Abstract
In Free and Female (Fawcett Crest, 1972), feminist journalist Barbara Seaman grappled with and synthetized new understandings of women’s sexuality, love, and marriage. A frequent co-author with her psychiatrist husband, Gideon, Seaman often wrote about marriage and domestic life in popular magazines like Bride’s and Ladies’ Home Journal. Speaking to a broad mainstream audience in her second book, she was especially invested in unpacking how novel feminist ideas could apply to husbands’ and wives’ everyday lives together. For many women, their marriages were less than ideal when considered through a feminist lens, to say the least. Channeling the zeitgeist, she gave her chapters provocative titles like “The Liberated Orgasm” and “The Children of Liberated Women.” The middle one contemplated “Men, Love and Marriage.” Ending on a critical note, she titled the final chapter “The Middle-Class Male as Mighty Joe Young, or Can Men Be Rehumanized?” Could marriage really work in this new era of women’s liberation? Could it change and exactly how much? Or, perhaps more importantly, how soon?
As Seaman recognized, by the early 1970s, the institution of marriage in America was already undergoing profound transformations. In Strange Bedfellows: Marriage in the Age of Women’s Liberation Alison Lefkovitz provides a fascinating and much-needed look at critical changes in the legal and cultural status of marriage in the late twentieth century United States. According to Lefkovitz, “a broad array of Americans identified marriage as a problem in the 1960s and 1970s.” The changes they sought to reshape the institution and correct their specific concerns ultimately constituted a “legal revolution.” (1) It was not just feminists, or their conservative critics, who identified these problems. Rather, Lefkovitz presents a truly diverse cast of historical actors beyond these expected characters, including divorced men’s rights activists, welfare rights activists, immigration reformers, and gay rights advocates.
Thankfully, this book is not a triumphantalist story of a clear-cut feminist legal victory. As Lefkovitz explains, although some of her actors (notably liberal feminists) were successful in changing laws, as they saw it, for the better, legislators and courts also enacted “new kinds of political inequality” in the process (1-2). It is these consequences that we have not yet fully understood or processed, as a profession or society. Lefkovitz cleverly breaks down these intertwined stories by structuring her book in two fairly distinct parts. The first half focuses on women’s liberation, equality, and rights within the context of the institution of marriage, showing “how lawmakers removed gender from marriage law.” (6) The second, featuring a series of thematic case studies that expand the analysis in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality, demonstrates “why the extraordinary achievements of this revolution in marriage were nonetheless circumscribed.” (6) By the end, I was thoroughly convinced of the author’s analysis and the continuing importance of understanding these changes and their lingering consequences for American life.
In Chapter 1, “The Problem of Marriage in the Age of Women’s Liberation,” Lefkovitz sets the stage regarding marriage’s tenuous position in 1960s and 1970s America and introduces a core theoretical concept that underlies her analysis throughout the book. Feminist critics, unsurprisingly due to their cultural prominence in these debates, are the first group of marriage reform advocates presented to the reader. Lefkovitz borrows from legal history and legal theory in order to explain the differences in approach by liberal feminists and more radical feminists and other dissenters. Expansionist critics (in this case, liberal feminists) “believed that the breadwinner-homemaker model of the home could persist,” if it were reformed to be more equitable (9). For example, men could also receive “dependent” benefits such as alimony, thus leveling the playing field. Marriage, from this perspective, could be made gender-neutral, less overtly hierarchical, and less inherently sexist. More radical perspectives, defined here as “individualist,” hoped to get rid of the homemaker/breadwinner model entirely. Lefkovitz provides context regarding women’s labor force participation and looks closely at the demands of the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women and proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment to show how the expansionist orientation made its way into legislatures and the courts. Other solutions from various “marriage dissenters,” such as individual liberation from marriage or alternative queer relationships, also flourished during this period. As Lefkovitz points out, while these more individualistic tactics “did not have the effects on law that liberal feminists had, their model became increasingly common in practice.” (37) Abstention from marriage and cohabitation, for example, are now far from rare.
Individualistic approaches return to the foreground in Chapter 2, “The End of Breadwinning and Homemaking,” where various parties including men’s rights groups and feminists battle over divorce law and the meaning (and value) of highly gendered forms of household labor. The breadwinner/homemaker model proved increasingly problematic as divorce laws liberalized and more and more unions dissolved. Some men revolted against the obligations foisted on them by the breadwinner role, particularly if they no longer benefited from having the perks of a full-time homemaker wife. Women, in turn, fought against traditional homemaking expectations of dependence on, and availability to, their husbands, and insisted on the financial value of their long uncompensated domestic labor. This chapter is particularly notable for its investigation of groups such as America’s Society of Divorced Men (ASDM). Men’s rights activism did not emerge only in recent years, but rather has a long history paralleling women’s rights activism.
