What Is Marriage For?

by E. J. Graff

  American childbearing statistics from Gordon, 48.

  “so foule and so hidous that [it] scholde not be nampned”: Noonan, 268.

  “so notorious in reputation that the inventor”: Chesler, 36.

  “It seems as though we were living”: Quoted in Broun and Leech, 28.

  “rubber articles for masturbation”: Dienes, 37.

  “challenges the permanence of the State”: Dublin, 191–192.

  “a criminal against the race”: Theodore Roosevelt’s anti-contraception quotes in Fryer, 199.

  “This pernicious sensualism”: Noonan, 440.

  “Are we to have homes or brothels?”: Dienes, 47.

  Information about Margaret Sanger comes primarily from Chesler, Woman of Valor.

  “Sexual congress is thus rendered but a species of self-abuse”: Fryer, 120.

  “spattering the country with its slime”: Chesler, 255.

  “The downright perversion of human cooperation”: Chesler, 212.

  Seventy-five percent of Americans believe health insurance should underwrite contraception: Figure from Planned Parenthood advertorial, July 1, 1998, New York Times, A27.

  “accepted by many as a legitimate exercise”: Roraback, 396.

  “the wife lying on her back”: Explicitly Christian marriage counseling books quoted in Ehrenreich et al., 147.

  “the acts of a husband and wife”: Finnis, 1068. Homosexuality, heterosexual oral sex, and contraception are morally equivalent: In the original, the addendum about contraception is in a footnote. The author makes clear, however, that he sees contraception as the moral equivalent of homosexuality because it prevents the “real goods” of marriage, but is “omit[ted] from the list in the text only because it would no doubt not now be accepted by secular law as preventing consummation—a failure of understanding.”

  “men using one another as women”: Podhoretz, 41.

  “Once a man assumes the role of homosexual”: Chauncey, 351.

  “fears we now felt of widespread militant”: Bryant, 15, 26.

  “a carefully disguised attempt to break down”: D’Emilio and Freedman, 42.

  “Vaginal intercourse is the only kind”: Family Research Council, “Domestic Partnerships.”

  “Homosexuality is not what God intends”: American Family Association, Homosexuality in America.

  Three: Babies

  “a civil contract whereby a man”: Burguière et al., vol. 2, 108.

  “The intent of matrimony is not”: Stone, FSM, 69.

  “Marriage is an institution created”: Wilson, 36.

  See Goode’s discussion of the idea that society never deals with individuals but with families, chapter 1, especially pages 3–4.

  “The Romans rarely used it to mean family”: Dixon, 2.

  The Roman patriarch’s legal authority to kill his family members was used mostly for newborns; there were social limits on his right to kill his family’s adults, although the symbolic threat could be usefully wielded. Dixon, 36, and Treggiari, personal communication.

  “in some ways resembled kinship”: Dixon, 114.

  “clearly wanted to treat [Patronia] as a daughter”: Dixon, 113.

  “A citizen of Rome did not ‘have’ a child”: Veyne, “The Roman Empire,” in Ariès and Duby, vol. 1, 9.

  For fuller discussions of the frustrating plasticity of “the family” (and therefore the impossibility of defining it and studying it as a single phenomenon), see, for instance, Dixon, chap. 1; Gies and Gies, introduction; Burguière and Lebrun, “The One Hundred and One Families of Europe,” in Burguière et al., vol. 2, 1–39; Cherlin, 85–87; Stone, FSM, 37–66; Laslett, Oosterveen, and Smith, introduction; and de La Roncière, “Tuscan Notables on the Eve of the Renaissance,” in Ariès and Duby, vol. 2, 157–170.

  “Before the 18th century no European language”: Gies and Gies, 4.

  “Most households included non-kin”: Stone, FSM, 28. For illuminating glimpses of demographic and family historians straining to determine which “servants” were or were not biological children, see, for instance, Laslett, Oosterveen, and Smith, and Rotberg and Rabb.

  “The want of affection”: Hanawalt, 157.

  Tuscan wetnursing statistics given in de La Roncière, in Ariès and Duby, vol. 2, 220.

