Two recent books by American journalists have blown air on the dying coals of the long-sidelined debate over marriage, partnership, the sheer amount of work involved in the whole business, and whether it’s worth it for women who value their personal autonomy over the vanishing amount of security offered by coupledom.
.. I am quite content with the fact that my work, my politics, my community and my books are just as important to me as anyone I happen to be dating. I love babies, but not enough to make the work, the pain, the worry and the lost opportunities involved worth it for me – not right now, and maybe not ever. I live in a commune, I date multiple people, and I’m focused on my career.
.. I’ve made the same choice that men my age have been able to make for centuries without being scolded by society, or even having to think about it too much – and in and of itself, that’s not radical. The possibility of millions of women making the same decision, en masse, however, is an entirely more threatening prospect.
.. Emotional and domestic labour is work, and women have been putting up with terrible working conditions for far too long.
.. Study after study has shown that it is men, not women, who benefit most from marriage and long-term partnership. Men who marry are, on the whole, healthier and happier than single men. Married women, by contrast, were no better off than their single counterparts. Men who divorced are twice as likely to want to get married again, whereas women, who are more often wanted out of the whole business.
.. If women reject marriage and partnership en masse, the economic and social functioning of modern society will be shaken to its core. It has already been shaken. Capitalism has managed to incorporate the mass entrance of women into the traditionally male workplace by depressing wages, but the question of how households will be formed and children raised is still unsolved. Public anxiety over the low fertility rate among middle-class white women is matched only by the modern hysteria about working-class, black and migrant women having “too many” babies – the attempts by neoconservatives to bully, threaten and cajole wealthy white women back to the kitchen and nursery are as much about racist panic as they are about reinstituting a social order which only ever worked for men.
.. women everywhere are simply going on strike, and it is a strike the like of which society has barely contemplated. It is distributed and dispersed, and the picket lines begin at the door of every household and the threshold of every human heart.
The Real Housewives of Jane Austen
Why do reality television’s most popular stars so uncannily resemble the heroines of the 19th-century writer’s work?
.. But what’s clear reading Austen today, or watching one of the countless adaptations of her work, is how much the women in her novels have in common with so many of the women on reality television. Her female characters are defined by two primary qualities: their privilege and their powerlessness. Her writing focuses almost entirely on women searching for stability and status, deploying the very limited means available to them. Deprived of intellectual gratification or professional empowerment, they scheme, manipulate, and get bogged down in petty rivalries with each other. Their ultimate endgame is marriage, described by Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice as the “pleasantest preservation from want.” That they do nothing of much more substantive significance (except, some of them, on rare occasions, be kind sisters or daughters) is their flaw, but also, as Austen portrays it, their fate.
.. Caroline Bingley, one of the least self-aware and most pathetically predatory characters in literature, would adapt in a matter of minutes to being cast in any one of the Real Housewives franchises... Almost two and a quarter centuries later, a flourishing television genre peddling “reality,” and fantasy, promotes a vision of women if anything more retrograde than Austen’s, without any of her irony... The Bachelor took the essential principle behind Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire—that women will sacrifice their independence, their bodies, and their dignity to fulfill their ultimate goal of marrying a wealthy man—and wrapped it up in a gauzy veil of romance... “The Bachelor set the mold for how women would be treated on reality television,” says Pozner. “With it, producers and networks accomplished what the most ardent anti-feminist organizations and activists had never been able to achieve. They created a version of the world that was supposedly real, that looked real, but in which women not only appeared to not have any choices, but appeared not to want to have choices.”.. In addition to being gorgeous, they were to be some combination of gullible and calculating, naïve and brazen, stupid and manipulative. They had insignificant careers or livelihoods of their own, and their dual goals were either to safely ensconce themselves within a marriage or to find fame, the financial value of either of which would establish them as an object of envy for all their competitors... Austen, Gilbert and Gubar write, explores the “hostility between young women who feel they have no alternative but to compete on the marriage market,” alert to the ways in which “female anger is deflected from powerful male to powerless female targets.”.. “One of the points Austen is making is that Lady Susan is just what … books advised women to be,” Tomalin writes. “She has perfectly mastered the art of using the conventions of society to get what she wants.” So, too, the best reality-show stars master the conventions of their genre—without ever seeming even slightly tempted to question them.
Considering marriage? Mind the Expectations Gap
Another wedding season, another study showing that marriage is a raw deal for heterosexual women.
Last month, University College London and the London School of Economics released a joint study that found men who married were far less likely to suffer from metabolic syndrome – a combination of diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity – than their unmarried counterparts. For married women, the same health benefits simply did not exist.
It’s just the latest in a towering wall of research illustrating that the much-touted benefits of marriage are, in fact, a gendered proposition. The phenomenon, known in sociological circles as the Marriage Benefits Imbalance, has shown consistently that while married men enjoy increases in health, wealth and happiness over their singleton brothers, married women tend to be less financially stable, more depressed, less physically fit and more vulnerable to violence and abuse than their single and unmarried female counterparts.
.. My best educated guess would involve yet another nifty sociological term: the Expectations Gap. This is the idea that the sort of women who tend to marry are often the sort of women who tend to have – shall we say – untenable expectations of the benefits their union is going to provide.
Franz Schubert (Wikipedia)
Appreciation of his music while he was alive was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death.
.. In 1814, Schubert met a young soprano named Therese Grob, daughter of a local silk manufacturer, and wrote several of his liturgical works (including a “Salve Regina” and a “Tantum Ergo”) for her; she also was a soloist in the premiere of his Mass No. 1 (D. 105) in September[15] 1814.[14] Schubert wanted to marry her, but was hindered by the harsh marriage-consent law of 1815[16] requiring an aspiring bridegroom to show he had the means to support a family.[17]
.. Schubert and four of his friends were arrested by the Austrian police, who (in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars) were on their guard against revolutionary activities and suspicious of any gathering of youth or students. One of Schubert’s friends, Johann Senn, was put on trial, imprisoned for over a year, and then permanently forbidden to enter Vienna. The other four, including Schubert, were “severely reprimanded”, in part for “inveighing against [officials] with insulting and opprobrious language”.[34]
.. He was nicknamed “Schwammerl” by his friends, which Gibbs describes as translating to “Tubby” or “Little Mushroom”. Schubert, at 1.52 m height, was not quite five feet tall. “Schwamm” is Austrian (and other) dialect for mushroom; the ending “-erl” makes it a diminutive.
.. The New York Times music critic, Anthony Tommasini, who ranked Schubert as the fourth greatest composer, wrote of him:
You have to love the guy, who died at 31, ill, impoverished and neglected except by a circle of friends who were in awe of his genius.