Trends in Marriage

College texts give a strong egalitarian gloss to their descriptions of marriage. They deplore sexism, tout equality, and in so doing reinforce the view held by many students that the struggle for equality is over, feminism has won and is no longer needed. Actually, we have a long way to go and outcomes are increasingly uncertain. Inequality is so much a part of the fabric of marriage that it is not perceived.

To ask how we can make marriage more of an equal proposition is, in the last analysis, to ask how we can have marriage without "wives." Making marriage equal in this society means breaking up the connection between primary identity as a female and being a wife, that is, secondary. It requires redefining both the term wife and the term femininity. How to be loved and loving, committed and the object of commitment, and not be defined as a wife?

Both increasing individualism and the push for more equality in marriage have fed into the development of a "new love ethic," which potentially decreases the centrality of marriage to the individual's "identity" and hence the salience of "wife."^[19] It also redefines the relationship between spouses. Although the new love

ethic continues to embody expectations of diffuse involvement and solidarity, the relationship need not necessarily last a lifetime to be considered successful, nor is it expected to be absolutely exclusive. Thus the new love ethic is a compromise between romantic-love approaches to marriage and more contractual approaches. Marriage is seen as an ongoing negotiable and renegotiable love relationship that needs attention to make it go well. It challenges the notion that marriage fixes ones identity for life and defines marital love as something that changes and grows. Whereas the older love was characterized as "true and deep," the newer love is more likely to be seen as "vital and alive." The older emphasis on self-sacrifice gives way to an emphasis on self-realization. At the same time it implies a new legitimacy for marital breakup.

The new love ethic fosters egalitarian relations by its emphasis on honest communication, sharing, and negotiation between partners. In the new ethic a wife is expected to be assertive and to have her "own" work. She is not locked into her husband's world so tightly. Thus the new love ideology is compatible with egalitarian relations and more individualism for women.

Men in modern times have never defined themselves as husbands as totally as women have defined themselves as wives, so these changes will affect women more than men. Although I do not expect to see the centrality of the couple relationship end in this society,^[20] there are many indications that it has become less salient in the lives of middle-class women and it was never as salient for women in classes where extended kin and quasi-kin relationships assume more importance.

As women gain power as people, they gain power within marriage itself. Increased female labor force participation, increased divorce and hence remarriage, increased singleness among women, increasing age at marriage, and increased female life expectancy all provide opportunities for women to expand their horizons and their relationships with others, especially with other women. Women gain more opportunity to see themselves in other relationships and in other capacities than that of "wife."

All of the liaisons and connections a woman may develop outside marriage decrease her dependence on her husband and give her a basis of equality with him. As more and more women are employed, they form friendships at work, friendships that are not con-

nected to being a wife. Indeed, one objection husbands have had to their wives working is that it threatens their centrality in their wives' lives. Women may also gain a sense of efficacy by working for wages even when the work itself is not pleasant.

Although the nuclear family "ideal" remains very much with us, the nuclear household exists for only some women and for only part of women's lifetime. In the middle class, women are marrying later and divorcing more frequently, thus the period they are married is shorter. Even though most divorced people eventually remarry, older women remarry less than older men. But even remarriage can weaken the centrality of "wife" by extending the ties that married women have with others.

Another factor likely to produce more egalitarian attitudes within marriage is the increasing age at marriage. The consequence for young adults of leaving home earlier and marrying later as they are now doing is that they spend a longer time living independently and gain more experience in forming relationships alternative to family living. Longitudinal surveys of young adults show that young women who had lived independently are more likely to expect to be employed, to want fewer children, and in other respects to hold less traditional views than those who lived with their parents. Young men were affected in the same direction but less so. Moreover, college education and nonfamily living both appear to reinforce each other in creating less traditional attitudes and more egalitarian expectations in marriage.^[21]

In addition, women are more likely to be widowed than men because women live longer than men do. Not to be married can mean loneliness in this coupled society, but it also creates the possibility of forming ties with other women as non-wives. Indeed, one of the most important (and unprecedented) demographic changes that will affect gender relations and reduce the salience of "wife" is the aging of the population. Since most older people are female, a population of single women is rapidly growing. These older women are potentially in a position to lead a movement toward less "husbandoriented" relationships.^[22] As the periods of nonmarriage lengthen in women's lives, women gain opportunities for forging ties that expand their identity beyond that of "wife." Moreover, not being married forces a change of consciousness on women as they learn to do things on their own and thereby gain confidence in their abilities.

Essentially, the move toward more egalitarian marriages that I have outlined is being bought at the cost of less stable marriages and a decreased salience for marriage itself. It is possible that marital relationships could become more stable as women become partners rather than wives.

In my view, for a loving egalitarian relationship to "work," it would need to be patterned more like women's relationships to women than "normal" heterosexual relationships. What most women seek is not power but the absence of domination. Also, as we have seen, most lesbians and heterosexual women are relationship-centered, but the words we use to describe this, such as caring and nurturant, sound vaguely insipid. Our language itself is predicated on the individual, isolated from relationships, so that one is at a loss for ways to talk about that "something else" that binds us together. Women are in a better position than men to move us toward a new language of love that can somehow overcome the sharpness of the distinction between self and other without domination or selfabnegation.

Married couples as "loving partners" would be more than sexual partners or business partners or friends, although they would be these too. Loving partners would be tied together by love made increasingly stable by the experiences, both the good and the bad times, they have shared together. Women as loving partners to men would act neither as men's mothers nor men's daughters nor men's wives. They would be loving adult female partners of loving adult males. Moreover, there should be nothing in the concept of "loving partners" to prevent people of the same gender from formally and freely joining together in a love relationship. Ending the definition of women as wives would allow homosexual relationships and heterosexual relationships to exist as "marriages" without dominant partners.