  The Catholic Church commissioned “pictures of the Madonna suckling the Child, a representation that must have stood as a perpetual reproach to those mothers, not only from the richer households, who had their children breast-fed by others, a practice that the Church had tried to stop as far back as the eighth century. . . .”: Goody, 154.

  “Less than half of the children”: Stone, FSM, 50.

  Seventeenth-century French stepchildren: Burguière and Lebrun, in Burguière et al., vol. 2, 59.

  British premodern children in stepfamilies: Stone, FSM, 46–50.

  U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1992, “Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage in the 1990s,” quoted in D. Popenoe, 127.

  Fourteenth-century and contemporary British family homicide rates: Hanawalt, 208, and Stone, FSM, 77.

  Limited demographic history for the nuclear family: Howard V. Hayghe, Division of Labor Force Statistics, “Family members in the work force,” Monthly Labor Review, March 1990, 14–19. Presumably demographers’ change to using the nuclear family as a census standard came as sprawling rural families became fewer, and as fewer urban families kept servants or boarders.

  “The irony remains, however”: Gaunt and Nyström, in Burguière et al., vol. 2, 486–487.

  Much of the bastardy discussion is based on Laslett et al., Bastardy.

  “Consider of what importance to society”: Johnson, quoted in Laslett et al., Bastardy, 214.

  “is plainly a great discouragement”: Blackstone, quoted in Laslett, Grossberg, 198.

  “because he was born before the marriage”: Hanawalt, 72.

  Statistics on pregnant English brides from Laslett, in Laslett et al., Bastardy, 23.

  Figures for postcolonial American pregnancies before marriage from Wells, in Laslett et al., Bastardy, 353.

  Scandinavian “out of wedlock” birthrates from Laslett et al., Bastardy, 56, 329, 330; and Gaunt and Nyström, “The Scandinavian Model,” in Burguière et al., vol. 2, 488.

  “If two parties, living together”: (italics in original) Laslett et al., 11.

  In the Michael H v. Gerald D case, “the state invoked the existence of a marriage to actually sever the link between procreation and child-rearing.” Brief filed by Robinson, Murray, and Bonauto, for the Supreme Court of the State of Vermont, Baker v. Vermont, Spring 1998, 28 and 32.

  Information about various child custody expectations comes from the sources previously given for each historical period. More particularly, information about child abandonment and adoption comes from Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers. The historical break from father-right to mother-custody comes from Mason, From Father’s Property to Children’s Rights, and Grossberg’s explanation of the “best interests of the child” doctrine in Governing the Hearth, esp. chap. 7. Information about the invention of modern adoption in the United States comes from Zainaldin and from Presser.

  “Be sure then to establish the authority”: John Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education.”

  “An orphan in colonial America”: Mason, 18.

  Mothers worthy of heaven: American black, immigrant, and working-class mothers may have been extolled by their own families and groups, but they were generally accused of vice and ignorance and blamed for their families’ poverty. American black women especially were left out of the idealization of “women” and “mothers”—a contradiction Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech exploited so powerfully.

  “Well may we exclaim THE MOTHER!”: Quoted in Coontz, Social Origins, 230.

  “notwithstanding the father’s natural right”: Mason, 14.

  “denial of the father’s right”: Grossberg, 241.

  “We are informed by the first elementar
y books”: Einhorn, 132.

  “nothing less than an assumption of power”: Quoted in Einhorn, 126.

  “weaken the ties of marriage”: Quoted in Grossberg, 245.

  “If women had the guardianship”: Quoted in Grossberg, 247.

  “The love of the mother for her child”: Quoted in Grossberg, 253.

  “A Plymouth court severely rebuked”: Mason, From Father’s Property, 39, 18.

  “surrendered his rights over the child”: Zainaldin, 1081–1083.

  Critic of Massachusetts’ “irrevocable” adoptions: Presser, 457–461.

  The breakthrough concept of “psychological parenthood,” widely cited in custody decisions and law journals ever since, was delineated by three child custody experts, Goldstein, Freud, and Solnit, in 1979.

  “the family, long supposed to be the best anchored”: Ernest Groves, Marriage (New York: Henry Holt, 1933), 3.

