our other friends will never, know. In times of trouble, we are each other’s first line of defense, and in times of need, we are each other’s main support. Still, we are not married. Nor do we yearn to marry.”

  4. Marriage is in important part about creating a “legal rights of access that married partners have to each other’s persons, property, and lives.”

    • “More important than sexual access, marriage gives spouses physical access to each other’s residences and belongings, and it gives access to information about each other, including financial status, that other friends and certainly the neighbors do not ordinarily have. For all that has been said about the privacy that marriage protects, what astonishes me is how much privacy one gives up in marrying.”
    • This kind of access is risky—people get abused and even killed—but “in our society there is greater concern for victims of bad driving than for those of bad marriages. . . . Driving without the requisite skills and scruples is recognized as a great danger to others and treated accordingly. No comparable recognition is given the dangers of legally sanctioning the access of one person to the person and life of another without evidence of the relevant knowledge and scruples of those so licensed.”

Card’s argument against motherhood: it is a decision to place the burden of childcare on two but realistically one person; and it’s not a good one.

  • Children benefit from being taken care of not just by the mother, but by their extended family, professional care workers, and “the village” and community at large—“in relationships carefully chosen and affirmed by their caretakers.”
  • But the state would only recognize up to two parents for one child. “It gives the child legal rights of access to at most those two parties.”
    • Implicitly, the state shrugs off a social responsibility to individual parents.