Chapter 3, “Blaming Feminism for the Fragile Family,” offers a fresh take on the story of the Equal Rights Amendment and its failure to be ratified, due to effective conservative counter-mobilization. While most readers will be familiar with Phyllis Schlafly and her STOP ERA campaign, this chapter is a novel contribution. Lefkovitz demonstrates convincingly that Schlafly and her allies did not oppose the ERA on purely moral grounds. Instead, they offered detailed critiques of the economic implications of the proposed amendment. Lefkovitz’s focus on political economy and her use of class as a lens of analysis shines throughout this chapter and gives Schlafy’s claims and NOW’s counterclaims about the ERA a deeper resonance. At the heart of these debates, this chapter shows, were competing ideas about the economic value of women’s labor and its proper relationship with the state apparatus. Lefkovitz also points out that in the context of deindustrialization and a changing economy, with their claims making, ERA opponents “both capitalized on economic anxieties and deflected attention away from the actual causes of those anxieties” (76). They “infused fiscal arguments with moral meaning, and vice versa,” a move similar to Lefkovitz’s own intervention into the literature on ERA activism (76).
Keeping our attention on class, next Lefkovitz explores “Race, Welfare, and Marriage Regulation” in her fourth chapter, arguably her best and most complex. She first examines various attempts to police who could and could not receive welfare benefits, including the imposition of and later repeal of so-called substitute father laws throughout the 1960s. These laws were attempts by government to graft breadwinner/homemaker models onto the poorest American families. At stake was the ultimate financial responsibility for childrearing. Who should pay to aid in the raising of children if their parents are unable, the state or approximate male breadwinners (sometimes even regardless of paternity status)? Restrictions designed to keep mothers off welfare and dependent on low wage-earning males seemed to disproportionately harm poor women of color and their children. Looking at these battles in context with other fights over alimony and the ERA also reveal, Lefkovitz explains, that in the grand scheme of things, feminists’ gains were rather limited. “What feminists won—financial compensation for housewives’ work in the home—was never granted to women on welfare” (104). This chapter raises provocative questions about exactly whose labor was valued in these historical (and, indeed, contemporary) debates.
The final two chapters focus on the utility and meaning of marriage in the context of immigration reform and debates over gay marriage. Both case studies deal with questions of what makes a marriage “real” or “valid” and the many strong opinions expressed on this matter from the 1960s onward. Immigrant marriages, Lefkovitz demonstrates, had different expectations places upon them by the federal government and the broader culture. Those seeking citizenship could abuse the institution of marriage as a means to an end, critics feared. Worse, immigrants could easily gain access to social welfare programs and become a financial burden to the state. Facing accusations of fraud, couples were under increased scrutiny to prove that their marriages were legitimate and financially sound. Gay couples also faced skepticism regarding the validity of their partnerships. This chapter provides a fascinating legal history of some of the strategies used and obstacles faced in the decades before the movement for gay marriage emerged. Gay and lesbian couples presented legal questions regarding traditional topics such as property ownership, immigration, and custody of children without the confounding factor of gender. While this would seem to be in line with earlier feminist demands, the legal system simply refused to recognize these relationships and households, and gay couples would have to wait much longer for a new marriage revolution of their own.
Strange Bedfellows is a welcome addition to women’s and gender history and the history of the family. It is especially recommended for anyone interested in the postwar United States, the intersection of legal and cultural history, or, of course, the history of marriage. This book is highly teachable, either in its entirety in a more advanced seminar, or broken up by chapter for a range of different classes. It would be a very welcome addition to comprehensive exam reading lists or course syllabi on modern American history, the history of the family, the history of women and gender, the history of sexuality, legal history, or economic history. Possibilities abound because the author’s decision to structure the book the way it is makes it very adaptable.
In light of the Covid-19 pandemic and its major disruption of American family life, it is especially worth meditating on Lefkovitz’s discussion of the evolution of the breadwinner/homemaker model. At the time of this writing, public schools are announcing that children may not return for their usual schedule, or in some cases at all, for the coming academic year. Parents are scrambling to figure out childcare and work/domestic life balance. Women especially will be forced to make difficult decisions about their careers outside the home. We are still living with the effects of the legal revolution and the reforms (both successful and unsuccessful) covered in this book. Strange Bedfellows is essential reading for these strange times.