  “distinctly antisocial, for it enables”: Dublin, 186–194.

  “A little child is a strongly uniting bond”: F. B. Meyer, Love, Courtship, and Marriage (London: S. W. Partridge and Co., 1899).

  “From their offspring the parents”: P. Popenoe, 161.

  “Which way happiness?”: Merle Bombardieri, The Baby Decision: How to Make the Most Important Choice of Your Life (New York: Rawson, Wade Publishers, 1981), 117.

  “The essence of adultery”: Judicial decisions equating donor insemination with adultery (Orford v. Orford and Doornbus v. Doornbus) are discussed in Katherine Arnup, “Finding Fathers: Artificial Insemination, Lesbians, and the Law,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 7 (1994): 97–115.

  Catholic theologians who wanted to outlaw DI: Juliette Zipper, “What Else Is New? Reproductive Technologies and Custody Politics,” in Child Custody and the Politics of Gender, ed. Carol Smart and Selma Sevenjuijsen (New York: Routledge, 1989).

  “One who consents to the production of a child”: People v. Sorenson, 68 C.2d 280; 66 Cal.Rptr. 7, 437 P.2d 495.

  DI now accounts for eight to ten times more births than all other types of reproductive technology combined. Wallach and Zacur, Reproductive Medicine and Surgery 782 (1995), cited p. 33, Appellants’ Reply Brief, Baker v. Vermont, May 1998.

  The “divorce effect”: Cherlin, 87–88. “As might be expected, the children whose parents divorced showed more behavior problems and scored lower on reading and mathematics tests than did the children whose parents stayed together. But when we looked backward through the records to the start of the study—before anyone’s parents had separated or divorced—we found that the children whose parents would later divorce already were showing more problems and doing worse in reading and mathematics.”

  This book cannot give a thorough account of the effects on kids of divorce versus death. For an investigation of single parenthood, see McLanahan and Sandefur.

  “while an absent father might”: P. Cohen, New York Times, July 19, 1998, A13–15.

  Much of the material on children and fathers in this chapter comes from Lamb, The Role of the Father in Child Development, and Stevenson and Black, “Paternal Absence.”

  Study controlling for mother’s age and the family’s poverty reported by Lewis, in Lamb, ed., 137: “When [the mother’s] age and the family’s poverty are controlled for there appear to be no unique contributions to the child’s development made by the father’s presence or absence.”

  The question of how to measure masculinity and femininity, traits whose manifestations vary from one culture to the next, is complex. Psychological researchers have not yet come up with a scale upon which they all agree. Some scales measure such things as whether you rate yourself independent, forceful, ambitious and aggressive . . . or affectionate, compassionate, warm, and gentle. But people who rate, on such scales, as more “masculine” are also rated as better adjusted; perhaps these scales are simply measuring the things that our culture values, rather than some “masculine” or “feminine” essence. Other scales try to measure things that happen to cluster among males or females— whether you prefer to take a shower or a bath, for instance—as if those measured something essential, not simply current cultural expectations. (A sixteenth-century lady of the chamber who liked to wear stockings, for instance, would have been considered masculine.) For more discussion about measuring masculinity and femininity, see Golombok and Fivush, Gender Development, 1994.

  On influence of fathers on boys’ behavior and “masculinity” ratings, see Stevenson and Black, and Lamb, throughout.

  Fathers encourage sons to “play with sex-typed toys”: See Lewis, in Lamb, ed., 126.

  “tended to provide staccato bursts”: Lamb, in Lamb, ed., 111–112.

  Pregnancy risk for girls in father-custody reported in Warshak, 133.

  “In sum, very little about the gender”: Lamb, in Lamb, ed., 10, 13.

  “If there are differences”: Lewis, in Lamb, ed., 141–142.

  Right-wing critiques of studies of children of divorced lesbians and gay men regularly charge that researchers refuse to compare lesbians’ and gay men’s children with children of “normal, intact” families. They have misunderstood—perhaps intentionally—the fact that researchers used divorced families because they were, in psychology-speak, “controlling for other variables.”

  All studies of children of lesbians and gay men through 1991 are cited and summarized in Charlotte J. Patterson, “Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents,” Child Development 63 (1992): 1025–1042.

