Thanks for submitting your questions last week. I’ll be answering those from here on out at the bottom of my posts, but today’s question deserves its own article.
I’ve decided to paywall one article a month to show my appreciation for those who support my work. (That’s this one). The other 3-4 articles a month will remain free.
If you want to ask a question for a future article you can do that here:
And if you want to become a paid subscriber, you can do that here:
Here’s the submitted question I’ll be tackling today:
“I want to hear you talk about marriage equality! In Women’s Circle you said you were still mulling over the question of whether or not full equality in a heterosexual relationship is even possible in our culture, and I wanna hear the conclusion of your mulling!”
Yes, last month’s Women’s Circle discussion kind of blew my mind and I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts around this question of equality being possible ever since.
(Read about what Women’s Circle is here. Next circle will open in February).
Our guiding discussion questions that week were:
What expectations did you have for your life growing up regarding romantic relationships?
How has patriarchy showed up in your current or past dating or partnership experiences?
Was a patriarchal script the default assumption in your relationships? Did you have to re-define your roles? How did that go?
What are some on-going successes and struggles?
We were nodding along in understanding as we listened to each other’s on-going, decades-long struggles to create equal partnerships when someone asked, “Wait. Is full equality in a heterosexual marriage even possible?”
The question brought me up short, and even more so when another woman, whose opinion I greatly respect, without hesitation and without stuttering said, “No. It’s not.”
She said that full equality between man and woman under our current patriarchal system is no more possible than full racial equality between white person and black person under our current racist system.
Then she said something along the lines of the following (details and stats filled in by me):
Are two co-workers up for a promotion—one black, one white—fully equal?
Regardless of how nice or qualified or poor the white person is, we live in a country where job applicants with white-sounding names get 50% more callbacks from their resumés than those with black-sounding names, even with identical qualifications. We live in a system where black Americans are incarcerated at 5x the rate of white Americans, where median black households have on average 1/10th the wealth of median white households—a result of our discriminatory redlining, capital-inhibiting history towards people of color.
That’s not equal.
Are a married man and woman fully equal?
Regardless of how nice or considerate or liberal the husband is, we live in a country1 where a wife was legally the property of her husband, unable to obtain her own mortgage, business loan or credit card until just a few decades ago. We live in a world where currently half the entry-level jobs are staffed by women, but women make up only 9% of CEOs, where working women on average do twice as much household labor as men do.
That’s not equal.
Hopefully full equality will be possible in future generations, but in order to root out present inequality, we must face it fully first. That’s step #1, and as a country, we haven’t collectively taken step #1. We still are not fully educated about black history or women’s history, and until we face it head on, full equality isn’t likely to be a reality any time soon.
She said something like that.
So, what do I think?