  The longitudinal study on children of divorced lesbian mothers is summarized in the introduction of Tasker and Golombok, Growing Up in a Lesbian Family.

  Do the children of gay parents grow up to be gay? See Patterson, and Tasker and Golombok, 107.

  What percentage of the population is “gay”? Although defining and measuring who is “gay” is exceptionally difficult, the conservative estimate of 2 or 3 percent, not the “one in ten” figure, strikes me as easier to believe. This is not, however, important in any way for political debate: the size of a minority must not determine how its members should be treated. American Jews, for instance, make up only 1 or 2 percent of the U.S. population.

  The newer and more methodologically sound studies of children of lesbians and gay men include A. Brewaey et al., “Donor Insemination”; Golombok, Tasker, and Murray, “Children Raised in Fatherless Families from Infancy”; and Chan, Raboy, and Patterson, “Psychosocial Adjustment Among Children Conceived via Donor Insemination.” Tasker and Golombok summarize the research in Growing Up in a Lesbian Family.

  The latest research is more meticulous: To ensure that its sample was truly random and representative, for instance, one European study included all the lesbian couples who used a particular Brussels fertility center within a four-year period, matched to heterosexual couples who used the same center, as well as to non-DI couples with similar characteristics. Others use such standard psychological research techniques as including researchers’, parents’, and teachers’ observations of the child, and having interview results scrutinized by outside experts who are “blind” to the children’s families.

  “Secure attachments”: Explaining attachment theory—the theory of infant and early childhood psychological development upon which most psychological researchers currently rely—is beyond the scope of this chapter. Much of the work in child development over the past fifty years has suggested that strong and secure attachment to at least one adult by the time an infant is six months old is an excellent predictor of healthy psychological development, while insecure or weak attachment prognosticates poorly.

  On the variations in studies on children of lesbian moms, see Patterson, 256–257.

  Studies of DI children show less pathology: See Kovacs et al.

  That children’s feelings for biomoms were stronger than for second parent, whether a mom or dad, reported in Brewaeys et al.

  Writings that assert that “homosexuals” are a danger to children almost all rely on spurious work by Paul Cameron, who has been expell
ed from the American Psychological Association for misrepresentations and ethical violations; denounced by the American Sociological Association because he “has consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented sociological research”; chastised by scientists for “distorting their findings in order to promote his anti-gay agenda”; and questioned by judges for fraudulence. He is either self-published or published in obscure journals (ones that rarely reject submitted articles) or vanity journals (to which contributing authors must pay a fee). Since his work uses distorted or sloppy methods to produce invalid “statistics,” it is consistently rejected by juried publications for its serious methodological flaws, such as surveying gay men who attended a VD clinic and using that skewed sample to make generalizations about “homosexual” sex practices. He is never cited by legitimate psychologists or sociologists except, occasionally, to dispute his conclusions or object to his misuse of others’ work. For more information about Cameron, see Mark E. Pietrzyk, “Queer Science: Paul Cameron, Professional Sham,” The New Republic, October 3, 1994; Gregory M. Herek, “Myths about Sexual Orientation: A Lawyer’s Guide to Social Science Research,” Law & Sexuality 1 (1991): 133, fn.116, or http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_cameron.html.

  1998 study of sexually abused boys: “One in Eight Boys of High-School Age Has Been Abused, Survey Shows,” A11, New York Times, June 26,

  1998, reporting on a 1998 study conducted by Louis Harris and Associates done for The Commonwealth Fund.

  Denver Children’s Hospital study: See Jenny et al.

  Is all male/boy sexual abuse committed by men who are “homosexuals,” even if that’s not how those men otherwise identify or behave? Many people interpret it this way. The problem here is with the dual meaning of “homosexual”; it’s both a coldly clinical adjective for all same-sex sexual contact and a descriptive noun for a personal identity that holds a universe of attractions and emotions—which is why so many of us recoil from the word “homosexual” and prefer “lesbian” or “gay” as wide enough for our hearts and minds and lives.

  Study of 175 Massachusetts men imprisoned for child sexual assault: See Groth and Birnbaum.